Resistance and the Development of Scientific Practice: Designing the Mangle Into Science Instruction

Abstract

This article addresses how we can develop learning environments that establish a need for scientific practices and provide a context for developing content knowledge through practice. It argues that Pickering's (1995) notion of “The Mangle of Practice” informs these efforts by focusing our attention on how resistance, or push-back from the world, destabilizes practices and ideas, creating a need to re-evaluate each in light of the other. I describe the design of science instruction for an elementary school classroom, showing how it built from attention to the mangle and established principles in the fields of education and the learning sciences. I then explore how three forms of activity emerged, were taken up by students, and developed as practices in the classroom community. Implications for the design of learning environments include attending to why students engage in practices and building resistances into students’ work to support the co-development of practices and content understandings.

Notes

“We” is used throughout the article to refer to the author, the classroom teacher, and other members of the research team.

This was a typical class size for this school, which had reduced class size in grades K–3.

“Teachers” refers to the article's author and the classroom teacher. Since both of us asked students questions and commented on their ideas, I treated both of our comments as framing and elaborating activity in ways consistent with teaching.

Transcription conventions: CAPS emphasis; [] overlap; - self interruption; … pause; (italics) gesture; other punctuation added to increase readability.

While I use “mechanism” throughout the article to describe moments where students tried to account for what they were seeing, their accounts were not typically what Russ, Coffey, Hammer, and Hutchinson (2009) consider to be mechanistic explanations, in that they did not always specify a physical cause or elaborate the process by which the cause produces the effect. These moments signal students’ sense of a need to propose an explanation rather than the achievement of a deep explanation.