Morning circle as a community of practice: Co-teachers' transmodality in a dual language bilingual education preschool classroom.

This article examines how co-teachers in Spanish/English dual language bilingual preschool classrooms use transmodal practices—integrating verbal, visual, and actional modalities—to facilitate the Morning Circle (MC) activity, a routine that supports academic and social learning. Through video analysis of three co-teacher pairs, the study finds that teachers strategically coordinate their multimodal and translanguaging resources by mirroring or expanding each other's practices according to the instructional focus, such as melodic learning, numeracy, literacy, or participation norms. These coordinated transmodal practices create a community of practice that engages emergent bilingual children in socially and instructionally relevant routines, highlighting the importance of multimodal communication beyond verbal language alone. The findings challenge traditional hierarchies privileging oral language by legitimizing teachers' collective translingual-transmodal repertoires as essential for supporting bilingual learners' meaning-making and socialization in early childhood education.