ERIC Number: EJ1471369
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jun
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1468-7984
EISSN: EISSN-1741-2919
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Morning Circle as a Community of Practice: Co-Teachers' Transmodality in a Dual Language Bilingual Education Preschool Classroom
Sabrina F. Sembiante1; Alain Bengochea2; Mileidis Gort3
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, v25 n2 p283-307 2025
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.
Descriptors: Learning Modalities, Bilingual Education, Preschool Education, Group Activities, Communities of Practice, Team Teaching, Spanish, English, Preschool Teachers, Interaction, Teaching Methods, Teacher Collaboration, Learner Engagement, Language Usage, Code Switching (Language)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Preschool Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Florida Atlantic University, USA; 2University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA; 3University of Colorado-Boulder, USA