Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl, Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, Lezlie Salvatore DeWater, Keiko Kawaski
Differential participation during science conversations: The interaction of
focal artifacts, social configurations, and physical arrangements
Wolff-Michael Roth, Michelle K. McGinn, Carolyn Woszczyna,
Sylvie Boutonne
Recent conceptualizations of knowing and learning focus on the
degree of participation in the practices of communities. Discursive practices
are the most important and characteristic practices in many communities. This
study was designed to investigate how the content and form of classroom
discourse was influenced by different combinations of artifacts (e.g.,
overhead transparencies, physical models), social configurations, and
physical arrangements. Over a four-month period, we collected data (
videotaped activities, interviews, ethnographic observations, artifacts, and
photographs) in a grade 6-7 science class studying a unit on simple machines.
Four different activity structures differed in terms of the social
configuration (whole class, small group) and the origin of the central,
activity-organizing artifact (teacher designed, student designed). This study
describes how different artifacts, social configurations, and physical
arrangements led to different interactional spaces, participant roles, and
levels of participation in classroom conversations and, concomitantly, to
different discursive forms and content. The artifacts had important functions
in maintaining and sequencing conversations. Depending on the situation and
the role of participants, artifacts served as resources for students' sense
making. Each of the different activity structures supported different
dimensions of participating in conversations and, for this reason, we
conclude that science educators teaching large classes should employ a
mixture of these activity structures. Overall, students developed
considerable competencies in discursive and materials practices related to
simple machines.
Physical arrangements, the spatial layout of a setting, the arrangement of
the furniture, the open spaces, walkways, coffee niches, doors to the outside
, and so on have an important influence on structuring interactions. . . they
encourage or hinder certain kinds of interaction between people in the scene.
(Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 74-75)
Ubiquitous mediating structures that both organize and constrain activity
include not only designed objects such as tools, control instruments, and
symbolic representations like graphs, diagrams, texts, plans, and pictures,
but people in social relations, as well as features and landmarks in the
physical environment. (Pea, 1993, p. 48)
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