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Consensus Construction as a Collective Task in Mexican Science Classes
Author(s) -
Candela Antonia
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1525/aeq.1995.26.4.05x1064x
Subject(s) - sociology , context (archaeology) , zone of proximal development , discourse analysis , orientation (vector space) , epistemology , social psychology , pedagogy , psychology , linguistics , philosophy , paleontology , geometry , mathematics , biology
In this article, discourse analysis focuses on the orientation of teachers' and children's classroom discourse toward the construction of a consensual version of science knowledge, even though a consensus is not always reached. This orientation, in which children and teachers shared as active participants the activity's proposals, can be seen as a collective way of developing the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in a cooperative context where the ZPD is the social product of the interaction, rather than the individual effect of the action undertaken by an adult on a child. Discourse orientation toward consensus can be seen as a cultural feature of the interactional dynamics in some school classes in Mexico.