Talking ideas into being: Reasoning about science phenomena in the elementary classroom.

The paper emphasises processes of growing understanding and reasoning about water-related phenomena in open inquiry-based science activities. It highlights the interplay of multiple cultural resources, which 4 to 8 year old children from diverse sociocultural backgrounds draw upon, to create shared meaning and attention when ‘doing science’ as cultural enactment in classroom contexts.
The rationale is to deepen our understanding about the nature of learning from a dialectical perspective, i.e. how processes of personal inquiry and collective knowledge creation mutually develop. ‘Doing science’ unfolds through a dynamic, non-linear and creative combination of culturally given tools and children’s specific multimodal repertoires.
The research draws close attention on the context-sensitive organization of this interactional achievement, i.e. the quality of the interactionally achieved convergence of multiple repertoires, their context-sensitive use and creative transformations The study is supported by a multi-method framework allowing to embrace multiple perspectives on the children’s inquiry processes. Two excerpts are discussed in detail – one from kindergarten, one from 2d grade – which address the children’s inquiry processes in different ways.
The data reveal an astonishing depth of discussion and scientific reasoning of children at this age. Children’s critical conversations display awareness of relevant discourse elements and related explanations from other curriculum areas, which are confronted and actively worked into each other as an active accomplishment done by the children in dialogical interchange. The study is of substantial significance for conceiving sustainable science learning environments in multilingual and -cultural school contexts.