Article: Characterizing Discourse Among Undergraduate Researchers in an Inquiry-Based Community of Practice
Engineering education is transitioning towards a new paradigm that encourages experiential, or active, learning over passive learning through the lecture mode. The monograph How People Learn (HPL), as well as the recently published How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom, describes active learning in terms of learners’ control and awareness of their own learning [1, 2]. The reported benefits from active, inquiry-based learning are far-reaching: the excitement of discovery enhances students’ motivation to learn [3], and improved motivation leads to student success. However, the field lacks concrete data on how active learning within communities of practice works in the real teaching and learning situations of engineering research.
The authors of HPL discuss evidence that “discourse is a primary means for the search for knowledge and scientific sense-making,” citing the Chèche Konnen approach as significant research in this field [1, p. 182]. Researchers have previously analyzed classroom discourse [4-11], sometimes in engineering environments [12-13]. However, this research has not addressed how active learning takes place linguistically.
The present study explores the discourse processes that characterize active learning in the Research Communications Studio (RCS) at the University of South Carolina, a novel environment in which undergraduates in chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering conduct independent research (directed by an engineering faculty research advisor). During a typical semester, three groups of four undergraduates each—which also include an engineering graduate student, a communications graduate student, and a communications faculty member—meet weekly in order to solicit feedback on project milestones such as abstracts and scientific posters. We aim to characterize active learning as a set of communicative processes wherein these group members with different expertise and perspectives are valuable to one another’s learning [14]. Distributed cognition, according to engineering educator Dorothy Winsor, “treats thinking not as an action that takes place wholly inside an individual’s head, but rather as an activity that is distributed among the individual, other people, the physical environment, and the tools the person uses, including language and such language structures as genres” [15, p. 6].
Our methodology draws on real-time participant observation conducted during multiple RCS sessions but closely focuses on the interaction during a single session recorded on digitized video. Theoretical concepts about language provide an avenue for operationalizing the language processes through which students engage in active learning. Accepting that speakers take action through their linguistic contributions (also called speech events), the present study takes up Austin’s notion of linguistic performativity [16]. Also, following work in linguistic pragmatics, the analysis assumes that the form of an utterance does not always match its pragmatic function; that is, a linguistic event or speech act may be indirect, requiring shared assumptions on the part of the interactants for its interpretation [17–20].
A set of seven speech events characterizes the processes of active learning as it occurs in the RCS. The seven principal types of speech that participants contribute in the session consist of critique, elicitation of critique, internalization and awareness of knowledge gained, contextualization and explanation of research or related ideas, and negotiation and consensus-building. These discursive activities are either absent or qualitatively different from the activities attributed to conventional classroom discourse [4-7], modified classroom settings [12], and one-on-one tutoring scenarios [8], as well as other small group contexts [9-13]. For example, in the RCS instruction is not limited to direct statements of procedural or epistemological fact, or solutions to challenging logistical impasses, such as troubleshooting problematic computer code, but includes both direct and indirect modeling of professional norms.
Additional findings concern the way that participants take part in these activities. First, the session studied participant roles are defined by the types of speech events different participants use; for example, the communications faculty member most often elicits critique from the other participants. Also, the speech events discussed in this article constitute contributions among all the participants, rather than a series of dialogs between a teacher and a student. Instead, the RCS environment encourages interactions between multiple participants with varying levels of experience and expertise (i.e., peers and near-peers), in turn fostering student-directed and group-negotiated learning.
In the context of the other studies of interaction in educational settings, these speech events that constitute active learning indicate that the RCS brings about a learning experience with social context. The research focus of the RCS, due to the ownership it affords students, may largely drive these activities. Nevertheless, the RCS approach may be adaptable to a number of other environments that are not necessarily focused on independent research projects—such as independent study projects, research group meetings, lab sections, and other research settings. Describing the interaction among the RCS undergraduates increases our understanding not only about how active learning takes place, but also about how authentic communities of practice emerge in which students develop as engineering researchers.
References
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AACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors of this work would like to acknowledge the National Science Foundation for funding (Grant #EEC 0212244).
Author 1: Lori Donath [email protected]
Author 2: Roxanne Spray [email protected]
Author 3: Nancy Thompson [email protected]
Author 4: Elisabeth Alford [email protected]
Author 5: Nadia Craig [email protected]
Article Link: www.asee.org