Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Goodwin (1994) - Professional vision


Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96, 606-633.

Central to the social and cognitive organization of a profession is its ability to shape events in the domain of its scrutiny into the phenomenal objects around which the discourse of the profession is organized: to find archaeologically relevant events such as post holes in the color stains visible in a patch of a dirt and map them or to locate legally consequential instances of aggression or cooperation in the visible movements of a man's body. This article has investigated three practices used to accomplish such professional vision - coding schemes, highlighting, and the production and articulation of graphic representations - in the work settings of two professions: an archaeological field excavation and a courtroom.

First, the power to authoritatively see and produce the range of phenomena that are consequential for the organization of a society is not homogeneously distributed. Different professions-medicine, law, the police, specific sciences such as archaeology-have the power to legitimately see, constitute, and articulate alternative kinds of events. Professional vision is perspectival, lodged within specific social entities, and unevenly allocated.

Second, such vision is not a purely mental process but instead is accomplished through the competent deployment of a complex of situated practices in a relevant setting.

Third, insofar as these practices are lodged within specific communities, they must be learned (Chaiklin and Lave 1993; Lave and Wenger 1991). Learning was a central activity in both of the settings examined in this article, but the organization of that learning was quite different in each.

Examples/Evidence from the Rodney King trial testimony and archaeologists howing measurement techniques

See: http://www.professional-vision.org/research.html

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Galguera: Developing Teachers’ Critical Language Awareness in Digital Contexts

Galguera, T. (2013). Developing Teachers’ Critical Language Awareness in Digital Contexts. In M. B. Arias & C. J. Faltis (Eds.), Academic Language in Second Language Learning (pp. 103–124). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Notes:


p. 105: Evidence from my research points to the power of electronic media and Web 2.0 tools in fostering critical language awareness, empathy, and in furthering pedagogical skills for language development among preservice teachers.

p. 105: For teachers responsible for the language development of students, language awareness is an important contributor to the development of the content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) they must possess to fulfill their obligations.

p. 106: Carter (2003) argues that, for teachers, language awareness can enhance their capacity to incorporate useful and meaningful learning tasks into their curricula, guide their assessment of students' learning and difficulties, inform their understanding of language varieties and appropriateness, and help them imagine links between language and learning in general.

Understanding the sociocultural and discourse-level features of the variety of language favored in academic settings is an essential component of the content knowledge required of teachers.

p.107: Building upon Lee Shulman's framework, Galguera uses "Pedagogical Language Knowledge" (PLK) (Galguera, 2011) as a construct to make it clear to the preservice teachers in my courses that the pedagogy I want them to begin developing is more than "just good teaching." Indeed, in a similar manner in which we must make a conscious effort to focus our attention on the structural and surface features of language, beyond meaning, it requires especial effort on the part of beginning teachers to notice the important, yet subtle characteristics of pedagogy for the development of language proficiency for academic purposes.

p109: Tigchelaar and Korthagen (2004, pp. 665-666) note that the predominant approach in preservice teacher education courses, a "technical-rationality approach," which aims to link theory-to-practice. The authors cite convincing research evidence that demonstrates that, even when student teachers recognize the value and importance of theories, the demands and immediacy of field experiences limit their ability to apply their theoretical knowledge to practice.

Tigchelaar and Korthagen also mention an alternate "practice-based" approach that depends on guided induction of teacher candidates at school sites, sometimes in partnership with institutions of higher learning. Yet, this approach has also failed to integrate practice with theory, often resulting in teachers who are socialized into a profession that is viewed as a collection of technical know-how that rejects and devalues theory.

Tigchelaar and Korthagen's (2004) provide evidence for the potential of experience in preservice teacher preparation utilizing a "realistic approach" that incorporates preservice teachers' reflection on specific experiences and behaviors in a cooperative setting while examining "Gestalts," which are automatic teaching behaviors that make up the bulk of what teachers say and do and that have cultural origins (p. 677)

Walqui (2006) Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual framework


Walqui, A. (2006). Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual framework. The International journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(2), 159-180.

p. 164: In education, scaffolding can be thought of as three related pedagogical ‘scales’. First, there is the meaning of providing a support structure to enable certain activities and skills to develop. Second, there is the actual carrying out of particular activities in class. And, third, there is the assistance provided in moment-to-moment interaction. Schematically, this can be represented in the following way:

Scaffolding 1: Planned curriculum progression over time (e.g. a series of tasks over time, a project, a classroom ritual)
Scaffolding 2: The procedures used in a particular activity (an instantiation of Scaffolding 1)
Scaffolding 3: The collaborative process of interaction (the process of achieving Scaffolding 2)

We can see how the sequence here moves from macro to micro, from planned to improvised, and from structure to process (Gibbons, 2003; van Lier, 1996). As we all know, plans have a way of changing as they are being carried out. In particular, pedagogical action is always a blend of the planned and the improvised, the predicted and the unpredictable, routine and innovation.

Features of pedagogical scaffolding (p.165)
All three scales of pedagogical scaffolding have six central features, according to van Lier (2004). As in any type of scaffolding, they are contingent, collaborative and interactive. However, in an educational setting, these features are further refined and features specific to schooling are added:

  1. Continuity: Tasks are repeated, with variations and connected to one another (e.g. as part of projects). 
  2. Contextual: support Exploration is encouraged in a safe, supportive environment; access to means and goals is promoted in a variety of ways. 
  3. Intersubjectivity: Mutual engagement and rapport are established; there is encouragement and nonthreatening participation in a shared community of practice. 
  4. Contingency Task: procedures are adjusted depending on actions of learners; contributions and utterances are oriented towards each other and may be coconstructed (or, see below, vertically constructed). 
  5. Handover/takeover: There is an increasing role for the learner as skills and confidence increase; the teacher watches carefully for the learner’s readiness to take over increasing parts of the action. 
  6. Flow Skills: and challenges are in balance; participants are focused on the task and are ‘in tune’ with each other.


Types of instructional scaffolding to use with English learners (pp. 170-177)
Assisting English learners’ performance in the English as a second language class or in subject matter classes taught in English can be done in many different ways. Six main types of instructional scaffolding are especially salient: modelling, bridging, contextualisation, building schema, re-presenting text and developing metacognition.

Modeling is the explicit presentation of examples of the products, learning processes, and the types of language that are most appropriate for each situation.

Text representation can be thought of as helping students learn conventions associated with particular language uses by translating content across genres, engaging in genre transformation.

Contextualization is scaffolding that links particular academic tasks with situated variables to enhance the students' ability to derive meaning from language and produce language that is both appropriate and effective.

Bridging is scaffolding that aims to make clear and explicit links between content and each student's prior knowledge, experiences, and interests as well as previously taught content.

Metacognitive development is ensuring that students choose strategies consciously for each activity and evaluating their choices and future choices based on results.

Schema-building is related to text representation in that the goal is to help students organize knowledge according to subject-specific frameworks (e.g., cycles, causeeffects, contrasts, whole-parts) and norms and conventions associated with oral and written discourse.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Lucero: Pedagogical Language Knowledge and the Instruction of English Learners

Lucero, A. (2013). Pedagogical Language Knowledge and the Instruction of English Learners. In M. B. Arias & C. J. Faltis (Eds.), Academic Language in Second Language Learning (pp. 57–81). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

p. 58: Lucero defines academic language as the language that students need to understand and produce in order to be successful in schools (Cummins, 2000; J. Gibbons & Lascar, 1998; P. Gibbons, 1993)

Five instructional moves that faciliate academic language development:
1) integration of content and language
2) dialogic interactions
3) movement along the context continuum
4) explicit instruction
5) linguistic scaffolding (pp.60-62)

Three Recommendations (p. 75-77)
  1. teacher education courses need to help teachers understand the multiple elements of academic language.
  2. pedagogical language knowledge requires that teachers be able to conduct linguistic analyses of their curricula because it is clear that, "content is not separate from the language through which it is presented" (Schleppegrell & Achugar, 2003, p. 21).
  3. a responsive teacher education program would explicitly teach pedagogical practices to develop academic language in concert with content learning.