In this paper, discourse analytical methods are applied to data from two middle school classrooms, as a teacher, researcher, and students' engage in research based curricula (Martinez, Orellana, Pacheco, & Carbone, 2008; Orellana & Reynolds, 2008) designed to leverage students' language brokering skills and facilitate discussion about languages.…

This analysis follows students' action and interaction with a single scientific phenomenon (bubbling/gas) over the course of a curriculum unit in a middle school science classroom to examine how and what they learn when doing laboratory activities. Taking a situated approach to interaction, I place the process of objectification in its multimodal…

This paper describes one way in which students develop durable, classroom-specific identities. When students enter new groups their identities are often fluid. Over time, however, students and teachers generally come to identify individuals in predictable ways. Durable identities emerge across events, as signs of identity come to presuppose a…

This analysis focuses on two writing activities required by a middle school science curriculum unit to demonstrate how particular forms of writing guide students to frame their knowledge in important ways. Following the completion of charts and "Think and Write" questions related to a single scientific phenomenon, I trace how students identify the…