Ma

On my plate for the next week:

1 - IUSE grant - get letters of commitment to colleagues I'd like to be involved (Jess Watkins, Ayush Gupta, Brian?, Danielle?, Sam, Megan, Amy, IDoTeach)

2 - STEM night prep (I'm running a little demo/make-and-take in an elementary school)

3 - literature review for IC paper


So for #3:

Jasmine Ma has an article "Designing Disruptions for Productive Hybridity: The Case of Walking Scale Geometry" that I've just finished -- what I like from this: "Those who have investigated designs for hybridity have discovered some difficulties in bridging students’ out-of-school resources with classroom content"... and the solution, for Ma, is not to anticipate and develop instructional links to out-of-school resources, but to make "certain typical classroom resources ... explicitly unavailable...and so a setting is created in which it is reasonable and even necessary for students to draw from their nonclassroom repertoires of practice."

I think that's exactly what we do in Scientific Inquiry - but not even with any kind of radical disruption (e.g., doing "walking scale geometry" on a football field, as Ma does) - but just by getting rid of books and lab equipment.

My take-away from this article, though, is this: she's talking about how to design for other resources (other contexts) to be brought into the classroom. I'm highlighting the ways in which other contexts appear and why that should matter for transfer. So, in the end, I don't know that this is going to be too useful, except in a end-of-paper implications/next steps kind of way.


Nice quotes, though, are below... in case I want to use this later:



"Rather than bridging home or community funds of knowledge with school learning, I propose designing disruptions to typical school practices to invite students to recruit out-of-school resources meaningful and sensible to them in order to grapple with school-valued concepts..."

"I take a relational view of equity here that “sees issues of diversity as emerging from the relations between communities in which students participate rather than as characteristics of students and their communities” (Cobb & Hodge, 2002, p. 257). From this point of view, equitable instructional design takes into account the variety of ways in which students participate in local and broader communities, or their repertoires of practice (K. D. Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003), ensuring that all students have access to learning, not despite, but because of, their diverse repertoires of practice and histories of engagement in cultural practices. Tasks and instruction must be accessible in relation to the actual knowledge and experiences of students rather than some narrow, assumed set, and they should build on this knowledge and experience so that new concepts are sensible to students."

...In contrast to instructional tasks designed around known student practices, these disruptions invite students to engage with tasks in ways that make sense to them, making connections to diverse out-of-school practices."

Heteroglossia, or the multiple voices in a social space, can be acknowledged and fostered so that dialogic meanings can be negotiated and developed. These multiple voices include not just those of the individuals present but also the many identities and histories of experience participants may choose to present in an interaction. This is in contrast to monologic and authoritative meanings that can be imposed in classrooms and other settings by those in power positions (e.g., teachers).

Third spaces arise when unofficial spaces, in interaction with official spaces and discourses, are included and supported.

Studies that seek to promote hybridity specifically (e.g., González, Andrade, Civil, & Moll, 2001; K. D. Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Moje et al., 2004) and equitable learning settings in general typically treat student participation and engagement in three common ways (Enyedy & Mukhopadhyay, 2007; Lee, 2001; Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino, & Warren, 2010). First, researchers and teachers take as assumed that diversity is a resource in teaching and learning and can be leveraged. They do this by incorporating typically invisible, undervalued, or marginalized student-centered resources into classroom activity. Second, students’ diverse contributions are actively invited and supported, whether they are discourse practices or other forms of funds of knowledge. Third, aspects of instruction—topics, participation structures, instructional strategies—are used to bridge school and out-of-school practices. ... The strategy described here, designing disruptions for productive hybridity, [incorporates the first two but] differs in that the designed setting is not meant to produce hybridity but to provide a setting to support it. By this I mean that designing disruptions does not provide bridges but instead opens up the learning environment to encourage students to build those bridges. I provide a rationale and a more detailed account of what this means in the next section.

Those who have investigated designs for hybridity have discovered some difficulties in bridging students’ out-of-school resources with classroom content...

Certain typical classroom resources are made explicitly unavailable through these disruptions, and so a setting is created in which it is reasonable and even necessary for students to draw from their nonclassroom repertoires of practice. I use the term setting deliberately to acknowledge that spaces are made up of built material features experienced in activity by individuals and groups (Lave, 1988; Lave, Murtaugh, & de la Rocha, 1984; Ma & Munter, 2014). Settings at once influence and are influenced by the activity that occurs within them. Thus, disrupting a setting disrupts both ongoing activity and how participants experience and understand the spaces of activity...

It can be struck as long as students are positioned with conceptual agency (Boaler & Greeno, 2000; Gresalfi & Cobb, 2006)—they must be active participants in the making and negotiation of meaning and inventing or selecting of strategies for problem solving, in part by recruiting resources of their choosing that may be unanticipated by or unfamiliar to the teacher or instruction designer.

In designing disruptions for productive hybridity, instructional designers replace existing settings with elements that disrupt some crucial infrastructure for learning or engaging in disciplinary activity. The disruption invites agentive student participation in hybrid learning activity in which students otherwise may have been held accountable, implicitly or explicitly, to cultural tools (e.g., representational forms, discursive norms) determined by the teacher or curricu- lum. In the WSG case representational forms and practices, shown to be highly consequential for the development of mathematical reasoning (Hall & Greeno, 2008; Lehrer & Lesh, 2003), was the target of disruption.

With a can-do attitude, anything can be food.

So today in class ("perspectives"), I had us consider what kinds of things "decompose" - and had students develop taxonomies of decomposition and consider various ways of describing/naming their taxonomies. I handed out a stack of cards with items to sort/categorize: flour, sugar, salt, wood, virus, dead fish, gasoline, plastic bag, iron, bread, granite, water, chalk, helium, honey, fossils.

I was thinking about questions like:
- what, if anything, is the fundamental difference between burning and decomposing? between dissolving and decomposing? between rusting and decomposing? between digesting and decomposing? are these different to a biologist but not a chemist?
- what are things that burn well but don't decompose easily (e.g., gasoline, wax) - and what's the difference?
- why are some energy-dense molecules just not suitable for food?
- why do some foods not go in the fridge?
- do these taxonomies loosely align themselves with disciplines - the "food/decompose" things (biology), the earth sciences things that do rock-cycle things, the high energy scales of nuclear decomposition, etc.  Does your discipline influence your taxonomies?

Some groups were just sorting "animal/vegetable/mineral" kinds of sorts without much cool conversation. At one table, they had a group labeled "food" and I asked about it -- and one student said, "With a can-do attitude, anything can be food." -- and this is actually a real question for me  -- is that true? What ideas from physics, chemistry and biology can support us in answering that question? And it's also play - I loved the phrasing of it. So I took a moment to celebrate that question at the table, then wrote it on the board and brought it to the whole class (34 students) to note that this, to me, is actually one of the deeper questions underneath this sorting game. Can anything be food? and is gasoline "food" for a car?

Anyway, it seemed reminiscent of my post from yesterday - like I'm in a room of toddlers, looking for a way to frame this as a game - and so I wanted to share.

The nip denotes the bite

I'm taking a parent/toddler class on Monday mornings. Kate plays with 9 other 2 - 3 year olds behind a one-way mirror as the parent(s) discuss all things toddler with an early childhood expert for 90 minutes.

Kate is an easy-going kiddo (no siblings and in daycare for 8 hours a day), but there are lots of challenges coming up - moms home with two kids who may have sibling issues, or a little boy who just needs to punch things to get out some feelings, and so on. One thing the instructor often discusses when someone brings up a problem (yelling, throwing, hitting, refusing to do something, etc.) is "are they really ____ or are they just playing with that idea?" And a lot of her recommendations have to do with what I would call framing -- if it isn't really ferocious, say, but a testing of boundaries or a play for power -- she has techniques that are all about framing it as play. It's fascinating.

And it works! - My one issue that I brought up was that Kate will often refuse to walk and - if I don't carry her - she lies down in the middle of the parking lot, say.  Maite (our teacher) suggested playing with this idea at a safe time -- if Kate refuses to get something or walk somewhere, I drop to the ground theatrically -- "OH, Kate, I CANNOT move my legs! Oh NO! Can you PLEEEASE help me?"  I tried it (Kate was refusing to get something), and Kate giggled and giggled and then - theatrically - helped mommy. It was a game, and it was fun. She got to play at being in power, she got to explore the idea of not being carried. And we got the job done. I don't know how to measure it, but I would guess that, over time, she'd get to work out her concerns and feel confident not being carried and feel safe being a big kid who can get places by herself.

Listening to the advice Maite gives, I keep thinking of Bateson's "the nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what the bite denotes." -- a theory of play (and puppies). And I think that so much of toddlerhood is puppy nips, and so much parenting missteps are to react to these nips as bites. Or maybe that the toddler doesn't yet quite know - is this play? is this dangerous? is this something I can explore? do I need to be brave here or can I just mess about? - and my job is to help frame it for her: yes, this is a game we can play, here's how we can make scary bites into playful nips so that we can explore. Toddlerhood is a pretty scary thing - having more power, feeling angry, competing with siblings, having new friendships, and being away from mom for longer stretches --  and framing our interactions to make these ideas *play* is part of my job (and her job, too - she's so good at it already, though).

And I think a lot about science -- we live in these imaginary/model worlds with our colleagues -- discussing invented objects (resonances, eigenvalues, energy states) -- and yet I don't think we do a good job framing classrooms as places of *play* -- science class is often so tied in with high stakes/evaluative kinds of activities that it can't feel like play, you have to be really brave all the time. (For one, college is just so expensive! - who has time to play?) And I do think some of what I do in a classroom is about framing the activity as play.  (This is related to Luke Conlin's dissertation, I think.)



Also, the preschool is from the Bank Street model - which describes its approach ("developmental-interaction") as: "Developmental-Interaction refers to the ways in which cognition and emotion are always interconnected in any teaching situation. Meaningful content (provided by a teacher) and active relationships and collaborations with student peers and teachers provide the basis for learning.  By closely observing the reactions, reflections, and interactions of students; by guiding with her own comments and questions; and by encouraging every ounce of student curiosity, the educator teaches her students."  Love it.



Another last note: I'm thinking more about not only how we create places of play to reduce the need to be so brave all the time, but also how we create sacred spaces, too - places of ritual and sobriety and remind us that it's not all play, that allow us to feel how real it all is. - I think it's important to have both. (Not that play and sacred are opposites.)