A dialectic view of student science notebook use: the dance of the individual | collective

Science notebooks can support students in working in active, inquiry-based ways of learning. When students use notebooks to document science investigations in rich and meaningful ways, notebooks can support not only the development of students’ content understandings, but also understandings about and engagement in science practices (Weibe et al., 2009). All too often though, student productions in science classrooms, such as entries in notebooks, are viewed as solely representative of individual understandings. This view serves to undercut the both individual and collective processes that constituted their construction, thus, inaccurately situating student representations as merely individual productions. In this presentation we show how an analysis of science notebook use in a primary classroom using the dialectic perspective of individual|collective revealed how aspects of students’ interactions with each other and with their notebooks are intertwined and co-constitute one another. This work emphasizes how viewing notebook use as individual |collective can reveal the dance of these inseparable aspects of interaction.