“Did you watch the Disney parade?” pedagogical translanguaging for evoking students’ perezhivanie to integrate representations in linguistically diverse science classroom

Abstract

Learning content subjects like science requires culturally and linguistically diverse students to learn abstract representations. Previous studies focused on how content teachers can use translanguaging to promote emotional engagement of students with homogenous cultural and linguistic composition. As students in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms brought different emotive experiences to classrooms, it was important for teachers to leverage semiotic resources to evoke shared memory that reconcile backgrounds of different students. This bridged the gap between students’ lived experiences and learning of abstract content representations. In the current case study involving a seventh-­grade mixed medium of instruction (MMI) science classroom, we examined how a science teacher capitalised on culturally and linguistically diverse students’ shared emotive experiences to translate across different representational levels in science. Drawing on the socio-­cultural concept of perezhivanie, our findings showed that the science teacher leveraged the class’s collective experience of watching the Disney parade and linked it to water molecules moving around dissociated salts in blackboard drawings. We argue for the importance of reconciling lived experiences among students with diverse cultural and linguistic background, in order to facilitate their equitable access to content subjects.

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