Writing at Good Hope Hospital: A study of negotiated discourse in the workplace

Based on a two-year observation of a midwest hospital department of nursing, this study focuses on the composing processes of a group of head nurses writing regulatory prose. Transcripts of audiotaped writing sessions, interviews with nurses, field notes and texts were collected in order to illuminate the writing strategies that appeared in a discourse community which had both hierarchical power structures and interdependent social subgroups which influenced the work of composition. Writing in this setting became an act of negotiation among hierarchical forces and peer influences. Situated on the border between delivery of bedside care and nursing administration, this collaborative group extended the composition process beyond planning and drafting to activities such as building community consensus, publishing local texts, and arranging for future revision. Negotiating among various community subgroups and revising documents in light of those negotiations were primary activities of the group. The proposed model of negotiated composition ties socially constructed community discourse to organizational change

On Learning Fundamental Concepts of Group Theory

The research reported in this paper explores the nature of student knowledge about group theory, and how an individual may develop an understanding of certain topics in this domain. As part of a long-term research and development project in learning and teaching undergraduate mathematics, this report is one of a series of papers on the abstract algebra component of that project. The observations discussed here were collected during a six-week summer workshop where 24 high school teachers took a course in Abstract Algebra as part of their work. By comparing written samples, and student interviews with our own theoretical analysis, we attempt to describe ways in which these individuals seemed to be approaching the concepts of group, subgroup, coset, normality, and quotient group. The general pattern of learning that we infer here illustrates an action-process-object-schema framework for addressing these specific group theory issues. We make here only some quite general observations about..

A Reaction to Burn's "What Are The Fundemental Concepts of Group Theory?"

Algebra. We have written a textbook and an expository article in the American Mathematical Monthly. The latter article has led to an exchange of letters in the Monthly in which we have participated, since we welcome this sort of discussion in an appropriate forum. We believe that two sorts of discussion are essential to the development of innovative mathematics pedagogies and that it is important to distinguish between them. Some discussions should make use of our collective teaching experience and inspire public conversations such as the one in the Monthly. But other discussions should make specific research assertions where data is presented, intepretations are made and conclusions are drawn. We reiterate that Dubinsky et al is a discussion of the second kind since it represents a systematic investigation of the nature of knowledge and how it develops in an individual. We hope, therefore, that others will analyze Dubinsky et al in the spirit in which it was written. This study and it..