Ana wrote:
> Those are the
>lines 36 - 43 in Gordon's transcript. I am transcribing them here without
>gestures and intonation - I hope you watched the movie and have the
>transcript near by:
>36 L: "Look at that sailboat"
>37 J: "That's neat."
>38 L: "Yeah and then we could make something like use *air to
>make it roll"
>39 J: "*wind power"
>40 L: "like use *wind power?
>41 J: "*Yeah"
>42 L: "I mean <that's>"
>43 J: "*Yeah - wind power. (Taps rapidly on picture then looks at L on
>"wind power")
>
>When you watch the movie you see that this is the moment when an OBJECT gets
>created. This object is not the same "thing" as the picture in the book -
>which is there at the beginning. We could say that it was the picture in the
>book that "made" them construct their own object. In that sense - the
>picture book is a very complex object made by someone else (many people,
>whole systems, really: a writer, a painter, a publisher, a book-seller,
>school teacher who bought the book, and before that: the object which was
>depicted ...etc - you could probably trace the history there at least
>cursory). But, a quick glance, little longer than at other pictures plus L's
>comment about air/wind power and J moves in 43 (underlined) to look away in
>space, open her mouth (impressed??), then looks back at L. This is a
>"click" - their object is made now. They continue to discuss this object
>(how to make wind power...). And there is a pleasure at creating something
together - the bond between the girls strengthens...
>One should note that this really is an object of a different kind - it is an
>object of their dialogue - it does not exist as a thing ("gegenstand") but
>as a concept or a plan that they start to elaborate.
>What is remarkable here is not that there is a difference between on one
>hand, social relationship between the two girls, and on the other, their
>individual relationships with the "idea of the boat on wheels", but that
>there is a connection (relation) between these two different orientations.
>And each part of this triangle: "L"-"boat"-"J" mediates between the two
>others. Each one of them becomes something a bit different through this
>motion.
>
>This is what I was trying to talk about - there is a functional asymmetry of
>the relations within the mediating relationships in meaning making.
>I do see this kind of meaning making as different from other kinds of
>communication between people, or between things, or between
>people/animal/things. I do not think that it is isolated, though from other
>types of communication, instead it is very integrated into all others. But I
>do see a need to study this particular type of communication in more detail
>because it is an activity that transforms (or forms) its makers. The various
>dimensions of this activity, which go into this brief instance range from
>symbols/tools that are made by a culture over a long period of time and by
>many people, to the very small moment in which a new meaning is created:
>language they use; books they use; school as an institution where children
>like them can engage in this type of activity; clothes they wear; their own
>personal realtionship and the brief history of the sicence class...; their
>relationships with the other children;...).
Thank you, Ana, for capturing the significance of this brief moment
so well. It was exactly this part that originally drew me to work on
the video-clip. It seemed to epitomize the sort of "dialogic
inquiry" that I have been exploring and trying to promote in
classrooms for the last twenty years.
Your commentary also helps me answer Nate's question:
"Was the video an after effect or was it an essential element in the
coding or anaysis? If one was just focusing on the typical audio
transcription, certain actions, gestures, movements etc would be
missed."
Much of the work I have done on classroom interaction has been based
on audio transcripts only. However all the extracts I have written
about in detail have been based on the video recording. I learned my
lesson quite a few years ago when I used a video clip with a doctoral
seminar in which I interacted with two students about an experiment
they had been doing. My familiarity with the episode was based on
discussion of the transcript - with Jay among others - (based on the
audio track only) but when we viewed the video in class it became
apparent that I had missed the nonverbal participation of one of the
children - not only in my analysis of the episode, but also in the
moment when I was with the children. I was mortified by my
insensitivity, which my doctoral class brought to my attention with
some satisfaction! Since then I have reanalyzed the material
(http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/%7Egwells/Shoebox.html) and, as a
result, started to pay attention to much more of what's going on
whenever people interact.
Writing about the land yacht episode was one outcome of this change
of heart and practice.
In some ways it is an "ideal" example, in that - as Ana points out -
so much of importance can be clearly seen as well as heard in this
five minute episode. As several people have pointed out,
participation in a joint activity involves a very complex dance, in
which - very often - different individuals are relating to each other
and the material setting in different ways, to different "music", and
on different time-scales. So, from an analytic point of view, it is
difficult to gain a focused understanding of what is going on and
(re)present one's understanding in a publishable article. (Alfred's
messages provide a particularly relevant alternative view on the
value of such analytic attempts.) A lot of a teacher's skill is in
coordinating and, frequently, leading the dance in such a way that
all the students are co-participating, contributing in their
different ways and appropriating new ways of acting, thinking,
feeling and talking in the process. In many classrooms this does not
seem to happen very effectively. One of my goals as an educational
researcher is to discover the different ways in which teachers can be
successful in creating a collaborating community in which all learn
with and from each other.
But the episode is not "ideal" in the sense that it is "superior" to
what was going on in the rest of the classroom. I spent quite a
number of hours in the classroom and saw other groups equally fully
engaged in planning and making their working models. Nate observes:
" the group in front while maybe not goofing off, interacted
differently with the object. They seemed less focused, more action in
the now, and less interested in dialogue." This particular pair
were twins, fairly recently arrived in Canada from SE Asia and not
yet entirely adjusted to the norms that had become established over
the course of the year. But later in the episode, one of the focal
girls turns to help them decide what they might make.
I think the main reason why one might see the land yacht episode as
"ideal" has to do with the nature of the activity. While specifying
certain requirements (use of junk materials, write concurrently in
log books), the teacher encouraged both initiativre and collaboration
and, most importantly, gave the children choice and ownership of
their project while addressing the broad theme of mechanical
technology. It is also significant that this episode took place
fairly late in the school year, by which time the class had
established productive ways of working and interacting.
The teacher, Zoe Donoahue, was one of the founding members of the
Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP) and,
together with several other teachers and myself and a colleague, was
committed to trying to adopt an inquiry approach to the curriculum.
She and her colleagues have written about their work in Action, Talk
and Text, a collection that I edited (Teachers College Press, 2001).
Zoe's chapter in that book is about the ways in which her class uses
class meetings to discuss how they live and work together as a
community. You can also read another article by her in Networks, an
Online Journal for Teacher Research, Vol. 1 (1998)
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/ in which she describes how
she changed her way of organizing literature discussions as a result
of studying videotapes of her early attempts one year.
I hope these remarks provide a little more context for the episode
under discussion.
Gordon
-- Gordon Wells UC Santa Cruz. gwells@cats.ucsc.edu http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/
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