Collaborative Meaning-making Research Articles

Digital technology and student engagement in online synchronous collaborative learning sessions / Tecnología digital y participación de los estudiantes en las sesiones de aprendizaje colaborativo en línea

This study examines students’ engagement in online synchronous collaborative learning (OSCL) sessions in a massive open online course (MOOC). The study focuses on the role of digital technologies in facilitating students’ agency in collaborative meaning-making activities. The primary data sources for the study were video recordings of OSCL sessions, which were analysed using the method of interaction analysis and interpreted through the lens of cultural-historical theory. The findings revealed four interconnected activities of collaborative meaning-making: establishing social connections and presence, reflecting on prior learning, sharing digital artefacts and reflecting on shared understanding. The progression from one activity to another unfolded as students contributed to collaborative learning activities using their own ideas and problem-solving approaches. The use of individually created digital artefacts, such as examination assignment drafts, deepened interactions and meaning-making processes, enhancing students’ agency in collaborative learning. The findings of this study provide insights into pedagogical strategies that can enhance student agency in MOOC environments, highlighting the crucial role of digital artefacts in developing students’ agency in collaborative learning.

Virtual repatriation as a methodological reframing for museum learning in the digital age: repositioning, digital transformation, and collaborative meaning-making

ABSTRACT Although virtual repatriation projects have been utilised by many museums to redress the dichotomy between possession of displaced legacies and decolonisation-oriented outreach for source communities, their procedures and outputs often do not fully realise the decolonising initiatives. By arguing that latent educational potential is embedded within such projects, this study utilises the current virtual repatriation practice as a methodological reframing for museum learning. Drawing on previous cross-disciplinary research in decolonisation, digitalisation and museum learning, this study repositions virtual repatriation as a community-oriented methodological approach for building object-based reciprocal interfaces. It is argued that these interfaces help integrate, mobilise, and empower digital learners and people from source communities in the process of meaning-making. Also, whilst these object-based reciprocal interfaces are framed by source communities and museums at the initial stage, in the long term, they are inherently made alive through ongoing meaning-making and knowledge reciprocation within and across nodes of participation in the digital world.

Frames of Learning: Privileging Teacher Perspectives for Decolonizing Lesson Study for Mathematics Teaching

Lesson study’s international popularity spread as a unique, agency-oriented model of teacher professional development that is context-rich and deeply rooted in teacher subjectivities. This project aimed to answer the question, what do mathematics teacher education researchers learn about teacher learning by focusing on uncertainties as they arise when the group is trying to construct new knowledge in lesson study? Using ethnographic case study, this article explores the ways one community of practice in a Chilean school negotiated evolving objectives over the course of one school year and how I as the lesson study facilitator took up roles to support collaborative meaning-making and decolonize lesson study as a professional development tool through the use of framing.

An Investigation of Teachers’ Knowledge of Read Alouds

The purpose of this investigation was to explore how teachers’ knowledge of read alouds might be shaped by opportunities to explore the crafting of picturebooks and the nature of collaborative meaning-making. Participants were enrolled in a graduate children’s literature course across one academic semester. Data included pre and post interviews as well as a reflective essay and a mini-research project. The authors found that although nearly all participants gained new knowledge about the crafting of picturebooks, only those with opportunities to apply what they were learning with children in classroom settings experienced a change in their thinking about the purpose and procedures for engaging students in read alouds.

An intricate dance of intersubjectivity

Abstract This article deepens the understanding of characteristic features of Shared Reading (SR) that can shed light on health benefits of this literary practice suggested by previous research. We provide a detailed analysis of language, interaction, reading strategies and collaborative meaning-making in an online SR group in which participants read and discussed a modernist poem. We triangulate our analysis with results from a focus group with the participants. Our study is informed by psychological theories about joint attention and its effects on social cohesion, mentalisation and perspective-taking. The analysis shows how the SR format provides a space in which ingroupness, intersubjectivity, and perspective-taking are created and realised in language use and interaction. Furthermore, our study suggests that many characteristic features of SR identified in earlier research can still be observed in an online SR group. The study lays the ground for more conclusive research of the benefits of this reading practice.

Collaging as Embodied Method: The Use of Collage in a Study of American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreters' Experiences

This methodological essay describes the generativity of collaborative collaging in a qualitative inquiry project with American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who serve D/deaf students within a public university. Sign language interpreting is a demanding profession requiring physical endurance, creativity, and quick mental processing to switch between spoken and sign language. Interpreters’ visual communicative culture aligns conceptually with the embodied arts-based, visual, and tactile research technique of collaging. We first introduce collaging scholarship to ground our discussion of using collaging as a method within this case study of ASL interpreters. We then provide an overview of ASL interpreter research and our case study to situate the collaging method used alongside other approaches, asking, “How was collaging a productive method for exploring interpreters’ understanding of their work experiences?” We describe the use of the method and the productivity of interpreters’ collaging for surfacing embodied experiences, fueling collaborative meaning-making, and showing rather than telling aspects of interpreters’ labor in another expressive language. We conclude by identifying the value of collaborative collaging in this case study and for other researchers, issues, and contexts.

Creating Community and Exploring Identity: Integrating a Virtual "Museum Tour" Into Intern Orientation.

Each July, interns join new training programs, often in unfamiliar places with limited social support. Program orientations are typically designed to assist interns in not only acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills to be effective novice clinicians, but also often contain elements designed to foster socialization and begin developing a shared culture. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has had a substantial impact on trainees; a recent study indicated that medical students believe their preparation for intern year was unfavorably impacted by the pandemic.1 Many residency orientations have transitioned to the virtual environment, creating unique challenges and opportunities for innovation. While knowledge and skills can be taught via online didactics and virtual procedure labs, facilitating the assimilation of shared attitudes, values, and socialization presents a challenge within standard educational paradigms in virtual environments.We implemented a virtual 2-hour “museum tour” drawing upon established techniques from art-based pedagogies. Art-based education has had demonstrated effects on creating psychological safety, leveling traditional hierarchies, discovering a common language, and clarifying group values, while enhancing observation skills and critical thinking. Session objectives were to facilitate navigation of identity transitions, enhance observation and reflection skills, build collective values, and inspire a sense of belonging and community. We conducted the session 4 times (for each incoming intern class in July 2020 and July 2021 at 2 emergency medicine residency programs). Sessions were facilitated by 1 to 2 clinical faculty with training in art museum–based education, using images curated from online collections of local museums or murals in each program's corresponding city. Participants completed a presession art-mediated reflection on their hopes and concerns about starting residency. The session began with a personal responses tour, wherein participants choose and share an image that resonates with them from a curated virtual gallery, to create space for acknowledging existing identities and forging personal connections among the group. We subsequently facilitated an open-ended discussion of a single work of art using a structured facilitation approach (Visual Thinking Strategies) that encourages collaborative meaning-making and exploration of new perspectives. Next, we transitioned the context from personal to professional by asking participants to “diagnose” and “interview” a portrait as though it were a patient, allowing them to practice close-looking, reasoning, and reflection on biases. We concluded the session with an art-mediated group discussion of professional identity, which mirrored the discussion of personal identity at the start of the session.Eighty-one percent (44 of 54) of participants completed an institutional review board–exempt post-session evaluation. Residents reported that the activity allowed them to reflect on their identity, role as a physician, and biases, while getting to know their colleagues and cities better. One participant concluded, “I learned that I am nervous and excited about my new journey starting residency and it's ok to have anxiety and lean on my class/faculty…I hope to become the best physician I can be by growing collectively with my class and not being afraid to be vulnerable or wrong.” Free text responses commonly described how the session facilitated a shared experience within a supportive community, forged bonds with co-interns, and highlighted the importance of bringing an open-minded approach to interactions with patients and colleagues (Table). Participants said they enjoyed how the session created a safe space for self-reflection and vulnerability: “It made me think a lot about my internal bias and initial impressions of images. The discussion…with my classmates reminded me that I am not alone and in a safe space to discuss my fears about starting residency.” Almost all (91%, 40 of 44) agreed they wished to see more arts- and humanities-based sessions in residency education.The virtual “museum tour” represents a low-cost, replicable approach to easing the transition to residency while building a sense of community. It also represents a means to ensure humanities education is accessible to residents at orientation and beyond. This is especially important since the Association of American Medical Colleges has deemed the arts and humanities as integral to medical education and has identified a paucity of humanities curricula in graduate medical education. Faculty seeking to replicate this activity should partner with local museum educators and artists while ensuring that selected art originates from local institutions and is representative of diverse subjects, media, and artists.

Conceptualizing community translanguaging through a family literacy project

ABSTRACT This article examines translanguaging that occurs in and as a community. Expanding the notion of translanguaging, we conceptualize community translanguaging as collaborative meaning-making among children, their family and community members, and their collective semiotic resources. Using a family literacy project as the research site, this article showcases how participating families built (on) cultural and semiotic wealth beyond the individual’s and across diverse sign systems; this was demonstrated both in the process and as the product of family storybooks. Taking an ecological approach and drawing from the notions of spatial repertoires, assemblages, and distributed/collaborative agency, the analysis shows that languaging is inherently social, intertextual, multimodal, and contingent on the dynamic of the semiotic ecology. Families collaborated, cross-culturally, metalinguistically, multimodally, and across generations, to discuss, write, draw, and digitize their family stories. This expanded concept of community translanguaging counters the coded notion of language and resulting separatist paradigm of language education with pedagogical implications. Leveraging community repertoires provides new opportunities to create educational space(s) where more/various semiotic resources can be drawn upon to maximize creativity in teaching and learning. It also can engage families and communities from diverse backgrounds in ways that empower, rather than marginalize, diverse ways with words and beyond.

Navigating young children's friendship selection: implications for practice

ABSTRACT Friendship is of great concern to young children (Unicef 2011. The State of the World's Children. New York: United Nations Children's Fund). Research also suggests the positive outcomes friendships have on children's development, learning and well-being (Daniels, Tina, Danielle Quigley, Lisa Menard, and Linda Spence. 2010. “My Best Friend Always Did and Still Does Betray Me Constantly: Examining Relational and Physical Victimization Within a Dyadic Friendship Context.” Canadian Journal of School Psychology 25 (1): 70–83; Hedges, Helen, and Maria Cooper. 2017. “Collaborative Meaning-Making Uusing Video Footage: Teachers and Researchers Analyse Children's Working Theories About Friendship.” European Early Childhood Educational Research Journal 25 (3): 398–411). This paper highlights how young children select their friends and how practitioners might use these data to support children's friendship choices. It draws upon on a phenomenological study of 5 and 6 year olds during which data were collected through small world play interviews. Findings provide new insights into how children select their friends, including pre-selection, using a selection criteria and putting selection into action. This paper argues for the need to listen to children's friendship selections and consider potential implications for practice.

Tracing the Ephemeral: Mapping Young Children’s Running Games

Young children’s play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this article, multimodal transcription is used to examine a video recording of three and four-year-old children playing a chasing game in an English nursery school. Map-like transcripts, including an animated transcript, are used to document an instance of their play, drawing particular attention to placement in space over time. Whilst such moments of play may at first appear fleeting and chaotic, multimodal transcription reveals the communicative, creative and agentive capacities of young children in a multitude of forms. The transcripts highlight and make evident the ways in which roles and rules of play are carefully negotiated moment-by-moment in multiple modes. In this way, map-like multimodal transcripts are presented as devices to highlight meaning-making where it may not normally be looked for, seen or recognised.

Playground as meaning-making space: Multimodal making and re-making of meaning in the (virtual) playground

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic ‘meaning-makerspace’ where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of ‘makerspace as mindset’, where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from ‘Playing the Archive’, an ‘Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’ funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s–1960s, the project involved ethnographic research in two contemporary London primary school playgrounds, working with children aged 7–11 as co-researchers. A range of multimodal methods were used with the children to gain insights into their play, including iPads as filmmaking devices, chest-mounted GoPro cameras, voice recorders, drawings and mapping of playspaces. The research highlights that contemporary play exists not only in physical playgrounds, but increasingly in globalised ‘virtual playgrounds’ such as video games and social media. While these playworlds may at first appear separate, we identified ways in which virtual play intersects and inflects activity in the physical playground. We argue that play should therefore be seen as a series of ‘laminates’ drawing variously on media culture, folklore and the children’s everyday lived experiences, re-mixed and re-mediated inventively in the playground.

Arts-Informed Inquiry: Possibilities and Potential for Decolonising Methodology

This paper explores the potential and contextual difficulties of experimenting with arts-informed research as a methodology through a decolonizing transnational feminist lens in the context of Pakistan. The approach was applied as part of a study with community development workers to explore the theory and practice or praxis of empowerment in development discourse. Although challenging, I believe that the approach has the potential to make research more relevant, accessible, and community-centered, honouring diverse ways of knowing. It can facilitate critical collaborative meaning-making in every day contexts, which is important for community development, women’s movements, and feminist theorizing.

Project leaders in transition: Manifestations of cognitive and emotional capacity

This research contributes to a dearth of research into leadership that focuses explicitly on senior leaders of complex projects. It identifies five transitions that were seen as essential as these project leaders developed their capacity to lead, including transitions towards: orchestrating dialogue between the right people, at the right time, about the right issues; guiding collaborative meaning-making to align key stakeholders; drawing on practical wisdom and judgment to progress complex project challenges; developing a range of power sources, and sensing a pathway through power dynamics; and negotiating project success for key stakeholders based on a broad concept of value. Instead of merely seeing this as the development of new skills, we argue that these transitions are manifestations of an increase of a more deeply rooted capacity to deal with cognitive and emotional complexity. This difference matters as learning a new skill requires a very different approach to stepping up an order of constructive development. A constructive developmental perspective appears particularly helpful for understanding how senior project leaders of complex projects learn to deal with the relentless onslaught of challenges that their projects can bring.

Collaborative Meaning-Making and Dialogic Interactions in Critical Friends as Co-Authors

ABSTRACTFrom this year-long study, we offer new perspectives for being and becoming critical friends as co-authors. Informed by the Transactional Theory of Reading, a narrative view of experience and feminist communication theory, we positioned ourselves as collaborative, active meaning makers who could read and make meaning from our lived experiences and who could disrupt and problematize our narrative lives as teacher researchers. Through use of a collaborative conference protocol, we discovered what it means to be and to become critical friends who can co-author narrative understanding of self in the study. We have revisited the concept of critical friendship by repositioning our coauthoring as not just a resource for the completion of a better end product, but also as a way of being and knowing that enables an individual to revisit, reignite, disrupt, problematize and challenge one’s past and present storied lives.

Collaborative Action Research as a Tool for Teachers’ Professional Development: A Study in a Private Lebanese University

Collaborative action research (CAR) is gaining currency as a teacher professional development strategy. This paper reports on the collaborative action research undertaken by two university teachers from different disciplines: a teacher of English and a teacher of Cultural Studies (CS) aiming to introduce a greater variety of activities in a predominantly lecture-based CS classroom and increase student involvement in class through the employment of active learning techniques. In addition to its main focus, the research brought to light the importance of taking into consideration such aspects peculiar to CAR as challenges of collaborative meaning-making, tensions arising in the process ofcollaboration, power relations between the researchers, and the pole of differing teachers ' perceptions. Observations, teacher diaries, transcripts of reflective dialogues of the Ovo researchers, and student questionnaires were used to document and analyse the classroom practice and the outcomes of the instructional changes. The research shows that professional development cannot be reduced to the use of new instructional techniques in class. Changes in instructional practices involve deeper changes in the teacher 's beliefs and teaching philosophy, and thus require time.

Collaborative meaning-making using video footage: teachers and researchers analyse children’s working theories about friendship

ABSTRACTChildren represent their efforts to make sense of their social worlds in various ways. Having, making and being friends are common foci of children’s interactions and identity development. These efforts may become visible through analysing video-recorded snippets of children’s play. In particular, repeated viewing of episodes of children’s interactions with each other may encourage and prompt adult reflection, analysis, meaning-making, and action. This article reports findings from a qualitative study in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, where children’s working theories (thinking) is a key outcome of the early childhood curriculum. We analyse two audiovisual examples of children’s thinking (working theories) about friendship and discuss subsequent actions and implications for supporting children’s social competence. We argue that research and teaching teams who engage in reflection and dialogue using video footage may create successful learning communities that foster children’s working theory development.

Collaborative Meaning-making in Arts-based Research: Data Interpretation with an Artist, a Physician, and an Art Historian

This article discusses collaborative meaning-making in arts-based research. It introduces a project in which an artist-researcher invited a physician and an art historian to help to interpret medical students’ hand-made drawings of the female reproductive system and the conception process. The authors elaborated on different viewpoints and modes of talking during the data interpretation, and discussed how these were founded on, and disrupted, their professional roles in various ways. The article discusses how these different viewpoints about the students’ drawings complemented or conflicted with each other. It also discusses the use of associations and humor in these interpretations, and the experiences of emotional discomfort during the process.

Collaborative meaning-making in delusional talk as a search for mutual manifestness

Delusional talk may pose predictable challenges to the hearer in identifying what the speaker intended to communicate, particularly if the speaker presumes the hearer to have access to assumptions based on delusional content. This paper explores delusional talk between participants with schizophrenia and an interlocutor, analysing how meaning is negotiated through achieving access to assumptions that are not initially manifest to the conversation partner. A Relevance Theory approach is taken to the analysis of the data revealing two strategies used by the interlocutor to negotiate meaning. The Relevance Theory notion of mutual manifestness emerges as a powerful explanatory factor. The pursuit of mutual manifestness and a mutual cognitive environment explains the interlocutor’s meaning negotiation attempts, allowing the communicators to ‘align’ and engage in conversation. The interlocutor is also exposed as seeking to exit the delusional talk by moving towards topics which are based on assumptions which are clearly mutually manifest.

Paying Attention to Gesture when Students Talk Chemistry: Interactional Resources for Responsive Teaching

When students share and explore chemistry ideas with others, they use gestures and their bodies to perform their understanding. As a publicly visible, spatio–dynamic medium of expression, gestures and the body provide productive resources for imagining the submicroscopic, three-dimensional, and dynamic phenomena of chemistry together. In this paper, we analyze the role of gestures and the body as interactional resources in interactive spaces for collaborative meaning-making in chemistry. With our moment-by-moment analysis of video-recorded interviews, we demonstrate how creating spaces for, attending to, and interacting with students’ gestures and bodily performances generate opportunities for learning. Implications for teaching and assessment that are responsive to students’ ideas in chemistry are discussed.

Teachers’ professional development as enabling and constraining dialogue and meaning-making in Education for All

This article provides reflections on the articles in this special issue on Education for All. The paper draws on the Nordic educational tradition, especially the manner in which action research can function as an arena and means for teachers’ professional development. Both the cases presented and the theoretical perspectives used, educative praxis and practice architectures, are related to and discussed in terms of dialogue and collaborative meaning-making, which are understood as the core practices of the Nordic tradition of action research. By doing this, the scope of teachers’ professional action and development expands, and comes to encompass various personal and particularly political aspects, immanent to education practices. Thereby teachers’ professional practice and development, especially when it comes to Education for All, are to take place on arenas and within practices characterised by respect, reciprocity and shared responsibilities.