Food Webs Around the World

Erin Doherty, Cypress High School

Erin Doherty is a science teacher at Cypress High School. In addition to teaching, she is also the advisor for several on-campus organizations student leadership groups, college readiness bridge programs, the Environmental Club, and Science Olympiad. Erin teaches Living Earth to 9th grade students and AP Environmental Science to 11th and 12th grade students. She is passionate about educating her students on the importance of environmental sustainability and enjoys helping them get involved in extracurricular activities that align with their interests.

Food Webs from Around the World

Erin noticed that although many of her students were plurilingual, the conversations in her science classroom was conducted almost exclusively in English. She wanted to find ways to support students in using their full linguistic repertoire to discuss scientific concepts, and also challenge the implicit monolingualism of advanced classes. In this end-of-unit Environmental Science project, Erin required students to demonstrate their understanding of core concepts from the unit by creating food webs from around the world, and to use multiple languages to convey their findings. Students were graded on the creativity of their approach to plurilingual presentation, and had the flexibility to either present results using languages spoken by group members or to research and incorporate languages used in the regions they were researching.

The slides below highlight Erin's approach to translanguaging in her science classroom and examples of how students used translanguaging in this project. Directions for this project are also included below, and as well as a rubric Erin uses to assess students' mastery of core concepts.

Erin Slides

Copy of Food Web Project.pdf

Food Webs Project Student Work

Students worked collaboratively to design a visual of a biome of choice from around the world. Students were empowered to use their entire linguistic repertoire in their design, and to co-create projects that challenge monolingualism in scientific discourse.

Challenging Linguistic Fragility

As someone who was raised a monolingual speaker of English, Erin is acutely aware of her responsibility to model ways monolingual teachers can nourish linguistically inclusive classrooms.. For Erin and her colleagues, this has meant grappling with their own "linguistic fragility," and "braving up" by acknowledging everything she doesn't know and cannot (yet) do with language. Erin found that the more she practiced her own emergent Spanish in the classroom, the more willing her plurilingual students were to use their full linguistic repertoires; she also noticed shifts in the ways her own monolingual English-speaking students thought about their own linguistic identities. At first, some students found the idea of scientific discourse in languages they didn't understand alienating and uncomfortable, but as they saw Erin attempt to stretch her own languaging, they began to value their peers' plurilingualism and experiment with stretching their own approach to languaging. Erin was especially impressed with the ways students demonstrated increasing linguistic creativity, voice and agency as the year progressed. At the end of the year, one group of students created the following "advertisement" for AP Environmental Science, in which they highlighted the Erin's approach to languaging as one of the important elements of the course.

Language Empowerment in Science Class

I am not a native Spanish speaker, and I have started giving directions and información en clase en Español, and I often pronounce things incorrectly. I find myself saying, “como se dice______en Español” a decent amount, however when students are able to help me, they are able to use their language skills in a way unexpected in a science class. Teenagers seem to like correcting the teacher, and this is a perfect way to empower them to do so. If I am willing to make mistakes to improve my language skills, students are more likely to take similar risks.

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