ABSTRACT
Collaboration is often emphasized as one of the key twenty-first century competencies to promote scientific literacies through many representational modes. However, collaborative interactions have been often characterized as a coordinated, synchronous, and symmetrical activity in terms of the same level of knowledge with little attention paid towards addressing deliberative inquiry and its eclectic nature through multimodal resources. This paper aims to revisit the notion of deliberative collaboration by revisiting Dewey’s curriculum theories. As part of a series of design-based research, this qualitative case study reports collaborative learning processes among a group of five Singapore astronomy amateurs with the facilitator in a multimodal modeling workshop. Through the lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, two contradictions were defined as a driving force to co-construct their conceptual understanding of distance and size of celestial objects and co-design multimodal models. This paper concludes with implications for supporting deliberative collaboration in scientific literacies.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the research participants and research team members/facilitators for their great contribution to the project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Ethical consideration
The manuscript follows the ethical responsibility guidelines after receiving the ethical approval from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.