ABSTRACT
In linguistically and culturally heterogeneous classrooms teachers and students employ a number of strategies to identify and respond to the naturally arising tensions between and among their different backgrounds and expectations. Such tensions take place when the organization and goals of classroom learning activity are no longer transparent or when there is a break in the continuity of classroom events. In previous work (Baquedano-López, Solís, & Kattan, 2005) we have discussed the ways in which the reactions of teachers and students to acts that counter expected behavior in the classroom, such as students not being called upon when raising their hands, combine to create educationally constructive tensions. In this chapter we focus on the ways teachers and students negotiate and orient to tensions inherent in institutional and local understandings and constructions of time, analyzing how such negotiations organize everyday normative classroom interaction. Drawing on data collected as part of a longitudinal study of urban elementary science classrooms, we argue that features of scientific discourse (e.g., predicting, estimating, generalizing) have an implicit “time” perspective that organizes scientific learning activity and shapes and reproduces scientific knowledge and epistemologies, or ways of thinking about that knowledge. While such time encoded understandings of learning science tend to reproduce power differentials in ways that support longstanding notions of a unilinear, irreversible learning process (Valsiner, 2002), teachers and students also continually re-negotiate and thus adapt the temporal parameters of their learning activities. The explicit management of temporal experience as coherent and sequentially ordered events or shared knowledge thus appears as a focal theme of tension.
