Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Breakdowns in elaborating new technologies 275
to handle a class with 40 students in such activities). In spite of suggestions of
the rest of the design- research team, the teachers groped in the dark concerning
how to interact and to evaluate in successive activities according to their new
epistemological beliefs.
Discussion
Our aim in the present study was to observe teachers dedicated to fostering dialogic
thinking in two activity systems and to compare their behavior in order to
infer shifts in their epistemological beliefs and in their actions. As shown in the
series of discussions we presented, the teachers behaved differently in the designresearch
team and in their classes. In the design- research team, they underwent
several breakdowns: when they requested a list of precise criteria for evaluating
arguments but rejected the suggestions to distinguish between argumentative components
such as evidence and explanations, or when they rejected the suggestion
to evaluate independently content and argumentativeness, and rather subordinated
argumentative aspects to content ones; when they discussed the quality of
a written argument brought from one of the classes (this activity challenged their
bureaucratic–institutional view of learning outcomes); when they were perplexed
concerning the communicative function of reasoning provided by Digalo. This
perplexity contrasted with the propensity they showed in Digalo discussions, and
with the innovative ways in which they animated the discussions according to
dialogic principles in their work with their students. They helped students identify
collective argumentation as a central vehicle of dialogical thinking: taking care of
others’ opinions, expressing opinions as a way to express an identity to the other,
but also being committed to quality of reasoning as a way to convince and to be
convinced. They capitalized on the very criteria they rejected when elaborating an
evaluation tool. The sophisticated argument about the story of the hunter’s son
that one teacher presented suggests that she put a special stress on argumentative
skills. However, this stress was put into action, not as a coercive way of labelling
argumentative levels in students.
There are two possible interpretations to these discrepancies. The first one is that
the breakdowns in the design- research team suggested a real resistance to change.
In the Digalo discussions, the teachers were aware of the fact that they played a
different role in a different system and intentionally instilled argumentative norms
in their classes according to the principles they discussed in the design- research
team. In contrast, in the design- research team, their status was at stake: they
thought about how their institution would judge activities that promote dialogic
thinking, and concepts such as “correctness,” “content to be taught,” and “criteria
for evaluation” turned out to be central. The breakdowns we detected were signs
of change in professionals ready to change their practices but anxious to preserve
the infrastructure in which they continue to evolve.
The second interpretation is that in their classes, teachers improvised their interventions
(see the notion of improvisation developed by Ludvigsen, Rasmussen, Ingeborg Krange,