A Comprehensive Review of Productive Disciplinary Engagement and Expansive Framing

• In Event: Promoting Productive Disciplinary Engagement Through Textual Practices

Abstract

Objectives
This presentation will summarize a comprehensive analysis of all publications to date that reference productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) and expansive framing. Emerging in design-based research by Randi Engle (1967-2012) and colleagues, these are among the influential principles for improving instruction using “situative” theories of learning. In contrast to prior cognitive characterizations, Engle and Conant (2002) characterized student engagement in terms of discourse. Student engagement is disciplinary when their discourse concerns the academic discipline at hand; disciplinary engagement is productive when it raises and resolves disciplinary problems, extends over time, and is emotional.
Theoretical Framework
Engle and Conant advanced four design principles for fostering PDE. Educators should (a) help students “problematize” disciplinary knowledge from their own perspectives, (b) empower students to resolve the resulting problems, (c) hold students accountable to disciplinary discourse, and (d) provide resources needed to accomplish these goals. Expansive framing (Engle et al., 2011, 2012) further supports PDE by (a) making connections with people, places, topics and times outside of the course; (b) positioning students as authors (rather than consumers) of knowledge; and (c) framing engagement as participation in a larger intellectual conversation that extends over time.
Method and Data Sources
Our initial search (in Google Scholar) revealed that (a) PDE was referenced almost 1,300 times, (b) expansive framing was referenced over 300 times, and (c) this body of research had yet to be systematically reviewed. Eliminating passing references or inaccessible documents left 535 publications, including 136 discussing expansive framing. As shown in Table 1, the majority of these references (408) were in STEM, with the largest category being general sciences (243). Outside of STEM, the largest category of disciplines was teacher education (31). Moreover, as shown in Table 2, of the 379 publications that specified academic levels, the largest level was undergraduate (87), but the references were evenly spread across levels.
Results and Significance
Our review focused particular attention on the 355 of the 535 papers that used PDE and expansive framing principles to improve instruction (the remainder were mostly theoretical considerations). Of these 355 interventions, just a handful (e.g., Engle, 2011) included quantitative comparisons of the sort needed to convince cognitivist skeptics (e.g., Kirshner, et al., 2006; Hmelo-Silver, et al., 2007); most of the interventions studies used interpretive methods to warrant using and adapting the principles. Drawing back to the focus on multimodal texts in Engle’s (2000) dissertation, our review pays particular attention to the manner in which multimodal texts were used as learning resources. The interventions we reviewed most extensively used the principles to position learners as participants in multimodal narratives that extend over time and space (e.g., Lopes et al., 2019); we believe that doing so is a relatively scalable model for generative learning that will transfer readily to new settings. We further believe that this approach is well-suited for refining socio-constructivist interventions to make them more efficient and effective (e.g., Piety et al., 2018-2021) and helping classroom educators efficiently transition to online learning (e.g., Hickey et al., 2020; Hickey, Duncan, et al., 2020).

Authors

• Daniel T. Hickey, Indiana University

• Tripp Harris, Indiana University

• Grant T Chartrand, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Salma Elsayed-Ali

• Nihal Katirci, University of Maryland - College Park

• Chenxi Liu