Everyday Ways of Knowing in Middle Schoolers’ Emergent Historical Practice of Evaluating Evidence for Argumentation

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 1:45 pm
  In Poster Session: Interactive and Integrative Practices to Improve Teaching and Learning in Elementary & Secondary Contexts

Abstract

Teachers are increasingly expected to create opportunities for students to learn through discussions in their day-to-day practice (e.g., National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; NCSS, 2013). In classrooms marked by open and dialogic discourse, it is believed that the enterprise of constructing knowledge is more democratically distributed. This study examines how the historical disciplinary practice of evaluating source evidence emerges - and is negotiated - discursively through whole-class discussions in the context of middle school social studies inquiry. The author analyzed seventeen video-recorded whole-class discussions and found that everyday ways of knowing (e.g., common-sense knowledge, speculation) are a prominent resource that the students and the teachers drew on as they talked the disciplinary knowledge and practice into being.

Author

• Sida Sun, University of Michigan