Investigating Participant Structures in the Context of Science Instruction by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2004-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Focusing in on a Specific Issue

Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notion of dialogism hinges on the notion that words (or other cultural tools such as practices and ideas) are “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345) and that one’s own voice and the voices of others “interanimate” (Wertsch, 1991, 1998) with some degree of accenting from different uses and sometimes tension between uses. To show the microgenesis and ontogenesis (across a 2-month period) of TJ and Dave’s inquiry practices, I focus on how the teacher and students introduce and take up ideas from one another. In this section, I look at how the students appropriated Wagner’s ideas of focusing in on a specific issue.

Wagner set the landscape of acceptable topics as “anything in an Earth Science book” and illustrated that range in his first quarter lectures on geology, meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy. Dave said in an interview that he thought those lectures were useful because “you could see which sections you thought were interesting, [and] that would help in picking your topic.” Wagner encouraged them in handouts and verbally to pick a topic that interested them. By Dave’s account, he and TJ picked hurricanes on the basis of Wagner’s lecture description and their interest in “destruction.” They then borrowed books about weather and hurricanes from Wagner’s collection in the classroom and also began to track down some hurricane resources on the Internet. They asked Wagner to help them save an image from the Web showing hurricane paths, which they included in their Background Information report. Their report contained a descriptive overview of what hurricanes are, how they arise, and the destruction they cause synthesized from information in two books and on two Web sites.

Up until that point, TJ and Dave’s work, like that of the other students in the class, had been for the most part “traditional library research,” with the possible exception of adding the Internet as a source. They had done mostly synthesis of known information, and they’d done it well. Next, they needed to, as Wagner put it, “focus it down [to] something where either you can do an experiment, or look for data that somebody else has collected, to try and answer a particular question.” Because the whittling down to a research proposal was “a very hard step,” Wagner held a whole-class brainstorming session on research questions using a photograph of a wolf pack from his office. The interactions that ensued between Wagner and the class as a whole group to brainstorm possible research questions followed the traditional I–R–E pattern:

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