Striving for Relationality: Teacher Responsiveness to Relational Cues When Eliciting Students’ Science Ideas

Abstract

Analyses highlighting the epistemic dimension of students’ participation in science have dominated science education literature for the past several years. While most of this literature has focused on how students learn together, the relational nature of these knowledge-building interactions has been under-examined. In response, this paper empirically examines how these epistemic interactions are also relational. Building upon Noddings’ ethic of care and Maheux and Roth’s argument that “being-in-the-know” in mathematics is always “being-in-the-know-with” others, I develop the construct of relationality as a moral and ethical orientation to teaching that is also visible in moment-to-moment interaction. I present a micro-interactional analysis of what enacting relationality can look like in the context of science teaching through two excerpts in which 8^th grade students made unexpected bids to shift their participation. I illustrate how these relationally- and epistemically-entangled bids, and the teachers’ attention and responses to them, precipitated role negotiations: explorations and expansions of what it could mean to “be-in-the-know-with” while building science knowledge. This analysis suggests that learning to notice students’ bids for new roles and learning to interpret those bids as simultaneously relational and epistemic moves is an essential aspect of responsive teaching that cultivates trusting relationships as participation in sophisticated disciplinary practices. I conclude with a discussion of how micro-level relational dynamics function as a mechanism by which meso-level classroom cultures and macro-level social narratives are constituted and contested, and the implications of these constitutions and contestations for science, teachers, and science teacher education.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Mr. M’s willingness to share his vulnerable teaching moments with us; Deborah Ball, Hilda Borko, and Margaret Eisenhart for their mentorship and feedback early in the project; and Elizabeth Dyer, Enrique Suárez, Eric Kuo, and Colleen Lewis for continual, invaluable feedback as well as moral support throughout this paper’s development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I also contrast this kind of epistemic risk with topically-related risks and vulnerabilities, such as vulnerabilities that arise when learning about “controversial” science topics or socio-scientific issues such as climate change. For example, students often need support in navigating emotions of helplessness or despair that come up during discussions of climate change (Khishfe et al., 2017) and other ways that humans have consequential environmental and ecological impacts (e.g., Hufnagel, 2018; Quigley, 2016).

2 A driving question board is a common strategy in phenomenon-based science instruction. The board serves as a public display of students’ questions about a driving or anchoring phenomenon, often organized by topics or categories that are then used to “drive” or structure the unit. Ideally, the class will return to the driving question board several times throughout the unit to evaluate which of their questions have been answered and which still need to be addressed.

3 The following interaction proceeded very similarly in terms of prosodic features to how Mr. M’s question series with Storm and Samar had gone, so I do not use Jeffersonian conventions here.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Award to Christina Krist. Original data collection was supported by NSF DRL 1020316 awarded to Brian Reiser at Northwestern University.