Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi

Those Who Get Hurt Aren’t Always Being Heard: Scientist-Resident Interactions over Community Water

This study is about the interaction of scientific expertise and local knowledge in the context of a contested issue: the quality and quantity of safe drinking water available to some residents in one Canadian community. The authors articulate the boundary work in which scientific and technological expertise and discourse are played out against local knowledge and water needs to prevent the construction of a water main extension that would provide a group of residents with the same water that others in the community already access. The authors draw on an extensive database constructed during a three-year ethnographic study of one community; the data base includes the transcript of a public meeting, newspaper clippings, interviews, and communications between residents and town council. The authors show not only that scientists and residents differ in their assessment of water quality and quantity but also that there is a penchant for undercutting residents in their attempts to make themselves heard in the political process.

Toward a Social Practice Perspective on the Work of Reading Inscriptions in Science Texts.

In the social studies of science, visuals and graphical representations are theorized by means of the concept of inscription, a term that denotes all representations other than text inscribed in some medium including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations. Inscriptions constitute an intrinsic and integral part of scientific practice; their development and the development of science are tightly interwoven. A focus on inscription therefore goes together with the social psychological study of the cultural practices that embed inscriptions. Thus, scientists produce line graphs to convincingly show relationships; they use histograms to show distributions; or they combine multiple graphs to show contrasts or correlations between different entities and contexts. Inscriptions are also present in school science textbooks with great frequency and high school science activities, including teaching, demonstrations, and laboratory tasks. However, to read inscriptions successfully, students need to develop a special kind of literacy that is related to the use of inscriptions, which, in turn, is tied to the way in which these inscriptions are produced within an authentic science environment. The situated and highly contextualized nature of inscriptions renders them meaningful only within and through particular interpretive practices that are developed concomitantly with their production and use in authentic science settings, to which students may not have access in their daily school activities. Moreover, the representational (rhetorical) power of an inscription is related to the amount of information it may carry and to its level of abstractness, which are also proportional to its complexity and, thus, to the difficulty in reading it. In this article, we review the literature on reading inscriptions in science contexts from a social practice perspective as it has by and large emerged during the past two decades.

Pictures in Biology Education

The question of reading tends to be relegated to processes that occur within the head and between the ears. There are other approaches, however, that have shown to be of much greater use for understanding reading process and for how to design classroom instruction: those of anthropological and social-psychological nature. In this chapter, we articulate this theoretical approach and provide exemplary analyses of the process of reading pictures. We show that the implications of this way of conceptualizing the reading process are easily applicable in biology classrooms, insofar as reading pictures is treated as a social practice that has its origin, as other higher cognitive functions, in social relations.

Responsibility in dental praxis: an activity theoretical perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transitions practitioners undergo as they move from dental school to their first job in a dental clinic and their learning in the workplace. The paper aims to investigate their use of ethical principles as they engage in practice, providing a theoretical explanation for the gap practitioners experience when moving from the school to the workplace, and also suggesting some viable alternatives for dental education.Design/methodology/approach – The database for this study consists of videotaped interviews with dentists. To analyze our data we followed the principles of interaction analysis, analyzing the data both individually and collectively, until some hypotheses were generated. Then, discourse analysis was used to analyze the interviews.Findings – From an activity theoretical perspective, the results show that dentists can and do learn ethical principles when working in their dental clinics, interacting with patients, and the findings and suggesti...

Catchments, growth points, and the iterability of signs in classroom communication

Abstract During lectures, a variety of signs are produced while the teacher communicates very specific conceptual meanings to students. In this article, we focus on particular signs constituted by both words and gestures that comprise a dialectical, indivisible unit, that corresponds to a double signifier, verbal and visual at the same time. From an illustrative case extracted from a database with twenty-six videotaped biology lessons, we analyze the repetition of gestures (i.e., catchments [McNeill 2002]) within and across lessons dealing with the same conceptual topic, and elaborate it as a special case of sign iteration (Derrida 1988). In each iteration of the sign, the unit of gesture and word produces and reproduces the meaning of the signified and of themselves as signifiers.

Visual Representations in Educational Research

Inscriptions represent data in different ways, and they also affect the reader in different ways. Photographs are believed to be realistic representations of the world, differing from graphs in their level of abstractness and their power of synthesizing complex information. The work of reading photographs is similar to the work of reading the world around us, which makes photographs easily accessible to audiences. This accessibility and perceived realism contribute to the power a photograph has in exerting a strong emotional impact on the public. Likewise, certain forms of qualitative, visual, arts-based and narrative re-presentations of research phenomena provide deeper levels of audience engagement with the “text”, and, depending on the purpose of our research, may be the most appropriate way for representing phenomena and providing evidence for our claims.