“Unleashing the Potential Within”: Latine Teachers’ Pedagogical Integration of Their Students’ Language(s), Literacy Practices, and Content Knowledge in Two-Way Bilingual Education (TWBE) Science Education

Latine novice teachers enter complex classroom contexts when teaching science with the potential for integrating their own and students’ linguistic, cultural, and racial resources and their students’ multiple literacy practices, broadly defined. Drawing on translanguaging theory and pedagogy and interdisciplinarity, this qualitative case study explores the specific, planned, pedagogical resource integration of two Latine novice two-way bilingual education (TWBE) teachers teaching science. Through lesson plans and observation, as well as reflections and interview data, our analysis shows the two TWBE teachers’ interconnectedness between subjects in a way that made them include specific language(s), literacy practices, modes of communication, and science cultural knowledge. This intentional resource and interdisciplinary-guided integration brought new cultural understandings surrounding scientific knowledge, thus expanding the notion of multilingual speakers’ “corriente” in elementary science to include specific language(s), diverse literacy practices and specific, culturally connected and critical science content knowledge. This new “corriente” is specifically tied to critically informed, culturally relevant science knowledge and contributes to transformative, equitable, planned practices in linguistic justice—oriented elementary TWBE science classrooms.