Promoting awareness of conflicts: analysis of discursive activity in science classroom

Abstract

This paper will examine how the conflict between the scientific point of view and the students’ everyday point of view can be perceived and overcome by the students with the mediation of a teacher. For this purpose we analyze a science class episode, which was recorded when a teaching sequence on heat and temperature was carried out with students aged 14-15 in a Brazilian secondary school. We used the framework proposed by Mortimer and Scott (2002, 2003) to make visible discursive moves that allows the students to become aware of the conflict between two models they use, in different circumstances, to interpret thermal phenomena: the kinetic particle model and a model of heat and cold exchange. Our analysis demonstrates how the teacher’s interventions guided the students to examine their own ideas through a slow and laborious meaning making process. We were able to identify changes in the teacher’s purposes and type of interventions as the students further developed their ideas. These changes are associated to alternations in the communicative approaches, first dialogic and then mainly authoritative. As in Mortimer and Machado (2000), our data indicate that the process of becoming aware of and overcoming conflicts, in the classroom, depends not only on the choice of suitable teaching strategies, but above all, on the discourse teacher and students build around the experiment.