Abstract
Teachers who work in the early grades find it often challenging to create learning environments for young children to explore the physical world. In this chapter, we follow a group of teachers, enrolled in a public school in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), while they create and develop a topic of the science curriculum, collectively designed with the participation of 5-year-old children. We employ a cultural-historical approach, using planning/executing dialect to analyze science-related activities for kindergarten classroom. Drawing on eight sessions with the children, we based our discussion on Leont’ev’s subject/object dialectic at the heart of the activity. We analyze the reorientation that occurs when teachers’ planning is transformed after children engage in an earlier proposed activity. We also emphasize the contradictions and the tensions that are the drive forces that allow the classroom to be in movement. This chapter is organized in three sections. In the first, we discuss the way the teachers listen to children’s demands for knowledge, creating principles that underlie the preparation of the planning. In the second section, we develop the dialectic of the subject/object, which allows us to see that the contradictions in planning/execution are inherent in teaching praxis. In the last section, we analyze the material of eight session of learning showing the movement that occurs inside the classroom.
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Notes
- 1.
In Chap. 8, we extensively describe our work with preservice teachers at the University of Ioannina, Greece, who learn how to plan and implement lessons on floating and sinking.
- 2.
To reiterate, in using the term “activity,” we are referring to the English equivalent of deyatel’nost’ and Tätigkeit rather than to expressions of vital activeness generally, many of which are not of the type that activity theory is about (see also Davydov 1999).
- 3.
This was precisely the decisive step in the evolution of the human species. Thus, for example, many primate groups make use of tools only to dispose of them once they finish the job at hand – fishing termites and ants or cracking nuts. A recent study in Africa has provided evidence of the emergence of anticipation in some chimpanzees about 4,500 years ago, which carried fist-sized rocks from one site for over 20 km to crack nuts at a different site. This demands anticipation that a material at hand in one site could serve as a tool for getting at food at another site reached only a day later.
- 4.
An individual highly skilled in a practice has opportunities for doing a particular job well, but also limitations in doing the same job in a different manner. The skill, being of a high level, also becomes a lens constraining the emergence of other possible skills and practices: “An excess of mastery loses mastery.… The concept of mastery is impossible to handle, we know it: the more there is, the less there is, and vice versa” (Derrida 1996, p. 129).
- 5.
That teaching and learning tend to be thought of as coextensive can be seen from everyday teacher expressions that take the form of “Last week we learned …” or “Yesterday we discussed …” when in fact the teacher saying this to a class of students had been lecturing.
- 6.
One of our earlier research project shows that there seems to be a “natural” trajectory of accounting for laboratory experiences even for older learners (Roth and Lawless 2002). Thus, tenth-grade students in investigating static electricity accounted for their findings to the inquiring teachers and researchers by redoing investigations. Later they used symbolic representations for the equipment and employed a lot of gestures. Only after many accounts of what they had done did these 15-year-olds use words and verbal descriptions for describing and explaining the phenomena observed.
- 7.
We know both from our own participation as teachers in school science and as researchers of school science that such instances are not isolated because of the tension that juxtaposes the amount of time that would be required to ascertain beforehand that all equipment is functioning in the required manner and the amount of time any teacher has in a normal day. Even the most prepared and experienced teachers find out in the course of doing a demonstration that what they had planned to show could not actually be seen.
- 8.
This is similar to the diastatic unit of response, which is temporally displaced across a listening|answering unit (Roth 2007). Thus, answering to someone begins with actively listening to the person, an event by means of which the listener comes to be affected by something she/he cannot anticipate. How the listener has been affected mediates what she/he says in return. That is, the response is spread across listening and the speaking that unfolds from it: we say it is diastatic unit. Moreover, the answer never can be understood in itself: the why of the response takes its origin in the preceding address.
- 9.
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Roth, WM., Goulart, M.I.M., Plakitsi, K. (2013). Creating the Potential for Learning in Early Childhood Education. In: Science Education during Early Childhood. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5186-6_7
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