I had fun with the readings this week. It was kind of like playing detective, trying to piece together phrases and focus areas to determine which model these studies fell under. At some point, the papers made it pretty clear, if not explicitly stated, which theory their study was rooted in. So, I guess I did not need to be a great detective but I think my close examination of the studies still helped me piece together what made the studies line up with the theory they claim to fall into. It also helped me see that even though they seemed to claim to be in a theory I still felt like they did not necessarily fit neatly in that theory based on our conversations in class.
I will start with Odden’s conceptual blends study because I think it falls the most on the cognitive side of things. The theoretical framework of this paper was knowledge in pieces, sensemaking, and conceptual blends. I was not very familiar with knowledge in pieces or concept blends prior to reading this paper but both ideas seem pretty cognitive to me. Odden specifically says that knowledge in pieces is a cognitivist theoretical framework. This makes sense to me because it seemed clear last week when we picked through the difference between Anderson and Greeno it seemed that Greeno made a distinction between knowledge being cognitive (I am pretty sure about this?) and maybe more of a process of knowing (I am not sure about this?) being sociocultural. Therefore, the focus on students’ concepts and knowledge seemed to situate this in the cognitive realm. Conceptual blends seem to be making connections between disconnected ideas which I’m not sure if we discussed completely but I feel like it could be an extension of the conceptual change theory. I have some familiarity with sensemaking and I feel like this could in some situations be social but the trajectory of the boys’ sense-making in figure 8 really looks similar to our model we drew of conceptual change with the different shapes and the connections between the concepts.
Next, I’ll move on to Chen and Techawitthayachinda’s article about epistemic uncertainty because I think it kind of bridges conceptual change with sociocultural theory. They claimed to be rooted in sociocultural theory but in their theoretical background, they talk about deep learning and uncertainty which seemed to fall more on the cognitive side of things. They say, “deep learning is generative because students actively reshape their own knowledge by linking new information to existing schema.” This seemed to be describing conceptual changes and the cognitive ideas of assimilation and accommodation to me. The idea of raising and maintaining students’ uncertainty reminded me of the cognitive ideas of disequilibrium and cognitive conflict (both were eventually mentioned in the theoretical background). Therefore, I was thinking they are focusing on these cognitive frameworks but they are claiming to be sociocultural. However, they framed these ideas in the whole class discussion to bridge the individual conceptual change with sociocultural levels. When students raise uncertainty the storyline of the classroom follows accordingly with learning activities that are driven by the students’ uncertainty and subsequent interactions with teachers and peers. This reminds me a lot of AST and what we do at PFMS. Prior to this, I was not really familiar with the term storyline talk/ story-line based curriculum but I believe an AST curriculum would be a storyline-based curriculum?
Finally, I’ll discuss the Lowell et al. article about supporting collective sensemaking through discussion which right off the bat from reading the title felt like it fell in the realm of sociocultural theory. This article also talked about ideas being connected with each other like the previous two articles but in this case, the students’ initial ideas were built on through interactive discussion that leads to interanimated ideas. Therefore, opposed to the conceptual blends article where ideas seemed to be connected more in the head, ideas here are connected through discussion and critique of other ideas that lead to collective sensemaking. I thought it was interesting when the authors stated that simply probing and pressing is not enough to reach an interanimated consensus that it is important to create a space where students critique and work with each other’s ideas.
I look forward to making more connections this week in class!
Grace,
First, I want to agree with you on your statement regarding Greeno referring to “knowledge” as more cognitive and learning as a process, situative. This dichotomy may be incorrect, but similarly to you, that is what helped me to understand most of these articles’ framework affiliations. Odden’s article definitely seemed cognitive to me, as he was really the only article that talked about knowledge being something that students obtain and then have for other situations. The Chen article was the bridge between situative and cognitive for me as well, but I felt as though the authors were trying to portray it as situated. They used a lot of jargon that comes from the cognitive camp though, which really threw me off. That article, in my mind, might be a good example of how the two can become messily intertwined if you don’t distinctly pick a framework and stick to its roots. I am definitely looking forward to talking about this more in class!