8th graders text production in authentic learning settings
Submitted by:
Raffaele Brahe-Orlandi
Abstract:
Key-words: Enterprise Education, Communicative Competences, Authentic L1-Learning, Design Based Research, Case-study.
The research question I will answer at the conference is; how does student´s initial selection of meaningful partners to work with, in entrepreneurial instructional designs in Danish elementary school, support or hinder their development of communicative competences related to the curriculum of Danish (DME, 2013) as L1?
I will argue for the following finding drawn from the analysis of the data so far collected: Students, who select a - for them - meaningful costumer to work with and for, achieve better results when it comes to communicative competences related to the curriculum of Danish. I will further argue that support from instructional material and the teacher in this phase are important. The arguments will be made by comparing two extreme cases, one telling about a group of students who did select a - for them - meaningful costumer, and the other one telling about students who did not.
The presentation argues for and discusses preliminary findings drawn up from an ongoing empirical Ph.D. study. The study is a qualitative exploration of potentials and challenges in connection to instructional designs that aim at the development of student´s entrepreneurial competences and their competences connected to text production (spoken, written and multimodal).
Theoretically, the design builds on learning theory such as Enterprise Education (Pepin, 2012) and theories focusing on learning through “thickly” authentic situations (Schaffer & Resnick, 1999).
Hence, students work as a communications office for 4 weeks. Their “job” is to find costumers by looking into their network, identify the costumers need for communication through research, come up with a communication strategy and produce relevant text material for the costumer.
Methodologically, the study draws upon Design Based Research (Barab, 2015) and Case Study as method. A design is iteratively developed and tested in different contexts. During the iterations, the researcher collects data in the form of interviews, video, field notes and student produced texts. The data material is analyzed focusing on the different design elements and their potentials to enhance or not enhance the desired communicative competences.
The two cases underlying the findings in this presentation, are constructed by combining and triangulating different pieces of data, such as observations of students and teachers sayings and doings, texts produced by students and signs of learning observed through the students` body language.
References:
The Danish Ministry of Education (DME)(2013), Forenklede Fælles Mål for dansk: http://www.emu.dk/omraade/gsk-l%C3%A6rer/ffm/dansk
Barab, S. (2015), "Design Based Research - A methodological toolkit for the learning scientist", In: The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, 2nd Edition.
Pepin, M.(2012),"Enterprise education: a Deweyan perspective", Education + Training, Vol. 54 Issue 8/9, pp. 801 - 812.
Shaffer, W & Resnick, M. (1999), "Thick Authenticity: New media and authentic learning", Interactive Learning Research 10(2), pp. 195-215.