Studying Cognition through Time in a Classroom Community: The Interplay between “Everyday” and “Scientific Concepts”

Abstract

This paper presents an analytic approach for understanding the interplay through time between “scientific” and “everyday concepts” in a mathematics classroom community. To illustrate the approach, we focus on an elementary classroom implementing an integers and fractions lesson sequence that makes use of the number line as a principal representational context. In our analysis of the community's emerging collective practices (recurring structures of joint activity), we trace the interplay between children's sensorimotor actions (displacing, counting, and splitting) and the mathematical definitions supported in the classroom, like definitions of unit interval or equivalent fractions. In our illustrative analysis, we find that the teacher orchestrated collective practices to support the use of actions to make sense of the formal definitions, and the use of definitions to regulate actions. Though we illustrate the analytic approach for a particular classroom community, the approach illuminates teaching-learning dynamics that transcend any particular classroom or subject matter domain.

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

“…However, it is able to robustly characterize the critical interactional mechanisms of moment-by-moment meaning-making that contribute to this trajectory over time [Saxe, 2012]. In this way, microanalytic investigations can complement existing longitudinal accounts of how students connect their spontaneous, embodied experiences with scientific concepts [e.g., Saxe et al, 2015]. Analytic attention to the fine details of how intersubjectivity is procedurally accomplished in familiar interactional sequences like revoicing holds potential for better understanding processes of learning and development.…”

“…For example, Saxe et al [2015] provide a longitudinal illustration of how reoccurring, routinized collective classroom practices like "correcting the teacher" provide repeated opportunities for students to connect embodied experiences with cultural formalisms over time. However, they argue that there is much left to uncover about how social interactions between adults and children can create ecologies for scientific and spontaneous concepts to shape one another.…”

“…However, they argue that there is much left to uncover about how social interactions between adults and children can create ecologies for scientific and spontaneous concepts to shape one another. Saxe et al [2015] join a growing group of scholars who argue that more microanalytic investigations of the fine details of social interactions are necessary to understand this process [e.g., Macbeth, 2011;Roth & Thom, 2009]. Wertsch [1980Wertsch [ , 1985 long ago argued for the importance of microanalytic investigations of the interactions between adults and children.…”

Reflections on Scaffolding and Semiotic Challenge

“…Almost a century later, Vygotsky's insights about the importance of integrating children's prior knowledge (everyday concepts) and academic discourse (academic or scientific concepts) continue to be relevant to instruction in schools [Forman & Shekell, in press;Saxe et al, 2015]. Nevertheless, educators have often oversimplified or misunderstood his ideas [Stone, 1998].…”

Introduction

“…My subsequent research on cognitive development has been a career-long effort to capture culture-cognition relations more adequately within a developmental framework in which cognition and culture are each understood as processes undergoing transformation. My work has taken me to field sites in remote regions of Papua New Guinea [e.g., Saxe, 1981Saxe, , 1982Saxe, , 1985Saxe & de Kirby, in press;Saxe & Esmonde, 2005;Saxe & Moylan, 1982], urban and rural contexts in Northeastern Brazil [e.g., Saxe, 1988aSaxe, , 1988bSaxe, , 1991Saxe & Gearhart, 1990], classrooms in the United States [Saxe, de Kirby, Kang, Le, & Schneider, 2015;Saxe, Gearhart, & Seltzer, 1999;Saxe, Gearhart, Shaughnessy, Earnest, Cremer, Sitabkhan, et al, 2009], and children's play of games in working class communities [Saxe & Bermudez, 1996;Saxe & Guberman, 1998;Saxe, Guberman, & Gearhart, 1987]. Summarized and further developed in my recent book [Saxe, 2014], my work grapples with the ways that individual participation in the generation of everyday contexts reproduces and alters the patterns and conventions of daily life, and the reciprocal ways that patterns of cultural life frame the constructive actions of individuals, leading to both integrity and novelty in cognitive developments.…”