Overall, I really enjoyed reading the selections by our class this week. Being that they were published pretty recently, it felt as though they were painting the most up-to-date image of education I have read about in this class thus far. Each paper provided some really nice suggestions for how practitioners can support their students in sense-making, social learning through discursive practices, and the utilization of uncertainty as a pedagogical resource as well. I don’t know about my peers, but I feel as though the suggestions from these readings seemed to be pretty user-friendly as well. The authors did a really nice job describing the benefits of each and the tacit components each method required to be successful. I believe the articles by Chen and their partner and Lowell et al. were more aligned with situated learning, where Odden was admittedly using a model founded on cognitivist theory.
The article by Chen and Techawitthayachinda was admittedly structured with social constructivist theories as well as Vygotsky in mind, which led to a very useful discussion of how students’ uncertainty should be utilized in a classroom that allows for students to “think and act like a scientist” (pg.1). To me, this rang true with situated cognition, as this statement is indirectly referencing “authentic” science classrooms. The authors even discuss how uncertainty is a key feature in science and will lead students to practice more like scientists. The focus of the article on storyline-curriculum, also makes me think that the authors’ research coincides more with situative learning, being that storyline-curriculum is regarded as a method of teaching that emphasizes students’ creating and communally agreeing on knowledge. However, I did notice that the authors do mention some cognitivist ideas such as “deep learning”, “cognitive structure”, and “conceptual development”, but I feel as though they were just employing terminology that comes from cognitive theory.
The second article by Lowell et al. was very similar, in my mind, to the first article by Chen and Techawitthayachinda. This was due to Lowell et al.’s focus on students’ collective sense-making and the discourse practices that they suggested could help guide students through the discursive sense-making process. I felt that Lowell’s article was really trying to push the authenticity of the discussion and critique practices that they were researching, which was an obvious nod to situated learning theory. They also drove home the point that student sense-making can only occur when discourse is dialogic, interactive, and highly interanimated (pg.5), which situates sense-making as a process as a strictly social learning activity. This article seemed the easiest for me to place in the situated learning camp, as their research was heavily focused on talk moves, stages of sense-making discourse, and how we can amplify students’ participation in collaborative learning. Out of all the articles, I think this one was my favorite as the authors made their suggested use of talk moves and discursive learning processes easy to enact.
Lastly, the Odden article seemed very easy to place in the cognitive camp. Not only did he come out and say that he was using cognitive theory, but he was also focusing on the utilization of conceptual blends to create new conceptual connections between scientific knowledge fragments that can then be carried across contexts (pg. 991). I don’t know if you could find a better definition of cognitive research haha! It was interesting though, that Odden was very interested in individual cognitive theory and how conceptual blends worked into students’ learning processes, but he then chose to use a pair of students as his primary case study. I understand that this may have been a choice that was intended to help make the students’ cognitive processes more observable, but I thought it was a little offputting. It probably doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it did make me reminisce on how cognitivism is typically seen as focusing on students individually.
Hi Nick,
I really agree with you that the authors did a good job of applying these learning theories to the classroom and it was cool to see some applications. I also agree with your discussion of the articles and think I said similar things in my post which you already commented you agree with, so I think we are good there. I think you made an interesting point about the fact that Odden used a pair of students but talked about individuals. I think this is probably because you cannot see what is happening inside a student’s head. So, the researcher has to make this observable through discussion. Although most of this seemed to be in almost an interview form between one student and the researcher not between the students. Look forward to talking with you later.