Discursive Interaction and Construction of Science in the Classroom

In this chapter, we aim to study several scientific knowledge co-construction processes in the natural context of the school classroom. Sociocultural orientation studies, with increasingly greater consensus in the field of educational research, argue that meaningful learning not only depends on the subjects’ prior ideas and their spontaneous evolution, as psychogenetic research has shown, but on the interactive sociocultural context in which it occurs (Bruner, 1984; Vygotsky, 1987; Lave, 2011). Therefore, to understand how science is taught and learned in the classroom, it is necessary to study the processes of constructing a shared understanding (Edwards & Mercer, 1988) through the discourses between teachers and students that are characteristic of the school situation in classrooms. I focus this study on some of the most important features to stablishing the scientific facts as it is the “empirical evidence” and how it is discursively stablished from an interpretative perspective of the participants in the science classroom work. The rethorical structure of the discoursive interaction between the teachers and the students is also an interesting characteristic where we can understand the participants construction of critical thinking and an explanatory attitude in relation to scientific topic. To achieve this study, I adopt an ethnographic perspective, which, from a qualitative and interpretive position, aims to understand the logic of the actors (teachers and students) in the educational processes, thus avoiding an evaluative stance (Lave, 2011).