Dialogic Inquiry in an Urban Second-Grade Classroom: How Intertextuality Shapes and Is Shaped by Social Interactions and Scientific Understandings

In this chapter, we explore the nature of dialogic inquiry that takes place in Amy Rife’s second-grade urban class as children and teacher engaged in integrated science-literacy experiences during a unit on states of matter and changes of states associated with the water cycle. We pay particular attention to the concept of intertextuality-the juxtaposition or reference to other texts. Elsewhere, we have described a typology of intertextuality, providing examples of the types that are possible in such units to support children’s scientific understandings (Pappas & Varelas, with Barry & Rife, 2003). Here, we focus on intertextuality in more depth. Using an excerpt of a read-aloud session-the third in the unit-we examine the ways in which instances of intertextuality contribute to the acquisition of science and literacy. The classroom talk, as dialogic inquiry, enabled this urban class to appropriate ideas, extend them further, question their validity, and even generate new ones.