Why Do Minoritized Students Deploy More Than One Language During a Physics Inquiry?

Abstract

We present a study that documented the participation of two high school Arab students in Israel in an extended (2-year) authentic physics inquiry that took place in a regional program located in a Hebrew-speaking kibbutz high school. The students' first language is Arabic, but they are fluent in Hebrew, and their inquiry was mentored by a Hebrew-speaking teacher-research-mentor (TRM) who speaks very little Arabic. None of the other students in the classroom spoke Arabic. The situational features of this case reflect the complex structure of uneven power relations between Hebrew and Arabic, between kibbutz and Arab schooling in Israel, and between teachers and students. Within this complex structure of uneven power relations, this study aimed to uncover the functions the deployment of Hebrew and Arabic fulfilled for these students during their engagement in the epistemic practices related to their scientific inquiry. The research approach combined ethnography with sociolinguistic discourse analysis of selected episodes. The findings suggest that the students' spontaneous shifts from Hebrew to Arabic while engaged in scientific epistemic practices often reflected challenges that are more sociocultural than linguistic. They imply that merely legitimizing multilingual discourse in monolingual classrooms may not be enough to support equitable science education, particularly when the students are members of a minoritized group. Teachers should be supported in becoming more attentive to their minoritized students' frames of participation, and researchers should be wary of automatically interpreting minoritized students' deployment of their minority language as merely indicating a difficulty expressing their thoughts in the majority language.