Guiding Inquiry Discourse Across Digital and Face-to-Face Knowledge Community and Inquiry Learning Environments

• In Event: 15.015 - The Knowledge Community and Inquiry Model: Synthesizing a Decade's Research for a Widening Audience

Abstract

Theoretical Perspective
Engaging a classroom as a learning community relies on guided inquiry discourse, where the teacher must respond to student ideas as they emerge, guiding individual learners and the class as a whole, along productive paths of inquiry (Slotta & Najafi, 2010). KCI offers opportunities for inquiry discourse through its use of persistent, emergent representations of individual and community knowledge, often dynamically aggregated on large digital classroom displays (Slotta, 2013). These representations inform students’ learning processes at various stages of inquiry. The structuring of inquiry designs to include sequences, roles, goals, allocation of materials, student groupings, and learning activities; has been referred to as a “script” (Dillenbourg & Jermann, 2007; Kollar, Fischer, & Slotta, 2007; Kolodner, 2007). The enactment of any inquiry script requires the “orchestration” of student interactions, activities, resources, technology, and time (Dillenbourg, 2013). In a KCI script, the teacher plays a critical orchestrational role (Slotta, 2013). Common Knowledge (CK) is a digital environment developed in recognition that teacher-facilitated discourse is essential to helping students access and make use of community knowledge across digital and face-to-face KCI learning environments, to advance their inquiry.

Objective
This study aimed to determine patterns of teacher orchestration and teacher-guided inquiry discourse that occurred throughout enactments of CK iterations; as they guided inquiry activity to and fro, between the digital CK environment and the face-to-face classroom environment.

Method and Data Sources
This was a multi-year design-based research (DBR - Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004; DBRC, 2003) study of CK design and its classroom enactments. CK was designed to enable learning communities to contribute inquiry notes to a collective knowledge base, which supports teacher-guided discourse and scaffolds the orchestration of inquiry sequences. Working closely with teachers who were experienced with inquiry and Knowledge Building pedagogy (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996), we investigated a sequence of CK design iterations, each integrated into a 9-week science inquiry curriculum for two grade 5/6 learning communities. To investigate teachers’ orchestration patterns, classroom video was coded for pacing and coordination patterns of CK activity. To investigate teachers’ discourse patterns, classroom video of CK activity was coded for the revoicing (O’Connor & Michaels, 1996, 1993) stances teachers adopted to foster various social participation structures (Erickson, 1982). Each CK design iteration aimed to better accommodate those patterns, gradually increasing the complexity of our curricular and digital learning environments.

Outcomes
Analysis of teachers’ orchestration patterns revealed a “3R” orchestration cycle (Reflect-Refocus-Release) that teachers used repeatedly to guide community inquiry between the digital CK environment and the face-to-face classroom environment. Four distinct teacher discourse orientations were also identified (Teacher Reflection, Individual Student Reflection, Community Reflection, Community Instruction); and furthermore, were found to be used in different proportions depending on the orchestrational needs of the inquiry script.

Scholarly Significance
This study advances the implementation of KCI by offering teachers some observed patterns of orchestration and discourse orientation used by veteran inquiry-oriented teachers during KCI implementation. These patterns could inform their real-time orchestration of inquiry discourse, processes, and progressions in a technology-supported KCI learning environment.

Author

• Cresencia Fong, University of Toronto - OISE / Toronto District School Board