Organizing Purposes to Support Students’ Semiosis and Science Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 118
  In Roundtable Session: Learning Science Through Engaging With Its Representational Practices

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of organizing purposes to show how it can support teachers in scaffolding students’ semiosis and conceptual learning in science.
Progression of learning can be understood as oriented by proximate purposes, which the teacher needs to make continuous with the ultimate purposes. These two kinds of purposes make up the organizing purposes of a teaching sequence. The ultimate purposes belong to the new kinds of scientific practices with concepts that are not yet mastered by the students. The proximate purposes include topics familiar to students. John Dewey called proximate purposes that make sense and give agency to the student ends-in-view. One important task for the teacher is to find proximate purposes that works as ends-in-views to the students and that the teacher also can make continuous with the ultimate purposes.
We analyze two situations. One is from a Swedish Year 5 class with the ultimate purpose how friction facilitates or impedes motion using proximate purposes like why cars have tires. The events in the classroom were filmed and transcribed. The other is from an Australian study on using representations as semiotic resources in introducing the concept of force in Year 7 (Hubber, Tytler & Haslam, 2010).
We coded situations in the classrooms as dealing with either proximate or ultimate purposes and the associated semiotic resources as colloquial language, inter-language, and science language (Wallace, 2004).
In the Swedish classroom the teacher first created a situation where the proximate purpose functioned as an end-in-view to the students and helped them to take part in the conversation. However, the teacher did not relate the proximate purpose to the ultimate purpose, so the students were not offered the possibility of seeing how only certain aspects of what was treated from the proximate purpose were relevant to the ultimate one about friction. Eventually the teacher chose the term resistance as an inter-language, but still no continuity was established to the ultimate purposes.
This situation is contrasted with the one in the Australian classroom concerning how forces affect objects (ultimate purpose). The students were asked to change the form of a lump of clay (a proximate purpose) and to give their own words to describe what they were doing, such as stretch (colloquial language), words which then were sorted under the headings “pull” and “push” (inter-language) to represent what physicists call “force” (science language).
By comparing these two classrooms we demonstrate how semiotic resources may help to create continuity when 1) the proximate purposes give students an activity where they can see an end-in-view, and 2) the semiotic resources are formulated in such a way as to create continuity between the ends-in-view and the ultimate purpose.
References
Hubber, P., Tytler, R., & Haslam, F. (2010). Teaching and learning about force with a representational focus: pedagogy and teacher change. Research in Science Education, 40, 5-28.
Wallace, C.S. (2004). Framing new research in science literacy and language use: Authenticity, multiple discourses, and the “Third Space”. Science Education, 88, 901-914.

Authors

• Per-Olof Wickman, Stockholm University

• Annie-Maj Johansson, Stockholm University