Premium
To be or not to be? Discursive resources for (Dis‐)identifying with science‐related careers
Author(s) -
Hsu PeiLing,
Roth WolffMichael,
Marshall Anne,
Guenette Francis
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of research in science teaching
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.067
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1098-2736
pISSN - 0022-4308
DOI - 10.1002/tea.20352
Subject(s) - formative assessment , performative utterance , science education , discourse analysis , pedagogy , sociology , discursive psychology , psychology , mathematics education , epistemology , linguistics , philosophy
One of the main objectives of many science educators is to enroll students into science majors and careers. Researchers have investigated students' views of science in terms of factors and influences that guide students to choose science as a career. However, few investigations exist that have studied the forms of language culture makes available for articulating possible careers generally or the ways of grounding (justifying) these possibilities particularly. The purpose of this study is to investigate ways of using language for supporting justifications of career choices in an interview situation. Thirteen high school biology students were interviewed about their career choices. Drawing on discursive psychology as theory and method, we identify four interpretative repertoires that are deployed during the interviews: the (a) formative, (b) performative, (c) consequent, and (d) potential repertoires. These interpretative repertoires do not merely characterize the discourse about different science‐related professions but in fact co‐articulate different science‐related identities. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 1114–1136, 2009