Deliberative collaboration in learning-by-designing multimodal modeling activities

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• deliberation
• cultural-historical activity theory
• multimodal modeling activities
• 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.

Additional information

Funding

Nanyang Technological University in Singapore granted the funding for the research project (OER 30/09MSK) described in this paper.