Justice-Based STEM Education for Multilingual Learners
In multilingual classrooms, teachers may not always have a pulse on what their students are saying. While you might think this would stymie collaboration in the classroom, the opposite is true, according to Assistant Professor Enrique (Henry) Suárez, the recipient of the prestigious National Academy of Education (NAEd) / Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Suárez is one of only 25 recipients of the two-year grant, which had more than 200 applicants in 2020.
When students are emboldened to communicate in the language of their choosing, says Suárez, they are free to make sense of the natural world by drawing on the full extent of their experiences, including cultural ways of communicating. Educators, rather than trying to assimilate students into English, simply need to rethink their criteria for measuring success. In classrooms with bi-/multilingual students, this act can be as straightforward as attending not only to what students are saying, but also to what they are doing.
“Kids may not articulate their ideas in terms of buoyancy, or gravity, or weight, but if I look at what they’re doing, what they’re demonstrating, there is a dexterity, a sophistication in terms of how they understand the physics of a problem,” says Suárez, himself a multilingual scholar who often read textbooks in English, Spanish, German, and French as an undergraduate physics student in his home country of Venezuela.
Suárez is interested in how bi-/multilingual learners use objects to engage with the natural world, communicate about it, and explain what they see. He studies “semiotic repertories,” a term borrowed from social linguistics, which can be thought of as richly-layered collections of symbols, norms, and values, all of which are bundled together in a person’s consciousness and expressed in different ways depending on the situation.
“New learning happens on the foundations kids bring to the classroom,” says Suárez. “Just because it’s a gesture, just because it’s not in the dictionary, just because it’s not the sanctioned kind of vocabulary word that comes in the curriculum doesn’t mean that it’s the only way someone can express their understanding of physical phenomena.”
Suárez’s current research focuses on partnering with elementary schools in western Massachusetts to revise their science curricula. His aim? To center justice-based approaches to learning, especially for bilingual learners. As part of his NAEd/Spencer Foundation grant, Suárez proposes pedagogical approaches that link science, learning through investigations, and environmental justice to students’ lives.
One of the focal points of the two-year grant is a unit on solar energy and engineering design. Suárez gravitates toward this subject, he said, because engineering is very hands-on. It involves intentional and creative decision making. The topic of alternative energy is very accessible too, he says, because it intersects with other debates in environmental preservation, including ecosystem health, urban sprawl, and pollution. When students are asked to solve problems faced by their own communities, they see the connection between science and lived experiences. Having the opportunity to build, test, and refine their ideas as interventions also gives young learners a sense of agency.
“You can really see, especially at this young age, the wheels turning, if you will,” says Suárez. “They have good reasons for choosing the things they choose. Sometimes they may have a harder time articulating what those reasons are, but they’re not just doing things at random.”
Suárez has partnered with educators in the Kwinitekw (indigenous name for the Connecticut River) Valley since August 2022 to co-design engineering design units for elementary-aged students. In addition to making the lessons themselves accessible, Suárez has also met with teachers themselves to reflect on and co-create a justice-based pedagogy.
“If we want to be justice-oriented, to be equitable, to really understand and validate the person and the student for who they are as a cultural being, then I need to make sure that my learning environment creates a space where all of those resources are validated, celebrated, and recognized for the collective meaning-making work that they can accomplish,” says Suárez.
"English isn’t the only way we can make sense of the natural world. If we create a space where students feel comfortable, in sharing knowledge in all of these different ways, we can create an opportunity where they are actually successful."
Case in point: Suárez recalls observing a classroom in Massachusetts where eight different named languages were represented. A group of three Brazilian girls was attempting to make a boat float. When their initial design didn’t work, they quickly conversed in Portuguese, made some adjustments, and succeeded. Suárez says that, while he didn’t have any idea what was said in their conversation, it nevertheless pushed him to broaden his thinking.
In some ways, this idea runs counter to the dominant cultural narrative of the United States, which positions English as the language of instruction in public schools. When educators dispense with this notion, says Suárez, they gain a more inclusive mindset for evaluating learning.
“We often underestimate what young kids can do,” says Suárez. “We have an opportunity to take off so many of the constraints with science, engineering, and languaging. They want to tell you—they’re dying to tell you—why they think something happens.”