“The Coat Traps All Your Body Heat”: Heterogeneity as Fundamental to Learning

This article explores heterogeneity as fundamental to learning. Inspired by Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, a design team consisting of an experienced classroom teacher and 2 researchers investigated how a class of 3rd and 4th graders came to understand disciplinary points of view on heat, heat transfer, and the particulate nature of matter. Through a series of planned and unplanned encounters, official versions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the particulate view of matter were juxtaposed with varied domains of experience of heat transfer and phase change in water. We analyze the children's discourse to examine how they populated these phenomena with meaning and what they learned in the process. We conclude by describing key principles and a conundrum that emerged from this research.

[1]  A. diSessa.  Toward an Epistemology of Physics , 1993 .

[2]  Andrew Elby,et al.  Tapping Epistemological Resources for Learning Physics , 2003 .

[3]  Andra A. DiSessa.  Inventing Graphing: Meta­ Representational Expertise in Children , 1991 .

[4]  Leslie R. Herrenkohl.  Intellectual Role Taking: Supporting Discussion in Heterogeneous Elementary Science Classes , 2006 .

[5]  Constance C. Gerger.  Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. , 1993 .

[6]  C. Pappas,et al.  Intertextuality in Read-Alouds of Integrated Science-Literacy Units in Urban Primary Classrooms: Opportunities for the Development of Thought and Language , 2006 .

[7]  Leslie R. Herrenkohl,et al.  Participant Structures, Scientific Discourse, and Student Engagement in Fourth Grade , 1998 .

[8]  Marcia C. Linn,et al.  Designing for Knowledge Integration: The Impact of Instructional Time , 2003 .

[9]  Angela Calabrese Barton,et al.  Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space , 2009 .

[10]  Marcia C. Linn,et al.  Scaffolding knowledge integration through curricular depth , 2000 .

[11]  Carol D. Lee.  Signifying in the Zone of Proximal Development , 2000 .

[12]  B. Cope,et al.  The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing , 1993 .

[13]  Jeannett Martin,et al.  Writing Science: Literacy And Discursive Power , 1993 .

[14]  Carol D. Lee.  Interrogating Race and Ethnicity as Constructs in the Examination of Cultural Processes in Developmental Research , 2002, Human Development.

[15]  J. Gee.  Social Linguistics And Literacies: Ideology in Discourse , 1996 .

[16]  Kris D. Gutiérrez,et al.  Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice , 2003 .

[17]  E. Moje,et al.  Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and Discourse , 2004 .

[18]  S. Heath.  Oral and Literate Traditions among Black Americans Living in Poverty. , 1989 .

[19]  James Paul Gee.  Discourse, learning, and schooling: Vygotsky and current debates in education: some dilemmas as afterthoughts to Discourse, Learning, and Schooling , 1996 .

[20]  Carol L. Smith,et al.  Linking phenomena with competing underlying models: A software tool for introducing students to the particulate model of matter , 2003 .

[21]  Michelene T. H. Chi,et al.  Commonsense Conceptions of Emergent Processes: Why Some Misconceptions Are Robust , 2005 .

[22]  N. Nasir,et al.  Identity, Goals, and Learning: Mathematics in Cultural Practice , 2002 .

[23]  S. Michaels,et al.  A pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures , 1996 .

[24]  B. Sherin,et al.  Inventing Graphing: Meta- Representational Expertise in Children , 2007 .

[25]  Andrea A. diSessa,et al.  Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy , 2000 .

[26]  L. Schauble,et al.  Design Experiments in Educational Research , 2003 .

[27]  Dana L. Kelly,et al.  International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement , 1998 .

[28]  M. Cole,et al.  Mind in Society , 2005 .

[29]  B. Lazerick.  Third international mathematics and science study , 1997 .

[30]  Gloria J. Ladson-Billings,et al.  Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education , 1995, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[31]  B. Rogoff.  The Cultural Nature of Human Development , 2003 .

[32]  B. Asher.  The Professional Vision , 1994 .

[33]  Bruce L Sherin,et al.  Common sense clarified: The role of intuitive knowledge in physics problem solving , 2006 .

[34]  Joyce W. Nutta,et al.  Teaching Science to English Language Learners , 2010 .

[35]  Carol D. Lee,et al.  Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre , 1993 .

[36]  Philip Johnson,et al.  Progression in children's understanding of a ‘basic’ particle theory: a longitudinal study , 1998 .

[37]  N. Nasir,et al.  “Points Ain't Everything”: Emergent Goals and Average and Percent Understandings in the Play of Basketball among African American Students , 2000 .

[38]  Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes,et al.  The Use of Argumentation in Haitian Creole Science Classrooms , 2003 .

[39]  M. Sinclair,et al.  Project-based learning. , 1998, NT learning curve.

[40]  Courtney B. Cazden,et al.  Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Second Edition. , 2001 .

[41]  Naoki Ueno.  Ecologies of Inscription: Technologies of Making the Social Organization of Work and the Mass Production of Machine Parts Visible in Collaborative Activity , 2000 .

[42]  Elinor Ochs,et al.  Interaction and grammar: “When I come down I'm in the domain state”: grammar and graphic representation in the interpretive activity of physicists , 1996 .

[43]  M. Bakhtin,et al.  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , 1981 .

[44]  J. Shea.  National Science Education Standards , 1995 .

[45]  Richard Phillips Feynman,et al.  Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher , 1994 .

[46]  Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns,et al.  “You're going to want to find out which and prove it”: collective argumentation in a mathematics classroom , 1998 .

[47]  Austin Henderson,et al.  Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice , 1995 .

[48]  Abbie Brown,et al.  Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in c , 1992 .

[49]  Caryl Emerson,et al.  Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , 1985 .

[50]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Embodied Practices of Engineering Work , 2000 .

[51]  Beth Warren,et al.  “Everyday” and “Scientific”: Rethinking Dichotomies in Modes of Thinking in Science Learning , 2004 .

[52]  Ricardo Nemirovsky,et al.  Body Motion and Graphing , 1998 .

[53]  M. Cole.  Struggling with Complexity: The Handbook of Child Psychology at the Millennium , 2000, Human Development.

[54]  Sherry A. Southerland,et al.  Individual and Group Meaning-Making in an Urban Third Grade Classroom: Red Fog, Cold Cans, and Seeping Vapor. , 2005 .

[55]  B. Latour.  Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands , 1986 .

[56]  S. Michaels,et al.  Narratives and Inscriptions: Cultural Tools, Power and Powerful Sense-Making , 2005 .

[57]  Deborah Loewenberg Ball,et al.  Integrity in Teaching: Recognizing the Fusion of the Moral and Intellectual , 1996 .

[58]  J. Stuber.  The American Dream and the Public Schools , 2004 .

[59]  M. Chi,et al.  Naive Physics Reasoning: A Commitment to Substance-Based Conceptions , 2000 .

[60]  C. Goodwin.  Practices of Color Classification , 1996 .

[61]  Luis C. Moll,et al.  Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms , 2005 .

[62]  L. Delpit,et al.  Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator. , 1986 .

[63]  Karen Gallas,et al.  Talking their way into science : hearing children's questions and theories, responding with curricula , 1995 .

[64]  Karen Gallas.  Talking their way into science , 1995 .

[65]  Kris D. Gutiérrez.  Developing a Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space , 2008 .

[66]  Ann Rosebery,et al.  Rethinking diversity in learning science: The logic of everyday sense‐making , 2001 .

[67]  C. W. Anderson,et al.  FOCUS ARTICLE: Implications of Research on Children's Learning for Standards and Assessment: A Proposed Learning Progression for Matter and the Atomic-Molecular Theory , 2006 .

[68]  M. Bakhtin.  Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics , 1973 .

[69]  J. Roschelle,et al.  Misconceptions Reconceived: A Constructivist Analysis of Knowledge in Transition , 1994 .

[70]  Sarah Michaels,et al.  Aligning Academic Task and Participation Status through Revoicing: Analysis of a Classroom Discourse Strategy , 1993 .

[71]  Victor R. Lee,et al.  Beyond transparency: How students make representations meaningful , 2006, ICLS.

[72]  M. Spencer.  Fourth Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research—Lessons Learned and Opportunities Ignored Since Brown v. Board of Education: Youth Development and the Myth of a Color-Blind Society , 2008 .

[73]  K. Allison,et al.  Social context and adolescence: Perspectives on development among inner-city African-American teens. , 1995 .

[74]  D. Medin,et al.  Cultural mosaics and mental models of nature , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[75]  J. Levin.  Computers, teachers, peers: Science learning partners , 2003 .

[76]  J. Lagowski.  National Science Education Standards , 1995 .