Wolff-Michael Roth

“Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy”: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory:

The authors describe an evolving theoretical framework that has been called one of the best kept secrets of academia: cultural-historical activity theory, the result of proposals Lev Vygotsky first articulated but that his students and followers substantially developed to constitute much expanded forms in its second and third generations. Besides showing that activity theory transforms how research should proceed regarding language, language learning, and literacy in particular, the authors demonstrate how it is a theory for praxis, thereby offering the potential to overcome some of the most profound problems that have plagued both educational theorizing and practice.

Gestures: Their Role in Teaching and Learning

Gestures are central to human cognition and constitute a pervasive element of human communication across cultures; even congenitally blind individuals use gestures when they talk. Yet there exists virtually no educational research that focuses on the role of gestures in knowing and learning and the implications they have for designing and evaluating learning environments. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the existing literature in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and education and, in the context of several concrete analyses of gesture use, to articulate potential focus questions that are relevant to educational research of knowing, learning, and teaching.

Inscriptions: Toward a Theory of Representing as Social Practice

We argue for a new theoretical perspective on representations. This perspective has its roots in recent scholarship in social studies of science and technology and is centered around the notion of inscriptions, graphical representations recorded in and available through some medium (e.g., paper, computer monitor). Methodologically, researchers have begun to investigate the construction and development of inscriptions, the transformations they undergo, the roles they play in social situations, and the (rhetorical) purposes for which they are deployed. As a result of this research, the social practices of inscription users came into focus, and individual mental activity was deemphasized. Inscriptions and inscription-related practices highlight aspects of representations and representing not captured by other theoretical frameworks. This framework has considerable implications for thinking about representations and representing, organizing classroom learning environments, and designing curriculum materials.

Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing From an Ecological Perspective

The goal of this article is to advance an ecological theory of knowing, one that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. To this end, the authors begin by describing the environment in terms of affordance networks: functionally bound potentials extended in time that can be acted upon to realize particular goals. Although there may be socially agreed-upon trajectories specifying the necessary components of a network activated for realizing a particular goal, the particular network engaged by an individual is dependent on adopted intentions and available effectivity sets, the attunements and behaviors that an individual can enlist to realize an affordance network. Thus, to help clarify the challenges of connecting learners to ecological systems through which affordance networks are activated, the authors use the term life-world, which refers to the environment from the perspective of an individual. Building on their characterization of affordance networks, effectivity sets, and life-worlds, the authors offer an ecological focal point for curricular design.

What Good Is Polarizing Research Into Qualitative and Quantitative

In education research, a polar distinction is frequently made to describe and produce different kinds of research: quantitative versus qualitative. In this article, the authors argue against that polarization and the associated polarization of the “subjective” and the “objective,” and they question the attribution of generalizability to only one of the poles. The purpose of the article is twofold: (a) to demonstrate that this polarization is not meaningful or productive for education research, and (b) to propose an integrated approach to education research inquiry. The authors sketch how such integration might occur by adopting a continuum instead of a dichotomy of generalizability. They then consider how that continuum might be related to the types of research questions asked, and they argue that the questions asked should determine the modes of inquiry that are used to answer them.

Teacher questioning in an open-inquiry learning environment: Interactions of context, content, and student responses

This article describes a case study of an expert teachers questioning strategies during an open-inquiry engineering curriculum in a Grade 4/5 classroom. The data sources collected over a 13-week period included videotaped whole-class and small-group teacher-student interactions, debriefing meetings after each lesson, interviews with observing elementary teachers, and stimulated recall sessions with both teachers present in the class. A holistic, sociolinguistic framework was used to analyze the transcribed videotapes. The analysis provides evidence for the complexity of questioning that is characterized by the interactions of context and content of, and response and reactions to questions. The teachers competence in questioning was related to her discursive competence in the subject-matter domain; but question content was always mediated by the contingencies of discourse context and response and reaction patterns. The study also provides evidence that questioning is a complex practice which cannot be appropriated easily, a finding which implies a fundamental change in the professional preparation and development of science teachers.

Differences in Graph-Related Practices between High School Biology Textbooks and Scientific Ecology Journals.

Our research program is concerned with the trajectory of individuals from their initial participation in science-related activities to their full participation in scientific research. This study was designed to provide answers to questions about (a) the practices required for reading graphs in high school textbooks and scientific journals, and (b) the role of high school textbooks in the appropriation of authentic scientific graph-related practices. For our analyses, we selected five leading ecology-related journals and six representative high school biology textbooks. Although there were no differences in the total number of inscriptions used in journals and textbooks, there were significant differences in the frequency with which Cartesian graphs were used. To allow more detailed analyses, an ontology of graphs was developed. Our fine-grained analyses based on this ontology yielded qualitative differences between the uses of graphs and associated captions and main text as they appeared in high school textbooks and scientific journals. Scientific journals provided more resources to facilitate graph reading and more elaborate descriptions and interpretations of graphs than the high school textbooks. Implications of this study are outlined as they relate to (a) producing graphs, captions, and main text in high school textbooks; and (b) teaching and researching graph-related practices from anthropological perspectives.

Scientific literacy as collective praxis

In this article, we conceive of scientific literacy as a property of collective activity rather than individual minds. We think of knowing and learning science as situated in and distributed across social and material aspects of a setting. To support the proposed conception, we provide several detailed cases from our three-year multi-site ethnographic study of science in one community, featuring different types of citizens who walk a creek, interact during an environment-oriented open-house event, discuss water problems, collect data, and have different conceptions of human-environment relations. The case studies show that collectively, much more advanced forms of scientific literacy are produced than any individual (including scientists) could produce. Creating opportunities for scientific literacy to emerge from collective activity, irrespective of whether one or more participants know some basic scientific facts, presents challenges to science educators very different from teaching basic facts and skills to individuals.

Professionals Read Graphs: A Semiotic Analysis

Graph-related practices are central to scientific endeavors and graphing has long been hailed as one of the core “general process skills” that set scientists apart. One research question that has not received much attention is, “Are scientists generally competent readers of graphs, or are graphs indissolubly tied to practices and understandings of their everyday workplace?” This study was designed to better understand the reading and interpretation of familiar and unfamiliar graphs by (mostly) scientists. From an extensive database on graphing involving university students to professionals, we selected two case studies and interpret them within a theoretical framework grounded in semiotics and hermeneutic phenomenology. The first case study provides a detailed analysis in which a scientist wrestles and in part inappropriately interprets an unfamiliar graph used in undergraduate ecology courses; the difficulties of the scientist include some of those identified among students in the graphing literature. The second case study provides an example of the transparent use of graphs in the work of a water technician who is not only familiar with her graphs, but who has an intimate, embodied knowledge of the world to which the graph refers. When it comes to reasoning, scientists are often taken as experts against which the performance of other individuals (“novices”) are judged (as inferior). If scientists’ own graphing practices are not general but tied to their embodied understanding, then the teaching of decontextualized graphing skills loses its legitimacy. Our results therefore have considerable implications to mathematics education. Professionals read graphs 2

A Cultural-Historical Perspective on Mathematics Teaching and Learning

Eighty years ago, L. S. Vygotsky complained that psychology was misled in studying thought independent of emotion. This situation has not signifi cantly changed, as most learning scientists continue to study cognition independent of emotion. In this book, the authors use cultural-historical activity theory as a perspective to investigate cognition, emotion, learning, and teaching in mathematics. Drawing on data from a longitudinal research program about the teaching and learning of algebra in elementary schools, Roth and Radford show (a) how emotions are reproduced and transformed in and through activity and (b) that in assessments of students about their progress in the activity, cognitive and emotional dimensions cannot be separated. Three features are salient in the analyses: (a) the irreducible connection between emotion and cognition mediates teacher-student interactions; (b) the zone of proximal development is itself a historical and cultural emergent product of joint teacher-students activity; and (c) as an outcome of joint activity, the object/motive of activity emerges as the real outcome of the learning activity. The authors use these results to propose (a) a different conceptualization of the zone of proximal development, (b) activity theory as an alternative to learning as individual/social construction, and (c) a way of understanding the material/ideal nature of objects in activity.