investigation in school science. Alongside the students’ conception of their agency
the resources of the screen enabled the students to take up different roles in the
lesson, in particular the role of ‘expert’ or ‘peer-tutor’. When working with the CD-
ROM on the interactive whiteboard the teacher positioned the students as
‘expert/teachers’. He achieved this positioning of the students through his talk
(calling them ‘Miss’, asking them to explain the phenomena, posing questions), their
position (at the front of the class), and their gestures with the screen itself (asking
them to point out specific elements and so on).
Finally, the teacher working with the resources of the screen was involved in a range
of practices with the students that drew them into a range of school scientific
practices demanded by the National Curriculum. He worked with the visual
resources of the screen, as described in Chapter Six, to establish the ‘empirical
reality’ of the investigation displayed on the screen. In doing so he both reshaped and
‘re-produced’ the traditional notion of investigation and positioned himself and the
students as actively involved in its production. The teacher worked with the ‘hide
particles’ option to establish the need for an explanation of the ‘everyday’ world and
the need to look beyond what we can ordinarily see in order to understand the
familiar. He then worked with the multimodal resources of the ‘view particles’ option
to encourage the students to offer a scientific explanation of the phenomenon ‘states
of matter’ drawing explicitly on the role of comparison and the resources of
movement. The teacher, through his gesture with the screen and drawing attention to
the multimodal resources of the screen, made a link between the role of observation,
prediction and evidence in the learning of school science.
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