Representing Percents and Personas: Designing Syncretic Curricula for Modeling and Statistical Reasoning

Abstract

Syncretic literacy can link everyday and scientific concepts in student learning. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a curricular unit in a bilingual middle school science class developed to help students link everyday conceptions, conceptions from math, science, and computer science, and their own broad linguistic repertoires to support syncretic literacy in modeling and statistics in a unit on post-Hurricane Maria outmigration from Puerto Rico. The unit invited students to use printed maps, physical objects, and computer code and simulations to explore concepts such as percentages and scientific models framed by an approach from translanguaging pedagogy. Qualitative study showed that this approach supported students to engage productively in the tensions between scientific and everyday conceptions as described in Gutiérrez (2014), while using language resources from across communities and disciplines.