Collaborative knowledge construction in authentic school contexts

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"Mää oon se ujo lohikäärme" : temaattisen fantasialeikin ja tarinanymmärtämisen välinen yhteys

Experiences in Sense Making: Health Science Students’ I-Positioning in an Online Philosophy of Science Course

This article reports on a qualitative study on the dialogical approach to learning in the context of higher education. The aim was to shed light on the I-Position and multivoicedness in students’ identity-building, and to provide empirical substantiation for these theoretical constructs, focusing especially on the connection between personal knowledge and theoretical knowledge. The study explored how health science students’ reflections on their work and discipline-related experiences provided resources for making personal sense of and understanding the subject studied. The students undertook an online course on the philosophy of science. To study students’ internal and external dialogue in…

Ilmiölähtöinen oppiminen valokeilassa : ymmärryksen rakentaminen ja reflektiivisyys yliopisto-opintojen alkuvaihesssa

Tarkastelemme artikkelissamme käsitteellisen ajattelun kehittymistä ilmiölähtöisessä oppimiskontekstissa yliopisto-opintojen alkuvaiheessa. Tutkimuksen kohteena olivat Jyväskylän yliopiston kasvatustieteiden perusopintojen Vuorovaikutus ja yhteistyö -kurssin opiskelijoiden laajat luentopäiväkirjat ja esseet. Näissä teksteissä opintojaksolla käsiteltyjä teoreettisia vuorovaikutusilmiöitä peilattiin omiin kokemuksiin tai käytännön esimerkkeihin. Tutkimuksemme teoriakehikko perustuu tieteellisen ajattelun, oppimisen henkilökohtaistamisen ja reflektion näkökulmiin. Tutkimme teksteistä, millaisia teorian ja käytännön yhteyksiä opiskelijat rakensivat ja minkälaista reflektiota ilmeni. Analyysi et…

Building teacher identity through the process of positioning

This study explores teacher identity work in the context of a one-year programme, Pedagogical Studies for Adult Educators. The data consist of weekly learning diaries written by Anna, a university teacher, during one academic year. The diaries are analysed by means of dialogically oriented narrative analysis leaning on Bakhtinian notions of voicing and ventriloquation. The results show how Anna positions her storytelling and narrated self in relation to relevant characters by voicing and evaluating these characters. The construct of positioning provides tools for understanding the relationship between the self and others in teacher identity. peerReviewed

Transformative Authorship Through Critical Dialogue : Concepts, Theory, and Practice

This conceptual article deals with components and concepts of transformative learning, emphasizing the organization-level perspective on critical reflection. The discussion leans on the concept of transformative authorship and it is argued that it enables authoring processes through which professionals can recognize and recreate their routinized work practices. The aim of the research is to explore how professional experiences are integrated with reflexive, theoretical knowledge through critical dialogue. The authoring process of transformative authorship is illustrated with two complementary case studies from postgraduate health care education. In both cases, the learning tasks were desig…

Analyzing the Contextual Nature of Collaborative Activity

This chapter discusses a methodology designed to explore the ­contextual nature of collaborative activity. The methods that can be generally considered to be based on ‘socio-cultural’ discourse analysis are discussed as a means to explore how different aspects of a situation mediate students’ shared meaning-making. First, an analysis is demonstrated, illustrating how different immediate and mediated contexts are embedded in students’ discourse as they are engaged in face-to-face collaborative activity in a computer-mediated context. Second, a multidimensional coding scheme is presented for analyzing the contextualized process of collaborative knowledge construction in an asynchronous web-ba…

Scripted Collaboration and Group‐Based Variations in a Higher Education CSCL Context

Scripting student activities is one way to make Computer‐Supported Collaborative Learning more efficient. This case study examines how scripting guided student group activities and also how different groups interpreted the script; what kinds of roles students adopted and what kinds of differences there were between the groups in terms of their activities. Seven small groups of higher education students participated in the study. According to the findings, scripting enhanced collaboration and ensured that all groups were able to complete the task, but despite the script the groups' activities varied during the task and the script could not guarantee any “high‐level” participation by all stud…

Teachers' instructional scaffolding in an innovative information and communication technology-based history learning environment

Abstract The nature of the role assumed by the teacher is crucial in the promotion of successful learning and collaboration in Information and Communication Technologybased (ICT-based) environments. The aim of this study was to examine how teachers with different conceptions of their teacher roles use different types of instructional scaffolding while working in an innovative learning environment. Our further aim was finding out how instructional scaffolding is related to learning activities of different kinds. The study was carried out at two secondary schools with a shared network-based learning environment. The results showed that teachers with different conceptions of the teacher's role…

Scripting Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

In this chapter, we will present a review of theoretical and empirical analyses of Web-based collaboration processes used during a scripted university course. The results refer to a design-based study that involved first-year teacher-education students (N = 30) studying pedagogy over a period of three months. The intervention involved structuring the subjects’ collaborative actions with three different pedagogical scripts. According to the findings, the scripts guided students’ activities by helping them find resources for knowledge construction and work together through a series of steps. However, there were variations among groups in terms of quality of collaboration, and the students mos…

Social Aspects of Collaborative Learning

Pre-service subject teachers’ personal teacher characterisations after the pedagogical studies

This study explored how five pre-service subject teachers characterised themselves as teachers after completing their year-long pedagogical studies in a Finnish university. Our narrative analysis of the interview data showed that the students shared a social representation of a past teacher characterised by wide power and emotional distance between pupils and the teacher. The students differentiated themselves from this kind of teacher character, and rather positioned themselves as interactive and caring educators identifying with their own ideal teachers as well as meaningful learning experiences in the pedagogical studies. Consequently, the study showed that engaging pre-service subject t…

Combining individual and group-level perspectives for studying collaborative knowledge construction in context

Abstract The aim of this article is to identify concepts and methods for studying collaboration in context. The article presents a two-level methodology designed to combine individual and group-level perspectives for the evaluation of collaborative knowledge construction in student groups. The group-level analysis is focused on the students' negotiation processes. A self-report questionnaire gives insight into students' short-term impressions, meaningful activities and personal meanings attached to different activities. Empirical examples of the analysis of a teacher student group illustrate the applicability of the methods used in investigating the mediating influence of context on collabo…

The Narrative Approach to Research Professional Identity: Relational, Temporal, and Dialogical Perspectives

In this chapter, we present the narrative approach as applied in the field of professional learning. The specific aim is to present the methodological opportunities and concerns it raises in research on professional identity within the sociocultural frames of work environments. We utilise examples from empirical studies that have employed a range of narrative methods to collect and analyse datasets. The datasets include individuals’ written and spoken narratives, encompassing the told experiences of their identities, and the meanings underlying these. We illustrate how a particular strength of narrative research lies in its ability to portray temporal pathways through the phenomena under in…

Contextual resources in meaning negotiations of a student pair in a web-based history project

Abstract This study examines how one student pair working face-to-face at a computer and engaged in a web-based discussion environment negotiated meanings for their activity and what contextual resources they used in this negotiation process. The aim was also to study how the students themselves interpreted the learning activity. The subjects were two secondary school students (aged 15) participating in a web-based history project. Data was collected by various means in order to validate the findings. Linell's [(1998). Approaching dialogue. Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.] notion of contextual resources was used as an anal…

Collaborative processes during report writing of a science learning project: The nature of discourse as a function of task requirements

The aim of this article is to specify how different aspects of task assignments are related to different types of student discourse during the report writing phase of a science learning project. A group of four ninth-grade students of the Finnish comprehensive school (about 15-year-olds) participated in a project work involving laboratory experiments, reading literature, and analysing and reporting research findings. The empirical data were collected through videotaping and interviews in authentic classroom settings. The results indicated that construction of shared, high-level understanding was quite rare in this case of small group interaction. As one of the main reasons for this, we sugg…

Dialogicality in making sense of online collaborative interaction : a conceptual perspective

In higher education, learning activities increasingly take place in online collaborative groups. In this conceptual paper, we explore online collaborative interaction from the perspective of dialogicality. We aim to reconceptualize the notion of “productive interaction” and the typical focus of its research by turning attention to the dialogic features of collaborative interaction, especially the notions of alterity, dialogic attitude, and dialogic orientation. In relation to this, we offer a contextual perspective on collaborative interaction. Relying on data from an online university course, we conceptually analyze specified components of dialogicality. This article illustrates and explor…

Dialogic Tensions in Pre-Service Subject Teachers’ Identity Negotiations

This study explores how five pre-service subject teachers from different disciplines made sense of and characterized their teacher identity after completing their yearlong pedagogical studies. Leaning on the Bakhtinian dialogical approach and socio-culturally oriented discourse analysis, we examine how the students negotiated multiple voices in their narratives (interviews) and how they positioned themselves in relation to these voices. In the students’ identity negotiation, the Discourse based on participatory pedagogy and education responsibility contradicted with the Discourse of traditional pedagogy that the students had as a cultural resource from their own youth. These different Disco…

Tensions and striving for coherence in an academic’s professional identity work

The emergence of ‘new managerialism’ in academic institutions and professions has given rise to tensions between one’s professional self and work context. Such tensions often originate from a misalignment between institutional and personal values. This study builds on a dialogical approach to identity and discusses the role of inner tensions and conflicts in terms of making sense of one’s professional identity. These aspects are explored and exemplified by introducing a sample case of one individual student and university researcher/teacher, Anna, who participated in one-year Pedagogical Studies for Adult Educators. Leaning on the narratives of Anna’s learning diaries and a later interview,…

Constructing Knowledge through a Role-Play in a Web-Based Learning Environment

This study aimed to find out how and on what level the students of two separate secondary schools shared and constructed knowledge on imperialism by interacting through historical role characters in a Web-based environment. Furthermore, the study aimed to find out how social and contextual features affected the nature of knowledge sharing and construction. The data about the history project were gathered by various means in order to validate the findings of the case study. The results demonstrated that the level of the Web-based messages remained quite low. Also the use of the Web-based environment in terms of shared knowledge construction was rather weak. In comparison, different instruct…

Experiences in Sense Making: Health Science Students’I-Positioning in an Online Philosophy of Science Course

This article reports on a qualitative study on the dialogical approach to learning in the context of higher education. The aim was to shed light on the I-Position and multivoicedness in students’ identity building and to provide empirical substantiation for these theoretical constructs, focusing especially on the connection between personal knowledge and theoretical knowledge. The study explored how health science students’ reflections on their work and discipline-related experiences provided resources for making personal sense of and understanding the subject studied. The students took an online course on the philosophy of science. To study students’ internal and external dialogue in terms…

Challenges for the Teacher's Role in Promoting Productive Knowledge Construction in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Contexts

This chapter discusses challenges related to teachers’ pedagogical activities in facilitating productive discussions among students in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) contexts. In the light of two different cases from secondary-level and higher education contexts, the authors examine how teachers’ pedagogical choices influenced the quality of students’ activity, namely Web-based discussion. The results of our studies indicated that rich moments of collaboration were rare and distributed unequally among the students. The obvious weakness from the perspective of teachers’ pedagogical activities was that in neither of the studies was the students’ interaction in the discussion…

Tracing discursive processes of shared knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced higher education setting

This study focused on combining both the group- and individual-level analyses in studying a collaborative activity in technology-enhanced interactions in a higher education setting. The aim was to make visible, with empirical examples, the quality of the students' web-based discussions and trace the route for shared understanding. By quantifying various communicative functions, the analysis provided general knowledge on the quality and purpose of the discussion in the group and highlighted the different functional positions each student had within the group. However, only a detailed interpretative analysis of the relationships between specific thematic contents, communicative functions, and…

No one ever steps in the same discussion twice: The relationship between identities and meaning

The concept of identification is a relational construct; that is, identities are not static but rather negotiated based on available material and symbolic resources. However, we know relatively little about how identities play a dual role when students collaborate. The aim of this paper is to explore this process through multiple case studies: we aim to explore how identities are enacted and used in making personal sense and understand the content knowledge, while at the same time we are interested in how this process can take a form of renewing process in the sense that the identities enacted are themselves changed, transformed or re-negotiated. Our results show that due to its dual role, …

Collaborative Learning and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments

A focus on purely individual cognition has set a stage to social construction of knowledge. New learning environments, in many cases supported by computer technology, are often based on collaborating and sharing expertise. As a result research on Computer Supported Collaborative learning (CSCL) environments is a significant and growing field, which actively seeks new methods to resolve the challenges of human learning across diverse levels of interaction in a modern information society. In this chapter we will discuss the concept of collaborative learning and the issues involved in using information and communication technology to support collaborative learning. We begin with the definition…