Wolff-Michael Roth
Biographic Data
| ID | 535294 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wolff-Michael Roth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wolff-Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Roth |
| SIGNATURE | ROTH W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Victoria |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9344-496X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 128 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 127 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Quantitative-Cumulative and Qualitative-Transformational Changes in the Continuous Becoming of Teachers
Professional development is a critical concept in the literature on teaching and teacher education. However, in this literature, continuous growth (learning)—e.g., improve teaching strategies, elaborate a variety of activities or integrate new technologies into their practice—is not distinguished from (crisis-like) change to qualitatively different forms of experience—e.g., engage students in learning, implement student-centered practices, consid…
How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work
To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common.…
Ideal in mathematics
The theory of knowledge objectification, initially presented and developed by Luis Radford, has gained some traction in the field of mathematics education. As with any developing theory, its presentation contains statements that may contradict its stated intents; and these problems are exacerbated in its uptake into the work of other scholars. The purpose of this study is to articulate a Spinozist-Marxian approach, in which the objectification ex…
“Coercive Care” or “Ur-wir [Great-we]”
“How stupid can a person be?” – Students coping with authoritative dimensions of science lessons
Current mainstream practices of education tend to have an authoritative and serious side through their emphasis on the transmission and reproduction of canonical knowledge. Simultaneously, there are calls for dialogical approaches that provide students with opportunities to express their understandings and thereby increase engagement in learning. Yet there is little educational research on the students' ways of coping with the authoritative dimen…
Looking Back and Looking Forward
Learner agency in urban schools? A pragmatic transactional approach
Enhancing learner agency in urban schools is seen as increasingly important in educational policy for narrowing existing attainment gaps. However, notions of learner agency are contested and require conceptual clarity. To help generate such clarity a conceptual synthesis of the field was undertaken that resulted in a mapping framework around three distinct and yet interrelated perspectives: (a) micro-individualistic self-authoring, (b) macro- and…
Toward an Organic Theory for the Cultural-Historical Sciences
Theorizing with/out “Mediators
Challenging the Cause–Effect Logic
From Object-Oriented to Fluid Ontology
The gap between instruction (plan) and situated action
In this study, I describe a potential challenge to semiotics, which exists in the fact that no interpretation of an instruction (text) can get us closer to doing what the instructional text describes. I provide a praxeological description of a situation in a software development firm where the instructions (rules) for a particular type of meeting are inscribed on the whiteboard in front of which the meetings were held. I discuss the gap between i…
Neoformation
In Vygotsky’s writings on development, we find the concept neoformation in the context of his distinction between quantitative-incremental and qualitative-revolutionary change in psychological development. Few studies have taken up this concept. The purpose of this article is (a) to provide a dialectical grounding to the distinction generally and to the emergence of new psychological and personality forms specifically and (b) to describe a 5-step…
Thinking with Spinoza about ‘hands-on’ learning
Despite its advanced age of about 375 years, the mind–body (psychophysical) problem is alive and well, in part because it is anchored so well institutionally in schools and in research (scientific vs. interpretive psychology). This continued presence is astonishing in the light of the fact that the seed for its solution, sown in Spinoza’s Ethics, is almost as old. The solution rests on the position that there is only one substance, which, invisib…
Towards a more symmetrical approach to the zone of proximal development in teacher education
This article focuses on relations between a new teacher and a teacher educator. It draws on the zone of proximal development (ZPD) studies, and the data is analyzed through conversation analysis. Ordinarily, the ZPD is used to theorize the learning that occurs in such a relation in asymmetrical terms. Our case study shows, however, that learning occurs for both participants in the relation, and that the very question of who becomes "the more comp…
The Thinking Body In/Of Multimodal Engineering Literacy
Studies show that engineering is particularly suited for students traditionally experiencing difficulties in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects—including those marked learning disabled—because it supports literacy in its different manifestations (i.e., across modes). This article addresses this topic, building on the late Vygotsky’s premise that activity is the origin of consciousness. In Vygotsky’s approach, there …
The collective work of engineering losers
Semiotics in Mathematics Education
This volume discusses semiotics in mathematics education as an activity with a formal sign system, in which each sign represents something else. Theories presented by Saussure, Peirce, Vygotsky and ot
Perezhivanie —A Monist Concept for a Monist Theory
The articles in this special issue constitute a much-needed effort to establish common ground concerning the ways in which researchers and practitioners in psychology and associated fields may want
Perezhivanie in the Light of the Later Vygotsky’s Spinozist Turn
Perezhivanie is a category that takes on special significance in the light of the Spinozist turn that Vygotsky was beginning to take toward the end of his life, but the development of which was interrupted by his untimely death. In this study, we use several empirical classroom episodes to exhibit how, with perezhivanie, psychological research necessarily moves from an empiricist stage to an inquiry into “peak psychology,” one that is oriented to…
From I-Awareness to We-Awareness in CSCW
Tappen im Dunkeln“. Der Umgang mit Unsicherheiten und Unwägbarkeiten während des Forschungsprozesses
'Wissenschaftliche Forschung wird oft als streng rationaler Vorgang beschrieben, den Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler verfolgen, um die Wahrheit zu entdecken oder um zumindest die faktische Natur ihrer Erkenntnisse zu untermauern. Der vorliegende Aufsatz befasst sich mit Strategien, die Wissenschaftler einsetzen, wenn sie sich nicht darüber im Klaren sind, was momentan vor sich geht. Diese Strategien lassen sich mit der Metapher des 'Tapp…
Ethics as Social Practice
Ethical issues have become increasingly important in research involving human beings. It is fitting, therefore, that FQS devotes a debate focusing on issues that are concerned with the many layers of decision making when it comes to ethics in qualitative research. In this contribution, I use a personal context to formally introduce the ethics debate in general and the contributions to this issue in particular. I extend an invitation to readers to…
Becoming and Belonging
Legitimate peripheral participation" (LPP) involves learning as a situated individual engages in socially mediated activity. We report on our attempt to use legitimate peripheral participation as a double normative frame for defining (a) a doctoral program and the struggles that ensued as the two authors produced and reproduced their identities as graduate student and supervisor and (b) a methodology for doing research among environmental activis…
But Does "Ethnography By Any Other Name" Really Promote Real Ethnography
Categorization—such as deciding whether something is real ethnography—is a difficult task, because nature and social practices, the topics of ethnography, themselves do not come with inherent labels. In this article, which takes its starting point in AGAR's contribution to the debate on the quality of qualitative research, I articulate and expose the aporetic and internally contradictory nature of categorizing something as real ethnography. URN: …
What Good Is Polarizing Research Into Qualitative and Quantitative
In education research, a polar distinction is frequently made to describe and produce different kinds of research: quantitative versus qualitative. In this article, the authors argue against that polarization and the associated polarization of the “subjective” and the “objective,” and they question the attribution of generalizability to only one of the poles. The purpose of the article is twofold: (a) to demonstrate that this polarization is not …
Curriculum-Based Ecosystems
The goal of this article is to advance an ecological theory of knowing, one that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. To this end, the authors begin by describing the environment in terms of affordance networks: functionally bound potentials extended in time that can be acted upon to realize particular goals. Although there may be socially agreed-upon trajectories specifying the necessary components of a network activated…
Of Disciplined Minds and Disciplined Bodies
Digitizing Lizards
In this paper, we describe and theorize the topology of `vision' in field ecology, a domain considerably different from laboratory work in the physical sciences, and discuss the temporal extension of data-collection practices. Data collection in this field is characterized by widely varying measurements, measurement dimensions and temporal extension of data collection. We present the ecologists' field laboratory as a perceptual machinery with a h…
Environmental education for social–ecological system resilience
In this paper we attempt to integrate environmental education, with a focus on building capacity at the level of the individual, with frameworks for resilience, with a focus on adaptive capacity at the level of the social–ecological system. Whereas previous work has focused on enhancing system‐level capacity through building adaptive capacity in individuals, we suggest a wider range of processes for linking individual learning with resilience in …
"Science and the "Good Citizen
Science literacy is frequently touted as a key to good citizenship. Based on a two-year ethnographic study examining science in the community, the authors suggest that when considering the contribution of scientific activity to the greater good, science must be seen as forming a unique hybrid practice, mixed in with other mediating practices, which together constitute "scientifically literate, good citizenship." This case study, an analysis of an…
Creative Solutions' and `Fibbing Results
This paper is concerned with enculturation in field ecology, where students are frequently required to spend long periods of time in the field with little or no contact with others. We document the practical choices that allow aspiring ecologists, more or less successfully (in their own accounts), to deal with the indeterminacy and open-endedness of independent fieldwork, involving a version of what Collins called `the experimenters' regress'. `C…
Making Classifications (at) Work
To make and use classifications is human. At least in the sciences, classification activities involve high degrees of uncertainty. Drawing on ethnography and conversation analysis of videotaped scientists, the activities of classifying and making classifications are analyzed considering four types of situations that arise when there is certainty or uncertainty about the object to be classified and the classification scheme to be used. As a collec…
Preparing Students for Competent Scientific Practice
Current empirical research in science and technology studies provides new and different views of science and scientists that contrast markedly with the mythical views that underlie many curricular efforts geared toward increasing scientific literacy. If descriptions of science and scientists that emerge from science and technology studies are legitimate, considerable implications arise for educational aims guiding science instruction, learning ex…
Learning to teach science as practice
Spielraum and Teaching
In recent years, reflection-in-action has been a major concept for taking account of the craft and practical aspects of teaching. Yet in the everyday teaching praxis, reflection is largely absent. In this paper, we argue that this absence is due to the fact that reflection requires objects of thought that have to be constructed. Both the construction and manipulation of these objects requires “time out” from acting in real time. Taking time out i…
Towards a chronotopic theory of "place" in place-based education
The notion of place, as in place-based education, has received considerable attention in educational theorizing because of its potential to link students, their lifeworlds, and their experiences in particular settings to formal education. However, in current debates of place-based education, the notion of place is emerging as problematic. The purpose of this study is to contribute to a rethinking of place in a form that is appropriate for describ…
Becoming-in-the-classroom
Community-Level Controversy Over a Natural Resource
In this article, we contribute to an understanding of science and scientific knowledge in support of the democratic ideal of including all stakeholders in community-level controversies over access to natural resources. By analyzing the actual discourse between scientists and citizens in a water-supply controversy, we move beyond “scientific” and “nonscientific” classification schemes to focus on the rhetorical strategies and different ways of pro…
When up is down and down is up
This article is concerned with understanding situations in which speakers talk in the presence of scientific inscriptions (lectures in science classes, public presentations). Drawing on extensive video materials accumulated in middle and high school science classrooms and university lectures, we develop a framework for the resources speakers make available to their audience for understanding what the talk is about. We distinguish three situations…
Towards a Praxeology of Teaching
Both preservice and seasoned teachers experience a considerable gap between theory and prescriptions for teaching and their day-to-day practice. We concep- tualize this gap in terms of the difference between descriptions of practice and practice itself. Descriptions cannot include the tacit understanding against which specific acts of teaching become meaningful; thus, they are inherently out of syn- chrony with practice. We illustrate how Bourdie…
Promoting pro-environmental attitudes and reported behaviors of Malaysian pre-service teachers using green chemistry experiments
Environmental degradation is a general problem but it is often more serious in developing nations where levels of awareness are lower than in industrialized countries. There is, therefore, a need particularly in developing countries to increase pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. In this paper, we report the results of a quasi-experimental study designed to change environmental attitudes and environmental behaviors among 263 science pre-se…
Radical Uncertainty in Scientific Discovery Work
Radical uncertainty is a concept currently debated, for example, in the economics literature to theorize the impossibility of foreseeing the outcomes of scientific and technological development work. The purpose of this study is to extend the concept to articulate and theorize the minute-to-minute transactions in scientific laboratories. Empirical materials resulting from five years of ethnographic work in one laboratory focusing on fish vision a…
Perceptual gestalts in workplace communication
How Ditch and Drain Become a Healthy Creek
We describe and theorize how `grass-roots' environmental activists create a `healthy stream' in their municipality. We frame this activity as a work of creating the creek in a new series of relations in the community that are more consistent with those articulated by stream ecology. This work, which we follow by tracing the activists' use of scientific register and inscriptions, involves re-presenting the creek in numerous localities. But this al…
To Event
In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events*‐in‐the‐making, by means of process categories—to learn, to teach—not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) exemplify doing and writing research consistent with process philosophy. To understand process we must not think, research, and write them in terms of categories (etymologically, things specified by predicates) but in terms of movement itself. The unfin…
Allgemeinbildung
Sociologists increasingly note that one lives in a risk society, characterized by the unpredictable consequences of techno‐scientific innovation and production and by increasing complexity. Life in risk society, particularly in truly democratic societies, increasingly requires competencies not only to understand and change one's own circumstances but also to participate in collective decision‐making and to care for others who, for various reasons…
Enculturation’
Traditional science teaching has relied on ‘chalk and talk’. In recent years, ‘authentic science’ has become an alternative slogan that many educators easily adopted into their pedagogic discourses, for it was associated with ‘getting students to do the real stuff’. However, authentic science when it is not accompanied by reflection on representations of knowledge more generally, can also mean to enculturate (and worse, indoctrinate) students to …
Discourse and agency in school science laboratories
Hands‐on activities are a stable feature of many school science classes. Yet, the role of laboratory activities in the appropriation and development of students’ science discourse is largely unexplored. In this article, I address this lack of research by providing 3 examples that illustrate the substantial integration of students’ bodily experience with and against the objects of their inquiries into their discourse. Analyses of episodes from phy…
Becoming and Belonging
Legitimate peripheral participation" (LPP) involves learning as a situated individual engages in socially mediated activity. We report on our attempt to use legitimate peripheral participation as a double normative frame for defining (a) a doctoral program and the struggles that ensued as the two authors produced and reproduced their identities as graduate student and supervisor and (b) a methodology for doing research among environmental activis…
Nonmetric Multidimensional Item Analysis in the Construction of an Anxiety Attitude Survey
The present study addresses some of the problems of traditional item analysis during the construction of attitude instruments by using a convergent analysis of three metric and nonmetric multivariate techniques for item analysis. Employing data from a recent administration of a science anxiety questionnaire, the use of maximum likelihood factor analysis followed by oblique rotations, multidimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analysis is …
A Combined Method of Indscal and Cognitive Mapping for Describing Changes in Students' Cognitive Structure
The purpose of this paper is to present a qualitative and quantitative technique for describing changes in the cognitive organization of science concepts. An individual difference model in multidimensional scaling and cognitive mapping were jointly used to describe temporal changes in students' conceptual framework and to describe changes in individual students' frameworks with respect to their peers and their instructor. The results from three s…
Affordances and constraints of computers in science education
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, computers in science teaching were seen as a panacea for many problems plaguing the domain. While considerable research has been done to determine cognitive achievements of students who interact with computers during their science learning, more basic questions have not yet been addressed. This study was designed to investigate how computers and a modeling software contributed to students' interactions and learning…
Applications of Science and Technology Studies
Researchers in science and technology studies appear to be more concerned with descriptions and explanations of social phenomena than with the potential applications of their findings. Science and technology studies should strive to change society by contributing to the design of learning environments that form future generations of producers and consumers of scientific and technological knowledge. In this article, the authors (a) illustrate how …
The Discursive Construction of Perception
Designing Communities
Inscriptions
We argue for a new theoretical perspective on representations. This perspective has its roots in recent scholarship in social studies of science and technology and is centered around the notion of inscriptions, graphical representations recorded in and available through some medium (e.g., paper, computer monitor). Methodologically, researchers have begun to investigate the construction and development of inscriptions, the transformations they und…
Becoming-in-the-classroom
Digitizing Lizards
In this paper, we describe and theorize the topology of `vision' in field ecology, a domain considerably different from laboratory work in the physical sciences, and discuss the temporal extension of data-collection practices. Data collection in this field is characterized by widely varying measurements, measurement dimensions and temporal extension of data collection. We present the ecologists' field laboratory as a perceptual machinery with a h…
Discourse and agency in school science laboratories
Hands‐on activities are a stable feature of many school science classes. Yet, the role of laboratory activities in the appropriation and development of students’ science discourse is largely unexplored. In this article, I address this lack of research by providing 3 examples that illustrate the substantial integration of students’ bodily experience with and against the objects of their inquiries into their discourse. Analyses of episodes from phy…
Preparing Students for Competent Scientific Practice
Current empirical research in science and technology studies provides new and different views of science and scientists that contrast markedly with the mythical views that underlie many curricular efforts geared toward increasing scientific literacy. If descriptions of science and scientists that emerge from science and technology studies are legitimate, considerable implications arise for educational aims guiding science instruction, learning ex…
Of Cannibals, Missionaries, and Converts
To date, little is known about when and to what degree science students begin to participate in authentic scientific graphing practices. This article presents the results of a series of studies on the production, transformation, and interpretation of graphical representation from Grade 8 to professional scientific practice both in formal testing situations (inside) and in the course of field/laboratory work (outside). The results of these studies…
Towards a Praxeology of Teaching
Both preservice and seasoned teachers experience a considerable gap between theory and prescriptions for teaching and their day-to-day practice. We concep- tualize this gap in terms of the difference between descriptions of practice and practice itself. Descriptions cannot include the tacit understanding against which specific acts of teaching become meaningful; thus, they are inherently out of syn- chrony with practice. We illustrate how Bourdie…
Gestures
Gestures are central to human cognition and constitute a pervasive element of human communication across cultures; even congenitally blind individuals use gestures when they talk. Yet there exists virtually no educational research that focuses on the role of gestures in knowing and learning and the implications they have for designing and evaluating learning environments. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the existing literatu…
Learning to teach science as practice
The Spiel on “ Spielraum and Teaching”
We begin by expressing our appreciation for the opportunity to take part in what we regard as an important dialogue concerning some of the responses that have arisen out of the commentaries on Spielraum and Teaching. For the most part, it seems evident that our paper and the accompanying commentaries by David Solway and Clive Beck and Clare Kosnik speak from very different approaches to understanding teaching. As such, we are quite willing to all…
Spielraum and Teaching
In recent years, reflection-in-action has been a major concept for taking account of the craft and practical aspects of teaching. Yet in the everyday teaching praxis, reflection is largely absent. In this paper, we argue that this absence is due to the fact that reflection requires objects of thought that have to be constructed. Both the construction and manipulation of these objects requires “time out” from acting in real time. Taking time out i…
How Ditch and Drain Become a Healthy Creek
We describe and theorize how `grass-roots' environmental activists create a `healthy stream' in their municipality. We frame this activity as a work of creating the creek in a new series of relations in the community that are more consistent with those articulated by stream ecology. This work, which we follow by tracing the activists' use of scientific register and inscriptions, involves re-presenting the creek in numerous localities. But this al…
Creative Solutions' and `Fibbing Results
This paper is concerned with enculturation in field ecology, where students are frequently required to spend long periods of time in the field with little or no contact with others. We document the practical choices that allow aspiring ecologists, more or less successfully (in their own accounts), to deal with the indeterminacy and open-endedness of independent fieldwork, involving a version of what Collins called `the experimenters' regress'. `C…
Enculturation’
Traditional science teaching has relied on ‘chalk and talk’. In recent years, ‘authentic science’ has become an alternative slogan that many educators easily adopted into their pedagogic discourses, for it was associated with ‘getting students to do the real stuff’. However, authentic science when it is not accompanied by reflection on representations of knowledge more generally, can also mean to enculturate (and worse, indoctrinate) students to …
Of Disciplined Minds and Disciplined Bodies
Scientific literacy as collective praxis
In this article, we conceive of scientific literacy as a property of collective activity rather than individual minds. We think of knowing and learning science as situated in and distributed across social and material aspects of a setting. To support the proposed conception, we provide several detailed cases from our three-year multi-site ethnographic study of science in one community, featuring different types of citizens who walk a creek, inter…
Redesigning an "Urban" Teacher Education Program
In this article, we use activity theory to frame the redesign of an urban teacher education program. Some of the contradictions that we had to deal with are endemic to traditional teacher education programs while others were particular to this program, which has as its goal to prepare teachers to work in urban (inner-city) schools. Our intervention consisted of a change to coteaching, a collective form of teaching, and cogenerative dialoguing, a …
Taking science education beyond schooling
Signs, deixis, and the emergence of scientific explanation
L'A. etudie la gestuelle qui accompagne les paroles dans une perspective semiotique, en proposant un modele semiotique pour l'etude de ces relations applicable au disocurs scientifique en particulier. Apres avoir analyse les signes et leurs relations dans les modalites de perception, de parole et de gestuelle, l'A. se penche en effet sur les situations dans lesquelles le locuteur fait face a une decouverte ou un nouveau phenomene scientifique. Il…
Sociology (83 works) · Psychology (76 works) · Epistemology (66 works) · Computer Science (58 works) · Philosophy (57 works) · Pedagogy (36 works) · Innovative Education and Learning Practices (27 works) · Political science (27 works) · Mathematics education (26 works) · Social science (26 works)