Engaging with materials and the body: young plurilingual children's resource-rich interations in science investigations

Children’s interactions are inherently multimodal. Accordingly, when children engage in science in classroom com-munities, their interactions are grounded in material and embodied aspects of interactions with teachers and their peers.
Purpose: This study explores the nature of children’s science inter-actions in a classroom community where students are working in a language they are also learning through examination of the ways in which open-ended pedagogical approaches mediated embodied and material science participation and sense-making.
Study and method: We employed multimodal interaction analysis layered with a critical ethnographic perspective to explore the embodied and materially-grounded experiences of a student work-ing in an early-childhood classroom with peers and teachers in science through a language he is also working to learn.
Results: Multimodal interaction analysis allowed us to build views of how the classroom interactional spaces afforded embo-died and material participation and learning in science, and uncovered the multimodal ways in which this mediated his engagement in science and communication of science mean-ings and wonderings.
Conclusions: Open-ended pedagogical approaches afforded spaces in which this student was able to engage with phenomena, materials, and embodied interactions, regardless of his verbal participation. His embodied participation and interactions are science learning. Pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of science with all children, and in particular with plurilingual children, through the use of open-approaches that afford resource-rich embodied engagement and learning are discussed.