FROM INTERACTION TO INTERACTION: EXPLORING SHARED RESOURCES CONSTRUCTED THROUGH AND MEDIATING CLASSROOM SCIENCE LEARNING

Recent reform documents and science education literature emphasize the importance of scientific argumentation as a discourse and practice of science that should be supported in school science learning. Much of this literature focuses on the structure of argument, whether for assessing the quality of argument or designing instructional scaffolds. This study challenges the narrowness of this research paradigm and argues for the necessity of examining students' argumentative practices as rooted in the complex, evolving system of the classroom. Employing a sociocultural-historical lens of activity theory (Engestrӧm, 1987, 1999), discourse analysis is employed to explore how a high school biology class continuously builds affordances and constraints for argumentation practices through interactions. The ways in which argumentation occurs, including the nature of teacher and student participation, are influenced by learning goals, classroom norms, teacher-student relationships and epistemological stances constructed through a class' interactive history. Based on such findings, science education should consider promoting classroom scientific argumentation as a long-term process, requiring supportive resources that develop through continuous classroom interactions. Moreover, in order to understand affordances that support disciplinary learning in classroom, we need to look beyond just disciplinary interactions. This work has implications for classroom research on argumentation and teacher education, specifically, the preparation of teachers for secondary science teaching

Two Birds, One Stone: Integrating Communication Proficiency Development Into Existing Academic Courses

This article discusses the pedagogical knowledge required to develop students\u27 communication proficiencies as part of their academic experience, proposes a method of doing so, and illustrates that method using a recent example. Using the case-study approach, first, the challenge is presented while its complexity in the context of academic studies is analyzed. Then, with implementation of the conceptual framework of “disciplinary literacy,” an original solution is offered in the form of a rolling multistage task in a seminar course that was a part of the master’s in teaching program. The rolling multistage task revolves around the development of the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach argumentation, and it includes building up useful practices and explicitly defined strategies for integrating writing education in a range of courses in a teacher education framework. Each instructional stage of the assignment and its rationale are presented in detail, aiming to enable the readers to implicate it to their settings. The rolling multistage task was developed specifically to the context of a seminar course for the graduate program in teacher education. Concluding remarks explain how the chosen writing skills match the course’s aims and contents, as well as the students’ background. Additionally, they deal with the importance of personal epistemology and of metacognitive knowledge in shaping meaningful and applicative experiences in schooling

Epistemic agency for costructuring expansive knowledge-building practices

As a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students\u27 epistemic agency: “reflective structuration” by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever-evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher\u27s support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Supporting Science Learning For English Language Learners

This study focused on two fourth-grade science classrooms with English learners (ELs), exploring how teachers supported students’ science and language/literacy learning in different language contexts. Three a priori research-based practices recommended for supporting science learning framed our exploration: (a) negotiation, opportunities for individual and social construction and critique of knowledge; (b) embedded language, opportunities for language and literacy learning as a natural aspect of science; and (c) non-threatening learning environments, opportunities for social apprenticeship and interaction. We provide insights into how science instructional practices supported ELs’ science and language learning. One key implication is that enacting these three principles of practice in students’ first language (Spanish), when less linguistic scaffolding is required, creates more opportunities to focus on disciplinary content and exploration of students’ ideas. The second key implication is that using open-ended questions and extending prompts and questions through exploration-based lessons was an effective way to support and guide ELs (and all students) to rich understandings of key concepts. A third key implication is that although teachers delivered instruction in two different languages, when they enacted these principles, they fostered student engagement and interest in science. Effective implementation of these practices outweighed the language of delivery

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

The power of discourse in high school adapted science with English language learning students

The significance of teacher and student interactions in classrooms as a means of enacting curricula, analyzing learning gains and embedding classrooms into broader societal power relations needs to be emphasized. In the context of science classes with English language learners (ELLs) in Canadian high schools, language learning and content learning goals are intertwined. In this study, I focused on the question of how I can help ELLs master science literacy, ommunicative literacies, and knowledge-based critical reasoning skills without simplifying the curriculum. I designed and delivered lessons for an adapted (transitional) science class of fourteen grade 10 ELLs over two semesters. I video-recorded all class activities and analyzed the data using the Communicative Approach framework, the Genre Egg framework, the Cognitive Discourse Functions construct, the 5R Instructional Model, and the Teacher Language Awareness construct. My data showed that adopting pedagogical practices via dialogic discursive interactions that create room for different points of view benefited ELLs in acquiring academic literacy. Furthermore, language accommodation did not seem to hinder or shift dialogic discourses into presentation and lecture-style authoritative teaching. However, the data also revealed the challenges of advancing content and language objectives in the same lesson under time constraints and given the reality of teacher training for adapted teachers in science. I argue that raising the content awareness of language teachers and the language awareness of content teachers has the potential to promote a genre-based, dialogic pedagogical approach in legitimizing learners’ views while offering access to dominant science perspectives in order to help ELLs develop criticality and maintain science identities as valued members of a high school science community. I reflect on the challenges in doing this and some of the strategies to overcome them. I conclude that the future of adapted teaching needs to endorse rigour as opposed to simplifying content, promote dialogicity instead of unilateral information-giving, utilize learners’ diverse pools of knowledge and experiences rather than leave them out of the curriculum, teach text-in-context as opposed to isolated language lessons, and foster critical thinking via reasoning and argumentation of today’s global issues to truly benefit language learners in developing science literacy

S-COL: A Copernican turn for the development of flexibly reusable collaboration scripts

Collaboration scripts are usually implemented as parts of a particular collaborative-learning platform. Therefore, scripts of demonstrated effectiveness are hardly used with learning platforms at other sites, and replication studies are rare. The approach of a platform-independent description language for scripts that allows for easy implementation of the same script on different platforms has not succeeded yet in making the transfer of scripts feasible. We present an alternative solution that treats the problem as a special case of providing support on top of diverse Web pages: In this case, the challenge is to trigger support based on the recognition of a Web page as belonging to a specific type of functionally equivalent pages such as the search query form or the results page of a search engine. The solution suggested has been implemented by means of a tool called S-COL (Scripting for Collaborative Online Learning) and allows for the sustainable development of scripts and scaffolds that can be used with a broad variety of content and platforms. The tool’s functions are described. In order to demonstrate the feasibility and ease of script reuse with S-COL, we describe the flexible re-implementation of a collaboration script for argumentation in S-COL and its adaptation to different learning platforms. To demonstrate that a collaboration script implemented in S-COL can actually foster learning, an empirical study about the effects of a specific script for collaborative online search on learning activities is presented. The further potentials and the limitations of the S-COL approach are discussed

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs