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This dissertation seeks to illuminate additive significance of the entanglements within a Dual Language Immersion Spanish Science classroom where arts-based pedagogies are employed. Using a theoretical framework that combines Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism (2010) and notion of Enchantment (2002) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of Nepantla (2015), the study posits DLI classrooms as in-between spaces that disrupt binaries of school knowledge/home knowledge, English/Spanish language use, arts/scientific disciplinary knowledge and researcher/research data. Bennett and Anzaldúa coincide in their view of the porosity of human and non-human relationships, the interconnectedness of all things, ontological monism, and the use of visual, translingual, and poetic notes in research and theory.
The empirical study that forms the basis of this dissertation involved applying qualitative research methods to the experience of three elementary school teachers in Georgia who integrated arts-based methods into their Spanish science lessons. The study combined hermeneutic phenomenological research (Seidman, 2019; van Manen, 2016) and poetic inquiry (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2003; Faulkner, 2020; Glesne, 1997; Richardson, 1993) for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Phenomenology and poetic inquiry are particularly effective methods for affording access to the entanglements of the DLI classroom as a research site because of their openness to all aspects of the experienced assemblage in a given context. These methodologies prioritize evocative, aesthetic language to communicate experience, assume that the experience of the other is marked by indeterminacy, and reject dualistic categories.
Findings chapters focus in turn on student experience, teacher experience, researcher experience, and how these are intertwined and entangled within the DLI Spanish science classroom context. Recognition of these entanglements is theorized as understanding of/from the in-between. Understanding of/from the in-between uses a mindset that assumes a continuum of identities, including the materiality of home and school selves and an interconnectedness of ideas, things, and beings that leaves room for indeterminacy, surprise, connection, and a surplus of learning. Schools, teachers, and researchers that acknowledge and cultivate understanding of/from the in-between create spaces for further connection and surplus significance within the classroom assemblage.
