Project Idea #2:Translanguaging in K12 – the Searchable Database

 

 

  • An introductory descriptive paragraph, which should include a problem statement, and say *what* your tool/thing will do. This is your abstract, or elevator pitch. This should not have the full theoretical framing of the project. That will come in the final.

Over the last 5 years, the state-funded CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB) has produced a series of guides to support K-12 teachers of all subject areas as they work with students who exhibit diverse and dynamic bilingual linguistic practices. CUNY-NYSIEB has generally provided teachers at partner schools and teacher candidates in CUNY graduate and undergraduate education courses with these publications in hard copy or in PDF format. The documents often exceed 100 printed pages. Several classroom teachers I have worked with in my capacity as a research assistant at the Initiative have expressed that while they know the guides are chock full of useful tips and strategies, they find them dense and overwhelming to navigate.

I propose drawing on the content from the main translanguaging guide and the forthcoming translanguaging guide for writing instruction in order to create a searchable database / website of translanguaging strategies that will be easier to navigate than the PDF guides. The database will included annotated images of classroom elements and student work, descriptions of strategies from the guides, and the theoretical Q and A sections about translanguaging, reproduced from the guides.

  • A set of personas

Prof. Ana Adjunct teaches courses in bilingual education at several of the CUNY Schools of Education. On an average day, she traverses the borough of Brooklyn to visit the undergraduate student teachers that she supervises at their placement sites — elementary schools which serve sizable populations of emergent bilingual students. In the evening, she teaches a foundations of bilingual education course to in-service teachers who are completing their bilingual extensions or TOEFL certifications. While her class is generally theory-heavy, she wants to make sure that she connects theory and practice so her students feel like her course is relevant to what they do every day.

Ms. “Busy” Bee is a new 5th grade teacher at PS 123 in Queens. She came to the profession through the NYC Teaching Fellows program after quitting her job in marketing. She has strong classroom management skills, but struggles to truly involve the students who have just arrived from foreign countries. The students speak Bengali, Spanish, or Chinese at home. Ms. B took a few years of high school Spanish, but has no familiarity with Bengali or Chinese. She spends a great deal of time outside of school lesson planning. Two nights per week, she goes to classes at Queens College so she can earn her Master’s degree and permanent certification as an English as a New Language teacher. She does most of her reading for class on the subway and bus between home, school, and the college.

Samantha Sophomore is an undergraduate in her last year at CUNY-Lehman College School of Education. She also works part-time as an assistant at a health clinic in the Bronx where she frequently interprets for Spanish-speaking patients. Inspired by a teacher she had as a public high school student in the Bronx, she decided to go into teaching, and she enrolled at Lehman to obtain her bilingual education / early childhood degree. She is just beginning her first semester of fieldwork, during which she is expected to participate as a teaching assistant in the classroom of her cooperating teacher. Because she is bilingual, she is often asked to work with small groups of 4th graders who are newcomers from Spanish-speaking countries. Her fieldwork supervisor has been coaching her to strategically use students’ home languages as a resource during her small group sessions.

  • A use case scenario (where would someone find your tool/thing and how would they use it). Keep it short.

In-service teachers taking a bilingual education course are asked by their professor to complete an assignment where they integrate a translanguaging strategy into their teaching of emergent bilingual students. Their professor provides them with a link to the Translanguaging Strategies Database. One teacher navigates to the database, where she is able to use a series of dropdown menus, checkboxes, or categories and tags to search by grade level and type of activity. She looks up “vocabulary” and finds several strategies relating to vocabulary including the “Frayer” model. She uses the suggestions yielded by her search to help her design an upcoming activity for her writing instruction.

  • How you will make the full fledged version. This is your “ideal world” version that fulfills all of your visions and fantasies (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc)

In the Spring of 2016, I would ideally first interview teachers and teacher prep students who have used CUNY-NYSIEB’s translanguaging guide in the context of their coursework and practice with students. I’ll ask them in what scenarios they have used the guides, and how they sought to locate the information that would be the most useful. As a proof of concept, this semester, I’ll create a paper prototype or perhaps a working WordPress prototype of the database and its organization and search functions to show to teachers or other members of the CUNY-NYSIEB team for feedback. I will have to work with the real text from the guide in order to determine the structure of the database, and will let the content drive the structure. At the same time, I will have to re-write and condense much of the text so that it gets to the heart of what teachers are most interested in. I will see how the teachers / intended users interact with the prototype, and then ask them to rate different ideas I might have for search functions and organization.

In the Fall of 2016, I will continue adding content to the site, assessing whether changes would need to be made to the planned structure of the site. I would include more of the images from CUNY-NYSIEB’s repository, and include links to other resources on the site as well.

  • Your assessment of how much time this will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.

A few years ago, I used WordPress to create a database of reading passages. The most tricky part of the process was determining the site’s organization — what the functions of tags, categories, and pages would be — in order to ensure maximum usability and searchability. If, through conversations with colleagues, I decide to use a tool other than WordPress, I will need to spend some amount of time, perhaps some this semester, and some next semester, learning the tool or code behind that tool.

I believe I will be able to integrate at least the tools and strategies sections from each guide into a new site / database within the semester allotted. I am familiar with WordPress, but ideally I would learn to use some other tool which would have me plunge more deeply into database design, as that is a skill I would like to develop. We were exposed to Omeka, and I have done some searching in the DiRT resources for other potential platforms, but before beginning this project, I would want to consult with others who have done this type of work in the past before deciding on the perfect tool. Ideally, I would apply for a workstation at the Media Lab and avail myself of the guidance of the technologist there.

  • How you will make the stripped down version. The stripped down version is the minimally viable product. It is the most *bare bones* version to prove that what you are trying to get at is viable. (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc)

The stripped down version of this site would include the content from only one of the guides, and would most likely employ WordPress and its tagging and categorizing functions.

  • Your assessment of how much time this will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.

If I use wordpress, I would not need to learn too many new skills. Once I have a viable organizing strategy for the database, the work of rewriting and formatting text and images will be tedious, but not particularly challenging.

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