I shall answer the prescribed questions for the Furberg and SIlseth answer in numerical order.
1.) What research questions were asked by the authors?
a.) In what ways do student resources become mediational means in whole-class conversations?
b.) What opportunities and challenges does the teacher face in whole-class conversations where students invoke resources from their everyday lives?
2 & 3.) What key constructs did the authors consider and how did they define them?
Student resources- Experiences, ideas, and assumptions from students’ everyday lives which can be built upon
Mediational means- Tools that allow us to do stuff we otherwise couldn’t. Resources have “meaning potentials” that are created by the students and their teachers.
Conceptual Framing – The way participants organize info through foregrounding & backgrounding in attention.
Alignment- The process in which students’ differing conceptual framings are mutually understood and integrated into one.
4.) What data was collected?
The data collected by the researchers included direct classroom observations, transcripts of classroom dialogue, and coding data for the dialogue transcripts.
5.) What conclusions did the researchers present?
a.) Invoking student resources might have an impact on engagement and whole-class discussion and curiosity.
b.) Invoking student resources can increase students’ willingness to engage in academic discourse
c.) Teacher time and attention, as well as authoritative distribution in the classroom, influences the impact of student resource on whole-class discussion.
Overall, Ferburg and Silseth presented research that exemplifies how educators can be directly responsible for students’ willingness to engage in classroom discussion by facilitating the uptake of student resources acquired from extracurricular settings. On this note, teachers can be the gatekeepers for students’ understandings of complex scientific concepts that are enrobed in a students’ casual syntax and prior knowledge/experiences.