MLRC to host new online Speakers Series starting Thursday, Aug. 1

First speaker is Haiwen Chu of WestEd

July 17, 2024   |   By WCER Communications

The Multilingual Learning Research Center's new Speaker Series will highlight current research related to the teaching and learning of multilingual learners. Every first Thursday of the month starting Aug. 1, a researcher or team of researchers is invited to share insights, findings, or learnings from their research via Zoom. Recordings are posted within one week of the event.

The first speaker, Haiwen Chu, will present "Multilingual Learners Co-Constructing Proofs and Representations: Linking Language and Logic," from 1–2 p.m. CT. Please register here.

Chu is a research manager for the English Learner and Migrant Education Services content area team at WestEd. He also serves as a co-Principal Investigator on the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. Chu draws upon his experiences as a high school mathematics teacher to design educative curriculum materials to expand the capacity of mathematics teachers across the country to challenge and support their students who are bureaucratically designed as “English Learners.”

About Chu's Aug. 1 talk:
Adolescent students who are bureaucratically designated “English Learners” have immense potential to learn mathematics while they simultaneously develop language to both explore inductively and prove deductively. We share evidence of learning from field trials of a summer bridge course exploring cross-cutting concepts of mathematics. The particular examples of language and learning are from a module about how to represent and analyze networks, including proofs of impossibility, by induction, and by exhaustion.

Learn more about the MLRC Speaker Series.