ABSTRACT
We consider each classroom as a learning community in which children and teachers work together to engage with materials, ideas, curriculum genres, and each other to achieve learning goals. Learning communities both shape and are shaped by their members as individual children’s conceptions interact with their peers’ and teacher’s ideas, blend, disappear, transform, get pushed away, and are negotiated. We believe that children come to appropriate accepted scientific understandings when they are given opportunities to think about their spontaneous, everyday-lifeworld ideas (Gee, 2004; Vygotsky, 1987/1934) as they engage in classroom hands-on experiences, along with ideas presented in children’s literature information books, a variety of writing experiences, and dialogue with classmates and their teacher. Moreover, we believe that children express these ideas in their own unique “repertoires of practice” (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) that enrich dialogic processes.
