Switching Genres: An Exploration of Student Agency Through Multiple Modes of Instruction

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 12:40 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Expanding Experiences and Intended Outcomes Around STEM Learning (Table 17)

Abstract

This project focuses on mixed age (1st - 4th grade) small student group discourse to identify student transformations of science practice structures while learning.As detailed by Emibayer (1998, pg 970) “...agency is not a possession of an individual, but a moment of engagement between an individual and a structure.” Structures are the contexts in which agency takes place (Giddens 1984). Our framework utilizes multimodal discourse analysis of genres defined as experimentation, and argumentation (Tang, Park, & Chang 2022). Findings suggest within the experimentation and argumentation genres, students may disrupt assigned objective structures, but cannot switch genres to/from experimentation and argumentation. Results imply that collective student groups take agentic acts when a powerful force dictates, such as a teacher or student.

Authors

• Rebekah Snyder, University of Missouri

• Laura Zangori, University of Missouri