Morning circle as a community of practice: Co-teachers’ transmodality in a dual language bilingual education preschool classroom

Abstract

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.