Boundaries and roles
From Jsarmi
Contents |
Boundaries and roles: Social location and bridging work in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) online community
Johann Sarmiento, Wesley Shumar: Drexel University
Abstract
As research in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) expands its understanding of diverse types of joint learning activities and the participation frameworks they enact, new perspectives on how social reality is constructed become necessary for analysis and design purposes. Our research concentrates on the temporal development of online learning groups into teams and communities and the interactional emergence of positioning or situated roles —dynamic orientations toward participation in small-group interaction. We investigate the ways that small virtual teams engaged in sustained work over time cross over the boundaries of time, episodes, collectivities, and perspectives to constitute and advance learning and knowledge-building as a continuous activity. We refer to this interactional activity as "bridging" work. While engaged in bridging work, team members position themselves, their co-participants and other collectivities dynamically in ways that suggest the need to consider the “situatedness” aspect of the concept of role in CSCL research. Bridging activity, and the positioning work it entails, contributes to the construction and maintenance of a joint problem space over time, to manage ongoing participation, and to the constitution of the temporal imagination of the collectivities involved.
Intro
As research in CSCL expands its understanding of diverse types of joint learning activities and the participation frameworks they enact, new perspectives on how social reality is constructed become necessary. Our research concentrates on the temporal development of online learning groups into teams and the interactional emergence of situated roles —dynamic orientations toward participation in smallgroup interaction.
In fact, the concept of role as an attribute of an individual although instrumental in small-group research (e.g., Hare, 2003) and in CSCL (e.g., Strijbos et al., 2007), has been questioned recently in other areas of research. An example of these new perspectives is "positioning theory" which favors a more situated lens that focuses its attention on "dynamic aspects of encounters in contrast to the way in which the use of 'role' serves to highlight static, formal and ritualistic aspects" (e.g., Davies & Harre, 1990, p.261). As a result, positioning theory favors an analysis of the actual discursive processes of locating social participants in conversations and interactions. Positioning can then be seen then as the interactional phenomena through which, implicitly or explicitly, a participant is constituted as having or not having a certain set of possible actions, of rights and obligations, particularly as to what conversational and interactional moves are open to him in a particular context (Van Langenhove & Harre, 1999). Co-participants might position each other in different ways throughout an interaction (a.k.a. interactive positioning) or they might attempt position themselves directly (a.k.a reflexive positioning).
We approach our analysis from this interactional perspective in order to explore the situated perspective of roles within the temporal development of learning teams in the context of the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) online community.
Virtual Math Teams at the Math Forum: A Case Study
The VMT project at the Math Forum investigates the innovative use of online collaborative environments for mathematics learning (Stahl, 2005). The Math Forum is an online math community, active since 1992. It promotes technology-mediated interactions among teachers, students, mathematicians, staff members and others interested in learning, teaching, and doing mathematics. Central to the VMT research program are the investigation of the nature and dynamics of group cognition (Stahl, 2006) as well as the design of effective technological supports for small-group interactions. In this particular study we investigate the ways that small virtual teams engaged in sustained work over time, crossing over the boundaries of episodes, collectivities, and perspectives to constitute and advance learning and knowledge-building as a continuous activity. We refer to this interactional activity as "bridging" work. Bridging is achieved through a set of methods through which participants deal with the discontinuities relevant to their collective engagement. Bridging thereby might tie events at the local smallgroup unit of analysis to interactions at larger units of analysis (e.g. online communities, multi-team collectivities, etc.) as well as between the individual and small-group levels.
Data sources and goals
During the spring of 2005, an experiment was conducted to explore collaborative knowledge building over time. Five virtual teams were formed with about four non-collocated secondary students selected by volunteer teachers at different schools across the USA. The teams engaged in online math discussions for four hour-long sessions over a two-week period. In the first session, teams were given a brief description of a non-traditional geometry environment: a grid-world where one could only move along the lines of a grid. Students were encouraged to generate and pursue their own questions about the grid-world, such as questions about the shortest distance between two points in this world. In subsequent sessions, teams were given feedback on their prior work and the work of other teams and were encouraged to continue their work.
Our qualitative analysis aimed at understanding how teams of participants in the VMT online community “bridge” the apparent discontinuity of their interactions (e.g. multiple collaborative sessions, teams and tasks) and exploring the role that such bridging activity plays in their knowledge building over time. We employ ethnomethodological approaches (Garfinkel, 1967) to examine sequences of episodes by using recordings and artifacts from the teams sessions. For our current purposes, we examined 18 team sessions, paying special attention to the sequential unfolding of the sets of four problem-solving episodes in which each team participated. Constant comparison through different instances of bridging in the entire dataset led to our refinement of the structural elements that define bridging activity.
Analysis
- How is that positions and positioning work are dynamic? In one interaction? Across interactions? Do the participants orient to positions as dynamic or stable?
- what position are relevant in the data we observed? Do they change over trajectories?
- Is positioning (and positions) to be attribute to individuals? To the group? To the "situated" group? Are they produced by individuals in cooperation with others? Are they co-produced and maintained? For a long time?
- Is there a visible relationship between the activity of positioning in learning interactions and learning activity? Does this tell us something about whether scaffolds are necessary? About the nature of such scaffolds? (e.g. role frames that are interdependent, rotations, etc.)
Case 1: Constituting and Positioning Collectivities and The Past as Resources for Problem-Solving
Case 2: Feedback and Assessment
Case 3: Social Remembering
Conclusion and discussion
We have identified a set of interactional methods through which participants deal with the discontinuities relevant to their joint activity. Our analysis of this “bridging work” shows that it is a highly interactive achievement of groups and, possibly, very consequential undertaking for their knowledge building over time. In particular, we show how positioning plays a special role in the dynamic way in which teams construct and maintain a joint problem space over time, manage their ongoing participation, and constitute their collective history. Our analysis illustrates the dynamics of positioning in the collective engagement with past and projected work. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that these attempts to establish continuity in collaborative problem solving involve the collective recognition and use of discontinuities or boundaries as resources for interaction (e.g. temporal or episodic discontinuity), changes in the participants’ relative positioning toward each other as a collectivity (e.g. co-narrators and interactive audience), and also the use of particular orientations towards knowledge resources and perspectives (e.g., the problem statement, prior findings, what someone professes to know or remember, etc.). In addition, we suggest that the lens of positioning affords us a more interactive perspective on participation and engagement than the traditional concept of role, at least, within the analysis of long-term, multi-team learning interactions.
References
Davies, B., & Harre, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, 43-63.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hare, P. (2003). Roles, relationships, and groups in organizations: Some conclusions and recommendations. Small Group Research, 34, 123-154.
Van Langenhove, L., & Harre, R. (1999). Positioning. Oxford: Blackwell.
Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (2002). Community building with and for teachers at the Math Forum. In K. A. Renninger & W. Shumar (Eds.), Building virtual communities (pp. 60-95). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Stahl, G. (2005). Group cognition: The collaborative locus of agency in CSCL. In T. Koschmann, D. Suthers & T. W. Chan (Eds.), Computer supported collaborative learning 2005: The next 10 years! (pp. 632-640). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stahl, G. (2006). Group cognition: Computer support for building collaborative knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Strijbos, J. W.,
Martens, R. L., Jochems, W. M. G., & Broers, N. J. (2007). The effect of functional roles on perceived group efficiency during computer-supported collaborative learning: A matter of triangulation. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 353-380.
