Discourse and agency in school science laboratories

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Abstract
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 physics lessons show the role materials, gestures, and bodily movement play in the emergence of students’ science‐related discourses. These episodes render evident that the analysis of utterances is insufficient in itself to understand just what was said and, therefore, to understand knowing and learning in school science laboratories. The findings presented here have consequences for discourse analysis in science education. First, science educators need to design appropriate learning environments that allow students to anchor their discourse in the laboratory experiences. Second, to understand discourse in laboratories, we need to do more than transcribe participants’ utterances. To understand students’ talk in science laboratories, the “transcriptions” need to account for the nonverbal forms of communication and aspects of the unspoken background against which verbal and nonverbal signs are produced. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with objects. (Johnson, 1987, p. xix)