Talk in institutional context and institutional context in talk: Categories as situated practices

Mäkitalo, Åsa; Säljö, Roger

doi:10.1515/text.2002.005

Cited by 88 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In this respect, meaning is negotiated through talk and other non-verbal cues indexing the construction of categories, which are embedded in the situated and dialogical nature of social action (e.g. Goodwin, 1995;Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2002;Roschelle, 1992;Säljö, 1999). We believe that the concept of co-construction in general, and 'co-constructive talk' in particular, can also be productively employed to characterise a much wider scope of collaborative activities and discussions children display when working together to solve problems of very different nature and in many educational contexts, well beyond the ones analysed in the present study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

Rojas-Drummond

Mazón

Fernández³

et al. 2006

Thinking Skills and Creativity

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This paper describes research that explored the question of whether or not it is possible to characterise and teach a single type of educationally productive talk. We analysed and compared the quality of children's interactional strategies when jointly working on a reasoning task and a psycholinguistic task. The latter involved writing an integrated summary of three related texts. Sixth grade primary school children (11-12 years old) solved these two tasks as pre-and post-tests before and after training in the use of 'Exploratory Talk' (ET) to think together and argue as well as in strategies for producing summaries. After training, children improved substantially in the use of ET when solving the reasoning but not the psycholinguistic task. However, using ethnography of communication methods to analyse the talk further around the latter task revealed that both the number and quality of communicative events and acts increased importantly. These changes were accompanied by a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries produced. These findings suggest that the requirement for explicit reasoning in the definition and analysis of ET may be task dependent. To account for the common features of the educationally productive talk in the two settings, we propose the more inclusive concept of co-constructive talk to characterise the inter-subjective orientation, social ground rules and communicative actions that support effective collaboration, co-ordination and creativity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

Rojas-Drummond

Mazón

Fernández³

et al. 2006

Thinking Skills and Creativity

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In focusing on how the category of HE-based teacher educator was produced in the job advertisements and further particulars, and research interviews with academic leaders in Education departments, our perspective was shaped by a sociocultural understanding of language as a mediational means by which individuals and institutions think and reason together (Mäkitalo & Säljö 2002, Mercer 2000. Moreover, the shaping of categories at the institutional level to some extent precedes individual sense-making, particularly when individuals are invited to align themselves with institutional motives and meanings in a job application process;…”

Section: Findings: Institutional Conceptualisations Of Teacher Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our analysis of both texts (job advertisements, etc) and talk (interviews), our focus is on how the category teacher educator is produced in discourse and what that might reveal about the institutional contexts in which this categorisation is produced. Theoretically, our perspective is grounded in sociocultural understandings of language as a mediational means and of the production and negotiation of categories as essential aspects of the cultural-historical processes that enable individuals and institutions to think and to reason together (Mäkitalo & Säljö 2002, Mercer 2000. In the next section, we provide some background to contextualise our inquiry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional conceptualisations of teacher education as academic work in England

Ellis

McNicholl

Pendry

2012

Teaching and Teacher Education

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Abstract:Through an analysis of job recruitment texts, and interviews with academic leaders, this article shows how the university-based teacher educator is produced as a category of academic worker in England. Focusing on the discursive processes of categorisation provides insights into how English universities conceptualise teacher education. Variations in conceptualisations are noted within and between institutions, with the teacher educator produced as a hybrid or exceptional category. Often, variations are produced around a practitioner/researcher contradiction. The article concludes by asking whether such variations and potential lack of coherence matter, in the context of national policy and funding constraints, and internationally.

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“…Categories are important assets in all human activity, and learning how to classify events, things and activities is part of the process of creating social order (Sacks, 1992;Garfinkel, 1967; for recent review see Mäkitalo 2002, Mäkitalo andSäljö, 2002). By sorting things out we are able to cope with complexity and maintain a measure of social order in our private and professional lives (Bowker & Star, 1999).…”

Section: Sociocultural Perspective On Prompting Categorisation and Kmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our interest is how students understand and use categories in problem solving and collaboration, as an activity situated in a social practice. Categories in educational settings don't come as empty vessels (as the name may imply), but are loaded with history and politics (Suchman, 1994;Mäkitalo and Säljö, 2002). Categories have evolved over time and can seen as part of what Bowker and Star (1999) labels categorical work.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Categorisation in Knowledge Building

Ludvigsen

Mørch

2003

Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments

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Abstract. In this paper we explore how students talk and reason when they were exposed to a set of categories taken from scientific discourse. The scientific categories are built into a web-based discussion forum (Fle) as part of a pedagogical and technological design. The scientific categories are based on the concepts of the progressive inquiry model for knowledge building. Socio-cultural theory with a focus on concepts like categories and prompting is our theoretical framework. In the DoCTA NSS project we have used the progressive inquiry model to explore how the students use categories to collaboratively build new understanding of a specific knowledge domain. Based on the theoretical framework and an empirical example, we argue that the progressive inquiry model -in its conceptual form -is too rationalistic for student knowledge building. We found that student knowledge building is task-specific and local oriented, rather than aimed at conceptual artifacts. INTRODUCTIONDesign experiments in different knowledge domains have been directed at how the learning environment could be designed to promote conceptual development beyond procedures and rules (Brown, 1992;Anderson, Holland, & Palincsar, 1997;Greeno & Goldman, 1998;Abbas et al, 2001). In many of these studies the authors have been able to show positive results, but they have also identified some shortcomings, such as fact-finding patterns (Hakkarainen & Palonen, 2002). An important finding is that students need to be prompted to articulate their conceptual understanding. The need for teacher intervention for creating conditions for the conceptual talk is also well documented (Hakkarainen, Lipponen & Järvelä, 2002).One important aspect of prompting that we explore in this paper is to use categories as "guiding principles" for the understanding-making process. Computer systems provide means for implementing such guiding principles, for example as different kinds of "sentence openers" built-into the ICT.Design experiments can be seen as an intervention in the educational practice; since the researchers in collaboration with teachers, try to change the way the students work. These shifts often presuppose a change in participation structures and how agency and division of labour are distributed between the teacher and the students. One aspect of this change is epistemological. By epistemological change we mean how the teachers and students think about the knowledge construction process. Their perception of this process has impact on what kind of participation structures will develop in the educational setting (Stenning, et al. in press; Hakkarainen, Lipponen and Järvelä, 2001).From a socio-cultural perspective on learning the notion of activity is seen as the basic concept for design and analysis. The participants in an activity are connected to each other by their involvement in talk and action with the teacher and their fellow students. The activity is mediated by the use of scaffolds inscribed in the computational environment. One scaffold we explore in t...

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Talk in institutional context and institutional context in talk: Categories as situated practices

Cited by 88 publications

References 9 publications

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

Institutional conceptualisations of teacher education as academic work in England

Categorisation in Knowledge Building

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