Engaging with materials and the body: young plurilingual children’s resource-rich interactions in science investigations

ABSTRACT

Background

Children’s interactions are inherently multimodal. Accordingly, when children engage in science in classroom communities, their interactions are grounded in material and embodied aspects of interactions with teachers and their peers.

Purpose

This study explores the nature of children’s science interactions in a classroom community where students are working in a language they are also learning through examination of the ways in which open-ended pedagogical approaches mediated embodied and material science participation and sense-making.

Study and method

We employed multimodal interaction analysis layered with a critical ethnographic perspective to explore the embodied and materially-grounded experiences of a student working in an early-childhood classroom with peers and teachers in science through a language he is also working to learn.

Results

Multimodal interaction analysis allowed us to build views of how the classroom interactional spaces afforded embodied and material participation and learning in science, and uncovered the multimodal ways in which this mediated his engagement in science and communication of science meanings and wonderings.

Conclusions

Open-ended pedagogical approaches afforded spaces in which this student was able to engage with phenomena, materials, and embodied interactions, regardless of his verbal participation. This embodied participation and materially grounded interactions entangle and unfold to become learning. Pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of science with all children, and in particular with plurilingual children, through the use of open-approaches that afford resource-rich embodied engagement and learning are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Material
• embodied
• multilingual
• science education
• early childhood

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the reviewers who provided insightful comments that helped us to refinement our manuscript. The authors also wish to thank Doriana Sportelli and the SciTeach Center Team who engaged in supportive research conversations at an early stage of analysis, and Dr. Kerstin te Heesen and Dr. Sergei Glotov for their helpful reviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms have been assigned.

2. Verbalizations were analyzed in their original version (Luxembourgish), and translated into English for publication purposes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Luxembourg Ministry of Education funding