Negotiating the Use of Novel Tools in College Instruction: Constructing Disciplines Through Census Data Web Maps

• In Event: 64.072 - Connecting Higher Education Classrooms to Learners' Lived Experiences and Community Ways of Knowing

Abstract

In its report Engage to Excel, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology highlighted the urgency – and challenge – of preparing college faculty to engage students in core disciplinary practices (PCAST, 2012), noting the potential of technologies to disrupt existing patterns of instruction. College instructors are also called to contribute to learners’ civic participation (e.g., hooks, 2003). Our goal is to understand how instructors negotiate relationships among novel tools, the discipline they teach, and their students as agents of knowledge construction. We aim to articulate design approaches for postsecondary learning that cultivate disciplinary and civic development.

We draw on dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981), sociocultural (Wertsch, 1998) and ecological (Barron, 2006) frameworks for studying learning. Bakhtin’s distinction between authoritative voice and personally persuasive voice is used to examine interactions between the tenets of a discipline and learners’ own logic and life experience (Tabak & Baumgartner, 2004). The ways instructors and learners construct the usefulness of the disciplinary canon and novel tools shape the ways learners appropriate both as sensemaking resources. This requires negotiating to resolve tensions involving tasks, tools, roles for participants, and ideational resources (Barron, 2006).

This study is part of a research program using data visualization tools in collaborative design, analysis, and re-design to study learning in college classrooms. We studied lessons from courses in different disciplines (Sociology, Public Health, Latino Studies) using a census-data visualization tool for an inquiry project. Each assignment attempted to leverage students’ lived experiences for exploring disciplinary concepts and practices, mapping data from neighborhoods of their city. Videos of class sessions were transcribed and analyzed to identify episodes in which talk referenced the tool, the discipline, or students’ lives, and the ways these modes of talk interacted (Radinsky, Milz et al, 2016).

The three cases revealed different approaches to navigating the tensions and opportunities that arose through exploring the tool. In one, the instructor leveraged everyday discourse to engage students as “digital natives,” modeling disciplinary practices through a lens of “cool stuff.” In another, the instructor combined teaching the tool with mini-lectures on the census, statistics, and disciplinary texts, making explicit what it means to “do sociology.” In the third, a co-instructor engaged, as an outsider to the discipline, in questioning with students, often without known answers, about what this tool might be useful for, asking them to articulate assumptions of their discipline and explore “problems of practice” and essential questions.

This study reveals ways in which data visualization tools can support disciplinary inquiry in college classrooms, and can disrupt patterns of instruction, productively and otherwise. Instructors’ and students’ ideas about the discipline, academic work, and data representations were challenged by affordances and constraints of the tool. Episodes of negotiation point to multiple approaches for disciplinary socialization, and for supporting learners in taking ownership over ideas. These cases suggest ways technologies might support both disciplinary and civic development in postsecondary learning.

Authors

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Iris Tabak, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev