This is the introduction to the special issue on Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Computing in Multilingual Contexts.

In this article, we draw on positioning theory to analyze interactions between parents and children in mathematics workshops in a bilingual setting. Grounded in an asset-based perspective of parents and children as sense makers, we look at how ideas are developed, expanded, adopted, challenged, or rejected and how parents and children position each other during the activities. We close with implications for teachers’ practice to support the learning of mathematics of bilingual children.

This article reports on how monolingual and bilingual teachers engaged in a collaboration with parents centered on learning mathematics together. We focus on how this shaped teachers’ mathematics instruction and their perceptions of students’ and their families’ strengths. Our findings include teachers’ awareness of making connections to children’s experiences in their teaching of mathematics; the realization that parents make significant contributions to their children’s mathematics learning; and the power of dual language settings in mathematics.

This article provides an understanding of how refugee families view mathematics and participate in their children’s mathematics learning. Using the two-year data from the GÖÇ-MAT project, the article shows how family engagement practices designed around mathematics can provide a context to understand families’ knowledge of mathematics and their community cultural wealth and efforts for their children’s education.

This article draws on a strength-based approach to examine how diverse students draw on multimodal forms of communication to engage in algebraic reasoning. It includes a qualitative case study of a mathematics lesson involving a culturally located task.

This study focuses on mathematical language in a bilingual Grade 4 classroom in Malta, wherein the author/researcher takes on a teaching role. The author explains how, by giving explicit attention to the discourse of fractions of quantities, she supported the young students to better understand the topic.

This article explores how dialogic translanguaging might work in relation to its potential for addressing and being responsive to engendered risks of onto/epistemic violence in the context of multilingual mathematics classrooms. Focusing on either emergent or orchestrated spaces of translanguaging in three settings—Greece, Spain, and Sweden—we discuss how a Bakhtinian notion of dialogicality allows for alternative accounts concerning these spaces.

Occurring within a research–practice partnership focused on developing K–12 students’ capacity for engaging in computer science, this study examines design principles intended to support teachers in productively engaging their students in computational thinking and supporting their language development. Analysis of instruction at the elementary level found that computational thinking provides a powerful avenue for language development if learning (1) is meaningfully contextualized, (2) positions students as agentic learners, and (3) promotes coherence over time.

Drawing on a Figured Worlds metaphor, this manuscript explores the development of bilingual Latinx students’ understanding of themselves in relation to mathematics and computer programming (CPM). The qualitative data analysis of six bilingual Latinx cofacilitators through a contrastive-comparative-constant analysis regarding their experiences in the program indicated that they increased motivation and confidence in CPM by learning and teaching it and developing personal connections to CPM and their peers. Implications and future steps are discussed.

The aim of this article is to better understand how predominantly low-income, multilingual Latina students experience identity development through the lens of diverse group membership. We examine how young Latinas, through their participation in a yearlong culturally and linguistically responsive computer science (CS) curriculum, leverage their intersecting identities to rewrite the formula of what a computer scientist is and can be, leaving space to include and invite other strong identities as well.

This study reveals different positions that Cindy, a Latina middle-school student studying mathematics and computing, took up while learning binary numbers in an after-school program. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, we approached the study by applying systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and positioning theory (PT). Focusing on Cindy’s reciprocal positioning as she participated during the first year in the program, this study’s data sources included videotaped interactions of twelve ninety-minute sessions and were analyzed using SFL and PT. Episodes portray Cindy’s experiences learning binary numbers, which include: (a) Cognitive dissonance and unfamiliarity with binary numbers accompanied by the facilitator’s disjointed interactions yielded Cindy’s positioning as a non-competent problem solver; (b) Cindy, supported by peers and aware of her incomplete understanding limitation, navigated binary number problems resolution through a position of ‘knowing’ (“fake it until you make it”); and (c) Nurturing peers’ and facilitators’ interactions, empathetic to Cindy’s current learning of binary numbers and use of Spanish, promoted a context that supported Cindy’s understanding of binary numbers. Implications and future work are discussed.

Schools often expect emergent bi/multilingual students to engage with named languages (e.g., English, Spanish), disciplines (e.g., math, computer science), and modalities (e.g., writing, reading, programming) within discrete classes. However, these schooled divisions leave little space for students’ multifaceted ways of knowing. Syncretic literacies offer a way to blur the boundaries between disciplinary and community practices, creating space for transformative learning. We present analysis of a bilingual middle school science class. Instruction, guided by a syncretic orientation, invited students to leverage translanguaging practices for a modeling and computing activity about post-Hurricane María outmigration from Puerto Rico. Micro-ethnographic analyses illuminated interrelationships between students’ engagements with models, computational and mathematical reasoning, and their knowledge of migration, in relation to translanguaging practices. The latter drew attention to students’ flexible semiotic practices and how these practices in part constituted and became resources for syncretic literacies. Findings show how students assembled representational forms from a variety of practices as part of accomplishing both designed and emergent goals including sense-making, constructing, explaining, justifying, and interpreting physical and computational models of migration. Implications support the development of both theory and pedagogy that intentionally make space for students’ translanguaging and syncretic practices as part of disciplinary learning.