4 - Personal Lens of Analysis: Individual Learning Trajectories

Summary

For whatever the art, the science, the literature, the history, and the geography of a culture, each man must be his own artist, his own scientist, his own historian, his own navigator. No person is master of the whole culture; indeed, this is almost a defining characteristic of that form of social memory that we speak of as culture. Each man lives a fragment of it. To be whole, he must create his own version of the world, using that part of his cultural heritage he has made his own through education.

(Bruner, 1966, p. 116)

Our analyses now turn to catching students in the act of making their culture their own through their experiences in Mrs. Glenda's science classroom. In this chapter we plot students' evolution over time as they created and negotiated concepts and epistemological practices together with the emotional climate and distinctions of worth within their classroom. Students brought their own “history in person” (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) as a starting point for improvising in this new classroom context.

We met the students at the classroom door and got to know them more through interviews and Mrs. Glenda's reflections. We had limited information about students' experiences in other classrooms and contexts outside of school. We followed how each student interacted with the new values and practices that were being introduced in the context of the study classroom.