Chapter 15: Exploring Translanguaging and Multimodal Practices in Nature Journaling With Preservice Teachers

This chapter focuses on naturejournaling with future elementary school teachers with the goal of incorporating this practice in their own classrooms with language diverse learners. I leverage the resources from Laws and Lygren’s (2020) book, How to Teach Nature Journaling, and adapt two strategies—event comic and soundscape—that can be used by teachers and their students in strengthening their interconnections to the living world and expanding their ideologies of “what counts” as science knowledge. The goals in the chapter are two-fold: (a) inspire the next generation of elementary teachers to notice and deepen their care and respect for the family of plants, ocean, mountains, animals, and various elements that interact with them; (b) actualize both the teachers’ and students’ language repertoires in science moving them towards a more expansive view of how learners communicate their science thinking to others in monolingual, and bi/multilingual classrooms.