Teacher perspectives on science literacy in multilingual classrooms –multidisciplinary explorations: analyzing teachers’ professional learning with the Clarke & Hollingsworth model

Around the world programs have been developed for science teachers work on literacy in multilingual settings. Science teachers need an understanding and a repertoire to move between daily and scientific discourses and to connect new concepts to students’ daily knowledge and language in the language of instruction (Jakobsson, Mäkitalo & Säljö 2009). This is especially important where students with multilingual backgrounds face the challenge of moving from their mother tongue in a second language science discourse. Researching teachers’ understanding of science literacy is a complex process in itself that requires multidisciplinary cooperation. The Swedish Science and Literacy Teaching (SALT)project focuses on the questions How do science teachers address literacy skills in classes with secondary students in a multilingual classroom? and How can an explicit focus on literacy development become an integrated part of science teachers’ practice and thinking? The multidisciplinary team includes expertise in applied linguistics (text analysis, second language teaching), science pedagogy and teacher professional development. Having gathered the SALT data, the challenge in this phase is in the analysis. How can disciplinary analytical perspectives meet and lead to a deeper understanding of science literacy learning and teaching? This international Roundtable first presents the SALT-work-in-progress from selected teacher discussions and from classroom data. Subtitled video clips will be shown with tentative analysis using Clarke & Hollingworth (2002) (referred to as C&H) model for analyzing teacher development as connections between teachers personal domain of knowledge and beliefs, practice domain of experimenting in the classroom, domain of consequence including salient student outcomes and the external domain of school based professional development with its sociolinguistic characteristics. Having previewed these clips, two presenters from other multilingual contexts give their comments on the analytical approach drawing on their own research in science literacy and teacher growth. The audience is invited to actively discuss the contributions of different disciplines to the analyses of concrete classroom data. C: Analysis of teacher growth during Continuing Professional Development (CPD) An important question to discuss in the roundtable will be how to represent both collective and individual teacher learning in analyses using the C&Hmodel. Collegial interactions have in previous research been seen both as part of the change environment and as a source of stimulus in the external domain. A Danish CPD project used C&H to analyze teachers’ meaning making while discussing video-based artefacts from local science classrooms. Based on thematic analysis of data (using Atlas Ti), and referring to previous research emphasizing the role of collegial interactions with respect to individual teachers’ learning, an additional ‘domain of collaboration’ was included in the C&H-model representing data from repeated interviews as meaning-making maps. The analyses revealed a subtle interplay between support from CPD facilitators (external domain), and peers in the local learning community (domain of collaboration) supporting teachers’ awareness and scrutiny related to student understanding of scientific phenomena.