This case study examines the role of playful talk in negotiating the "how" of collaborative group work in a 6th-grade science classroom. Here we develop and test a Vygotsky-derived hypothesis that postulates playful talk as a mechanism for identity exploration and group status negotiation. Our findings indicate that students utilized the…

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and…

This article reports on a qualitative study on the dialogical approach to learning in the context of higher education. The aim was to shed light on the "I"-Position and multivoicedness in students' identity building and to provide empirical substantiation for these theoretical constructs, focusing especially on the connection…

This article investigates the coconstruction of student identity and engagement in the case of a 9th grader in a project-based algebra classroom that afforded students a great deal of autonomy. The focal student, Terrance, utilized classroom resources to serve both project-related and social functions as he interacted with his peers during…

In his article "Principled Practical Knowledge: Not a Bridge but a Ladder," Carl Bereiter (2014) argues that theoretical knowledge is too shallow to support the generation of innovative learning activities. He makes a case for principled practical knowledge (PPK)--"principled know-how and know-why"--to fulfill this practical…

"Practicality Studies" (Janssen, Westbroek, & Doyle, 2015/this issue) starts with a critical commentary on "Principled Practical Knowledge: Not a Bridge but a Ladder" (Bereiter, 2014) but consists in the main of an essay on what the authors consider to be "really" practical knowledge for teachers. The gist of…

Design research is strongly associated with the learning sciences community, and in the 2 decades since its conception it has become broadly accepted. Yet within and without the learning sciences there remains confusion about how to do design research, with most scholarship on the approach describing what it is rather than how to do it. This…

We question widely accepted practices of publishing articles that present quantified analyses of qualitative data. First, articles are often published that provide only very brief excerpts of the qualitative data themselves to illustrate the coding scheme, tacitly or explicitly treating the coding results as data. Second, articles are often…

In this study, I provide a microgenetic-historical account of learning in an informal setting: the conceptual change that occurred while a university-based scientific research laboratory investigated the absorption of light in rod-based photoreceptors of coho salmon, which the "dogma" had suggested to be related to the migration between…

The much-lamented gap between theory and practice in education cannot be filled by practical knowledge alone or by explanatory knowledge alone. Principled practical knowledge (PPK) is a type of knowledge that has characteristics of both practical know-how and scientific theory. Like basic scientific theory, PPK meets standards of explanatory…

This article reports on a study in which activity theory was used to design, implement, and analyze a 10-week curriculum unit about how honeybees collect nectar with a particular focus on complex systems concepts. Students (n = 42) in a multi-year kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom participated in this study as part of their 10 regular classroom…

This article analyzes the design decisions of a team developing diagnostic assessments for a learning trajectory focused on rational number reasoning. The analysis focuses on the design rationale for key decisions about how to develop the cognitive assessments and related validity arguments within a fluid state and national policy context. The…

Participating in communities of practice (CoPs) is an important way of learning. For newcomers in such communities, the learning process can be described as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Although a body of knowledge on LPP has been accumulated from qualitative case studies, mostly focusing on the use of practices, the concrete…

It is commonly observed that during classroom or group discussions some students have greater influence than may be justified by the normative quality of those students' contributions. We propose a 5-component theoretical framework in order to explain how undue influence unfolds. We build on literatures on persuasion, argumentation,…

We propose a systemic-constructivist perspective for analyzing knowledge construction. In contrast to theories that focus on individuals as actors, the systemic-constructivist approach emphasizes the relevance of social systems and regards the construction of knowledge as a self-referential process that takes place in social systems. We propose…