Noticing Relationality in Conversations With Materials

• In Event: Materiality and Sociomaterial Practices in Learning, Designing, and Making

Abstract

Purpose
Scientific practice is often presented as discrete chunks of action (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Alternatively, we wish to place emphasis on the relational nature of science (Bang et al., 2012). We develop a perspective of “conversations” to foreground the many dynamic relationships between learners, instructors, disciplinary ideas, and physical materials that occur in science. Our research question is:

What kinds of disciplinary conversations and relationships influence meaning-making in science?

Perspectives
Inspired by Bamberger and Schön’s (1983) generative metaphor of a “conversation with materials,” we explore the utility of expansively defining “conversations” to include the careful attention and response that occurs in many different kinds of relationships. Conversations help us see science as collections of people, materials, and ideas talking and listening to each other.
Methods and data sources
We analyzed video, audio, and field note data from an undergraduate course in computational physics. Our observations took place at a small, private, liberal arts university during the Spring semester of 2019.
Students were asked to “make an oscillator” with a collection of string, magnets, wooden hoops, tongue depressors, wooden dowels, scissors, glue, paper, wooden spools, and chipboard. The students used computational modeling techniques to generate numerical data that helped them understand their device’s behavior. In addition, they gathered observational measurements and compared the two sets of data.
Results
We observed two groups having different kinds of “conversations” with their oscillators. One group’s conversation included an attention to the equations and algorithms attached to their theoretical models as they settled on the physical structure for their oscillator. While another group’s conversation included a separate kind of attention to their affective states. As they paid close attention and listened to the peculiar behaviors of their magnets, they reconfigured the materials in their oscillator to align with their understanding of what was worth modeling. Both groups not only adjusted their understanding to better approximate the physical system, but both physical systems were adjusted by the students to be in better alignment with their understanding.
Scholarly significance
A common way to conceptualize sense-making is that our knowledge becomes refined by iteratively adjusting our models to better fit the reality of our observed experiences. However, studies and histories of scientific practice indicate that not only do our understandings move towards a fixed version of the world; we also change our world to fit our understanding. We saw this happen in the work of both groups of students.
We notice that there is descriptive power in the way conversations are conceived as situated within relationships. Conversations can also be understood to incorporate nearly instantaneous feedback as well as meaning-making that occurs over the span of multiple exchanges. We see these students’ conversations with materials as contributing to productive, disciplinarily meaningful, relationships. We suggest that a lens of “conversations” can be used to analyze emergent disciplinary actions that are both traditionally and non-traditionally conceived (e.g. coding and algorithmic thinking versus epistemic affect (Jaber & Hammer, 2016) and embodied, distributed, and social forms of cognition).

Authors

• Ezra Gouvea, Tufts University

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University

• Timothy Atherton, Tufts University

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, Boston University

• Maria C Olivares, Boston University