Discourse Analysis of In-Service Teachers’ Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Decision-Making through Design-Based Integrated STEM Activities

Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine the nature of the reflective decision-making processes of a group of teachers participating in the engineering design part of integrated STEM activities, and the argumentation schemes they use in the reflective decision-making part of integrated STEM activities. Eleven in-service teachers, all from the same institution, with expertise in different STEM disciplines, participated in the study. A STEM professional development program was applied over five days. Each day, one design-based integrated STEM activity was employed lasting about four hours, in two rotating groups of participants. For discourse analysis, each group’s data were collected using a voice-recorder and transcribed by applying Jefferson (2004)’s Transcription Notation. During the professional development program, the researchers walked around the groups, listened to their discourse, and observed the group members’ participation. Furthermore, the analysis steps defined by the literature were employed. The results showed that the engineering design process was carried out in two ways, namely, “joint design” and “existence of a dominant member.” Joint design was conducted during the pre-design, design, and post-design stages. The existence of the dominant member is seen in non - joint-design-oriented discourses and in the post-design stages. We found that one of the essential factors in shaping the activity within the group and managing it was the existence of a dominant character in the group. In our case, the dominant character was not the same participant for all activities. Rather, different characters dominated in different design activities and took the lead/initiative. The teachers made use of four argumentation schemes -- position to know (personal), position to know (research), consequences, and popular opinion -- in the reflective decision-making part of integrated STEM activities. By implication, integrated STEM professional development programs should support teachers’ development of collaborative reflective decision-making and group work skills to teach them how to handle such students in class. Moreover, teachers should attend professional development programs to see how the members of small groups interact with each other.