Identités sociomatérielles et création d’histoires plurilingues et numériques

In the context of this special issue offering new materialist viewpoints in the field of language education, a sociomaterial perspective allows me to question an anthropocentric definition of learners’ and teachers’ identities in a school context. Looking at two moments of plurilingual and digital story production that occurred in an elementary school located in a major city in British Columbia, I trace the trajectories of sociomaterial agencements which involved learners, languages, spaces, researchers and other materials. I adopt a post-qualitative inquiry stance and go back and forth between concepts from posthumanist, new materialist, Deleuzo-Guattarian and Indigenous perspectives and narrative descriptions, screenshots and other figures. Thinking with theories, I follow unpredictable lines of flight which lead to the rhizoanalysis of two moments lived in a French immersion classroom, and I invite readers to come up with their own questions and to take part in the inquiry process. The following concepts – spatial repertoires, agencements, body materiality, excesses and flows of affect – demand that we widen our gaze in research and in practice so that we can better understand the dynamic identity agencements that gather diverse human and material elements.

The Nephrology Immersion Classroom for Internal Medicine Residents

BackgroundIn graduate medical education (GME), there are many barriers to achieving a personalized learning process with standardized learning outcomes. One way to support this is through mobile-friendly digital blackboard videos. We sought to measure the effect of a mobile-friendly video curriculum on resident satisfaction, knowledge, and clinical skills during a nephrology rotation.MethodsThis was a prospective, controlled, nonrandomized trial. The control group consisted of internal medicine residents who completed our inpatient nephrology consult rotation as usual. The classroom group had the same clinical experience, but also had access to a library (Nephrology Immersion Classroom) of mobile-friendly, nephrology-themed, digital blackboard videos. In a postrotation assessment, we measured resident satisfaction, clinical knowledge using 15 multiple-choice questions, and nephrology-specific clinical skills.ResultsOf the residents in the classroom group, 77% enrolled in the online classroom, and the majority reported using the classroom occasionally or frequently. A majority found it very easy to use (86%) and strongly recommended having similar videos for other rotations (77%). We observed improved report of rotation-specific clinical skills, but no difference in short-term knowledge between the two study groups.ConclusionsA mobile-friendly, digital video curriculum for internal medicine residents on an inpatient consult rotation was well utilized, highly rated, and associated with improved nephrology-specific clinical skills. Continued evaluation and incremental improvement of such resources could enhance implementation of GME core curricula.

Learning Mathematics in a Second Language: Language Positive and Language Neutral Classrooms

Research focused on learning mathematics in a 2nd language is generally located in individual 2nd-language contexts. In this ethnographic study, I investigated mathematics learning in 4 different second-language contexts: a mainstream classroom, a sheltered classroom for Indigenous students, a welcome class for new immigrants, and a French-immersion classroom. The study was framed by a view of learning as socialization and the Bakhtinian notion of centripetal and centrifugal language forces. I present 7 socialization events that were particularly salient in 1 or more of the classrooms. For each socialization event, I identify various socialization practices. Based on a comparison of socialization practices in the 4 classrooms, I propose a distinction between language positive and language neutral mathematics classrooms. In language positive mathematics classrooms, students’ socialization into mathematics and language includes explicit attention to different aspects of language use in mathematics. In language neutral mathematics classrooms, the role of language in mathematics tends to be implicit.

Student Language Use In a One-Way Mandarin Immersion Classroom

This research describes language use by four first-grade students during mathematics and Language Arts instruction in a one-way 50/50 Mandarin immersion classroom. The urban public school was situated in the heart of an African-American community in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Participants were video- and audio- recorded while wearing lapel microphones for 56–75 minutes per week for five weeks, followed by a semi-structured focus group interview. A total of 3,090 speech turns were coded and analysed under five categories: number of speech turns, vocabulary, grammar, linguistic functions, and other themes that emerged from the interview. Overall, students used Mandarin 61% of the time. Data indicated that multiple factors may impact student target language use, including motivation, learning strategies, social identity, linguistic background and pedagogy. Implications for changes in immersion curriculum and instruction, as well as calls for future research on trilingual education are shared.

In search of immersion teacher educators’ knowledge base

Although it has long been touted as a key ingredient to successful immersion practice, no research to date has examined immersion teacher educators’ (ITEs) knowledge base as it relates to the work of content, language, and literacy integration in curriculum planning and teaching. Thus, it is difficult to know whether or not ITEs are ready and able to support the pedagogical transition toward better-integrated practice in the immersion classroom. This qualitative study set out to fill this gap in our knowledge by exploring ITEs’ understanding of the nature and role of language and literacy in the context of their discipline of expertise through the use of an analytic framework designed to examine ITEs’ knowledge base. Key findings point to the need for the elaboration of a professional development (PD) program specifically dedicated to supporting ITEs’ continuous knowledge growth, particularly when it comes to the issue of pedagogical integration.