Joshua Danish » Activity Theory

Presentation: The Primary Interactive Pathway: An Analytic Tool For Examining and Comparing Students’ Representational Activities

Joshua — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:12:44 +0000

Danish, J. A. (2010). The Primary Interactive Pathway: An Analytic Tool For Examining and Comparing Students’ Representational Activities. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Presentation: ‘Negotiating the “Relevant” in Culturally Relevant Mathematics’

Joshua — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:51:13 +0000

Enyedy, N., Danish, J. A., Fields, D., Kao, L., Hart, M., & Mukhopadhyay, S. (2009). Negotiating the “Relevant” in Culturally Relevant Mathematics: The Community Mapping Project. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Presentation: CHAT & Actor Network Theory (ANT) Perspectives on How Kindergarten and First Grade Students Co-Construct Science in Action

Joshua — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:30:51 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2008). CHAT & Actor Network Theory (ANT) Perspectives on How Kindergarten and First Grade Students Co-Construct Science in Action. Paper presented at the ISCAR.

Paper: ‘Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations’

Joshua — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:45:51 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2007). Negotiated Representational Mediators: How Young Children Decide What to Include in Their Science Representations. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we synthesize two bodies of work related to students’ representational activities: the notions of meta-representational competence and representation as a form of practice. We report on video analyses of kindergarten and first-grade students as they create representations of pollination in a science classroom, as well as summarize results from interviews regarding the design choices that they made. Analysis of the semistructured pre- and postinterviews reveals that students attend to the content domain, local activity, and their personal preferences when evaluating representations. Analysis of video case studies that followed the students as they created their representations further reveals several key mediators of the students’ representational activities, including other students, task constraints, the teacher, and local norms for what constituted a ‘good representation.’ In addition, the data show that these norms shifted over time as new content was covered in the class, and were appropriated in interaction with other students. Finally, both sets of analyses reveal that students often face competing constraints when creating their representations, and resolve these constraints through a complex set of negotiations.

Paper: ‘Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations’

Joshua — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 01:45:02 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2006). Unpacking the Mediation of Invented Representations. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Bloomington, IN. Science Education, 91(1), 1-35.

ABSTRACT: In this paper we compare two contexts where students were inventing representations; a 2nd and 3rd grade classroom creating a shared representation, and a kindergarten and 1st grade classroom creating unique representations. Contexts for developing shared representations are those in which a class attempts to jointly construct one representational form to solve a given problem. In contrast, contexts for inventing unique representations emphasize individual representational choices with no explicit attempt to create a shared representational form. Drawing on and comparing data from two recent studies we use the Negotiated Representational Mediators (NeRM) framework to analyze young children’s activities oriented towards the production, evaluation, and modification of representational forms. Both cultural contexts lead to a convergence toward normative representations as well as continuing to diverge in the form of individual acts of creativity and agency. We argue that despite these similar trends, the different contexts support unique aspects of representational practice.

Presentation: Mediation of Students’ Ideas Through Representational Activities

Joshua — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 23:24:32 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2005). Mediation of Students’ Ideas Through Representational Activities. Paper presented at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research, Sevilla Spain.

Presentation: ‘The Dialectic of Task Based Communities and Communities of Practice’

Joshua — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:03:59 +0000

Danish, J. A., & Enyedy, N. (2005). The Dialectic of Task Based Communities and Communities of Practice. Paper presented at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research, Sevilla Spain.

Presentation: ‘At the intersection of classroom culture and culturally relevant pedagogy: What students’ arguments around maps reveal about how to increase student achievement within our diverse society’

Joshua — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:46:30 +0000

Enyedy, N., & Danish, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of classroom culture and culturally relevant pedagogy: What students’ arguments around maps reveal about how to increase student achievement within our diverse society. Paper presented at the International Society for Culture and Activity Research, Sevilla Spain.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes data from the Community Mapping Project (CMP), a set of activities within a summer seminar for high school students. CMP was designed based on the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy to create conditions where students would appropriate statistics as a tool for identifying and describing inequities that face their communities. An analysis of pre- and post- assessments revealed measurable improvement in the students’ statistics understanding. However, fine-grained analysis of the classroom video revealed several tensions that arose between the three social justice goals of the curriculum and the instructional objective of learning statistics. This paper uses activity theory as a lens to identify and describe these tensions.