Dialogic Inquiry in Life Science Conversations of Family Groups in a Museum

This research illustrates the efficacy of a new approach for collecting and analyzing family conversational data at museums and other informal settings. This article offers a detailed examination of a small data set (three families) that informs a larger body of work that focuses on conversation as methodology. The dialogic content of this work centers on biological themes, specifically adaptation. The biological principle becomes visible when families talk about survival strategies such as breeding or protection from predators. These themes arise from both the family members and the museum exhibit. This study also analyzes the inquiry skills families use as they make sense of science content. I assume that children and adults offer different interest areas or expertise for dialogic negotiation and that family members use inquiry skills in dialogue to explore matters of importance. This analysis offers educators methodological tools for investigating families’ scientific sense-making in informal settings. 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 138–162, 2003 Museums are places where families play, talk, and learn from each other. Yet, although families make up more than half of all visitors to museums, we have little detailed understanding, beyond behavioral descriptions, of how family members interact with one another (Diamond, 1986; Ellenbogen, 2002; Hilke, 1987). In this research, I demonstrate a new methodological tool that allows a fine-grained analysis of collaborative scientific sense-making, based on family conversations. I call these conversations dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999) because families use dialogue when they undertake mental and physical inquiry. In this article I focus specifically on two aspects of family dialogue: the thematic content that underpins conversations about life sciences and the inquiry process skills (Ash, 1999) that advance or hinder dialogue. Looking at dialogue is not new to classroom research (Brown et al., 1993; Rosebery, Warren, & Conant, 1992; Wells, 1999) but it is relatively new to informal learning research settings which, one can argue, offer a richer context and more free-choice learning opportunities (Falk & Contract grant sponsor: Museum Learning Collaborative, University of Pittsburgh, and Committee on Research Grant (COR) and Social Science Division, University of California, Santa Cruz. Correspondence to: D. Ash; E-mail: [email protected] DOI 10.1002/tea.10069 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dierking, 1992, 2000). The present work is informed, in part, by research carried out in classroom settings in Oakland, California (Brown, 1992; Brown et al., 1993; Brown & Campione, 1996) in the Fostering a Community of Learners project (FCL), and also by Wells (2000) as part of the Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project (DICEP) in Toronto, Canada. In this work I adopt a Vygotskian (1978) sociocultural frame of reference that focuses on the zone of proximal development (zpd) as the interaction region between the family members, individually and collectively, and the exhibits. The Vygotskian perspective on the social origins of mind places an emphasis on the role of dialogue and the co-construction of knowledge, in our case between parents and children. This view presupposes that language is a negotiating medium for teaching and learning. Many others have prepared the way for this view. Halliday (1993) suggested that language is how experience becomes knowledge. Leont’ev (1981) called language a tool that ‘‘mediates activity and thus connects humans not only with the world of objects but also with other people’’ (p. 55). Vygotsky expressed this succinctly when he called language the tool of tools (1978). My research emphasizes what Wells (1999) called the ‘‘co-construction of knowledge by more mature and less mature participants engaged in activity together’’ (p. xii). Wells (1999) suggested ‘‘education should be conducted as a dialogue about matters that are of interest and concern to the participants’’ (p. xi). This is the central feature of good classroom design (Brown, 1992) and arguably it is a central feature in informal settings as well, because dialogue functions as a way to carry out activities in which the participants are jointly involved (Brown et al., 1993; Vygotsky, 1978; Wells, 1997). I have suggested previously that family dialogic inquiry occurs within a zpd established between the social ensemble, individually and collectively, and the actual or virtual artifacts that comprise exhibits (Ash, in press). Wells suggested that ‘‘the zpd may apply in any situation in which, while participating in an activity, individuals are in the process of developing mastery of practice or understanding of a topic’’ (Wells, 1999, p. 333). From FCL research, we know that learning environment design that encourages multiple overlapping zpds provides a variety of entry points into dialogue for learners of all ages and with distributed expertise (Brown et al., 1993). Ann Brown argued that in the classroom setting Theoretically we conceive of the community as composed of multiple zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), through which participants navigate via different routes and at different rates. A zone of proximal development is a learning region that learners can navigate with aid from a supporting context, including but not limited to people. . . .Because varieties of expertise and talent are encouraged, and there are multiple ways into the community (Lave & Wenger), individual difference are legitimized (Heath, 1992). (Brown, Ellery, & Campione, 1997, p. 12) Because museums are rich sources of artifacts, people, gestures, and potential dialogic interactions (McManus, 1989, 1989; Paris & Hapgood, in press), dialogic inquiry as instruction can take place at any particular exhibit as parents interact with their children, each other, and artifacts. Furthermore, we have observed that family groups (and others) split into dyads or triads at exhibits and then come together again later to share meaning. I take the view that multiple zpds are constructed because of the grouping and regrouping of the social ensemble at artifact-rich exhibits. Multiple zpds are also constructed as parents interact differentially with children in the same conversation. When these multiple routes are available, learners with different expertise, jointly or individually, can progress toward new levels of understanding using each other and exhibit materials as scaffold (Ash, in press; McManus, 1989). DIALOGIC INQUIRY 139