Teaching STEM Education through Dialogue and Transformative Learning

Global Significance and Local Interactions in Mexico and the UK

Catherine Montgomery, Juan Manuel Fernández-Cárdenas

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000022490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book focuses on reconceptualising the teaching of STEM education through dialogue and transformative learning, presenting examples of research from Mexico and the UK.

It centres on research which introduces critical pedagogies in the teaching of STEM, where in the past there has been an over-emphasis on content and a technicist perspective on science. The research in this book considers critical and dialogic approaches to teacher education for STEM subjects and emphasises the crucial role that teachers play in improving life chances for marginalised young people and their communities. STEM education is not just a way of improving a country's GDP, but if taught through dialogic and transformative pedagogies it can enable teachers to empower students to improve their own lives.

The collaboration between these two countries is timely and comes as Mexico is developing and emerging as a key global economic nation. The work presented here engages in theoretical and empirical work that has application beyond the two countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching.

1 The social construction of a Teacher Support Team

An experience of university lecturers’ professional development in STEM

Elvia Castro-Félix iD and Harry Daniels iD (Mexico and England)

ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on understanding and exploring how a group of university engineering and science tutor educators learn and assimilate new conceptions about their role in the face of the forces of globalisation that are transforming the system of higher education. This research paper adopts the notion of the Teacher Support Team (TST) as developed by Daniels and grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural account of the social formation of mind. These structures of meaning provide insight into the role played by the context, the interactions, the needs and the demands of actual activities, agreements and learning processes that this group of STEM lecturers undertook as they sought to transform their usual teaching methods that were focused on individual and isolated work in order to create more innovative practices and impact on their students’ performance. The analysis of this experience, which was based on the epistemological principles of the sociocultural approach, focused on the educational model that emerges from needs that are perceived and shared through the group’s interactions, as well as the transitions that such a team undergoes in its actions and decisions.

Identifying the problem

Today’s globalised world is ever-changing in many aspects. It is challenging to understand the professional capabilities required in different labour markets without considering the wider economic and social world and its calls for new socio-professional objectives. In our case, we focus on the transformation of educational systems and policies within a private university in western Mexico. This has had a profound effect on the new lecturers’ professional role, with the introduction of a new strategy of curriculum formation which calls for enhanced knowledge exchange and collaboration. Such pressures on education make it possible to appreciate, among other issues, the reasons behind the emergence of new professional identities and social practices (Daniels and Garner 2013).

In the Mexican context, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) university lecturers are being encouraged to focus on solving problems for society. They are expected to work collaboratively in groups in order to implement fundamental changes in their teaching practices. In this setting, there is considerable interest in examining and understanding how university lecturers learn and develop new conceptions of their practice in response to the demands of this globalised context. As a result, the concept of the Teacher Support Team (TST) developed by Daniels (1998) has been adopted and transformed to meet the needs of this local scenario. The TST approach carries with it a focus on context, social interaction, dialogue, roles taken on by lecturers, joint activities, obstacles and limitations that arise within relationship that seek, from the perspective of the lecturer, to make a change in teaching and improve student performance (Sannino and Ellis 2013).

The approach used in this study to examine the learning and cognitive development of lecturers participating in a ‘team-learning’ type of professional education seeks to avoid the traps of concentrating only on the individual or on mental processes in a vacuum (Moll 2013). The notion of a TST as proposed by Daniels, grounded as it is in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, helps university staff to gain insights into ways in which deep changes in lecturers’ understanding can be achieved through participation, activities and conversations with colleagues. The concept of social collaborative learning, which posits a process of development as part of the intellectual life of others with whom one interacts, represents another key foundation of this research. This paper aims to give an account of a professional educational model based on peer interaction and dialogue in academic work, its advantages and its impact on university lecturers’ culture and practice.

Theoretical framework

The main focus of this research is on an intervention strategy that is configured through the interaction and dialogue between peers who are members of a university teaching staff in order to influence students’ learning. The TST intervention was adopted in order to enhance the ways in which university lecturers learn and achieve new understandings of their function. The decision to use this theoretically driven construct was influenced by the advantages that it offers in understanding the context of the interaction, the role of the participating members of staff, the activities and individual and collective learning that are generated between participants of a group. To visualise the potential that this concept offers the study, it is necessary to consider the work of Vygotsky (1982) and what is often termed a sociocultural approach that theorises culturally mediated co-construction (Moll 2013). This paper follows an analytical focus on the dialogues and exchanges that occur between the lecturers and the role played by socio-cultural tools or artefacts (such as new forms of talk) in their development.

Vygotsky placed the concept of mediation at the centre of his theoretical thesis. In Vygotsky (1978a) he argued that ‘a person undertakes activities through the mediation of others. All of their behaviour is absolutely fused and rooted in social relations’ (1978a, 76). In the case of this paper, reference is made to this type of mediation as it focuses on the movement from ideas which develop in social interaction between people to ideas that become personal. This is the essence of Vygotsky’s general genetic law of cultural development which celebrates the primacy of social interchange in the development of individual cognitive and affective development.

Faulkner, Littleton, and Woodhead (2013) reframe this concept and refer to ‘mediated learning experience’ when they discuss the impact mediation can have on the cognitive structure. It is not only knowledge that is mediated but also processing strategies, as Faulkner, Littleton, and Woodhead (2013) indicate ‘the existence of groups of strategies and repertoires that allow the organism to use this exposure efficiently has an important influence on cognitive development’ (2013, 34). Mediation understood as such may be enacted by an expert in the subject of learning or by a lecturer or a partner who has a more advanced level of knowledge and therefore helps facilitate learning to others (see Watermeyer and Montgomery, 2018). Tharp and Gallimore (1988) also make reference to this type of mediation and call it assisted performance. This form of mediated learning can be strengthened by increasing opportunities for interaction and dialogue. These relationships have the function of mediating the meaning of the world in terms of experiences, perceptions and ideas about practice (Davis et al. 2015). In this way, the subject, through mediated activity in a sociocultural context and participating with others in socioculturally constructed practices, redesigns their world (Hernández 2004).

Tharp (2005) distinguishes five means of supporting others which can be observed in any expert-apprentice relationship: demonstration, contingency management, feedback, task structuring and language media. In the process of teaching and learning, Sannino and Ellis (2013) point out that the psychological effects should not only be considered but the social context of the interaction as well. Thus, there is a mutual shaping of person and situation that is theorised within this framework. For Vygotsky (1978b), an individual’s development cannot be understood independently from the social environment in which a person is immersed. The activity context is a scenario where the interaction occurs; this is why it is more than just a physical environment.

In this study, we adopt the notion of context proposed by Gallimore (2002), which ‘not only includes aspects of the environment but also the scripts, plans and intentions of the actors’ (2002, 41). Therefore, the ways in which interactions occur and the roles taken by people with their representations and meanings is understood as a key part of the context. It is the place where the collaborative interaction occurs and arises from the pressures and resources of the social system of which its actors are part. In this conception, the cultural, environmental, social, cognitive aspects and particularities of a person or group are brought into a dynamic or dialogic relation. In this perspective, the role of the tutor ought to go beyond the mere transmission of knowledge and should be attributed the role of mediator or facilitator in the construction of understanding. Gallimore (2002) claims that without this context, an ideal of development based on mediation cannot be achieved. Vygotsky’s (1978b) widely discussed Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is a dynamic region which may be thought of as a notional space in which external influences, such as teaching, may, if correctly positioned, be effective in supporting individual progress. The ZPD is in part conditioned by the culture in which the person develops (Moll 2013), as they participate in problem solving along with other members of his cultural group who have greater experience (Davis et al. 2015). A breakthrough in the ZPD is only achieved when that niche provides joint dialectical activity for both the expert and the learner.

In sum, contexts are not to be understood as definitely given, but are formed in a dynamic way, that is mutually shaped by the activity of the participants. In other words, they are constructed from what people do, where and when they do it and, in this sense, the people who interact get to form the context for others (Silvestri and Lacasa 2001). In these spaces, knowledge is constructed jointly as individuals engage in activities that are negotiated rather than imposed.

The notion of the Teacher Support Team (TST)

A TST, like other similar conceptions such as communities of practice, exists in the plurality of social organisations. One can talk about teams in multiple situations, especially when people hold common interests and purposes, share certain belief systems, ways of seeing and doing, and establish various forms of social relationships (groups, associations, organisations) that provide them with support, recognition and identity, while, as a counterpart, they also demand certain commitments and loyalties (Engeström 2014). A TST is a set of people (usually 3 to 5) who meet at a given time and place, engage in a task that requires them to assume roles and interact to achieve a goal. Teams are not an end in themselves; they are a means through which the growth of its members is supported. These groups are not static, but advance in spiral form depending on the task being performed. The interaction that takes place generates development and a specific and group reality that relates the social structure to the individual. For the continuous process of a learning community’s development, certain requirements are identified:

• Clear specification of the task to be carried out and mobilisation of the efforts and interests of all to achieve goals and objectives.

• As part of the norms, attendance and punctuality of the programmed sessions.

• Distribution of responsibilities within the group; in other words, the assignment and/or assumption of functions that are rotated from time to time.

• Full participation of all members in constant decision-making and exchanges while in compliance with standards and principles, which can result in the satisfaction of the learning needs of each one of its members and of all as a whole.

Tharp and Gallimore (1988) characterised the nature of these teams as a Joint Productive Activity (JPA). This term was adopted directly from Vygotsky (1978b) suggesting that psychological activity and phenomena depend on and support each other. This perspective is oriented to the understanding of historically defined practices; it is based on a dialectic of knowledge centred on the creative potential of human cognition and seeks to explain the qualitative changes that occur over time in human practices to influence them. The activity is developed through constant negotiation, orchestration and struggle between the different goals and perspectives of the participants. The purpose and motive of a collective activity are like a mosaic in constant evolution, a pattern that never ends completely. In this line, Engeström (2014, 69) notes that:

Artefact-mediated object-building [...] is a collaborative and dialogical process where different perspectives [...] and voices [...] collide and merge. These different perspectives are rooted in different realities that continue to coexist within the same context of activity.

Gallimore (2002) agrees that the unit of analysis in a setting such as a TST is a joint dialogue and not an individual activity because what matters is the process of social transformation. Tensions are considered forces that motivate change and development. Transitions and reorganisations in the learning team are part of their evolution, which modify not only the mediated activity but also the environment.

Daniels’ theoretical construct of TST (1998) is important, especially when we consider that lecturers are very often working on their own when dealing with complex educational and instructional problems. The demands of teaching in general, but also the demands of the continuous, almost non-stop changes that lecturers have to cope with, including attention to diversity, can provoke professional stress and burn-out, leading to lowered tolerance and less personal involvement when lecturers are faced with any situation that call for dealing with new challenges. A TST is explicitly designed to offer a forum where educational professionals can share, discuss and solve immediate and individual problems that arise in lecturers’ day-to-day work in the classroom.

Methodological design

It is important to emphasise that one of the purposes of this study is to understand and articulate how university lecturers’ knowledge is constructed through dialogue in peer interaction within the setting of a certain activity. The case for the research is a private university in western Mexico which encourages its lecturers within their disciplinary areas to collaborate on the generation of strategies and proposals that will help to improve teaching practices an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface by Peter Gilroy
• Introduction – Teaching STEM education through dialogue and transformative learning: global significance and local interactions in Mexico and the UK
• 1 The social construction of a Teacher Support Team: an experience of university lecturers’ professional development in STEM
• 2 Developing a material- dialogic approach to pedagogy to guide science teacher education
• 3 Creating a dialogic environment for transformative science teaching practices: towards an inclusive education for science
• 4 STEM outreach activities: an approach to teachers’ professional development
• 5 The role of non- formal contexts in teacher education for STEM: the case of horno3 science and technology interactive centre
• 6 Public dialogue with science and development for teachers of STEM: linking public dialogue with pedagogic praxis
• 7 Innovating science teaching with a transformative learning model
• 8 A hybrid and flipped version of an introductory mathematics course for higher education
• 9 Developing non- formal education competences as a complement of formal education for STEM lecturers
• Index