Grammatical processes of objectification in a middle school science classroom

Abstract

This paper focuses on the discursive and grammatical means by which science students extract and objectify knowledge from the dynamics of the laboratory setting. I argue that nominalization is a particularly important strategy by which this curriculum unit and teacher apprentice students into objectifying the data, evidence, and conclusions from the labs. This paper shows how students are tasked with mastering an unusual locution: the use of the verb ‘to weigh’ as a noun in the subject position, with atypical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. I suggest that these novel nominalizations are a way that inquiry-based curricula apprentice students into an ideology of scientific research that backgrounds potentially fallible researchers and their technology, and privileges instead the inscriptions that are the products of that lab work. Evidence is presented showing that students adopt and even extend the unusual nominal constructions involving the lexeme ‘weight’.