Maria Varelas

Intertextuality in Read-Alouds of Integrated Science-Literacy Units in Urban Primary Classrooms: Opportunities for the Development of Thought and Language

The nature and evolution of intertextuality was studied in 2 urban primary-grade classrooms, focusing on read-alouds of an integrated science-literacy unit. The study provides evidence that both debunks deficit theories for urban children by highlighting funds of knowledge that these children bring to the classroom and the sense they make of them and demonstrates how intertextuality in classroom discourse creates learning opportunities as teachers and students interact with texts broadly defined. Changes over time of the various forms of intertextuality emerged in the 2 classes, thereby showing how intertextuality is both an act of discourse and an act of mind. A particular type of intertextuality-event intertextuality-dominated throughout the read-alouds and revealed how hybrid classroom discourse, incorporating both narrative and scientific genre features, allowed the emergence of classroom discourse that shared characteristics with scientific language.

Dialogic Inquiry around Information Texts: The Role of Intertextuality in Constructing Scientific Understandings in Urban Primary Classrooms

Abstract This article develops a typology of intertextuality identified in collaborative read-alouds of science information books during an integrated science-literacy unit on States of Matter in two urban primary classrooms. It provides classroom discourse examples to illustrate the forms and functions of the instances of intertextuality, and the ways in which teachers and children jointly constructed scientific understandings and linguistic registers. Issues such as the importance of dialogic speech genres and the hybridity of such classroom discourse, allowing for the voices of children who come from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds are examined as they are related to intertextuality.

BETWEEN THEORY AND DATA IN A SEVENTH-GRADE SCIENCE CLASS

A conceptual framework is developed incorporating the dialectic of science (developing theories and collecting and analyzing data) and the dialectic of education (bringing preexisting sociocultural elements to the students and letting the students develop their own understandings). The theory-data dialectic is specified as including both the inductive and deductive directions. Discourse is seen as central to both the activity of science and the educative process, and hence as the bridge between them. In the context of this framework, an empirical study was designed and executed in a seventh-grade science class. This article presents and analyzes data focusing on (a) how teacher and students moved between theory and data in a unit on sinking and floating, designed to engage the students mostly in the deductive direction of scientific activity; and (b) how the dialectic of education was played out in the classroom as teacher and students were engaged in (a). A qualitative, interpretive methodology was used. Some of the complexities that this science class encountered as teacher and students attempted to engage in the deductive mode of scientific activity are presented and discussed. The reform of science education has been in the forefront of attention in recent years (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989; International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1988; Linn, 1992; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1988; National Science Board Commission on Precollege Education in Mathematics, Science, and Technology, 1983), and enhancing elementary and middle school students’ experiences in science has become a national priority. It seems appropriate that efforts dedicated to the improvement of science education take into account recent developments in understanding the sociocultural nature of both science and education. This involves a serious reconceptualization of the foundations of science education. This article examines the problematics of science education in this spirit, theoretically and empirically, focusing on the theory-data dialectic of scientific activity, and the sociocultural elements-individual meanings dialectic of education. The background for the theoretical framework developed in this report is the movement in recent years from a traditional, teacher-directed perspective to a progressive, student-centered one. This movement came as an opposition to the traditional book- and lecture-centered approach that was seen as dominating science education and producing rote learning rather than understanding-and which therefore has been seen as based on a transmission model of education. The student-centered perspective has often taken the form of a hands-on, discovery learning approach which minimizes the role of the teacher and emphasizes the students’ development of new understandings through their own hands-on inquiries.

Content Learning and Identity Construction: A Framework to Strengthen African American Students' Mathematics and Science Learning in Urban Elementary Schools.

We present a theoretical framework that views learning as a process involving content learning (CL) and identity construction (IC). We view identities as lenses through which people make sense of, and position themselves, through stories and actions, and as lenses for understanding how they are positioned by others. As people become more (or less) central members of a disciplinary community (e.g., a science or mathematics classroom) and engage (or not) in various cultural practices, changes in identity and knowledge accompany changes in position and status. IC and CL share an important characteristic: they both involve meaning making. For IC, it is the development of reasoned, coordinated, coherent, and meaningful ways of seeing one’s self in relation to communities, and for CL, it centers on the development of disciplinary concepts, processes, tools, language, discourse, and norms within practices. Focusing on Black students in mathematics and science classrooms, we claim that three intersecting identities are particularly important: disciplinary identity (as doers of the discipline, i.e., mathematics and science), racial identity (emerging understandings of what it means to be Black), and academic identity (as participants in academic tasks and classroom practices). In this paper, we elaborate on the CLIC framework as a useful tool for understanding how Black students negotiate participation in, and come to see themselves as doers of science and mathematics in their school classrooms. We synthesize empirical findings from our research with younger and older students, as well as with parents and community members, to illustrate dimensions of this framework.

Semiotic aspects of cognitive development: Illustrations from early mathematical cognition.

The premise of this article is that cognitive development involves both conceptual and semiotic achievements. From this perspective, the authors emphasize the distinctness of the semiotic issues and develop a differentiated appreciation of semiotic aspects of cognition, particularly in the field of elementary mathematical cognition. The authors provide semiotic analyses of the differences between counting, adding, and multiplying and of the conventional place-value sign system. The authors introduce the concept of the field of reference of a sign, the differentiation of the field into foreground and background, and the dynamics within the field of reference. Finally, the authors relate these ideas to the dynamics between two dimensions of semiotic relations: the sign-referent dimension and the sign-sign dimension.

Intermingling and Bumpiness: Exploring Meaning Making in the Discourse of a Science Classroom.

In this study we capture and analyse in qualitative terms the conversational rhythm—the ebb and the flow of meaning making—in a Year 5 class in order to understand when and how teacher and students succeed in developing shared understandings, and when and how they encounter difficulties. We use the two contrasting concepts of intermingling and bumpiness to catch the phenomenological aspect of time in the science class, which is constituted by the voices of the teacher and the students as they come together to construct disciplinary knowledge. It is a collaborative action research that sheds light on the struggles and possibilities that arise in a science class as a teacher enacts a socio-cultural perspective and engages his students in collecting and analysing experimental data and reasoning through a particular model.

Dialogic Strategies in Read-Alouds of English-Language Information Books in a Second-Grade Bilingual Classroom.

This article shows how various dialogic discourse strategies were used in read-alouds of English science information books in a 2nd-grade bilingual classroom. Using a variety of discursive strategies, Ibett encouraged her Spanish-speaking students to provide explanations and reasoning related to science ideas. Similarly, she used intertextual connections to prior classroom discourse, prompted deep understanding of new concepts, and reinforced vocabulary. This article illustrates that it is possible to employ dialogic practices in read-alouds of English informational science texts in bilingual classrooms to strengthen both language/literacy and science instruction.

Meaning making in a community of learners: Struggles and possibilities in an urban science class

In this study, we embark on an exploration and analysis of a community of learners of science in a classroom of one of the authors (Barbara Luster)—a group of Year 8 African American girls and boys in an urban, inner-city school. This study is a collaborative action research project that examines closely the practice of teaching and learning science within a socio-cultural perspective that Barbara has espoused and brought to her classroom. We study the two dimensions of a community of learners—social-organisational, and intellectual-thematic—and how each evolved and influenced the other. As we explore these dimensions we pay particular attention to the gender of the students, looking for similarities and differences between boys and girls in the patterns that emerge. Our findings indicate that in Barbaras class the relative success of the learning community in terms of the social-organisational dimension was not accompanied by a relative success in the intellectual-thematic dimension. Barbara and her students, for the most part, succeeded in developing a community of people coming together to ask questions, offer their thinking, and respectfully sometimes build on each others contributions and sometimes disagree with each other. However, Barbara and her students did not quite succeed in developing shared understandings, and we discuss the reasons for this.

Third and Fourth Graders' Conceptions of Repeated Trials and Best Representatives in Science Experiments

This study involved 24 third- and fourth-grade students in a suburban school in the Chica- go area. These children had been learning science through a reform-based, integrated science and mathe- matics curriculum for about 2 years. In this study I explore how these children made sense of a scientific procedure that had been introduced to them and they had used before in their own experimental inquiries: performing repeated trials and determining the best representative of the measurements of a continuous dependent variable. Specifically, I explore how children made sense of the variability in the results of re- peated trials, how their ideas of repeated trials and best representatives are related to their understandings of the sources of the variability, and how they thought about what would be the best representative of their measurements. The data and analysis reveal the complexity of the understandings involved in this appar- ently simple procedure, as children attempted to appropriate for themselves the procedure that had been introduced to them. The results support the idea that many of the children had not conceptualized the pro- cedure of repeating trials and finding the best representative of the results in the way adult practitioners do. They also point to the value of introducing children to such experimental procedures.

Piaget’s Early Theory of the Role of Language in Intellectual Development: A Comment on DeVries’s Account of Piaget’s Social Theory

In the March 1997 Educational Researcher, Rheta DeVries presented a thought-provoking account of the social factors in Piaget’s conceptualization of intellectual development, primarily in his early works. However, DeVries ignored the fact that in these early writings Piaget made language an integral part of his ideas on intellectual development. DeVries’s elision is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it raises an issue of validity: Are we justified in simply discarding the linguistic element of these writings? Second, DeVries missed the opportunity to show how Piaget’s early ideas on the role of language might be relevant to contemporary interest in socio-cultural aspects of development.