Rogers Hall

Conducting Video Research in the Learning Sciences: Guidance on Selection, Analysis, Technology, and Ethics

Focusing on expanding technical capabilities and new collaborative possibilities, we address 4 challenges for scientists who collect and use video records to conduct research in and on complex learning environments: (a) Selection: How can researchers be systematic in deciding which elements of a complex environment or extensive video corpus to select for study? (b) Analysis: What analytical frameworks and practices are appropriate for given research problems? (c) Technology: What technologies are available and what new tools must be developed to support collecting, archiving, analyzing, reporting, and collaboratively sharing video? and (d) Ethics: How can research protocols encourage broad video sharing and reuse while adequately protecting the rights of research participants who are recorded?

Disrupting Representational Infrastructure in Conversations Across Disciplines

In this article, we analyze conversations in consulting meetings where people work across disciplines to design things. We focus on interactional processes through which people disrupt and attempt to change representational technologies for scientific and technical classification. Our case material is drawn from ethnographic and cognitive studies of work in field entomology and architectural design. In both cases, we find common structures of interaction when people work across disciplines. These include selective use of talk, embodied action, and inscription to animate representational states that make up design alternatives. Participants from different disciplines animate situations in strikingly different ways, but these differences can either go unremarked or be put into coordinated use without explicit, shared understandings. Differences become remarkable either when a design proposal runs counter to deeply held disciplinary objectives or threatens to destabilize a wider network of representational technologies. These kinds of disruptions, and their consequences for representational infrastructure, are a central problem for research on distributed cognition.

Counter-Mapping the Neighborhood on Bicycles: Mobilizing Youth to Reimagine the City

Personal mobility is a mundane characteristic of daily life. However, mobility is rarely considered an opportunity for learning in the learning sciences, and is almost never leveraged as relevant, experiential material for teaching. This article describes a social design experiment for spatial justice that focused on changes in the personal mobility of six non-driving, African-American teenagers, who participated in an afterschool bicycle building and riding workshop located in a mid-south city. Our study was designed to teach spatial literacy practices essential for counter-mapping—a discursive practice in which youth used tools similar to those of professional planners to “take place” in the future of their neighborhoods. Using conversation and multimodal discourse analyses with video records, GPS track data, and interactive maps authored by youth, we show how participants in our study had new experiences of mobility in the city, developed technically-articulate criticisms of the built environment in their neighborhoods, and imagined new forms of mobility and activity for the future.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Modalities of Body Engagement in Mathematical Activity and Learning

How is the active human body—through gesture production, manipulation of tools, mobility in the local environment, and interaction with others—involved in mathematical thinking and learning? This special issue of the Journal of the Learning Sciences presents three articles, each taking a different approach to this question. Two commentaries by accomplished scholars in the cognitive and learning sciences provide a critical perspective on the articles and pose far-reaching questions about studies of embodiment in human thinking and learning. These articles and commentaries appear amid a diverse set of theoretical proposals for how cognition is necessarily embodied, supported by a growing collection of empirical findings regarding the body, concepts, and cognition that come from a range of scientific disciplines. Not surprisingly, these articles and the larger interdisciplinary field reflect different commitments to the nature of the mind, to modes of scientific investigation in the learning sciences, and to what should count as an adequate or a productive explanation in our field. In this introduction, we start with a brief review of proposals for embodied cognition and what they can tell us about mathematical activity in particular. What is the nature of mathematical knowledge, what is the role of the body in

Talk and Conceptual Change at Work: Adequate Representation and Epistemic Stance in a Comparative Analysis of Statistical Consulting and Teacher Workgroups

In this article we ask how concepts that organize work in two professional disciplines change during moments of consultation, which represent concerted efforts by participants to work differently now and in the future. Our analysis compares structures of talk, the adequacy of representations of practice, and epistemic and moral stances deployed when workgroups in clinical health sciences and secondary mathematics teaching seek to improve their work in discussions with colleagues and experts. Our comparative analysis highlights interactional supports for identifying, elaborating, and stabilizing relatively small-scale innovations in joint work that contribute to development at multiple timescales. These supports include comparisons over accounts of practice that borrow and extend method or technique, negotiating adequate representations of practice, use and uptake of epistemic stance toward what can be known about shared work, and surrounding organizational structures that provide for (or inhibit) the circulation of new concepts across workgroups.

Changing Concepts in Activity: Descriptive and Design Studies of Consequential Learning in Conceptual Practices

Concepts and conceptual change have been studied extensively as phenomena of individual thinking and action, but changing circumstances of social or cultural groups using concepts are treated as external conditions. We describe research on consequential learning in conceptual practices, where concepts include representational infrastructure that coordinates meaning and activity across time, setting, and social participation. Consequential learning changes ones relation to conceptual practice, creating access to and valued possibilities for participation in practices at a broader scale. We illustrate our approach to conceptual change with case studies and design research in workplaces, schools, and urban communities. We compare our approach to previous efforts to bridge theoretical perspectives published in this journal, focusing in particular on Greeno and van de Sande (2007). Our efforts provide new constructs and studies that may yet create a span between cognitive and sociocultural theories of learning and conceptual change.

Attaching Self and Others to Social Categories as an Interactional and Historical Achievement

Culture is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, more or less accurately, and then learn to read. People are not just map-readers; they are mapmakers. People are cast out into the imperfectly charted, continually shifting seas of everyday life. Mapping them out is a constant process resulting not in an individual cognitive map, but in a whole chart case of rough, improvised, continually revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map-making and navigation. [Frake, 1977/1997, pp. 44/45]

Developing & using interaction geography in a museum

There are many approaches that support studies of learning in relation to the physical environment, people’s interaction with one another, or people’s movement. However, what these approaches achieve in granularity of description, they tend to lose in synthesis and integration, and to date, there are not effective methods and concepts to study learning in relation to all of these dimensions simultaneously. This paper outlines our development and use of a new approach to describing, representing, and interpreting people’s interaction as they move within and across physical environments. We call this approach interaction geography. It provides a more integrative and multi-scalar way to characterize people’s interaction and movement in relation to the physical environment and is particularly relevant to learning research and professional design practice in informal learning settings. The first part of this paper illustrates our development and use of interaction geography to study visitor engagement in a cultural heritage museum. In particular, we illustrate Mondrian Transcription, a method to map people’s movement and conversation over space and time, and the Interaction Geography Slicer (IGS), a dynamic visualization tool that supports new forms of interaction and multi-modal analysis. The second part of the paper describes one team of museum educators, curators, archivists, and exhibit designers using a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment based on interaction geography. We show how this environment used interaction geography to disrupt the conventional views of visitor engagement and learning that museum professionals hold and then reframe these disruptions to enable museum professionals to perceive visitor engagement and learning in innovative ways that potentially support their future design decisions. We conclude the paper by discussing how this work may serve as a blueprint to guide future efforts to expand interaction geography in ways that explore new collaborations across the fields of education, information visualization, architecture, and the arts.

Cultural Forms, Agency, and the Discovery of Invention in Classroom Research on Learning and Teaching

In this chapter, I consider the relative powers of cultural forms, how agency is frozen into and circulates through forms over historical time, and how these processes are relevant for design-oriented studies of classroom learning and teaching. I start with a question about the costs and timescale of invention, comparing innovation in the classical music business (the “power of inertia,” as analyzed by Howard Becker) with processes underway in the classroom learning and teaching of statistics, which are offered by Rich Lehrer and Leona Schauble for secondary analysis in this volume. After a description of my own path through the corpus materials, I look across analyses in the target chapters that anchor this volume to build a synthetic account of the corpus as a case of what I call “the discovery of invention.” In this account, not only are children asked to invent data displays, but also the entire apparatus of teaching statistics for conceptual understanding is in the midst of invention. Just as it would be difficult to invent a truly novel way of authoring, performing, and hearing classical music, it has proven difficult to invent a novel way of teaching and learning mathematics (in this case statistics) in US public school classrooms. Reviewing the substantive and (in my view) complementary contributions of each target chapter, I argue that the difficulties of inventing a new way to teach mathematics are instructive and worth continued, collective effort.

Reconstructing the Learning Sciences

“A REAL WITCH always wears a wig to hide her baldness. She wears a first-class wig. And it is almost impossible to tell a really first-class wig from ordinary hair unless you give it a pull to see if it comes off.” “Then that’s what I’ll have to do,” I said. “Don’t be foolish,” my grandmother said. “You can’t go ’round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.” “So that doesn’t help much either,” I said. “None of these things is any good on its own,” my grandmother said. “It’s only when you put them all together that they begin to make a little sense.” (“How to recognize a witch,” Roald Dahl, 1997, p. 219)