Multiple school science literacies. Exploring the role of text during integrated inquiry-based science and literacy instruction.

Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to explore how literacy is embedded in six primary school science classrooms during integrated inquiry-based science and literacy instruction. This is investigated by analyzing classroom video data from six primary school science classrooms, along with interview data with students (n=33) and textual artifacts from the six classrooms. The classroom video study was conducted through a larger research and development project, The Budding Science and Literacy project, in which six primary school science teachers were recruited from an in-service professional development course on inquiry-based science and literacy. The six teachers were then video-recorded, along with their students, as they taught a sequence of lessons, where they were to explicitly integrate disciplinary literacy practices with inquiry-based science, as a part of the professional development course. The first article included in this thesis (Article I) is an overview video study of the Budding Science and Literacy project, which explores the variation and patterns of integrated inquirybased science and literacy instruction by mapping the occurrence and co-occurrence multiple learning modalities (reading; writing; talking; doing) and main inquiry phases (preparation; data; discussion; communication) in the six classrooms. The results show that the teachers spent comparably more time on preparation and data than on the consolidating phases of discussion and communication. Reading and writing were also more prominent in these phases of inquiry. Article II investigates the literacy practices that emerge among primary school students during integrated inquiry-based science and literacy instruction. This is mainly explored through video analysis of literacy events that occur in the video material, with student interviews and collected textual artifacts acting as additional data sources. The article reveals how multiple literacies emerged in the context of integrated science-literacy instruction. For example, elements of students’ informal literacies became valued resources in the dialogic process of inquiry, but the students also engaged in typically schooled literacy practices that helped structure their learning experiences. The article also indicates that the implemented instruction created new literacy demands that were not always clear to the students. Article III provides an introduction to what a social view of literacy means for school science. In the first part of the article, we use sociocultural perspectives to argue that literacy in school science is best understood as social practices embedded in cultural and ideological contexts. In the second part, we rely on these perspectives to present a framework for promoting literacy in science classrooms. Finally, the article discusses how a social view of literacy can provide science educators with the theoretical perspectives to consider how literacy is actually used in contexts relevant to a transcending science subject for scientific literacy. The final article, Article IV, is a methodological contribution that considers the use and re-use of video data from two perspectives: the primary researchers (or archivists) and the secondary analysts. It combines two research projects—The Budding Science and Literacy project (the primary researchers) and the PISA+ video study (the secondary analysts)—to make an argument for establishing more common practices when conducting classroom video studies. The four articles address the overarching aim of the thesis from different perspectives. While the first article maps the time is spent on different learning modalities in the six classrooms and how these co-occur with science inquiry phases, Article II goes beyond “reading” and “writing” per se to investigate what texts students encounter, what they do with these texts, and how they talk about them, from a sociocultural perspective on literacy. These two articles represent the empirical studies that make up this thesis. The third article builds on the first two articles, along with other relevant studies on the role of text in school science, to discuss what a social view of literacy means for science teachers’ educational practice. The final article in this thesis, Article IV, considers some of the methodological issues related to using and re-using video data in classroom video studies. In this way, Article IV frames the empirical research reported in articles I and II, in addition to discussing how video can be used to investigate classroom practice in general. Taken together, this thesis demonstrates how literacy is interwoven in the activities and inquiries of the six participating classrooms. By approaching literacy as a social practice, these findings illustrate how multiple school science literacies, which attend to markedly different purposes in the classroom, can emerge in an inquiry-based context in primary school science. The thesis highlights a need for supporting teachers in the discussion and communication phases of inquiry, as well as providing explicit instruction to the specialized conventions of scientific language that frame reading and writing in school science.