Open seminar with Professor Wolff-Michael Roth: Science Language Wanted Alive: Through the Dialectical/Dialogical Lens of Vygotsky and the Bakhtin Circle

Seminar open to the public

Over the past two decades, science educators have increasingly become interested in the role of language in the learning of science and have drawn on the work of Bakhtin, among others, for understanding the dialogical nature of knowledge in a sociocultural framework. However, the nature of language and its relation to thinking have not substantially changed and, in many ways, are inconsistent with the cultural-historical, materialist dialectical underpinning of the original framing of the sociocultural and dialogical approaches in the theories of L. S. Vygotsky and M. M. Bakhtin. I present a model that integrates the fundamentally common features in the two approaches and present a table with the correspondences of the theoretical terms across four European languages. I then articulate and elaborate on five main issues that are relevant to and have implications for research: (a) self-movement and development, (b) the nested relations between activity and living utterance, (c) signification, (d) vernacular as the origin and locus of development, and (e) unit analysis. The theoretical aspects of this presentation are exemplified with materials from a concept mapping session in a 12th-grade physics course. The study has considerable implications for theorizing the relation between classroom talk and formal written genres of expression, and gives rise to many new research questions.

Professor Wolff-Michael Roth has conducted research in the following areas: applied cognitive science, science education, mathematics education, social studies of science, informal science, workplace learning, history and philosophy of science, and linguistics. He has conducted numerous studies on knowing and learning along the life span, including a 5-year ethnographic study of fish hatching, a 5-year ethnographic study of an experimental biology laboratory, and a 3-year ethnographic study in field ecology.

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