Investigating the Double-Move in Pedagogy in a Grade 4 Namibian Science Classroom: A Cultural Historical Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates how a teacher in a rural school in Namibia teaches science. Of interest to us is the nature of the classroom discourse in constructing scientific knowledge that is meaningful to students. We draw on the work of Vygotsky (1978) in order to understand teaching/learning as dialectically entailed and to understand the notion of scientific and spontaneous concepts as distinct from science concepts, and operationalise his pedagogical theory utilising Hedegaard's (1998) notion of the double-move in pedagogy as fundamental to meaningful engagement. Through a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogical discourse we show how the linking of scientific and spontaneous concepts can either facilitate or hinder learning. Our analysis points to the importance of co-constructing meaning in the class, between teacher and taught and illustrates how analogies and metaphors can fail to create meaning in a classroom if the teacher does not recruit the learners' own everyday concepts.

An Information Content and Set of Common Superconcepts-Based Algorithm to Estimate Similarity between Concepts of Ontologies

“…One of the most important activities in the study of ontologies is semantic similarity between words. This activity is necessary in many domains such as medicine [4], learning [5], large-scale storage systems and data management [6]. Semantic similarity is the set of correspondences between entities (e.g., classes, properties, and predicates) that form ontology.…”

Cultural taboos in mediating science in a Namibian bilingual primary school

“…This is most profoundly evident in rural schools that lack human and material resources to action a curriculum that relies on a level of initiative from the teacher that was not required under apartheid education (Kasanda & Kapenda 2015). In fact, rather than research indicating a shift towards progressive student-focused pedagogy, what we continue to see in Namibian schools is a focus on teachercentred, didactic lessons (Hardman & Set 2021). This impacts on a teacher's ability to effectively teach science as teachers tend to rely on chalk and talk to cover content, rather than to develop students' meaningful acquisition of the content.…”

“…This impacts on a teacher's ability to effectively teach science as teachers tend to rely on chalk and talk to cover content, rather than to develop students' meaningful acquisition of the content. The traditional Initiate Response Evaluate (IRE) sequence illustrative of most traditional pedagogy continues to permeate teaching even today (Hardman & Set 2021;Sinclair & Coulthard 1975). We are not suggesting that the IRE sequence is necessarily negative for conceptual acquisition, but longitudinal research suggests that this kind of discourse structure is best used for reinforcing knowledge rather than for Background: The need to meet the demands of education in the 21st century has seen Namibia move, after democracy in 1990, from a segregationist educational system to an inclusive one in a bid to develop students' capacities to think critically, particularly in science.…”