Accounts in the Classroom: Discourse and the Coconstruction of Meaning

Abstract

Our general aim is to study the construction of meaning in the classroom through the analysis of classroom activities and discourse. We adopt a qualitative methodology to study educational practices. Our results describe how teachers create an account to narrate certain events, how teacher and students use what they consider to be the culturally valid sources of knowledge, and how students appropriate collective constructions of meanings. Our work contributes to the understanding and description of how meaning is coconstructed in educational activities.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain Grant BSO2000–0474 and BSO2003–03607, awarded to Rosario Cubero

Notes

Transana.org (Chris Fassnacht). Developed and sustained by David K. Woods at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

These discursive resources were developed on the basis of research by other authors focusing on the analysis of discursive devices, communicative and semiotic resources in the coconstruction of meaning systems. Some of the authors we have used as basic references for our research were Derek Edwards and Neil Mercer (D. Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Mercer, 1995), César Coll and Javier Onrubia (2001), and Antonia Candela (1999).

This study was facilitated courtesy of the research projects “The Construction of Psychological Knowledge: A Study of Interaction and Discourse in University Lecture Halls” (BSO2000–0474) and “Construction of Knowledge and Educational Discourse: Semiotic Devices, Monologic and Dialogic Forms in Reasoning, and the Creation of Intersubjectivity” (BSO2003-03607), funded by the General Promotion of R&D Knowledge Programme of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The study is described in R. Cubero, Santamaría, de la Mata, Prados, and Bascón (2005) and Prados (2005).

The complete study can be found in Ignacio (2005).