Morning circle as a community of practice: Co-teachers’ transmodality in a dual language bilingual education preschool classroom | CU Experts

To understand how verbal, visual, and actional modalities serve dual language bilingual education instruction and learning in the preschool activity of Morning Circle (MC), we ask: (a) What is the nature of teachers’ transmodal practices to facilitate MC activity? (b) How do teacher pairs orchestrate transmodal practices across MC activities? Using a communities of practice perspective, we explore how co-teacher pairs establish a nexus of high-valued practices and transmodal norms. We collected bi-weekly video recordings of co-teachers’ MC practices across three Spanish/English dual language bilingual education preschool classrooms to capture teachers’ and students' transmodal interactions. Findings reveal variation in and strategic coordination of co-teachers’ transmodalities based on instructional foci/content of different MC activities (e.g., singing songs; reviewing numeracy concepts or literacy concepts; fostering participation norms). Co-teachers’ collaborative efforts created a community of practice inviting and engaging children in the socially-aligned (e.g., participation norms) and instructionally-relevant (e.g., numeracy and literacy) routines and purposes of MC. Findings have implications for how teachers’ transmodal/translanguaging practices vary according to social and curricular expectations, problematizing the oral-multimodal divide and hierarchy and legitimizing teachers’ collective translingual-transmodal repertoire.

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