Engagement in What? The Negotiation of Joint Enterprise in Project-Based Learning

• In Event: Rounding the Sociocultural Turn in Research on Classroom Motivation

Abstract

Objectives/purposes
We addressed symposium question 2 through a study of how engagement develops in small group work during a multi-week simulation activity. We analyzed how groups negotiated their goals – their “joint enterprise” (Wenger, 1998) -- and the nature of individual members’ participation in that enterprise, how students positioned themselves or others in relation to the group, and how this afforded or constrained opportunities for different forms of participation. We also considered the teacher’s role in shaping the group’s joint enterprise and individual students’ positions in their group through interaction over time.

We used Wenger’s (1998) concept of “joint enterprise” to capture ongoing negotiations of a group’s sense of itself, what binds members to the group, and what they accomplish together. Group members’ participation in the group both determines and is influenced by this sense of “what we are about” (Gresalfi, 2009). In the activity studied, students were cast as members of a specific discipline: attorneys representing parties in a case involving freedom of religion and speech. Their understanding about productive disciplinary engagement (Engle & Conant, 2002) and their goals evolved over time through interaction with the teacher, an outside expert, and material tools.

We studied the roles that students took up in these disciplinary practices and how they contributed to developing shared goals, along with other goals: doing schoolwork, furthering social agendas, and the like. We used Jurow’s (2004) idea of “laminations,” in which students simultaneously or serially participate in multiple social worlds, to help analyze the kinds of engagement captured on video. Thus, we examined two research questions in this analysis of student engagement:

1. Engagement in what? What was the nature of groups’ joint enterprise from moment to moment and across weeks?
2. How was joint enterprise negotiated? How did participation shape the group’s goals and activity, how did positioning within the group afford or constrain individuals’ productive disciplinary engagement, and how did groups manage the laminations inherent in classroom simulation activities?

Methods and data sources. Participants were 8 high school seniors in a diverse urban high school We analyzed the discourse and other forms of participation of each group over the 5-week unit on the US Supreme Court. Data included daily videorecords of whole class and small group activity, artifacts including student notes, handouts, directions for the simulation, a class progress chart, and powerpoint slides used by the teacher, along with curriculum documents for the unit.

Results. Results show groups negotiating their joint enterprise overtly and through shifts in participation, that positioning plays a role in affording or constraining opportunities for engagement, and that students and teacher attempt to negotiate equitable participation given individual differences in skills, background knowledge, and changing commitment to the evolving joint enterprise. Joint enterprise was constructed through negotiation as students and teacher juggled the laminated worlds of school, the legal system, and civil rights.

Scholarly significance
This study provides a rich view of how motives and purposes evolve through group interaction, bringing together lenses from both motivation and the learning sciences.

Authors

• Susan B. Nolen, University of Washington - Seattle

• Gavin Tierney, University of Washington

• Kendall Becherer, University of Washington - Seattle

• Susan E. Cooper, University of Washington

• Christopher J. Ward, University of Washington