Too often, the needs of English language learners are met with simplified curriculum and lowered expectations. What would happen if instead classrooms were organized to honor the promise of these students by increasing rather than decreasing the intellectual challenge of instruction, by increasing the support such challenge requires, and by…

This paper presents a case study of science teaching in an eighth grade school classroom in India. It comes out of a larger ethnographic study done in 2005 that looked at how science was taught and learned in a rural government run middle school in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Subscribing to a sociocultural perspective, the paper presents…