Students’ deviations from a learning task: An activity-theoretical analysis

International Journal of Educational Research 70 (2015) 31–46

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Students’ deviations from a learning task: An activity-theoretical analysis Antti Rajala 1,*, Annalisa Sannino 1 University of Helsinki, Finland

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 17 May 2014 Received in revised form 21 October 2014 Accepted 28 November 2014 Available online

Students’ interpretations of school tasks that deviate from teachers’ intended assignments have seldom been the object of empirical analyses, though disregarding such interpretations can seriously hinder attempts to understand how students relate to assigned tasks. This study utilized the activity-theoretical concept of personal sense for disclosing students’ deviations from an inquiry-learning task extending over seven lessons in a Finnish primary school classroom. The study suggests a multi-layered conceptualization of disruptive and productive deviations from the assigned task. The conceptualization focuses on students’ connections to the broader contexts of the activities they inhabit and to the socio-emotional aspects of the task. The paper concludes with reflections about the pedagogical implications for supporting students to elaborate their personal sense of school tasks. ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Task interpretation Activity theory Personal sense Classroom interaction

1. Introduction Students’ interpretations of school tasks that deviate from teachers’ intended assignments have seldom been the object of empirical analyses. Yet, a series of pioneering studies showed that disregarding these deviating interpretations can seriously hinder attempts to understand how students relate to assigned tasks (Hallde´n, 1982; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Sa¨ljo¨ & Wyndhamn, 1993). These studies indicated that institutional settings strongly influence how students interpret and accomplish tasks. Students interpret a task differently depending on whether it is presented in a school lesson, a one-to-one tutorial, or an after-school club (Newman et al., 1989) – or in a mathematics or social sciences lesson (Sa¨ljo¨ & Wyndhamn, 1993). Additionally, students’ interpretations of tasks can restrict their conceptual engagement. For example, upper secondary school students’ interpretations of discovery learning tasks predominantly involved following procedures (Hallde´n, 1982). As a result, the students became more preoccupied with the way the school system works, rather than with the actual learning goals. Finally, these pioneering studies pointed at multiple student interpretations that did not correspond with the teacher’s understanding of and intention for the tasks. For example, when fourth-grade students were tasked with mixing all possible pairings from a set of four chemicals, some engaged primarily in describing fascinating chemical reactions instead of finding the pairs (Newman et al., 1989). Thus, task instructions were not sufficient for a task to be performed as intended and often students were seen as ‘‘’doing the task poorly’, when they [were] in fact not doing it at all’’ (Newman et al., 1989, p. 141).

* Corresponding author at: Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 9, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. Tel.: +358 044 5454797; fax: +358 09 19129611. E-mail address: antti.rajala@helsinki.fi (A. Rajala). 1 Both authors have contributed equally to the analysis and writing of the article. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2014.11.003 0883-0355/ß 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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More recent studies have conceptualized students’ interpretations of tasks with the help of the concept of framing (Engle, Nguyen, & Mendelson, 2011; Engle, 2006; Lantz-Anderson, Linderoth, & Sa¨ljo¨, 2009). While these studies help with the understanding of how students interpret core epistemic aspects of tasks, they do not specifically focus on the extent to which these interpretations deviate from the teachers’ intentions and the important contextual and socio-emotional resources for learning involved in these deviations. Our study utilized the activity-theoretical concept of personal sense in order to disclose students’ deviations from an inquiry-learning task extending over a series of lessons in a primary school classroom in Finland. The study suggests a multilayered conceptualization of deviations from the assigned task, which involve productive interpretive dynamics. While deviations can be seen as mere disruptions of engagement in the core epistemic aspects of a task, they can also be an entry into the ways in which students personally understand the task. By paying attention to students’ personal sense of a task, we can gain insight into the connections the students make between the given task and the broader contexts and motives of the activities they inhabit, and into the socio-emotional aspects of a task. The study was guided by the following research questions:  To what extent do students deviate from the teacher’s intentions for the given task?  How do deviations convey the personal sense students make of the given task?  What contextual and socio-emotional resources for learning are mobilized through these deviations and through the elaboration of personal sense involved in them? This paper begins by introducing the concept of personal sense as a lens to study students’ interpretations of school tasks that deviate from teachers’ intended assignments. We then present the design of the study and the task assigned to the students. A section devoted to the results follows, reporting a multi-layered conceptualization of the deviations observed in the study. We conclude by discussing the results and their contribution to research on students’ task interpretations, and by elaborating on the pedagogical implications of these results. 2. Personal sense and deviations Students interpret a task by developing their personal sense of it in the course of interactions with the teacher, the institutional context, the materials, and other students. A personal sense of a task, however, primarily resonates with the students’ lives, connecting the task to their realities and relationships. When facing a school task, students largely rely on well-established meanings (Leont’ev, 1981). Meanings are generalized senses of ideas or concepts that comprise accumulated experiences in society and are independent of the students’ lives. The curriculum, textbooks and the teacher’s voice are key sources of such meanings. However, subjectively, meanings exist only in relation to one’s personal sense, and to fully engage with the meaning of a task, students have to develop their personal sense of it (Leont’ev, 1978). If the task does not resonate with students’ lives, they probably interpret it as uninteresting, irrelevant, or even nonsensical. Such ‘‘senses . . . have lost their real life basis and for this reason sometimes agonizingly discredit themselves in the consciousness of the subject’’ (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 94). Students may thus perform poorly or disruptively if tasks are detached from their real life relevance. Ultimately, the elaboration of the personal sense of a task can be a laborious process for which material and social support is necessary (Sannino, 2008). Elaboration of personal sense of a task is constrained and influenced by the social structure of school (Engestro¨m, 1998). School activity is an object-oriented, collective, and systemic formation with internal structure and dynamics. Texts become the object of school activity when students merely reproduce them (Engestro¨m, 1987). Consequently, tasks tend to be disconnected from students’ experiences and knowledge outside the school and remain detached from their personal sense. A personal sense is genuinely nourished when the contents of learning become students’ tools for orienting in the world. Multiple scripts of actions and interpretive resources emerge and are played out in classrooms (Gutierrez, Rhymes, & Larson, 1999). While the dominant official script governed by the teacher and the institutional setting defines what counts as knowledge, students also co-construct this knowledge. The primary emphasis on meanings inscribed in the teacher’s speech, curriculum, and study materials often leads to students engaging in parallel scripts. These are deeply imbued with students’ personal sense and highlight important connections between the epistemic aspects of the school tasks and students’ lives outside of school. These parallel scripts, however, are often seen as disruptive deviations from the official script and are largely dismissed as marginal attempts to construct personal sense. Moreover, the motivational sphere (Engestro¨m, 1998) of the systemic organization of a school activity contributes to the ways in which students interpret tasks. The motivational sphere includes ‘‘grading and testing practices, patterning and punctuation of time, uses (not contents) of textbooks, bounding and use of the physical space, grouping of students, patterns of discipline and control, connections to the world outside the school, and the interaction among teachers as well as between teachers and parents’’ (Engestro¨m, 1998, p. 76). Time, for instance, is standardized in weekly schedules, and activities happen in well-circumscribed spaces within specified time segments (Lemke, 2004). The motivational sphere is constitutive of students’ educational experience and contributes to the ways in which students make sense of school tasks. In short, students’ interpretations of assigned school tasks are situated in and interact with the institutional context of a school activity as well as the multiple contexts of their lives. Deviations from the teachers’ intended assignments can thus be depicted with a nested structure of layers of deviations, represented in Fig. 1.

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]

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Fig. 1. Three layers of deviations.

The two outer layers of deviations in Fig. 1 constitute a contextual grounding for the interpretive work on the epistemic contents of the task represented by the innermost layer. The three layers should not be seen as separate but as interacting with, and sometimes melting into, one another. Layer 1 represents deviations that occur when students incorporate contents from their non-school activities into the classroom. Students are simultaneous participants in multiple activities of their everyday life and they may deviate from an assigned task to engage in non-school activities, such as exchanging stickers. Layer 2 concerns deviations related to the motivational sphere and involves mismatches between the task and the functional arrangements on which the school activity relies, such as delays when students have to wait for the teacher’s attention (Jackson, 1968). Usually these deviations result in simple adjustments, but they create an expansive potential for the questioning and reorganization of the given practices (Engestro¨m, 1987). Layer 3 represents a more direct interpretive engagement of personal sense with the epistemic contents of the task, but in ways that can also divert from a straightforward adherence to the assigned task. In fact, a true interpretation of a task is inherently a deviant process in which students attempt to elaborate their own personal senses of the task. These personal senses are always original and cannot exactly correspond with the teacher’s intentions. 3. Method The research setting is a culturally and socio-economically heterogeneous classroom with seventeen fourth graders and their teacher (the first author) in the metropolitan area of Helsinki. The data were collected in a semester-long learning project about Finnish wild animals, the Animal Project. In the project, the teacher began to introduce student inquiry into his instruction. The data were recorded by one video camera focused on a student group, with a microphone placed on the students’ table. Worksheets and other materials produced by the students were collected. The last phase of the project was selected for analysis because it comprised a prolonged learning task with same participants cooperating over seven consecutive lessons. The selected data focus on the social interactions of two focal students, Samira (immigrant background, low test performance, Finnish language skills below the native level) and Vilma (Finnish background, average test performance).1 They were selected because we expected variability in their interpretations of the task and open negotiations about different interpretations. The interactions between the students and their teacher were analyzed with the help of interlocutionary logic (Sannino, 2008; Trognon, 1999) and interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Interlocutionary logic identifies the pragmatic and cognitive functions of individual discursive contributions as they evolve through the subsequent speaking turns of a conversation. This method allowed us to trace participants’ interpretations from their conversations. Interaction analysis provided for capturing the interplay between verbal and non-verbal actions. The analysis involved three steps.

1

All names are pseudonyms. Informed consent was obtained from all research participants and from the students’ parents.

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First, we described all interactions of the focal students in common sense terms. Task-related talk was transcribed verbatim and translated from Finnish into English. Standard punctuation was added for readability. We then segmented the transcripts into topical episodes based on the substantive contents of the talk and non-verbal conduct. Simultaneously occurring episodes were considered to be separate episodes. Second, we identified all the deviations from the official script in the video and the transcripts. The official script consisted of episodes of students working to accomplish the task as formulated by the teacher. Episodes that featured the delivery of task instructions and preparations for the task were also included. Deviations from the assigned task were defined as actions and interactions that interfered or conflicted with the focal students’ work on the task or that diverted from straightforward adherence to the assigned task. We analyzed the talk and actions in these episodes in terms of how they contributed to the accomplishment of the task. We also systematically compared the contents of the students’ worksheets to the contents of the textbooks. Third, the deviations were organized into the three layers depicted in Fig. 1 as follows. Layer 1 deviations involved students’ talk and actions that connected to the multiple non-school activities that they inhabited. Through the parallel scripts, the students thus brought the wider contexts of their lives into the classroom. Layer 2 deviations concerned the functional arrangements and structural components of the classroom activity on which the engagement with task relied. Layer 3 involved the interpretive engagement with the task, that is, the attempts to make sense of the task or actions that hampered these attempts. Analytical subcategories within each of the three layers and the interpretations of excerpts were iteratively created, revised and refined in repeated critical discussions between the two authors. 4. The task The teacher had two main instructional intentions for the Animal Project. The first intention, fostering personal sensemaking, involved harnessing the students’ interests and local knowledge (Kumpulainen et al., 2010; Matusov, 2009). The second intention, fostering scientific sense-making, involved connecting the students’ learning to big ideas of Biology, such as biodiversity and evolution. For this purpose, the teacher adapted ideas from the pedagogical model of Progressive Inquiry, which imitates practices of scientific research communities, and students are guided to participate in ‘‘extended processes of pursuing their own questions and explanations’’ (Hakkarainen, 2003, p. 1073). Accordingly, the project started with the students formulating research questions about animals guided by the teacher, resulting in two main questions: How do animals survive? How have animals developed? The students subsequently formulated their own explanations as solutions to their questions. To refine their understanding of the topic, they used textbooks and the knowledge acquired from experts during fieldtrips. The intermediate results were shared and discussed with the class. The selected project phase comprised seven lessons (Table 1). The students worked in small groups or pairs, Samira and Vilma forming a pair. Each group could choose from four alternative questions or invent their own question if they could justify its relevance for the project’s main questions. Vilma and Samira pursued two questions over the lessons, both being variations of one of the teacher’s alternatives: ‘‘How do animals take care of their babies?’’ They studied first mammals and then birds. The teacher felt responsibility for the students’ learning of contents specified in the curriculum. Thus, he had the partly conflicting goals of both promoting students’ inquiry based on their own interests and ensuring that they would learn enough school-based knowledge in the given time (McNeil, 1986). He had prepared in advance textbooks and other reading materials for the students that contained answers to the proposed research questions and that were easy enough for the students to read and understand. The teacher believed that he could promote the students’ sense-making through specifying procedures and actions for the students to follow. These included using concept maps, explaining the passages found in the textbooks in students’ own words, using varied knowledge sources in talk, and taking care that everyone in the group participated equally. While the students worked, the teacher moved across the small groups occasionally guiding them, mainly focusing on adherence to the correct procedures.

Table 1 The analyzed lessons. Lesson

Date

Brief description of the contents of the lesson

Length of video

1.

Nov 21, 2008

45 min

2. 3.

Nov 26, 2008 Dec 3, 2008

4. 5.

Dec Dec Dec Dec Dec

The teacher announced the new project phase and formulated its task. The task involved the following components: choosing the research question; writing down prior knowledge about the topic; starting to investigate the topic from textbooks; the use of personal knowledge and experiences was encouraged (half class) The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks; (half class) The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks; choosing a new question; (half class) The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks; (half class) The inquiry continues; investigating textbooks; (half class) Reproduce the results as a poster Sharing the results with other students; (whole class) Sharing the results continued; (whole class)

6. 7.

10, 12, 12, 16, 16,

2008 2008 2008 2008 2008

44 min 48 min 41 min 44 min Could not be recorded 43 min 32 min

[(Fig._2)TD$IG]

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Fig. 2. The travel of meanings from the textbook to the worksheets and poster.

5. Results Neither of the teacher’s two instructional intentions were successfully translated into the students’ practice. Instead, Vilma and Samira enacted the official script in terms of reproducing meanings from the textbooks to their worksheets and poster, which were exact copies or only slight rewordings of the corresponding passages in the textbooks. Fig. 2 illuminates this with the help of an example. In Fig. 2, the highlighted exemplary sentence from the textbook translates as ‘‘Lynx mother takes care of its babies for about a year and teaches them hunting skills which improve as the babies play’’. The corresponding sentence in the students’ worksheet and the poster reads: ‘‘Lynx mother takes care of its babies for about a year and teaches them hunting skills which improve in their play’’. The outcome of the students’ work is a nearly perfect reproduction of the textbook passage. Our analysis aims at accounting for the interpretive dynamics that resulted in this kind of difficulties in the students’ elaboration of their personal sense of the task. We will do this by means of a detailed examination of the three layers of deviations. 5.1. Layer 1: parallel scripts Through parallel scripts, the students’ actions were connected to the wider contexts of their lives. Parallel scripts consisted of the students’ engagement in off-task actions and talk that did not contribute to the accomplishment of the task. These deviations included, for example, exchanging stickers, managing interpersonal relationships, or non-task-related talk about texts and pictures. The following excerpt2 illustrates parallel scripts.

2 (0.5) Measured pause(s) (.) Pause, less than 0.3 s [Overlapping utterances Emphasis = Latching of turns˚ Quiet voice˚ £Smiling voice£: Sound stretched " Raised pitch Wor-Unfinished word (—) Unclear words.

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[TD$INLE]

Excerpt 1, Lesson 1 Transcript

Non-Verbal actions on video

172 Samira: hehhee hehe tell the boys 173 Vilma: eh (0.9) °I don’t want to.° [I don’t174 Samira: [Tell them it is funny 175 Vilma: =It is disgust176 Esa: Tell us

(176) Esa sits at another desk.

177 Samira: =Tell it as a joke (0.2) it is not disgust- [he heh (0.2) but laughable 178 Vilma:

[he heh

(4.3)

(179) Teacher rises from another desk. Vilma looks at the teacher, stops laughing, and starts to write on the worksheet. Samira follows the teacher’s movement with her

[TD$INLE] gaze until the teacher has passed by. 180 Samira: °you just tell them° (0.6) or will I tell them?

The excerpt began with Samira attempting to persuade Vilma to tell a funny story to two other students sitting nearby (lines 172–178). Vilma and Samira abruptly stopped their parallel script when the teacher approached (line 179). The gap in the verbal interaction and the perfect synchrony of the students’ and teacher’s non-verbal movements indicates that the students deliberately hid their parallel script from the teacher. When the teacher passed by, Samira continued to persuade Vilma, but with a lowered voice. Parallel scripts occurred consistently (Table 2), indicating only a partial engagement with the task. This deviating to engagements other than the given task implied sense-making, that is, interpreting the task as uninteresting. When the students were asked to write their own explanations in Lesson 1, parallel scripts occurred markedly more than during the other lessons. Paradoxically, the figures indicate a larger disengagement from the task despite the emphasis on the students’ own ideas in Lesson 1. 5.2. Layer 2: motivational sphere In and through the deviations of motivational sphere the students’ task interpretations interacted with various components of the institutional context. Table 2 Occurrences of Layer 1 deviations across the lessons.

Parallel scripts

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Total

23

7

6

8

10

9

5

68

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Time constraints were the most pervasive type of deviations of the motivational sphere. These involved interruptions, negotiations, and disputes at the boundaries of time segments. Unexpectedly, temporal delays were infrequent (cf. Jackson, 1968). The analysis indicates a tension between the teacher’s expectations and what the students actually achieved within the time constraints. The teacher had assigned more Animal Project lessons in the weekly schedule than was usual, and he sometimes asked the students to complete their work during recess time. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that Vilma’s personal sense of the task was largely restricted to unquestioning compliance with the teacher’s expectations. At the end of Lesson 3, Vilma proposed to Samira that they pretend reading to get themselves to the end of the hour. Otherwise, she often persisted in continuing the task when the lesson time was running out despite Samira’s protests and consented to the teacher’s requests to complete their work during the recess. Samira’s compliance did not extend to continuing working during the recess. Evaluation involved episodes of evaluative statements of the students’ performances. These were predominantly peer evaluations of handwriting, spelling, or pronunciation. Typically Samira’s peers negatively evaluated her spelling and handwriting. The teacher appeared to deliberately refrain from evaluating the students’ work, and neither did the students talk much about the teacher’s evaluation. The teacher’s rare evaluations mostly emphasized correct task procedures. Discipline involved the teacher’s reactive disciplinary actions in response to inappropriate student actions. The teacher disciplined students to keep them on-task and to prevent teasing. A mild reproach for the students to stop talking or to return to the task from their parallel scripts occurred most often. The teacher allowed the students’ parallel scripts to some extent but did not tolerate defiant actions that challenged the official script. The severest disciplinary actions were making the students work overtime or threats of detention. Placement in space involved interruptions and disputes regarding the material environment. Most typically these disputes erupted from competition for seats, as a consequence of the teacher’s regular reassignment of new seats and groupings to serve the pedagogical activities. Writing involved problems and disputes concerning the process of writing or the usage or availability of writing equipment or worksheets. The teacher’s requirement of equal contributions from the students conflicted with how they themselves liked to organize their work. These deviations mainly stemmed from Samira’s refusal to take turns in writing on a shared worksheet. She maintained that her handwriting was ugly. When the students had individual worksheets in the last two lessons, Samira did not complain about having to write. Finally, reading materials involved problems in the usage and availability of the textbooks. Samira’s confusions about the amount of reading were the main issue. The teacher’s guidance regarding the reading materials varied greatly across the lessons, ranging from dictating a specific page to recommending choices of books. This variability appeared to frustrate Samira. Table 3 shows an overview of the Layer 2 deviations. While these included trivial incidents stemming from the condition of sharing the same space and time in a classroom, our analysis indicates that the new learning practices added complexity to the organization of the learning and teaching that the students were already used to. This complexity appeared to confuse Samira and diverted the students from the interpretive engagement with the epistemic content of the task to dealing with the conflicts and disruptions in the flow of activity. Moreover, despite the introduction of new practices of teaching and learning, old practices appeared to mobilize restrictive personal senses of the task in the students. Finally, in contrast to Jackson’s (1968) findings regarding the extensive amount of time that students spend waiting for a teacher’s attention, the students in this case were in a constant hurry to complete their worksheets – despite the fact that the teacher had extended the time allowed for the project and for individual lessons. 5.3. Layer 3: attempts at reinterpretation of the task The deviations of this layer involved students’ interpretive engagement with the epistemic contents of the task. Our analysis of these deviations illustrates the contested and conflictual nature of the elaboration of personal sense of the task. At this layer both expansive and restrictive interpretive dynamics were played out. To highlight these dynamics, we grouped the subcategories of this layer into two groups that are presented in the following. 5.3.1. Uncertainties, restrictions, and workarounds The first group of deviations at Layer 3 featured restrictive dynamics of students’ task interpretations that was counterproductive for accomplishing the task. Table 3 Occurrences of Layer 2 deviations across the lessons.

Time constraints Evaluation Discipline Placement in space Writing Reading materials

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Total

7 5 8 4 2 1

4 3 3

4 8 3 6 7 1

6 4 1

3 4

14 1 9 3

5 6 7 4

2

1

43 31 31 22 18 15

4 1

2 7

5 3 2

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Uncertainty in interpreting the task involved uncertainties regarding what action to take. Almost all of these concerned the confusions Samira expressed by asking Vilma what to do next. Samira also often expressed frustration about these uncertainties. A typical example is from Lesson 2: Do I have to read about ways of living? ‘‘Have to,’’ Samira’s usual choice of modality for relating to the task, indicates an interpretation of it as an imposed set of actions. Imposed authoritative interpretation of the task involved episodes in which the teacher interfered with students’ sensemaking attempts by ignoring or silencing students’ own approaches to the task or their counter-arguments. It also included episodes in which the students contained each other’s sense-making by referring to the authority of the teacher or the textbook. In the excerpt below the teacher had told Vilma and Samira to make a concept map instead of a regularly written text, as he had instructed when the lesson began. He did not give any reasons for preferring a concept map, however, nor did he inquire about the students’ reasons for writing a regular text in the first place. The excerpt starts when the teacher had just left. Vilma was erasing their text from the worksheet and started to design the concept map. [TD$INLE]

Excerpt 2, Lesson 2 Transcript

Non-Verbal actions

77 Vilma: We have to erase this (0.8) or no (1.0) We don’t need to if we do like this (1.5) um (2.4) lynx (0.6) or yes (0.3) coz we can- (.) we can like put here like lynx lives about (1.6) 78 Samira: Yea 79 Vilma: Lynxes live about (0.6) fourteen dash seventeen year olds.

[TD$INLE]

80 Samira: Yea. 81 Vilma: It will be like a concept(map)

(81) Vilma erases the writings in

(0.5) coz that is what we were told to

the worksheet.

do. 82 Samira: =Why do we have to do the concept map? (0.6) 83 Vilma: I don’t know. The teach told us. (0.4) Now I took the mammals away. (1.0)

The excerpt begins with Vilma designing the concept map (lines 77–81). At first, Samira approved of Vilma’s suggestions, responding minimally (lines 78, 80); but then she asked about the reasons for doing a concept map (line 82). Samira’s question could have created a dialogic space for elaboration of the students’ personal sense of the task. Vilma, however, ignored Samira’s initiative by stating that she did not know why and that the teacher just told them to do so (line 83). After this, Vilma simply continued designing the concept map. Thus, both the teacher and the students imposed authoritatively determined procedures on the task that hampered the students’ sense-making attempts. The teacher never authoritatively interfered with the interpretation of contents, but the students sometimes stopped each other’s sense-making attempts on the contents by referring to an authoritative knowledge source. The students also cheated; that is, intentionally transgressed the rules secretly. They cheated to avoid the teacher’s instructions to write the passages from the textbook in their own words or not to read from their notes when sharing their findings with peers. Although these instructions were designed to foster students’ sense-making, the students’

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interpretation of them as rules made them counterproductive. In cheating, the students secretly molded their interpretation of the task to make more sense to them. 5.3.2. Attempts at deliberate sense making The second group of deviations in Layer 3 featured potentially productive and expansive interpretive dynamics. Articulating a new personal sense of the task involved episodes in which students invested the given meanings with a new personal sense. In and through these deviations, the students’ wider life contexts and lived experiences intersected with their work on the task. For the purpose of clear presentation of the findings, this subcategory of deviations was categorized as Layer 3 despite the productive interaction and overlap with Layer 1. Through these deviations the students related the meanings of the task to their experience or local knowledge, engaged in playful interactions while working on the task, illustrated the meanings with bodily enactments, or raised new questions. They also took emotional stances toward the meanings, conveying pleasure, disgust, fear, or wonderment. For example, Samira approached the life of wild animals negatively or with caution. She asked Vilma whether lynx is evil or bear is dangerous. Vilma and Samira also talked much about cuteness or loveliness of mammals and gave special regard to qualities that were human-like or related to cultural practices at home, such as associating a picture of baby bear to teddy bears. Their everyday classification of animals as ‘‘cute’’ and ‘‘disgusting’’ appeared to sustain their gender-related social identities. Similarly, some of the boys recurrently gave positive attention to pictures featuring an element of danger. Yet, they only rarely elaborated on these connections to the task. The following excerpt, in which Vilma and Samira explored their textbook searching for the next animals for their inquiry, illustrates a deviation of this subcategory. [TD$INLE]

Excerpt 3, Lesson 2 Transcript

Non-Verbal actions

197 Vilma: The seal gets (0.7) its first

(197) Vilma points the place in the

(0.3) seal pup not before °four dash°

book.

(0.3) no fi:ve dash seven years old. (0.4) Do you know what’s a seal pup? (0.7) 198 Samira shakes her head. 199 Vilma: It’s like (0.2) this (0.2) or the baby seal (1.4) [then yeah because this is a seal pup 200 Samira:

[five dash seven

year old (0.2) like ↑so: (0.4) like (0.5) ↑like (0.5) ↑way (1.0) ↑too young (1.6) 201 Vilma: well but it is [like this 202 Samira:

[It is perhaps

(202) Vilma reads while Samira is

almost (0.3) new born. (1.6) When I was

talking, giving only one quick

five (0.4) my lil sister is five years

glance at Samira. Samira gestures

and look how small she is (1.0) I mean

lively.

six years (0.5) Soon she will be seven but look how small she is. (4.0) 203 Vilma: Haa:: (0.6) hhaa (0.8) well

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[TD$INLE] (0.6) 204 Samira: Well let’s write it down then. (0.3) 205 Vilma: No: °no no no no° (0.5) I

(205) Vilma turns the page.

don’t want that °anymore°. (1.9)

Vilma first read and explained a passage about the age when seals give birth (lines 197–199). In response, Samira wondered the young age of their reproduction. Without elaborating on Samira’s concern, Vilma stated that seals simply are like this. Samira interrupted Vilma to compare seals to herself and to her sister at the same age (line 202). Samira’s emphatic tone of voice and lively gesturing indicate her emotional engagement. There was not sufficient allowance, however, for the elaboration of the connections to Samira’s lived experience. Vilma treated Samira’s contribution as irrelevant and showed only marginal interest in Samira’s talk (line 202). When Samira suggested writing about seal pups, Vilma said she was not interested in seals any longer and turned the page to study other animals (lines 204–205). Contesting an authoritative interpretation of the task involved questioning the authoritative meanings or procedures presented in the teacher’s or peers’ talk, or reading materials. An example was shown above when Samira asked Vilma the reasons for making a concept map (Excerpt 2). As in the example, the students’ questioning was often silenced and sometimes simply ignored. Furthermore, challenging the teacher’s authority in his presence presented an insurmountable barrier for Vilma and Samira. Vilma did not contest the authoritative interpretations of the task at all, and Samira did this only when the teacher was not present. Enacting conflicting interpretations of the task involved a student expressing an interpretation of the procedures or meanings of the task that conflicted with the other students’ interpretations. The difference from the previous subcategory is that the students did not question the authority as such but the correctness of the interpretation. Enacting conflicting interpretations made visible the inherent ambiguity of the teacher’s formulation of the task and of the contents of reading materials. All three of the above types of attempts at sense-making had the potential to engender students’ elaboration of their personal sense of the task. The excerpt below shows an example. In the excerpt, Vilma read a passage from the textbook and began to elaborate on her personal sense of this passage. [TD$INLE]

Excerpt 4, Lesson 3 Transcript

64 Vilma: Okay (0.4) babies are when

Non-Verbal actions

(64) Vilma reads from the book.

they are born. °Two° (.) Hairless and pink. Their ears (---) Well this I already know (0.9) coz we have a hamster (1.9) 65 Samira: disgusting those

(65) Samira points at a picture in

(1.5)

the textbook.

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[TD$INLE] 66 Vilma: golden hamsters have spacious

(66) Vilma continues reading. Vilma

°cheek bags° in which they carry (0.3)

illustrates the length of hamsters

um:: Hamster can get even a stick of

with her fingers.

this length into its cheek (1.5) 67 Vilma: They have such (thick) cheeks. (0.6) (68) Samira smiles and breathes out

68 Samira: £hhh£

loudly expressing surprise. 69 Vilma: And then it can, then it can

(69) Vilma gestures touching her

like put them into its cheek, even two

cheeks.

of them like this. (0.4) Then it can (0.2) even

[eat something

70 Samira:

[stick?

(0.9) 71 Vilma: yes a kind of (.) even (.)

(71) Vilma illustrates the size of

food such as this long food.

food with her fingers.

72 Samira: mmm (0.9) 73 Samira: Do you mean this?

(73) Samira points at a picture of

(1.0)

a hamster holding a seed in its paws.

74 Vilma: Yes. (0.5) 75 Samira: Seeds 76 Vilma: =And then (0.2) then dwarf

(76) Vilma illustrates the sizes of

hamster can also

gold hamsters and dwarf hamsters

(0.2) but it is only

(0.3) um (0.3) um golden hamsters are about this long. (.) Dwarves are like

with her fingers.

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42

[TD$INLE] these. (0.9) 77 Samira: Yes. 78 Vilma: =And when they are (.) um

(78) Vilma points a picture in the

(0.4) um. Those babies are like this.

book.

(2.5) 79 Vilma: [Two 80 Samira:[↑Let's write this. (0.4)

(80) Samira reads aloud from the

Golden hamsters have spacious
textbook.

bags>

[in which they carry food

into a tunnel. 81 Vilma:

(81) Vilma begins to write.

[Okay

Vilma first indicated that she had a hamster at home and that she thus had local knowledge about hamsters that was relevant to the passage (this I already know,line 64). She then explained the passage to Samira by using bodily gestures to illustrate the respective sizes of hamsters’ cheeks and the sticks they carried in their cheeks (lines 66–74). Samira expressed surprise (line 69) and asked for clarifications (lines 70, 73). She added that hamsters also eat seeds, like the hamster in the textbook picture (line 75). Vilma then employed her local knowledge to compare gold hamsters to dwarf hamsters that also carry things in their cheeks. She illustrated the respective sizes of different hamsters with her fingers (lines 75–78). The students finally wrote the passage (lines 80, 81). Thus, the students first articulated their personal sense of the task regarding hamsters’ feeding habits through using their own bodies for reference and through incorporating their local knowledge acquired at home. In contrast to the earlier examples, they co-constructed and elaborated the new personal senses, enriching the given meanings with an embodied illustration. This episode thus contributed to their shared understanding on the topic. Yet, the expansion remained within the confines of the actions performed in this particular episode. Eventually, the students copied the passage verbatim from the textbook and returned to their usual mode of working. They appeared to consider only the official meanings, and not their personal senses, as legitimate inclusions on the worksheet. Nonetheless, in Lesson 6 when sharing their findings to other students, Vilma evoked the personal sense elaborated in this episode by making an embodied illustration of the size of hamster’s cheeks. Table 4 shows that the deviations at Layer 3 involved strong restrictive dynamics: the deviations of uncertainties, restrictions, and workarounds occurred consistently. The marked increase in their occurrences in Lessons 6 and 7 resulted from ambiguous and complex task instructions. The task procedures functioned as rules for the students by dictating a set of actions to be performed for their own sake instead of serving as tools for making sense of the contents. The teacher sometimes reinforced this interpretation of the task, but the procedures carried authority even without his presence. In fact, the students imposed authoritative interpretations more often than the teacher. The analysis further supports our interpretation of Vilma’s restrictive personal sense of the task as requiring blind compliance with the teacher’s authoritative instructions. Samira, in turn, struggled to construct any personal sense of the

Table 4 Occurrences of Layer 3 deviations across the lessons. Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Uncertainties, restrictions, and workarounds Uncertainty in interpreting the task Imposed authoritative interpretation of the task Cheating

1 3

3 4 4

Attempts at deliberate sense making Articulating new personal senses of the task Contesting an authoritative interpretation of the task Enacting conflicting interpretations of the task Elaborating personal sense of the task

9 2 1

7 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Total

2 1 1

4 2

3 2 1

5 11 4

17 3

35 26 10

12

2 4 2 2

2

4 1 5

7 4 3 2

43 13 13 6

2

2

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task at all–despite her multiple attempts at sense-making. Samira appeared not to understand the premises of the task procedures. Neither did Vilma always understand these premises, but she nonetheless complied with them. Vilma was also reluctant to discuss the premises with Samira. Thus, the students broke rules instead of openly challenging requirements they did not understand. The overview, moreover, shows that the students frequently engaged in incipient sense-making but this seldom generated expansions of the dominant reproductive mode of working. Elaborations of personal sense of the task were relatively rare and did not occur in every lesson. They were also confined within the episodes of their occurrence. 6. Discussion The purpose of this study was to explore and conceptualize the interpretive dynamics in play when students faced a learning task that extended over several lessons. The task was assigned in a fourth-grade classroom in which the teacher was beginning to incorporate inquiry-based learning. In particular, we investigated the deviations that the students engaged in from the assigned task. We also examined how the students’ personal sense of the task was mobilized in and through these deviations and to what extent the deviations were productive for accomplishing the task. Fig. 3 summarizes the subcategories we identified within each of the three layers of deviations. These deviations constituted the predominantly restrictive interpretive dynamics that were counter-productive for accomplishing the task. Consequently, one of the students, Samira, struggled to construct any personal sense of the task at all. The other student, Vilma, constructed a restrictive personal sense of the task as a matter that required obediently following the task procedures. The deviations of parallel scripts (Layer 1) and the motivational sphere (Layer 2) distracted the students from their engagement with the task. Table 5 shows in detail how these deviations occurred in each lesson, their total duration ranging from 16 to 40% of the lesson time. Through the parallel scripts the students interrupted the monotonous work to create episodes of off-task camaraderie and playful interaction, resembling the classic notion of ‘‘banana time’’ (Roy, 1959). The deviations of the motivational sphere showed that the new learning practices added complexity and additional distractions

[(Fig._3)TD$IG]

Fig. 3. The subcategories of the three layers of deviations.

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Table 5 Durations of the deviations of Layers 1 and 2 across the lessons.a

Layer 1: Parallel scripts Layer 2: The motivational sphere Overlaps between Layers 1 and 2 Layers 1 and 2 total Lesson total

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

10 min 36 s (23%) 8 min 56 s (20%) 1 min 30 s (3%) 18 min 2 s (40%) 45 min 26 s

3 min 33 s (8%) 3 min 47 s (9%) 25 s (1%)

2 min (4%) 10 min 6 s (21%) 5 s (0%)

5 min 24 s (13%) 6 min 55 s (17%) 4 s (0%)

3 min 42 s (8%) 7 min 25 s (17%) 0 s (0%)

2 min 14 s (5%) 6 min 6 s (14%) 41 s (2%)

13 s (1%) 5 min 18 s (16%) 4 s (0%)

6 min 55 s (16%) 44 min 19 s

12 min 1 s (25%) 48 min

12 min 15 s (30%) 41 min 35 s

11 min 7 s (25%) 44 min 40 s

7 min 39 s (17%) 42 min 47 s

14 min 20 s (17%) 32 min 46 s

a The lesson was considered to begin when the students entered the classroom, and to end when they had cleaned their table. Minor disruptions related to research activity were not included.

for the students to consider (Lantz-Andersson et al., 2009). Thus, the students did not use the additional time resources reserved for the project to refine their understanding; instead they resolved disputes and problems and made their life in the classroom more enjoyable. Moreover, the deviations of parallel scripts and the motivational sphere mobilized the students’ personal senses in counter-productive ways. At Layer 1, the deviations constructed an opposition between the parallel scripts imbued with personal sense and with the task that the students appeared to consider as uninteresting. At Layer 2, conventional practices of teaching and learning, which were present despite the introduction of novel practices, mobilized restrictive personal senses in the students. In all, this counter-productivity probably stemmed from the teacher’s lack of awareness of the contextual grounding of the students’ task interpretations. The Layer 3 deviations mobilized the students’ personal senses in both restrictive and expansive ways. The students’ sense-making attempts were mostly hampered by their social interactions with the teacher. Although the teacher had designed the task procedures to foster sense-making, his authoritative imposition of these procedures on the students undermined his original intention. The teacher’s guidance was contradictory in this respect. On the one hand, he encouraged dialogic negotiations about the task contents. On the other hand, he prescribed authoritative task procedures without explaining the purpose of these procedures or without being sensitive to the students’ own interpretations of the task. Concomitantly, the students treated their attempts at sense-making as sidetracks or cheating. This contradiction resembles the ‘‘contradictions of control’’ analyzed by (McNeil, 1986; also Rainio, 2008). Yet we also identified expansive interpretive dynamics that allowed the students to elaborate their personal sense of the task. In other words, a few times the students’ interpretation of the task was temporarily expanded to transcend the boundaries between their personal worlds and the school world. In particular, three kinds of deviations were conducive to this kind of expansion: articulating a new personal sense of the task, contesting an authoritative interpretation of the task, and enacting conflicting interpretations of the task. Our findings offer pedagogical insights into guiding students to elaborate their personal senses of tasks. Teachers can use the categories we identified to become more sensitive to the expansive potential of students’ emergent task interpretations. For instance, the students of this study would have needed more support to overcome their emotional resistance toward the core aspects of the task and to turn their spontaneous emotional responses into resources for learning. Now, instead of contributing to expansions of the students’ interpretations of the task, many of the personal senses the students articulated oriented them to peripheral aspects of the task. A possible instructional strategy for working with these diverging personal senses could have been to topicalize and analyze them together with the students. A starting point could have been to juxtapose the students’ notions of cute and disgusting with the task-relevant notions of domesticated and wild, and to reflect on why wild animals sometimes disgust people. How could such expansions of students’ interpretations of tasks be sustained? The analyses of each of the layers suggest partial answers. Firstly, we maintain that teachers should make changes in the tasks they assign and ultimately in their pedagogical approaches and arrangements when the students’ emergent actions deviate from the teachers’ instructional intentions (see also Engestro¨m, Rantavuori, & Kerosuo 2013; Twiner, Littleton, Coffin, & Whitelock, 2014). We believe that a sustainable change of teaching and learning that promotes students’ personal sense-making is as much a bottom-up as a topdown process. The teacher of this study attempted to implement a dialogical microculture of student inquiry in a monological manner that was a contradiction in terms. Secondly, sustaining the students’ sense-making attempts would probably have necessitated the teacher’s consistent support to authorize the students to develop and take responsibility for their ideas and interpretations of the task (Engle et al., 2011; Engle, 2006). To make students treat their personal senses as relevant requires much work since this involves a profound change in what usually counts as knowledge in classrooms (Gutie´rrez et al., 1999). Thirdly, the results suggest that sustaining the expansions of students’ interpretations of tasks requires a holistic reorganization of the motivational sphere of school activity. Students’ motives that form the basis for elaboration of their personal sense of tasks can be indirectly cultivated through transforming and expanding the students’ relations to the school-going activity (Leont’ev, 1978). In other words, new practices of teaching and learning cannot just be added on the top of old ones. A school activity is a lamination of coexisting historical layers producing dilemmas and conflicts that need to be

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foregrounded and deliberately resolved (Engestro¨m, 1987). In the case examined in this study, the introduction of students’ inquiry appeared to mainly have affected the surface-level of the school activity. Despite the new practices, regular aspects of school work, such as spelling and handwriting, played an important role in the students’ interpretation of the task. An implication is that actions involving students’ inquiry, such as posing questions and seeking knowledge to answer them, would perhaps make more sense to students in connection with problems that have relevance outside of the school, such as documenting problems in city planning to influence local political decision making (Rajala, Hilppo¨, Lipponen, & Kumpulainen, 2013) or publishing a local history of a community through interviewing elderly people (Hakkarainen, 2010). This kind of a reorganization of the motivational sphere of school activity is best achieved through teachers’ and other stakeholders’ collective efforts (Engestro¨m, 1998). Fourthly, the partitioning of the students’ activities to official and parallel scripts suggests that the discrepancy between the official meanings and the students’ personal senses was firmly established as an essential aspect of what schooling meant for the students. The teacher was also involved in sustaining this discrepancy since he tolerated the students’ parallel scripts when they did not challenge the official script. Bridging the gap between students’ personal senses and the official school meanings requires disrupting this recurrent pattern and agreeing with students on doing school differently. The findings of this study resonate with and extend prior research on students’ interpretations of tasks. For example, the notion of elaborating a personal sense of a task resembles the notion of expansive framing (Engle, 2006; Engle et al., 2011). Both notions involve connecting sense-making across time and space. But, the notion of personal sense emphasizes the students’ personally meaningful connections; expansive framing deals with any kind of spatial and temporal expansion of sense-making. Overall, the prior studies of students’ interpretations of tasks have mainly focused on epistemic aspects of these interpretations, ignoring or treating the socio-emotional aspects as implicit. To overcome this limitation, this study suggests a conceptualization of students’ interpretations of tasks in which epistemic and socio-emotional aspects are tightly interwoven (Fig. 3). This conceptualization implies that the interpretations of tasks involve avoidance, workarounds and inserting the tasks into the flow of multiple interactions that are not necessarily focused on the intended epistemic core of the task. Moreover, this study provides novel ways to conceptualize the relationship between students’ interpretations of tasks, and the multiple contexts of their lives and the institutional context of any given school activity. It makes a theoretical and methodological contribution in this respect by showing how productive and disruptive deviations at the multiple layers of daily classroom life enter into the interpretative dynamics and what the consequences are for students’ possibilities to elaborate their personal sense of the task. The scope of this study is limited to a study of a single case. While we argue that studying a setting in which the teacher was beginning to incorporate student inquiry was fruitful for exploring and conceptualizing interpretive dynamics, we acknowledge a need for future studies in similar and different settings to test and elaborate the conceptualization developed here. Arguably, this conceptualization can be adapted to a study of any learning setting. Moreover, it can be used for investigating and comparing students’ interpretations of tasks in and across diverse settings of learning, such as science centers, after-school clubs, or students’ informal everyday activity settings (see also Erstad & Sefton-Green, 2013; Kumpulainen et al., 2010). To conclude, a crucial challenge for schools and teachers is to make school tasks personally meaningful for students. The students need to be provided with possibilities for incorporating their lived experience and interests in school work. However, as the results of this study demonstrate, this requires teachers and students to deal with deviations that arise when students face school tasks. This study accounted for these dynamics and elucidated the expansive potential involved for transforming classroom instruction together with the students. Acknowledgements The present study was financially supported by the Doctoral Programme for The Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, Multidisciplinary Research on Learning Environments (OPMON) and Finnish Doctoral Programme in Education and Learning (FiDPEL). The writing of the article was supported in part by an Academy Research Fellowship granted to Annalisa Sannino (No. 264972) by the Academy of Finland, Research Council for Culture and Society. We warmly thank the reviewers and the following colleagues for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article: Ola Erstad, Jaakko Hilppo¨, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Annika Lantz-Andersson, Per Linell, Lasse Lipponen, A˚sa Ma¨kitalo, Juhana Rantavuori, Roger Sa¨ljo¨, and Pa¨ivi Tynja¨la¨. In particular, we are grateful to Yrjo¨ Engestro¨m for guiding us with insightful comments and invaluable support on the core theoretical ideas of this article. References Engestro¨m, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit Oy. Engestro¨m, Y. (1998). Reorganizing the motivational sphere of classroom culture: An activity-theoretical analysis of planning in a teacher team. In F. Seeger, J. Voigt, & U. Waschescio (Eds.), The culture of the mathematics classroom: Analyses and changes (pp. 76–103). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engestro¨m, Y., Rantavuori, J., & Kerosuo, H. (2013). 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