Infrastructure to Bridge a Knowledge-Building Classroom With Public Discourse (Poster 5)

• In Event: Advancing Understanding of Infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Background
Knowledge Building (KB) is a pedagogy that aspires to cultivate a culture of knowledge creation in classrooms, where all students are expected to take collective responsibility in their learning (Chen & Hong, 2016; Scardamalia & Beretier, 2022). To make knowledge building pervasive, students are encouraged to pursue authentic problems as they traverse both physical environments and web spaces surrounding them. Supporting KB in schools requires infrastructural work (Penuel, 2019) that recognizes system inertia and creates coherence to configure favorable conditions for KB.

Methods
This poster is situated in a design research project named IdeaMagnets that was focused on building a technological innovation to bridge Knowledge Forum (KF) and public discourse on the web. Through co-design workshops with science teachers, the IdeaMagnets tool was created to help students easily capture ideas on the web and then import them into their KF discourse. With IdeaMagnets, the team co-designed a classroom intervention and involved five science classes to build knowledge about energy and elements using KF and IdeaMagnets.
This study was guided by this question: What infrastructuring work was conducted, with whom, to support the introduced innovation? To answer the questions, we retrospectively analyzed design documents and team communication data to surface infrastructural work during the classroom intervention phase of the project.

Findings
Several areas of infrastructural work were revealed from this analysis. First, in preparation for the classroom intervention, the teacher played an instrumental role in pedagogical design, bringing to bear his knowledge of the curricular topics, students, and the school, as well as his understanding of progressive inquiry. The design work, participated by the teacher and two researchers, unfolded in a virtual whiteboard and was essential for creating coherence between the project’s goals and the school context. This work, led by the teacher, was creative and consequential for student learning.

The second type of infrastructuring happened throughout the classroom intervention when the project team attempted to facilitate information flow across different digital spaces. The teacher led the team to create coherence between IdeaMagnets and the classroom’s technological infrastructure. The class also encountered and dealt with infrastructure “breakdowns” such as certain public websites not being whitelisted by the school. These incidents of infrastructural work were not planned by the research team but created conditions for KB discourse in the classroom.

Finally, to meet the need for assessing student learning and participation, the teacher designed a portfolio-based assessment system that asked students to select and reflect on digital artifacts that could demonstrate learning. This work was needed because the teacher was accountable to student progress. By involving students to curate and reflect on their contributions, the assessment system was also successful in retaining students’ epistemic agency.

Significance
This analysis demonstrates the nuanced process of incorporating an innovation in a classroom setting and extensive infrastructural work to integrate the intervention in existing infrastructures. The teacher’s creativity and resourcefulness were especially key, creating coherence between project goals and curricular objectives, bridging the project with existing infrastructures, and finding solutions to address infrastructural frictions.

Authors

• Bodong Chen, University of Pennsylvania

• David Groos, Minneapolis Public Schools

• Xinran Zhu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign