Before her involvement in Project LEARN. Brooke prioritized student collaboration, but did not explicitly focus on or encourage students to stretch their plurilingual abilities. During the 2022-23 school year, Brooke focused on expanding her use of translanguaging and linguistically sustaining pedagogies in when teaching 7th grade natural science. In the following lesson, Brooke describes how she encouraged students to leverage their full linguistic repertoire when discussing and presenting about scientific concepts, and provides recommendations for other science educators.   Additional resources she used in the classroom include multilingual assignment checklists and sentence starters, as well as an end-of-unit self-reflection, to guide students in planning and evaluating their final products.

The student who created the Cañón del Colca brochure below had only completed assignments in English for most of the school year, despite being plurilingual in Spanish and English. However, as Brooke modeled and encouraged translanguaging for this assignment, the student felt comfortable enough to stretch her linguistic abilities. This student selected a rock formation central to her culture, chose to present her brochure in both English and Spanish, thus leveraging her full linguistic repertoire as she communicated about course content.   In the weeks following the Rock Formation unit, Brooke noticed an increased level of confidence among her students, as students who had previously had written only in incomplete sentences in English began using their full linguistic repertoire to present  increasingly complex and well-developed scientific explanations.