Thursday Seminar
Date: 29 December, 2016
Time: 15:30 - 16:30
Venue: Main Building Lecture Room - G1
Coordinator: Prof. Jyotsna Vijapurkar
Title: Classroom Talk In Science Classrooms,
Speaker: Garima Bansal,
ABSTRACT:
While drawing from the socio-cultural traditions of Vygotsky (1978) and Bakhtin (1986), several studies have explored the speech genres in science classrooms (Barnes, 1976; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Dawes, 2004). According to Mortimer and Scott (2003) “the key feature of any science lesson (…) is the way in which the teacher orchestrates the _talk_ of the lesson, in interacting with students, to develop the scientific story being taughtâ€. Classroom talk enables teachers to examine children’s alternative conceptions about various phenomena (Driver, Squires, Rushworth & Wood-Robinson, 2006), provides opportunities to discuss students’ understanding associated with colloquially generated words (Mercer, Dawes & Staarman, 2009), furthers development of scientific academic language (Wellington & Osborne, 2001), and acculturates learners in dialogic knowledge building processes which are at the core of scientific practice (Duschl, 2008; Christodolou & Osborne, 2014). I have attempted to investigate various types, tools and purposes of teachers’ discourse moves essential for orchestrating dialogic discourse in secondary science classroom settings. Key findings entail identification of types of discourse moves—foundation, initiation and perpetuation- and the ways in which their interaction may yield self-propelling classroom dialogue.
About the speaker:
Dr. Garima Bansal is an educational researcher with interests in formative assessment, continuous and comprehensive evaluation, classroom talk, pedagogic and curricular processes in science and mathematics classrooms. She has a Masters in Physics and a doctorate in Education from the Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi (2009-16). Her thesis is titled: Assessment, Curriculum and Pedagogy: Towards conceptualising an alternative framework of assessment.
She is currently Assistant professor, Department of Education, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi.