(Key constructs in italics)
Furberg and Silseth (2021) investigate how student resources (“experiences, ideas, and assumptions about science matter that students ring to school” p. 3) that are “brought in spontaneously by students” are made sense of and used to make sense of (mediational means, or meaning-making”) to canonical science knowledge during whole-class discussions. They also study what circumstances and situations are useful to support students’ conceptual development using student resources, how student resources can help students engage in and contribute to academic discourse, and what role the social and structural dimensions (defined as factors including the “authoritative distribution” between teachers and students, discourse moves used or not used by the teacher including elicitation, contextualization, and revoicing, as well as teacher time spent on the resource, etc.) of whole class discussions play in making meaningful use of student resources as a learning tool in the classroom.
Furberg and Silseth (2021) recorded the entirety of 11 lessons over a four-week period in a lower secondary school science classroom. They used transcripts of the recordings as a basis for coding and analyzing discussion types from whole-class sessions including episodes (a stretch of conversation about one thing) and sequences (defined speech units within episodes). Sequences were coded in further detail as either dyadic** (teacher and 1 student) or true discussion (including a minimum of three participants). Sequences were the primary unit of analysis.
They found that student resources become mediational means when teachers allow and embrace students’ use of basic interpersonal communicative skills rather than insisting on cognitive academic language. Allowing students to speak in ways that are comfortable seems like it might also function to increase expansion. Also, when teachers respond positively and give time to student resources, then student curiosity, participation, and engagement increase. However, there are implications for teachers. To handle student resources skillfully, in a way that allows them to act as mediational means, teachers must “devise dialogic moves that explicitly elicit sensemaking in the intersection between everyday and traditionally scientific ways of engaging with subject matter” (p. 33). Teachers must also devote time to the resources, rather than interacting with them in a purely “superficial way” and they must be on the lookout for the “conceptual framings” that underpin student resources, which may not always align with scientific understandings but might be able to be built upon (p. 33).
**Why is this “triadic” if it’s only two people? Why not “dyadic”?
Bailey,
It looks like I agreed with you in my breakdown as well and had the same question about triadic vs diadic!