Shifting Knowledge Territories and Participation Frames Through Prototyping a Structure

• In Event: Places of Possibility, Cultures of Connection: Exploring Art, Design, Making, and Imagination in Enacting Educational Alternatives

Abstract

Traditional scripts of schooling enforce implicit cultural rules about how teachers and students enact participatory roles that work in opposition to constructivist learning goals (Lemke, 1990; Simich-Dudgeon, 1998). Dialogue is largely directed toward accepting or imposing ‘finished’ meanings, where teachers hold the correct, known answers and learners work to find them. This is epitomized in the known-answer question routine (Waring, 2009; Wells & Aruz, 2006). A disruption to such orders must allow for alternative interactional rearrangements in which questions are grounded in an authentic unknown, and students are positioned as consequential contributors.
This study aims to extend current understandings of the epistemic affordance of prototyping in a middle grades geoscience unit. I focus on the negotiation of an individual’s contribution within a situated learning activity, with socially organized rules and roles, and examine how it is valued within the community (Solís, Kattan and Baquedano-López, 2009; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Kelly & Cunningham, 2019; Goodwin, 1997, 2010). I use conversation analysis (CA) to examine teacher-student and student-student questions throughout the prototype testing activity. In CA, who has the rights to possess or articulate information is part of the complex structure of turn-construction and allocation in conversation (Heritage, 2012). An individual in conversation is said to have rights and responsibilities to certain domains of information, or territories of knowledge, such as their thoughts, feelings, experience, families, etc. (Drew , 1991; Heritage, 2012; Hayano, 2011). Conversational participants occupy different status along an epistemic gradient (more knowledgeable [K+] or less knowledgeable [K-]) based on what is known and how it is known.
This study suggests that the use of questions during the prototype testing activity becomes a discursive feature that positions students as knowers and frames them as consequential contributors within the interactionally organized classroom. Question use demonstrated clear links to participation frames: students as knowers, students as collaborators, and teacher as knower. In the students as knowers and students as collaborators participation frames, students and teachers exercised micro-level status shifts (i.e. shared information, sought clarity, gave input) which successfully altered the roles students and their teacher played as initiators of talk and action. As an integral aspect of the knowledge building community, they aligned to each other as experts and holders of information. Alternatively, in the teacher as knower participation frame, the teacher claimed higher epistemic status using subtle language and gestural cues.
We need research that investigates how students and teachers make sense of relational aspects of design activity as a way to foreground students’ authentic contributions to the classroom. While makerspace activity, engineering practices and design thinking gain traction in classrooms, this prototype testing activity offers one context through which a teacher might attune to how different knowledge territories might be more explicitly assembled in constructivist approaches to learning. Additionally, we need to think about the discursive moves that keep potentially innovative reform practices, such as interdisciplinary or PBL projects, from reinforcing traditional relational structures.

Author

• Melita Morales, Boston College