#201: Designing Teacher Curricular Customization Tools to Enhance Elementary Students’ Language Use for Scientific Sensemaking

Elementary classrooms are a critical space for engaging students in expansive science instruction. High quality instructional materials can support teachers in shifting and transforming how science is taught at the elementary grades. However, teachers need to customize the curriculum for their specific contexts. By curricular customizations, we mean adaptations or changes teachers make to personalize or localize the materials. Specifically, we are interested in supporting teachers in making principled customizations to support their multilingual learners (MLs). For this project, we ground our design work in a language for science perspective in which we center the diverse and wide-ranging language resources MLs bring to the classroom. In this paper, we share the designs of two curricular customization tools aimed at increasing multimodality during discussions, and an example 4th grade customization that illustrates MLs’ expansive language use for scientific sensemaking.