Margin|Center

  • Wolff-Michael Roth
  • Maria Inês Mafra Goulart
  • Katerina Plakitsi
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Cultural Studies of Science Education book series (CSSE, volume 6)

Abstract

One of the central challenges for researchers is to understand what happens inside classrooms that make the environment available for children’s learning. In this chapter, we adopt and further develop the margin|center dialectic as a general framework for describing participation of very young children in science-related activities. In this study, we employ a cultural-historical approach that goes beyond the classical theories and allows us to see learning as participation of very young children through a dialectical lens. We suggest that the contradictions inherent in the concept of participation can be examined through the metaphor of the dialectical union of margin and center, which, as all dialectical units, embodies contradictions that constitute the drivers of change. We analyze the events in a classroom of 4-year-old children in a public Brazilian kindergarten school focusing on the interactions that occur during a hands-on activity about a physical world phenomenon exploration. The case study shows us that (a) young children’s participation is more than following teacher’s instruction, (b) learning is a process of change in and through concrete social practice, and (c) viewed through the metaphor of margin and center; participation and learning are constituted dialectically between individual and collective.

Keywords

Science Education Center Unit Kindergarten Teacher Dialectical Perspective Kindergarten School 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Wolff-Michael Roth
    • 1
  • Maria Inês Mafra Goulart
    • 2
  • Katerina Plakitsi
    • 3
  1. 1.Griffith Institute for Educational ResearchGriffith UniversityMt GravattAustralia
  2. 2.Faculty of EducationUniversidade Federal de Minas GeraisBelo HorizonteBrazil
  3. 3.School of EducationUniversity of IoanninaIoanninaGreece

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