Building Resilient Homes

Erik Cobian-Mejia, Lexington Junior High School

When Mr. Cobian-Mejia joined the faculty of Lexington High School as a science teacher, he was surprised by level of English dominance within the classroom: many of his students were monolingual in English, and those students who were multilingual rarely used their full linguistic repertoire in the classroom. The following lesson illustrates how Mr. Cobian-Mejia used culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy to stretch students' ways of thinking and communicating about science, and create opportunities for students to engage and amplify linguistically diverse voices in their community.

Lesson: Natural Hazards

In his week-long Natural Hazards Engineering Challenge, Erik challenged students to think about how natural hazards impact local and international communities. As part of this project students conducted research regarding personally and culturally relevant experiences with natural disasters (such as the impact of flooding in their parents' home countries); used engineering principles to design a home that could withstand their chosen hazard; and created an infographic to educate community members about hazard mitigation. To encourage students to leverage their full linguistic repertoires, Erik provided instructional materials in multiple languages, encouraged students to discuss their projects with family members, and required students to consider both the priorities of and languages spoken by their broader communities when crafting their final projects. Below, you will find Erik's slides detailing each task students completed, as well as students' final infographics, completed in a variety of languages.

Lesson Materials

In the slides below, Erik details how he scaffold students each of the three tasks associated with this unit. First, students had to design and construct a model capable of enduring a simulated flooding scenario. They created a detailed sketch of their structure, which served as the blueprint for strategic planning and creative execution, and then used materials like popsicle sticks, rubber bands, string, hot glue, mini marshmallows, toothpicks, and index cards to build their models according to required design specification.

After testing their structures using a flood table, students identified their structure's breakage point and wrote a short analysis of the factors that affected their structure's resiliency. Students used their preliminary findings to create plans for flood-resiliant housing, and then Tinkercad to create 3D models, aiming for structures that can withstand a simulated 10-inch flood. Throughout, they reflect on their designs, assessing what worked and what didn't, proposing modifications, and correlating their solutions with real-life California disaster scenarios.

At the end of the project, students created infographics about their findings, focusing on how their project addressed community concerns, evaluated their performance using a provided rubric, and provided feedback on their peers' presentations.

Copy of Natural Hazard

Student Infographic Examples

The culminating task for this lesson was the creation of an infographic about natural disasters, focusing on both the design/build process they used in their unit as well as steps to take in the case of natural disaster. Students could choose whether to write in English or in another language, and used peer- and parental-review to evaluate the impact of their languaging and overall messaging. Many of Erik's students said this was the first time they were encouraged to use a language other than English in a science classroom, and he noticed an increased sense of linguistic curiosity as students began to learn more about their own heritage languages or languages spoken by other families in the classroom. See below for examples of projects created by Erik's students.

Student A: Tagalog

Tagalog Example.pdf

Student B: Vietnamese

viet version (1).pdf

Student C: Tamil

Student D: Spanish

projecto (1).pdf

Reflecting on Student Learning

As Erik reflected on student work, he noted both the impact of the lessons on students and opportunities for improvement. In the slides below, he summarizes his recommendations for other science teachers interested in increasing their use of linguistically expansive pedagogies.

Natural Hazards Capstone Project

Curious and Brave Spaces

"Since a large majority of my students are monolingual, they have lost connection to their parent’s linguistic wealth. With a project that allowed them to use their home language, students became curious; they wanted to learn Italian, Korean, French, Vietnamese, etc.. Emergent bilinguals were proud to use their home language in an academic setting; they were also experts in the language and were able to provide necessary linguistic feedback to other students. I want to provide further opportunities for my emergent bilingual to showcase their linguistic skills."

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