"It's Kinda Cool...I'll Show You How It Works": Endogenously Organized Teaching-Learning Interactions in a Science Center

• In Event: 15.041 - Endogenously Organized Teaching and Learning Events in Informal Learning Environments

Abstract

Studies of school field trips have taken a predominantly exogenous approach (Stevens, 2010), typically examining student learning in terms of pre-delineated goals that privilege designer and curricular aims over learners’ emergent interests and meanings (Author). The purpose of this study is to examine how an endogenous approach to the study of Learning as a Members’ Phenomenon (LAMP; Stevens, 2010) might advance the field’s understanding of what and how children learn during school excursions. To do this, this study examines cases of spontaneously organized peer-peer teaching-and-learning interactions taking place among schoolchildren on a field trip to a mathematics exhibition.
This study is theoretically framed by a commitment to understanding teaching and learning on school field trips “from within” (Stevens, 2010, p. 82), an approach that is grounded in ethnomethodology’s privileging of members’ meanings and methods. This framing draws attention toward events in which participants demonstrably assemble, maintain, and orient to an interaction as a teaching and/or learning event, without necessarily naming or explicating it as such. This study also attends to the embedding of social and mathematical status, positioning, and identity (Langer-Osuna & Esmonde, 2017) within such events.
Methodologically, this study draws on embodied interactionism (Streeck, Goodwin, & LeBaron, 2011), particularly as it is used in the learning sciences (Hall & Stevens, 2015), in order to understand how peers co-assemble teaching-learning events through inter-elaborating communicative modalities such as talk, gesture, and material actions. We examine cases of spontaneously organized peer-peer teaching-and-learning interactions, selected to maximize case variability (Merriam, 2009) from a larger data corpus derived from a video-based field study (vom Lehn, Heath, & Hindmarsh, 2002) of 5th--7th-grade field trips to an interactive ratio-and-proportion exhibition.
Analyses examine multiple cases in which schoolchildren appropriate exhibit features and instructional materials to demonstrate how something works (see Figure 1), ask and answer questions, observe peers who have become experienced exhibit users, and make and respond to bids for assistance.
Findings include that schoolchildren on field trips may engage in frequent and conceptually significant forms of LAMP in the context of spontaneously organized peer interactions and that these interactions are often invisible to extant assessment regimes for school field trips and typical forms of field trip research and evaluation. Findings also demonstrate the potentially overlooked importance of exhibit peripheries, as cases of LAMP in this study are often embedded within mundane negotiations – even arguments – around exhibit access. Finally, attention to issues of power across these episodes reveals how spontaneous peer teaching-and-learning events on school field trips can be problematic sites for the enactment of local asymmetric power relations as well as enduring inequities related to social and mathematical status. The broad significance of this study is to point to a new direction for research on school field trips, one that takes seriously the often off-the-record interactional work in which schoolchildren spontaneously engage in order to teach and learn from one another.

Author

• Molly Kelton, Washington State University - Pullman