Virginia J. Flood

Students Talk about Energy in Project- Based Inquiry Science

We examine the types of emergent language eighth grade students in rural Maine middle schools use when they discuss energy in their first experiences with Project-Based Inquiry Science: Energy, a research-based curriculum that uses a specific language for talking about energy. By comparative analysis of the language used by the curriculum materials to students’ language, we find that students’ talk is at times more aligned with a Stores and Transfer model of energy than the Forms model supported by the curriculum.

Multimodal Revoicing as an Interactional Mechanism for Connecting Scientific and Everyday Concepts

A perpetual problem learners face is identifying which aspects of embodied experiences are relevant for appreciating the world in culturally specific ways. Vygotsky argued that social interactions with more competent cultural members provide arenas for linking everyday and scientific concepts. However, the precise interactional mechanisms of how these linkages are forged remain underexamined. I argue that understanding these mechanisms requires examining how intersubjectivity is built and maintained. I propose that ethnomethodological conversation analysis and the co-operative action framework provide a uniquely suited analytic orientation for this project because they focus on the fine details of the actual practical methods people use to procedurally achieve intersubjectivity. To illustrate the utility of these approaches, I show how the fine details of multimodal revoicing interactions present semiotic challenges that allow learners to link everyday and scientific concepts. Specifically, I examine the role dialogic gesture plays in reformulating a multimodally expressed idea about what it means to “go faster.”