I'm sorry to be so late in re- joining, even in my status as an appreciative
lurker. I wonder what conversations I will find? My name is Beth Warren. I
co-direct (with Ann Rosebery and Ricardo Nemirovsky) the Research Center at
TERC, a non-profit R&D organization in Cambridge, MA. My research focuses
on science teaching and learning in language minority classrooms, in
particular how Haitian and Latino students make sense of science and
appropriate scientific ways of knowing, talking, valuing and acting, and the
roles of teachers in bridging (bi-directionally) between students' everyday
discourses and those of science and mathematics. On this latter point, I
would add that the status of such distinctions as *everyday* and *scientific*
or *mathematical* is very much a focus of our group's inquiry. Also integral
to our work is a seminar with teachers in which we steep ourselves in doing
science and in considering literature from sociolinguistics, classroom
ethnography, and sociohistorical psychology. These perspectives then inform
and are informed by our joint exploration of videotapes of talk and activity
from the teachers' classrooms, through which we address the following kinds
of questions: (1) What discourses (or more broadly, sense-making resources)
do students and teachers bring to the science classroom? (2) How do these
discourses come into contact as students investigate scientific phenomena?
(3) How do teachers use knowledge of the ways these discourses come into
contact to build pedagogical bridges that support language minority students'
learning in science? (4) How do teachers and students use texts, activity,
tools, models, representations and talk in constructing scientific ideas and
norms of scientific practice? Among the many theorists and researchers who
inspire our explorations, Bakhtin remains perhaps the most provocative. I
look forward to rejoining the conversation.
Beth Warren
TERC
2067 Mass. Ave
Cambridge, MA 02140
617 547 0430
617 349 3535 (fax)
Beth_Warren@terc.edu