The Role of Feedback in Shaping Student Agency in Technology-Supported Embodied Science Activities (Poster 9)

• In Event: Whose Agency? What Learning? Whence Power?

Abstract

Purpose

Technology-supported embodied learning activities provide a productive opportunity for students to actively explore concepts and ideas through their bodies and movement (Lindgren & DeLiema, 2022). By definition, these active, exploratory environments seem like they should support student agency. However, there are implicit constraints in these environments. In addition, the environments are often chaotic as students move around, making it difficult for instructors to track and notice what every student is doing. Therefore, acts of agency can be easily overlooked. In this poster, we look at the role of feedback from instructors, students, and the technology in affording and constraining both agency and structure. We aim to understand when and how students’ individual acts of agency are noticed and reacted to, such that they contribute to the class’s collective engagement.

Theoretical Framework

We define agency from a sociocultural perspective as the actions that students are afforded and choose to take up in a classroom activity system. The possibilities for taking actions are shaped by mediational means, which are embedded in broader sociocultural contexts, and include both materials and people (Wertsch et al., 1993). To avoid the assumption that everything that students do in embodied environments is an intentional choice, we focus on enacted agency, or students’ actual actions, and the responses to those actions from others in the activity system, rather than attempting to identify implicit motivations or choices that may underlie those actions.

Methods & Data Sources

We analyze video recordings of 23 first grade students participating in an iteration of the Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) project (Author et al., 2020). The students were split into two groups and participated in eight 30 minute science lessons about bees. We watched both groups of students during the embodied activities and subsequent debriefs and wrote analytic memos (Saldaña, 2011) that captured 1) the feedback that was given to students from instructors and student observers as well as how this was related to technological feedback, 2) the types of movement the feedback was in response to, and 3) who was giving and receiving feedback.

Substantiated Conclusions & Scholarly Significance

During each round of embodied activity, the feedback from the people in power (often the instructors) constrained opportunities for enacted agency and its value. Movements were often only acknowledged when the technology responded to them. Likewise, movements that the technology did not respond to (like little dances, or flying around), were discouraged by instructors and not taken up by other students. We noticed several categories of interactions that impacted the visibility of students’ agency. In our presentation, we will share examples of 1) ways the software constrained enacted agency, 2) ways the software drove teacher feedback, 3) ways both drove peer feedback, 5) moments of agency that were afforded by this feedback, and 6) moments of agency that were constrained by this feedback. Through attending to these categories, we explore how to recognize the impact of these common classroom mediators upon students’ participation in collective embodied activity for learning.

Authors

• Selena Steinberg, Indiana University
  Presenting Author

• Joshua Adam Danish, Indiana University
  Presenting Author