Questions as Boundary Object in a Teacher Education Setting
Author(s):
Mona Blåsjö (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 12 B,

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-11
09:00-10:30
Room:
208.Oktatóterem [C]
Chair:
Linda Hobbs

Contribution

The complexity of the modern world is increasing (cf. OECD 2005), not least in educational settings. Throughout their education, students have to relate to various aspects, differing norms, several subjects etc. To this situation, they bring their own knowledge, experiences, identities, languages etc. Students of the world is a very heterogeneous group, and consequently there is a need to study their situations and strategies for coping. In this paper, the main research question is: How do HE students cope with complexity to be able to act? The paper reports one of the findings of a completed empirical study within the Scandinavian research project The struggle for the text. It aims to discuss higher education and academic writing in a complex society with the help of one empirical example, the issue of questions as a boundary object.

Within a sociocultural theoretical framing (Vygotsky 1978, Wertsch 1998), here academic literacies are regarded as dynamic, situated practices related to issues of power, knowledge domains, identity etc. (cf. Ivanič 1998, Lillis & Scott 2007). If students could just bring their ability to read and write to university and use it without problems, higher education would not be in need of constant development on academic writing. In fact, students come from and encounter different knowledge domains (Macken-Horarik et al. 2006) with different literacy practices. To write a shopping list in a everyday domain is something quite different from writing an academic paper. In a specific learning situation, knowledge and literacies from several different domains can converge. Boundaries between the domains are constantly mixed and crossed, and learning can be regarded as the crossing of boundaries.

To study such boundary crossings, research has recently been applying the concept of boundary object (Star & Griesmar 1989,  Star 2010, Akkerman & Bakker 2011). A boundary object is something at a boundary that people on the different sides can use to understand each other – not completely, but sufficiently to be able to cooperate, to act in the situation. The boundary object should be open or “ill-structured” (Star 2010) enough to be able to be interpreted and formed differently within certain groups. Boundary objects may have the character of what Latour (1999, cf. calls “black boxes”, i.e. they can be invisible or implicit in a certain social practice. Boundary objects are usually identified as physical artefacts such as texts, but as Akkerman & Bakker (2011) points out, they are not objects in the sense of goal or results, but tools or mediational means to achieve goals. In this study, boundary object is applied as an analytical concept to capture physical and more abstract, intellectual and linguistic tools (cf. Vygotsky 1978, Blåsjö 2004). 

Method

The data for this study are taken from a larger material covering the work with “independent projects” in teacher education at a Swedish university 2012-2014. Here, the core data are three group supervisions or seminars, with the same student group and supervisor. The seminars, each approximately 3 hours long, were studied by means of participant observation, including field notes and photos. Two of the seminars were audio recorded and fully transcribed. The data were triangulated with documents such as students’ texts, curricula, interviews with the supervisor and two of the four students. The students were in their fifth semester of a teacher education, eight semester long, heading for teaching children 6-12 years old, with a specialism in mathematics and natural sciences. Beside their academic part of the education, they had been practising in schools, with supervisors who were professional school teachers. All students were women, approximately 25 years old. The supervisor was a man between 35 and 40. They worked full time with the independent projects for half a semester, doing an empirical study in a school, reporting it in an academic paper and discussing it critically in a seminar. The analytical focus was on the students, although the actions of their supervisor was of course relevant for many situations. The data were analysed inductively until the finding of coping strategies were identified. In relation to the theoretical framework, the concept of boundary object was chosen to analyse what was going on in the data. As stated above, the concept of boundary object in this study is regarded as both physical artefacts and intellectual tools or linguistic mediational means. Moreover, it is applied as an open analytical category; i.e. we did not set out to study a certain boundary object, but searched the data for different, unpredicted boundary objects. The guiding principle was what appeared as relevant for the participants (cf. Cicourel 2007). The analytical question, posed to the data was: What functions as something on the boundary between the academic domain, the professional domain of school teachers and students’ everyday domains in order for the students to make meaning out of the complex situation and to be able to act strategically (i.e. write a paper that is approved)?

Expected Outcomes

The students make use of boundary objects that they know from their everyday domain and from experiences from school as pupil and student teacher. The core boundary objects found are texts, questions, reading aloud, narratives and jokes. Questions are used in all domains, but have very different roles. In everyday situations, questions are used as a general interactional tool, for social and practical purposes. In school, questions are used for very specific purposes, such as assessing knowledge and scaffolding certain forms of reasoning. In the academic domain, questions are also used as an analytical tool, in terms of research questions and critical questions to sharpen the scientific status of ideas and texts. The students in the study are supposed to apply an academic type of questions, both in their writing and in the seminars. Some of them perform resistance against this type of questions. To serve as a more effective boundary object and pedagogical tool, the awareness of the roles of questions, and different aspects of them, could be raised in the social practice of higher education, making their differences explicit to students. Conclusions Firstly and theoretically, boundary objects are not simple links between two domains, but several domains may be involved, and the links may be smooth, or used with resistance (cf. Ivanič & Satchwell 2007, Wertsch 1998). Secondly and pedagogically, some boundary objects may have the character of “black boxes” (Latour 1999). Their significance and properties can be more or less invisible for the university teachers, as they have completely appropriated the objects (cf. Bakhtin 1981, Wertsch 1998). Consequently, higher education would gain from analysing local boundary objects and making them more explicit. In the increasingly complex world of higher education, students will need them to be able to act “interactionally and independently” (cf. OECD 2005).

References

Akkerman & Bakker (2011): Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 132-169. Bakhtin (1981): The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blåsjö (2004): Studenters skrivande i två kunskapsbyggande miljöer. [Students’ writing in two knowledge-constructing settings]. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Cicourel (2007): A personal, retrospective view on ecological validity. Text & Talk, 25(6/7), 735–752. Ivanič (1998): Writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Ivanič & Satchwell (2007): Boundary crossing. Networking and transforming literacies in research processes and college courses. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4, 101-124. Latour (1999): Pandora’s hope. Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Lillis & Scott (2007). Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 5 – 32. Macken-Horarik, Devereux, Trimingham & Wilson (2006). Negotiating the territory of tertiary literacies: A case study of teacher education. Linguistics and Education, 17, 240-257. OECD (2005): The definition and selection of key competencies. Star (2010): This is not a boundary object. Reflections on the origin of a concept. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35, 601-617. Star & Griesmar (1989): Institutional ecology. “Translations” and boundary objects. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387-420. Vygotsky (1978). Mind in society. The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge/London: Harvard Univ. Press Wertsch (1998). Mind as action. New York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press

Author Information

Mona Blåsjö (presenting / submitting)
Stockholm University
Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism
Stockholm

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