Understanding <i>Understanding</i>: Interdisciplinary Articulation for Instruction and Assessment

Deeper Learning, Dialogic Learning, and Critical Thinking

“…As I will show, transforming selected classroom discourse into written texts allowed us to observe how we were constructing discipline-based principles of interpreting literary texts with the students. Further, I describe how, by adapting an Interactional Ethnographic perspective , we created a metadiscourse for us to develop ways of talking or negotiating interdisciplinary discussions and understandings (Baker & Däumer, 2015b). An Interactional Ethnographic perspective uses principles of ethnography to examine discursive interactions (e.g., seeking an "insider's" point of view, triangulating evidence to support claims, and engaging in abductive thinking); therefore, for example, we strived to understand students' perspectives through analysis of their discourse.…”