ABSTRACT
Our efforts to provide pre-service teachers with approaches that integrate science, culture, and language materialized in the development of a restructured framework for teacher education programs (Stoddart, Solís, Tolbert, & Bravo, 2010). This work increased the coherence between what took place in pre-service teacher’s practicum experiences and in the courses they enroll in as part of their teacher education program by tying together these experiences with a common set of pedagogies. The new framework explicitly and systematically articulated the Effective Science Teaching for English Language Learners (ESTELL) instructional practices in elementary science contexts and prepared teacher candidates to teach science to English Language Learners (ELLs1). This work involved redesigning the content and delivery of the science methods course that is a part of our teacher preparation programs. Two of the authors of this chapter took the lead in developing the observational protocol for observing the science methods courses and then conducted the observations in these courses along with other colleagues. The collaborative work on the science course framework involved science and language educators in restructuring the science methods course to focus on the “sweetspots” between these disciplines – where language and culture can be authentically addressed as part of authentic scientific practices (Buxton, 2006; Lee, Quinn, & Valdes, 2013; Lynch, 2001). This chapter explains the process undertaken by our research team to construct an intervention course for pre-service teachers where they learned research-based instructional approaches for leveraging cultural and linguistic knowledge in the service of ELLs’ science learning (August, Branum-Martin, Cardenas-Hagan, & Francis, 2009; Goldenberg, 2013; Lee & Luykx, 2006; Lynch, 2001). We provide qualitative exemplars of how
the ESTELL practices were integrated into teacher education science methods courses. Moreover, this chapter addresses the following research question as part of the larger ESTELL study: How do teacher education science methods faculty implement the ESTELL instructional practices in their ESTELL-infused courses?
