Science Education Program Seminar Fall '08

September 15:  Dan Levin

September 29:  Stieff Group

October 13:    Discussion of Recent Literature

October 27:    David Hammer

November 10:   Open

November 24:   Randy McGinnis/Project Nexus

December 8:    Kitty Tang

Abstracts

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Kitty Tang

From interaction to interaction:

Exploring the shared resources constructed through and mediating classroom science learning interactions

The initial idea for this study came from a phenomenon I noticed in previous teacher professional development experience: classrooms differentiated a lot in terms of their affordance of productive inquiry learning, even when students were of the same level and the teachers claimed that they were doing the same learning activity. Employing the lens of a modified activity theory (Engestrom, 1987, 1999), I chose to investigate the activity system of a high school biology classroom over time, exploring how participants of this classroom constructed shared mediational resources relating to learning, and how such resources afford or constrain their productive science learning. Methodologically, I plan to videotape a teacher’s classroom for a whole semester. This would serve as the major data source, which can be triangulated with data from teacher interview, student interview, student work, as well as student epistemology survey administrated at the beginning and end of the semester. Snippets representing repeated interaction patterns would be selected for detailed discourse analysis, through which I aim to 1) identify shared mediational resources; 2) exemplify how they gets constructed through interactions; 3) reveal how they align with changes in discourse patterns and quality of student inquiry. Finally, I discuss the potential significances of this proposed study, especially how it would speak to teacher educators.