Empowering Bilingual ELLs in Social Studies: Translanguaging and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in action
This study uses the qualitative case study method to examine how an urban 9th-grade Spanish bilingual global history teacher’s implementation of culturally relevant and translanguaging pedagogies to teach social studies to his secondary bilingual ELLs (English Language Learners). The results show that the bilingual social studies teacher’s in-depth understanding of the students’ home language and culture, as well as their previous literacy education experiences, is key to motivating, engaging, and sustaining the students’ learning of social studies. Equally important is the teacher’s willingness to utilize the students’ culturally familiar knowledge and multilingual and multimodal resources to create translanguaging opportunities that advance their social studies learning. The findings argue for training social studies teachers to use culturally relevant and translanguaging pedagogies in social studies instruction to bilingual ELLs.
