Making the Absent Present: Improvised Representational Fields in Students’ Negotiations of Meaning With GIS (Geographic Information System) Tools

• In Event: Emergent Methods for Studying Spatial and Embodied Dimensions of Learning

Abstract

Engaging in representational work has been shown to be central to the practices of scientists (Lynch, 1990) and science students (Lemke, 2000; Radinsky, 2008). Much of this representational work consists of making accessible phenomena that occur at otherwise-unobservable scales of space and time. Recently the spatiality of these representational practices themselves has become a focus of great interest. The study of these embodied sense-making practices can help reveal the emergence of disciplinary knowledge as it occurs in real time.

This paper presents an analysis of the representational practices that emerged in a group of 6th-grade students learning to examine tectonic processes in the earth’s crust using GIS software (Radinsky et al, 2005). The research team developed a scheme for coding embodied practices improvised by the group that supported their negotiation of representational meanings. The analysis documents the ways the group managed multiple semiotic resources, as they attempted to make sense of interactions among tectonic plates, earthquakes, volcanoes, and elevation changes, as mediated by a variety of maps, curriculum materials, and GIS tools.

The coding identified two phases of representational work: (1) assembly of representational fields, and (2) representational use of these fields to negotiate meaning in the group. Analysis of students’ gestures, manipulations of material artifacts, and spoken discourse was used to create a visual representation of the group’s assemblies of multiple representational fields over time, including failed attempts as well as successes (Figure 1). The analysis highlights the spatial properties of the emergent representational fields themselves, and the ways students mapped between these spatial properties and those of the represented worlds they sought to investigate.


Figure 1. Students negotiating a representational field, and the corresponding timeline of coded moves: assemble as squares, use as triangles, by student and field.

Two cases studies are presented. The first case examines a group of three students negotiating how to describe the direction a tectonic plate might be moving, as they capture map images and negotiate the wording for written descriptions of what these images show. The second case examines the same group negotiating representational decisions about how to display topographic and earthquake data in a geographic information system (GIS) computer program used for the inquiry.

The use of a field to accomplish representational work was usually preceded by lengthy and often unsuccessful attempts at assembly of the field. In these negotiation processes, participants often made explicit arguments for or against particular fields based on spatial characteristics of the target-represented-world, and its relationship to spatial characteristics of a field. These processes of negotiated assembly moved across modalities of speech, gesture, drawing, writing, and computer manipulation. The cross-case analysis suggests that the construct of representational fields and the related coding scheme can be useful for documenting these practices across two very different semiotic situations: discussing cardinal directions of motion, and choosing representational schemes for a GIS map. This suggests that the approach has promise for studying these core practices of science across multiple modalities and multiple contexts of learning.

Authors

• Raedy Ping, University of Chicago

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Emma Hospelhorn, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Susan R. Goldman, University of Illinois at Chicago