Connecting to the outside: Cultural resources teachers use when contextualizing instruction

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine what resources teachers mobilize when contextualizing instruction. In this instructional method, teachers use students' everyday experiences as tools for teaching subject matter at school. Research has documented that contextualizing instruction can support classroom learning. However, we do not know very much about what types of resources teachers view as relevant in this type of instructional work. In this article, we analyze video data of student-teacher interaction in 43 lessons, which was collected when following 4 lower secondary teachers over one academic year. The analysis is based on a sociocultural perspective of learning and teaching in which the focus of analysis is on what kind of everyday experiences teachers orient to when supporting student's reasoning about academic matter. The findings show that the resources that teachers orient to can be grouped into five categories, which represent different resources as part of the students' everyday life: (1) Teachers orienting to characteristics of the local community, (2) Teachers orienting to examples from everyday practices, (3) Teachers orienting to personal issue, (4) Teachers orienting to concrete objects and (5) Teachers orienting to knowledge from traveling abroad. These categories show variation and multiplicity of resources that teachers use when contextualizing instruction, and the implications of this multiplicity are discussed in the article.

A digital learning environment mediating students' funds of knowledge and knowledge creation

“…Still, as vignettes 2 and 3 demonstrate, it has the potential to be a promotional context for students' knowledge expansion and learning. The ways in which teachers interacted with students played a crucial role in mediating the students' opportunities to draw upon their funds of knowledge and productively connect this knowledge to their academic learning (see also Silseth, 2018;Silseth & Erstad, 2018). Our findings point to the need to research and better understand the role of the teacher in a FUSE studio and different makerspaces in general, identifying interaction processes among teachers and students that support and enhance students' knowledge creation processes.…”

“…Previous studies applying a funds of knowledge approach have largely focused on promoting inclusive educational practices for underrepresented students, with ethnography being conducted by teachers in students' homes and neighborhoods and within typical classroom settings (e.g., Barton & Tan, 2009;Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzales, 1992;Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992). Recent research in regular classrooms has shown that the ways in which teachers interact with students play a crucial role in mediating students' opportunities to draw upon their funds of knowledge and productively connect this knowledge to academic learning (Silseth, 2018;Silseth & Erstad, 2018). Researchers have yet not examined how students' funds of knowledge are manifested in school-based technology-enhanced making and design environments.…”

“…The study highlighted that heterogeneity is an essential component of robust conceptual learning in science. Silseth and Erstad (2018) showed that teachers also spontaneously built on students' funds of knowledge as part of their instruction. In their study of mathematics and social sciences lessons in Norwegian lower secondary school classrooms, they identified varied everyday resources that the teachers used as means to contextualize instruction.…”

Trajectories of knowledge builders: A learning lives approach

“…In several of the research projects I have been leading we find that teachers struggle with creating learning environments that truly draw on informal learning experiences of students (Silseth & Erstad, 2018;Wiig, Silseth & Erstad, 2017). Teachers are generally positive to the importance of involving students' experiences and practices from other contexts as part of classroom activities but have problems to implement this in practice.…”

Barn nr. 2, 2018

“…This issue has attracted the interest of researchers in a number of fields, including game studies, education, and literacy studies. For example, Silseth and Erstad (2018) explored how teachers draw on students' leisure experiences to contextualize their classroom teaching, and Potter (2013) advises researchers to work with teachers and students to explore media-based learning at home, at school, and in in-between settings. In my own research, I have also observed the connections between learning at home and at school, and I will return to this issue later.…”