Translanguaging Interpretive Power in Formative Assessment Co-Design: A Catalyst for Science Teacher Agentive Shifts

Science education with multilingual learners: Equity as access and equity as transformation

“…For example, through participation in a teacher–researcher collaborative (Fine, 2022), Emily, a monolingual English‐speaking teacher, learned to pause to consider MLs' ideas, lean into her own knowledge about languaging in science, use Internet‐based translation tools, and consider multimodal aspects of MLs' responses. By deepening her translanguaging interpretive power (Fine, 2022), Emily moved from ideological stances to agentive actions that came to permeate her general pedagogical practices with MLs.…”

“…For example, by expanding beyond written language and independent performance, Grapin and colleagues uncovered ELs' sophisticated science ideas expressed in ways that diverged from what was normatively expected (e.g., creative visual representations, everyday languaging practices), whereas their non‐EL peers tended to use canonical representations and “academic language” that turned out to be devoid of science understanding. Likewise, by expanding beyond assessment in English, Fine's research shows how teachers can be empowered to interrogate their taken‐for‐granted ways of interpreting MLs' work and critically examine how their assessment practices “welcome or limit students' linguistically heterogeneous contributions” (Fine, 2022, p. 194). Together, these research efforts leverage synergy across STEM education (e.g., expanding notions of “correctness” in the assessment of science models) and multilingual education (e.g., expanding ways of demonstrating science learning through multimodality and translanguaging) to raise fundamental questions about what meaning‐making resources get valued in science assessment and who this privileges.…”

“…Whereas Grapin and colleagues' research sought to expand assessment beyond a narrow focus on written language and independent performance, research by Fine and colleagues (Fine, 2022; Fine & Furtak, 2020a, 2020b; Fine et al, 2023) turned attention to the traditional monolingual (i.e., English only) orientation of science assessment. This research took a two‐pronged approach of (a) developing a framework for science classroom assessment task design and (b) codesigning science tasks with teachers.…”

“…Findings from this research indicated that, while teachers felt pressure to prepare students for English‐medium district science assessments, they came to understand this tension as a productive site of dissonance that underscored the imperative of embracing (trans)formative assessment in their classrooms (Fine et al, 2023). For example, through participation in a teacher–researcher collaborative (Fine, 2022), Emily, a monolingual English‐speaking teacher, learned to pause to consider MLs' ideas, lean into her own knowledge about languaging in science, use Internet‐based translation tools, and consider multimodal aspects of MLs' responses. By deepening her translanguaging interpretive power (Fine, 2022), Emily moved from ideological stances to agentive actions that came to permeate her general pedagogical practices with MLs.…”

“…The second prong of Fine and colleagues' research focused on examining how middle school science teachers codesigned assessment tasks, informed by the SAEBL checklist, to welcome translanguaging—what they called (trans)formative assessments (Fine, 2022, p. 196). Similar to Pierson's research (described as part of “Learning” above), this research took a participatory design approach and was carried out in an English‐dominant schooling context in which multilingualism had not always been valued.…”