The American School of Barcelona (ASB) serves international and Spanish families seeking high quality instruction and a supporting learning environment for students. With almost 1000 students, the ASB provides students with learning opportunities across three instructional languages, English, Spanish and Catalan.
Recently, Grade 1 teachers at the ASB began implementing translanguaging pedagogies in their classrooms to leverage the linguistic resources of their diverse multilingual student population. To support this innovative work, Jon Nordmeyer, MLRC School Network Director, visited ASB in January 2023 to observe classrooms and provide support with strategic visioning for the project. In March 2023, Dr. Esther Bettney Heidt, MLRC School Network Researcher, joined the Grade 1 team virtually to explore some foundational concepts in translanguaging. In their session together, the teachers identified their current understanding of translanguaging, established learning targets for students’ ongoing multilingual growth and refined their co-teaching strategies. This intentional, targeted capacity building has empowered teachers to move forward with their pioneering work in translanguaging.
To further this important work, ASB decided to join the MLRC School Network so their faculty could engage in engage in dialogue and collaborative research in a dedicated research-practice partnership to explore common problems of practice in teaching multilingual learners in international school contexts. The MLRC School Network promotes inquiry both within schools and across schools.
The American School of Barcelona will also host the first MLRC Research Symposium on November 18-19, 2023. The MLRC Research Symposium is a unique two-day opportunity for international educators – teachers and leaders – to engage deeply in existing research about multilingual learners, connect with global education scholars, inquire together about shared problems of practice and discuss innovative strategies for serving multilingual learners. Building on the previous success of the WIDA Symposia and the WIDA Global Community of Practice, the MLRC Research Symposium provides an opportunity for participants to develop a research-informed approach to improving school-wide systems by identifying strengths and goals for improvement.
Each MLRC Research Symposium will be guided by principles of reciprocal learning, by which participants learn from each other and from the research expertise of the MLRC, while at the same time sharing their own expertise with other schools and with the MLRC. Throughout the two days together, participants will engage in disciplined inquiry with other participants with similar interests and questions, as well as spend focused time with their own school-based team to identify important problems of practice.
We are excited to welcome ASB as one of the inaugural members of the MLRC School Member Network. We look forward to learning and growing together, in support of multilingual students.