Building on Each Other’s Ideas: A Social Mechanism of Progressiveness in Whole-Class Collective Inquiry

Abstract

In recent decades, important advances have been made in understanding how discursive symmetry can be achieved in whole-class dialogue. However, very little is known about how this dialogue may progress in the sense of critically linking ideas in coherent lines of collective inquiry. This article investigates this issue by analyzing 4 consecutive sessions of a science class with children ages 8 to 10 and identifies a social mechanism that can explain the emergence of progressiveness in collective inquiry. The identified mechanism consists of a series of iterations of the sequence (Direction) → Inference ↔ Observation ↔ Consensus → Fixation. This sequence enables the transition from local to collective agency and meaning. Direction creates a gap in a semantic structure, leading to the local formation of an inference. This inference then escalates through observation and consensus before finally being fixed through the creation of an artifact that reifies it as a collective meaning. Based on this collective meaning, a new direction leads to a new local inference, and the cycle begins again.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the school, the teacher, and the children who participated in this research.

Notes

¹ In the IRF structure, the teacher initiates the exchange (I), the pupil responds (R), and the teacher follows up (F; Coulthard, M., & Brazil, D, 1981; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Wells, 1999).

² For example, Vygotsky (1987) argued that when trying to understand the capacity of water to extinguish fire, “this man will discover, to his chagrin, that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains combustion. He will never succeed in explaining the characteristics of the whole by analyzing the characteristics of its elements” (p. 45).

³ All names are pseudonyms.

⁴ Here the term unit is used in the sense of the methodological delimitation of the phenomenon under study. Thus, the unit here is the methodological definition of the whole.

⁵ The fact that the teacher tried to directly fix the inference that bacteria excrete waste does not mean that she succeeded in doing so; observation and consensus had not occurred, so the fixation was interrupted, and observation began. This time, two inferences were formed in very quick succession, and their observation was somewhat mixed. For the inference that bacteria excrete waste, some children found it hard to believe that our mouths are full of excrement. However, other children explained that because bacteria are so small, their excrement must be even smaller, which must be why we do not see or feel it in our mouths. After this discussion, consensus was reached and the idea was fixed. No consensus was reached on the idea that this excrement could cause holes in teeth, so it was not fixed. Many children thought that bacteria eat teeth (indeed this idea had been previously fixed as “bacteria eat”), and this idea was difficult to reconcile with the other idea. In the fourth and final session of the teaching unit, the teacher finally introduced the authoritative view on this issue.