Mobilization of Knowledge Across Activity Systems: Bilingual Chinese Teacher Candidates and Children's Participation in Multimodal Learning

• In Event: 35.051 - Mobilization of Knowledge and Boundary Crossing in a Bilingual Teacher Education Program

Abstract

As scholars within the CHAT and Expansive learning tradition assert, it is horizontal and dialogical learning that creates knowledge and transforms the activity by crossing boundaries between activity systems (Engestrom, 2003; Sannino, Daniels, & Gutiérrez, 2009). Following this principle, this presentation examines the mobilization of knowledge across three activity systems (Daniels & Edwards, 2009), in which four bilingual teacher candidates who participated in a literacy course worked with two bilingual Chinese second graders participating in the after-school program around STEM concepts during the spring semester. The university literacy course required from the teacher candidates to work in pairs to create case studies that involved close documentation of a child's learning and a final case study report. These teacher candidates chose to complete their case studies with children participating in the bilingual after-school program. A major question guiding this inquiry, following Daniels and Edwards (2009) was How to capture the generation and mobilization of knowledge in practices that span different settings? One way to capture this movement was by following the tools, the subjects, and the partial shared object across activity systems during the analysis.

Three activity systems (AS) were involved in the analysis. Data from AS1 (the literacy course) comes from eight Kidwatching or observation reports in which the teacher candidates documented and reflected on the learning of two children from the after-school project over a semester. It also comes from the case study report the teacher candidates wrote for the literacy course. Data from AS2 (the after-school program) included audio recordings of 9 sessions and multimodal compositions by the child (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Data from AS3 (children's homes) comes from parent interviews. The findings will be exemplified through a case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of the interactions between a child and a teacher candidate (both of Chinese background) around a multimodal representation of the scientific concept of erosion in which tools from the three activity systems came together to support a miniature learning cycle (Engeström & Sannino 2009). The child used clay and produced a culturally specific Chinese landscape using the application Comic Life, inspired by the Chinese book The story of Monkey King, a story celebrated at home. Discourse analysis of the interactions (Gee, 2010) between the teacher candidate and the child and of a parent interview, and analysis of the tools mediating learning, enabled to see the flow and mobilization of knowledge across different activity systems.

The role of the Kidwatching report and the teacher candidate’ cultural background were key elements on the validation of a representation that initially seemed off task. The significance of this finding points to the relevance of close observation and documentation of students' learning as part of teacher education programs. The teacher/researcher/student roles of the teacher candidates impacted their expansive learning experiences, broadening their notions of what counts as learning and literacy of Chinese/English bilingual children through documenting children’s multimodal compositions in relationship to their cultural funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992).

Author

• Carmen M. Martinez-Roldan, Teachers College, Columbia University