Collaborative Meaning-Making and Dialogic Interactions in Critical Friends as Co-Authors

ABSTRACT

From this year-long study, we offer new perspectives for being and becoming critical friends as co-authors. Informed by the Transactional Theory of Reading, a narrative view of experience and feminist communication theory, we positioned ourselves as collaborative, active meaning makers who could read and make meaning from our lived experiences and who could disrupt and problematize our narrative lives as teacher researchers. Through use of a collaborative conference protocol, we discovered what it means to be and to become critical friends who can co-author narrative understanding of self in the study. We have revisited the concept of critical friendship by repositioning our coauthoring as not just a resource for the completion of a better end product, but also as a way of being and knowing that enables an individual to revisit, reignite, disrupt, problematize and challenge one’s past and present storied lives.     

Palabra escrita,interpretación oral: Los libros de texto en la clase

Resumen

Investigaciones recientes sobre el uso de la lengua escrita muestran que las interpretaciones de los textos escritos son construcciiones sociales. Este artículo intenta mostrar cómo las interpretaciones de las lecciones del libro de texto se construyen en la interaction verbal que se da en el salón de clases. La relación social con la lengua escrita se enmarca dentro de la estructura de la clase y el uso del texto modifica las pautas de interacción y del discurso docente.     

The Interplay Between Content, Expressions and Their Meaning When Expressing Understanding

In the intentional-expressive approach, a development within the phenomenographic tradition, an alternative view of the role of language is adopted. The approach focuses the learner’s use of expressions and intended meanings, in relation to his/her conception of a phenomenon. The article presents empirical findings from a study made at a university of technology using a special dialogue structure. The aim of the dialogue is to capture the individual’s way of reflecting on the interplay between the expressions he or she uses, their intended meanings, and his or her conception of the phenomenon. Twenty-four students participated and were presented an everyday situation involving the physical motion of a body. The results show that the interplay was ambiguous and dynamic. The relationships between expression and meaning were much weaker than between meaning and conception. In learning situations, this may cause problems concerning students’ knowledge formation, since a stable relationship is often taken for granted in learning and teaching.     

The use of language in understanding subject matter

Empirical results show that frequently the meaning of expressions used by students in expressing their understanding of subject matter does not correspond to the meaning of those expressions in the subject matter theory that the students are expected to learn. There is also often a lack of identity of meaning between the same students’ use of the same expression from one use of the expression to another, in very similar contexts. The context gives a specific meaning to any expression. This variation in context and meaning is very central to the phenomena of teaching and learning. In educational research there is a need to differentiate between specific meanings expressed in conceptualizing subject matter, on the one hand, and concepts and meanings seen as parts of cognitive systems and social languages, on the other. The contextual character of the use of language is crucial to the understanding of teaching and learning and needs to be more carefully considered. The article is a discussion of the problem of varying meanings of language expressions in relation to major traditions of research, focusing on meanings and concepts within the field of learning and teaching.