Learning to Notice Quality Interactions: Preservice Teachers’ Sense-Making of Multilingual Family Engagement in Community-Based Fieldwork

This study examines what became salient in preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) written sense-making as they conducted community-based observations of multilingual families in a children’s museum, and how they interpreted families’ language and literacy practices through written fieldwork artifacts. Situated within the Family Learning Observation and Analysis (FLOA) project, we analyzed 39 artifacts (fieldnotes, video analyses, and analytic reports) produced by 13 English-monolingual early childhood PSTs during a Spring 2025 museum-based field experience. Using multiple cycles of qualitative coding, we examined the interactional features that PSTs repeatedly treated as consequential for children’s engagement and participation. Three interconnected themes emerged across PSTs’ written sense-making: relational presence, translanguaging, and multimodal meaning-making. PSTs attended to publicly observable cues such as getting “on the child’s level,” following children’s lead, adjusting pacing and responsiveness, shifting between languages to sustain understanding and connection, and coordinating gesture, movement, gaze, and object use to guide participation. Findings suggest that informal community learning settings can function as professional learning contexts where multilingual families’ interactional expertise becomes visible and families are positioned as educational partners and sources of pedagogical insight for future early childhood educators.