Storygraph: A Scaffold for Thinking About Empirical Narratives (Powerpoint Presentation) - Brown Bag Presentation at the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, July 9, 2007 (some of the links to Storygraph exampes in this slideshow currently require a password; a version with all publicly-accessible files will be available shortly)

True Stories, Storied Truth: Stitching Narrative and Logico-Scientific Discourse Together in an Age of "Spin" - First International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) Congress, September 2005 (here is the Powerpoint)

How Disability Studies, Character Education, and the Learning Sciences Can Support Inclusive Communities of Practice - A Symposium conducted at AERA 2005

Digital history in an afterschool learning environment: Developing preservice teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and the historical thinking skills of youth (by Joseph L Polman & Laura Westhoff, AERA 2004)

The Digital History Project at the University of Missouri-St. Louis attempts to better prepare future teachers of secondary history and improve the historical thinking skills of high school students. Through a technology-rich after school program, students in a social studies methods class and high school youth explored the history of the high school's neighborhood in an open-ended inquiry project. In this paper, we report on the first year of research into the results of this effort. Case study research in the after school club demonstrates how youth driven by questions of commonality and differences between generations moved towards chronological thinking; youth driven by a desire to understand why African-Americans would want to move to a segregated city moved toward deeper historical comprehension based on contextualized thinking; and youth driven by the challenges of formulating their identities looked to the past as a resource for understanding the complexity of human motivation as well as how individuals can fit into their own social environments. It further exemplifies how preservice teachers' knowledge of history related to their pedagagical content knowledge, and their ability to facilitate inquiry by youth whose history content knowledge was limited.

Enacting Technology-Supported Inquiry Learning through Mapping Our Environment (by Bob Coulter & Joseph L. Polman, AERA 2004)

The Mapping the Environment project at the Missouri Botanical Garden is an attempt to foster inquiry-oriented environmental science teaching and learning integrating geospatial technologies. In this paper, we describe the development and design of the professional development activities in Mapping the Environment over the past six years, and the most recent two years of research. Teachers who engaged in more focused curriculum planning customized for their situation created experiences that led to higher levels of student inquiry. Conversely, teachers in one subgroup of the program who participated in a more general Òactivity exposureÓ approach to inquiry that characterized that institute were less committed to student inquiry, and (potentially) less commited to overcoming the inevitable technology hurdles.

Re-Creating the Past: Building Historical Simulations with Hypermedia to Learn History (AERA 2002)

In this paper, I side with educators and historians who argue that certain aspects of expert historical thinking are excellent tools for democratic citizenship. Specifically, I focus on "contextualized" understanding of the past, as opposed to "presentist" attitudes which assume the past is "just like the present." I present a framework for analyzing contextualized historical thinking about events in terms of consideration of location, the perspectives of participants, placement within the flow of time, an understanding of the cultural tools and norms of the period, and the overall climate of opinion. Based on these elements as well as other hallmarks of educational tasks in history, I sketch a task analysis, based on cognitive and sociocultural approaches to mind, of a number of activity structures commonly used in history instruction and some newer computer-based activities. Finally, I relate the task analysis to an empirical study from an intervention and study of children creating a hypermedia simulation of travel on the Underground Railroad.

Inquiry into Local History as a Means to Foster Multiple Levels of Development (AERA 2002)

United States social studies and science educators have long recognized the importance and potential benefit of grounding some portion of the curriculum in local history and local phenomena. Every year, K12 students around the country learn about their local community's historical roots and development, economy, weather, climate and geology. With the increasing prevalence of inquiry-based approaches to history and science teaching and learning, new possibilities arise for authentic, situated learning activities. One such possibility is linking children's inquiry projects with ongoing community efforts at historic preservation and community development. In this paper, I discuss one such project, and the multiple aspects of development at work within it.

Designing Project-Based Science Learning Environments (NARST 2002)

I discuss a rationale for taking a design approach to project-based teaching and learning, and summarize lessons from Designing Project-Based Science (Polman, 2002) on important affordances, constraints, and ways of dealing with tradeoffs in learning environments for project-based science.

Historical Learning and Identity Development on the Borders of School (AERA 2001)

History learning involves more than the mastery of cognitive skills and problem-solving, because history learning always take place within sociocultural environments, and the material itself is charged with values and identity issues. In this paper, I present a theoretical perspective for understanding and designing history learning environments outside of school, and demonstrate its usefulness through two case studies from after school history clubs. The location and design of learning environments for history is non-trivial, and I will show that situating such learning environments "on the borders of school" presents substantial opportunities as well as some important risks. In one case, a youth's identity as a participant in the after school club positively influences his school identity and his future learning; in another case, a youth's school identity and norms of the school influence his participation in the club and in many ways negatively influence his opportunities for learning.

The Culture of School and the Problems of Open-Ended Science Projects (AERA 2000)

A strong commitment to inquiry-based science teaching and learning clashes in many ways with traditional school norms and culture. This paper illustrates the cultural complexity of project-based teaching in the context of a "normal" high school, through examples taken from an interpretive case study.

Activity structures for project-based teaching & learning: Design and adaptation of cultural tools (AERA 1998)

Common activity structures such as classroom lessons and I-R-E sequences are important cultural tools that help students and teachers accomplish everyday activity, but they are not well adapted to open-ended projects. I demonstrate how alternative activity structures scaffold children's performance of complex open-ended projects. On a more long-term scale, a milestone activity structure works by laying out a small set of interim material artifacts which students turn in over a period of weeks, and on a shorter time scale, the repetition of Bid-Negotiation-Implementation-Evaluation (B-N-I-E) and Question-Clarification (Q-C) many times helps the teacher to guide students in their work, while requiring that students remain active. Finally, I describe how adapting the milestone activity structure across disciplines presents a number of hurdles because it depends on discipline-specific task analyses, but the B-N-I-E discourse sequence seems generally adaptable to a wide range of inquiry-oriented work.

Why train "little scientists": The purposes and practices of science education in today's democracy (AERA 1998)

In this paper, I describe an argument in support of "training little scientists" based on the requirements of participation in a media-laden, democratic society fraught with scientific claims and counterclaims. This leads to a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of various approaches to science education at addressing the requirements specified, as well as their enactments in practice. Finally, I demonstrate the promise of this framework by examining some results of case study and survey research in project-based science classes at the high school level.

Scaffolding Science Inquiry through Transformative Communication (Polman & Pea, NARST 97)

Teachers interested in fostering science learning through inquiry or projects must play a complex role in discourse with students. They must scaffold student activities in the classroom without taking away students' active role, much like a coach. In this paper, we provide a framework for a specific form of scaffolding open-ended science inquiry, based on Pea's (1994) notion of transformative communication: (1) Students make a move in the research process with certain intentions, limited by their current knowledge; (2) The teacher does not expect the students' move, but understands how the move can have additional implications in the research process that the students may not have intended; (3) The teacher reinterprets the student move, and together students and teacher reach mutual insights about the students' research project through questions, suggestions, and/or reference to artifacts; and (4) The meaning of the original action is transformed, and learning takes place in the students' zone of proximal development. We provide specific case studies from interpretive research in a project-based high school earth science class, at two crucial and difficult junctures of projects--the formulation of researchable questions, and the marshaling of evidence to support a conclusion through data analysis. The strategy of transformative communication proves to be a powerful means of supporting students.

modified January, 2006