Learning Culture and Social Interaction最新文献

This article explores how interdisciplinarity is constructed and enacted in a Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) educational environment, when self-tailored personal academic development is intertwined with collaborative group work involving various disciplinary input. A case study taking a grounded theory approach analyzed how interdisciplinarity emerged from collaborative groupwork dynamics in which students' academic identities manifest and interact. Academic identity in LAS contexts is complex: Individuals' disciplinary identities intersect with a generic program-bound identity shared by all students. Disciplinary identity was not only unique for each student, but also showed diverse configurations among the LAS population, as revealed in three disciplinary profiles: disciplinary specialists, topic experts, and identity explorers. Interdisciplinarity, accordingly, has different meanings and entails different journeys of academic growth. The interplay between and among the intersectional academic identities constitutes different groupwork dynamics and leads to different learning experiences. Comparing three patterns of groupwork experience—non-disciplinary, monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary—the article argues for two key concepts crucial for experiencing interdisciplinarity: disciplinary enablement and disciplinary transaction. To make sense of interdisciplinarity in LAS contexts, the article further looks into tensions perceived by students regarding specific groupwork as well as long-term academic development. The tensions reflect two dimensions of knowledge and knowledge work that both LAS students and LAS education in general need to reconcile, namely, specification and specialization versus generalization and integration.

Writing anxiety is effective on writing performance. Although anxiety is not always an obstacle, controlling its probable damages can facilitate the learning process. The present study investigated the effects of peer, reciprocal, and distributed scaffolding on English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners' anxiety level. 120 IELTS candidates were randomly selected in an IELTS center in Iran. Prior to the course, the participants were interviewed about their perceptions toward anxiety and the ways to reduce it. Then, the participants were randomly placed in one control group and three experimental groups. In each of the experimental groups, one of the aforementioned scaffolding techniques was practiced by a trained IELTS teacher. The Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) was administered before and after the treatment, and the results were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance. The findings showed that only the reciprocal scaffolding group had a significant difference with the control group. Also, the use of reciprocal scaffolding had a significant effect only on cognitive anxiety. The qualitative analysis showed a general misperception and a pessimistic view toward the employment of reciprocal and peer scaffolding by the participants. These findings can have implications for all the stake-holders in language learning; especially IELTS test takers, teachers, and language institutes.

This conceptual article argues that not only are agency and imagination key concepts in the funds of identity work, but that they are a compelling vehicle toward epistemic justice through envisioned futures. We summarize sociocultural perspectives of imagination and agency as emerging processes within a funds of identity approach and make visible the ways these evolved into future visions of epistemic justice. We illustrate three cases that engaged participants' funds of identity through creative mediating strategies that exemplify and characterize these connections in practice across different educational settings and participants. The funds of identity approaches used in each case were intentional in fostering imagination and agency to envision more equitable and alternative future possibilities. We conclude by presenting five considerations to facilitate engaging a funds of identity approach toward epistemic justice in educational contexts. These considerations are: 1) use mediational devices to support engaging imagination, agency, and aspirational funds of identity, 2) create spaces of trust and safety, 3) examine history and power within the context, 4) be open to exploring dark and invisible funds of identity, and 5) support educators in linking curriculum to student funds of identity.

In this study, we investigate peer talk in consensus-oriented first-grade classrooms. Earlier research has shown that the quality of argumentation improves when students argue to agree, because it steers the students toward patterns of argumentation that support the exploration and elaboration of perspectives that is typical of deliberative argumentation. Using multi-modal argumentation analysis, we identify four patterns in the peer talk. First, the students invoked consensus when the conversation developed in a direction that was not in accordance with their understanding of the task instructions. Second, the students tended to delegate the authority to decide what the group will answer. Third, the students searched for the lowest common denominator, looking for a common element in their individual answers. Fourth, the students put the decision to a vote, going with the majority and ignoring the perspectives of the minority. We argue that these patterns illustrate a general tendency for the students to rush toward a conclusion. Accordingly, we argue that younger students need a more explicit instructional design by the teacher to support exploration and elaboration of different perspectives.

For collaborative groups to succeed, problem solvers need to agree on what the problem is and how to solve it. In ill-structured problems, the problem solvers switch back and forth between redefining the problem and generating solutions. This lack of parameters and structure implies that solving ill-structured problems is a complicated process, which can present problems in several different phases of problem solving. Efficient metacognitive regulation (MR) and socially shared metacognitive regulation (SSMR) skills benefit ill-structured problem solving. Online environments often lack the necessary social dimension to foster MR and SSMR. In the current article we report on a natural experiment caused by COVID-19 which forced a classroom-based workshop into an online version, thus contrasting face-to-face and audio-synchronous online learning setting in an Educational Sciences course of the Open University of the Netherlands. The student groups were presented with an ill-structured problem during which MR and SSMR processes were analyzed. We found that groups from the online setting demonstrated more MR processes than the face-to-face groups whereas the face-to-face groups engaged in more SSMR than the online groups.

Video is a powerful tool that has widely been implemented in research on and practice in teacher education and professional development (PD). Therefore, this issue of LCSI is timely, and all articles provide insights into the “positioning” of video as an “ontological and epistemological” research tool beyond methodological developments. In the following, I do not intend to present each study in detail. Instead, I select research highlights from the papers and link their contributions to the overall aims of this special issue.

Fostering moral thinking and cultural literacy are major contemporary concerns in Europe and beyond, as means for young people to co-create social futures. We present a theoretical-methodological approach to understanding students' moral thinking in the context of collaborative interpretation of visual narratives (“wordless texts”) with ethical implications. Six layers of interpretation are defined, from referential reconstruction of characters' intentions, through semiotic symbolism, to making the moral of the story explicit in terms of conceptualisations of three key European values (empathy, inclusion and tolerance). Within a case-study approach to analysing computer-mediated dialogues, we show the extent to which students are led to discuss and understand ethical implications of a particular narrative, and how this relates to the quality of collaboration.

Educational and psychological research on argumentative interactions has identified several challenges in young people's argumentation, as well as early manifestations of some (hybrid) reasoning mechanisms that children and adolescents are able to put into service when necessary. The purpose of this short article/commentary is to inquire into some of these mechanisms, as presented in the articles published in the special issue “Interpersonal argument”, through: (a) framing them from a psychopedagogical perspective; and (b) questioning whether they represent genuine participation in argumentation dialogues or just some isolated manifestations of skills that may lead or not to such participation. It is argued that participation in genuine argumentation requires the sharing of a mutual dialogical goal among participants, and such sharing requires some degree of intersubjectivity, not available in the early years of life. It is also argued that group work is not a guarantee for having sophisticated argumentation among peers, as it requires a high degree of collaboration, which does not always and spontaneously emerge. Therefore, collaborative work may be considered more as a design principle rather than an outcome of engaging in interpersonal argument. Lastly, the challenge of arguing with a virtual rather than a physical other is also discussed.