Lsri Speaker Series - Audio

Telling, adapting, and performing stories: How literacy meets identity

Kendler and Kendler (1962) are remembered for their bold challenge to the behaviorist tenet, widely accepted in the middle of the 20th century, that the learning process functions in an identical manner across species and across the human life cycle. To the contrary, they argued, learning develops. Young children learn via associationist mechanisms, but by age 7, the learning process has been transformed into one involving internal mediating concepts that connect overt stimuli and responses. Today it is apparent that the Kendlers overstated their case in claiming that young children do not form concepts. There is ample evidence to the contrary, and a different explanation for age differences on Kendlers' learning tasks is required. Following the Kendlers' work, the question of developmental changes in the learning process was largely put aside, as interest in children's learning declined in general. It is now, however, a somewhat different question than it was in the Kendlers' day. Rather than formation of S

American children usually find a free-flowing, open format approach to classroom discussion called Collaborative Reasoning to be intellectually stimulating and personally engaging. In this talk, I will present initial evidence about the response of the children from two sites in China and one site in Korea to Collaborative Reasoning discussions. The expected discourse of these discussions is a radical departure from the prevailing patterns of discourse in Asian homes and schools. Thus, according to some theorists, the performance of the children should have been awkward, at best. Based on analysis of discussion transcripts and individually-written reflective essays, I will suggest answers to the following questions: Could Chinese and Korean children manage their own discussions with little or no help from the teacher? Were the children attentive and engaged? Did the children display rhetorical moves, or ‘argument stratagems’, similar those observed among American children? Did skills of argument children acqu

Dr. Hilda Borko’s presentation focuses on the teacher professional development component of the STAAR project. STAAR – Supporting the Transition from Arithmetic to Algebraic Thinking – is a multi-year, multi-site research program funded through an IERI grant. The research team at the University of Colorado at Boulder is developing and studying a professional development program intended to help teachers foster algebraic thinking in their classrooms.

Ten years ago, I realized that case-based reasoning, an approach to designing computer programs that could reason based on their experiences, suggested ways of promoting productive learning in people. Based on that insight and on CBR's implied cognitive model, my research group and I have designed a project-based inquiry approach to middle school science called Learning by Design. LBD takes into account the cognitive model proposed by CBR as well as the constraints and opportunities afforded by middle-school classrooms and students. By studying the strengths and weaknesses of the approach as it has been implemented in a variety of venues in the Atlanta area, we've discovered opportunities for designing and integrating several kinds of technology appropriate not just to LBD classrooms, but to project-based inquiry classrooms more generally.

By facilitating the growth of a culture of collaboration and rigorous scientific thinking in middle school science classrooms, we've been able to promote significant learning of and engagement in scientific reasoning. I present some of what we've learned about how to promote a classroom culture and the learning that ensues from it.

Jay Lemke (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Professor in the School of Education, Department of Educational Studies, at the University of Michigan and Co-Editor of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. Before coming to Michigan, he was Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the City University of New York Graduate Center and co-editor of Linguistics and Education. His research interests include science education, new learning technologies, multimedia semiotics, discourse analysis, and applications of complex systems theory to the study of social, cultural, and institutional change.