Emerging Perspectives on the Co-Construction of Power and Learning in the Learning Sciences,Mathematics Education,and Science Education

Power

Given that others have written tomes about the construct of power, we cannot fathom providing a conclusive definition of the term in a few lines. The dictionary definition is a helpful starting point: “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behavior of others or the course of events” (New Oxford American Dictionary, n.d.). We also interpret power as the ability to alter or maintain the physical, social, structural, cultural, and political conditions, resources, and/or opportunities of individuals and collectives (Baldwin, 2013; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Davis, 1983; hooks, 2014). From our perspective, power is co-constructed at multiple scales—historically and structurally at the macrolevel, at the organizational and institutional levels, at the interactional level, and in and through the bodies of individuals themselves. At each of these levels, power is simultaneously coercive with the threat of force and violence and also ideological in that it exists as assumptions of “commonsense” and practices taken to be “normal” (Foucault, 1979; Gramsci, 1971; Hall, 1996). The operation and outcomes of power are sometimes aligned across these levels and contradictory at other times.

Interaction and Microgenetic Analyses

Researchers who employ interaction and microgenetic analyses are diverse in terms of their disciplines and the specific methods they employ. However, there are certain commitments that characterize these approaches. Researchers who employ interaction analysis share the premise that “knowledge and action are fundamentally social in origin, organization, and use, and are situated in particular social and material ecologies” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 41). As Jordan and Henderson (1995) further elaborate, “This view implies a commitment to grounding theories of knowledge and action in empirical evidence, that is, to building generalizations from records of particular, naturally occurring activities, and steadfastly holding . . . theories accountable to that evidence” (p. 41). The interdisciplinary methods that characterize interaction analysis empirically investigates “the interaction of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment” through close attention to “talk, nonverbal interaction, and the use of artifacts and technologies, identifying routine practices and problems and the resources for their solution” (p. 39).

While the roots of interaction analysis “lie in ethnography (especially participant observation), socio-linguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, kinesics, proxemics, and ethology” (Jordan & Henderson, 1995, p. 39), we see microgenetic analysis as an important parallel set of methods that has its roots in psychology and cognitive science. Microgenetic approaches accentuate fine-grained processes of learning and change that occur “at the smallest observable time scales” (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013, p. 7). They seek a “moment-by-moment explanatory account of learning in particular contexts” and “conceptual resolution” that yields “very fine distinctions in meaning” that must be tracked (Parnafes & diSessa, 2013, p. 7). For Siegler (2006), microgenetic approaches are characterized by the following methodological commitments:

Similar to the use of the term critical in fields such as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995), we seek to identify a body of work that has implicitly or explicitly linked interaction and microgenetic analyses with an examination of power. Critical interaction and microgenetic analysis forefronts that moment-by-moment processes of learning and change, and the interactions of human beings with each other and with objects in their environment, reflexively co-construct “wider social and cultural structures, relations, and processes” and “struggles over power” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 132).

The Dynamic Construction of Identity and Ideology

A distinct and shared characteristic of the articles in this review is that they explicitly emphasized the moment-to-moment co-construction of power, identities, ideologies, and learning. This approach stands in contrast to perspectives that have assumed that learning takes place on the substrate of relatively stable and durable identities, ideologies, and forms of status and power. Critiquing these perspectives, Wood (2013) has argued that the most prevalent approaches “lack the sensitivity to account for variability” in who students are across time and place (Wood, 2013). As Wood (2013) argues, assumptions about stability often function to mask or render invisible variations in students’ identities. She highlighted the need to attend to “micro-identities,” or “identities enacted in a moment of time,” in addition to the more common focus on “macro-identities,” or “relatively stable, long-term constructions of who a person is” (p. 776).

By using positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1999), Wood examined how dramatically students’ identities could shift across a single classroom lesson. Her analysis identified the “offered position(s)” and “enacted position(s)” in each relevant turn of talk in one group of fourth-grade students interacting during a mathematics lesson. While most work on identity has ample caveats about multiplicity and variability, the typical reliance on interview data or summative narrations of participant observations often does not show the empirical basis or consequences of these theoretical conjectures. Wood demonstrated how close attention to micro-interactions among participants brings multiplicity and variability in identities to the fore, even across short timescales. Making a more explicit connection between possible micro-identities and macro-identities, Gamez and Parker (2017) used the construct of “micro-figured worlds” to study the subtle ethnic, racial, class, gender, and linguistic inequalities that emerged in two small groups. By focusing on two multilingual learners, they draw attention to the significance these subtle distinctions made in the groups and how they might differentially affect students from the “same” presumed identity category.

Through the lens of ideology, Philip (2011), Philip et al. (2016), and Philip et al. (2018) draw attention to the micro-interactions through which ideological stances are taken by participants, taken up by others, and contested and co-constructed in interaction. They demonstrate how participants’ ideological stances construct oneself and others in the moment. Similar to Wood (2013), they show the large amount of variation that can be glossed over through accounts of ideology that emphasize stability and durability. In particular, Philip et al. (2018) studied an undergraduate engineering ethics course and showed how presumptions of relative ideological stability is better understood as an interactional achievement between participants that involve moments of ideological expansion and convergence. They define ideological convergence as “the narrowing of the field of ideological stances that are salient and seen as useful as individuals participate in a joint activity” and ideological expansion as an “analogous broadening of the ideological field” (Philip et al., 2018, p. 185). They trace expansions and convergences using Du Bois’s (2007) stance triangle, arguing that stances both evaluate an object and aligns or dis-aligns the stance taker to other participants. Their work troubles assumptions about the necessary salience of certain ideologies like American nationalism or the differential value attributed to civilians of different nationalities; they demonstrate how the participants had to co-construct relevant local ideological meanings, which drew on available macrolevel ideologies as well as their locally relevant identities as engineering students, Americans and non-Americans, ethical actors, and so on.

The methodological diversity in the approaches taken by Wood (2013) and Philip et al. (2018) is further reflected in Orlander Arvola (2014) who examines middle school classroom discursive practices during a lesson on human genitals. Drawing on practical epistemology analysis (Wickman, 2004), Orlander Arvola (2014) shows how the teachers and students co-constructed specific meanings through verbalizing, tacit or explicit acceptance of a prior utterance, and/or filling in the gaps and connections left unsaid in a prior utterance. The inclusion and exclusion of particular knowledges and their significance were outcomes of interactional negotiations between the teacher and the students. While the teachers’ moves emphasized learning basic facts about human anatomy, students’ wonderings connected them to their own experiences, blending gender and sexuality. Thus, “basic facts” reemerged in this discourse as contextual and imbued with cultural-political meaning. Linked to dominant ideologies, the facts-focused discourse also tended to center male anatomy and heteronormativity, with the discussion of female anatomy as derivative and deviating from male anatomy. Even with these reinscriptions of dominant ideology, Orlander Arvola shows that students’ questions challenged hegemonic normalizations of gender and epistemology, creating a more expansive and tangled discursive space. Similarly, Hale (2015) shows how the status and identity of being a “special education” student was acknowledged, accepted, contested, and rejected through students who participated in cogenerative dialogue with their peers and teacher.

The distinctive contribution of Wood (2013), Hale (2015), Orlander Arvola (2014), and the work by Philip and his colleagues is showing how identity and ideology are co-constructed in interaction between participants within the particularities of context. To be clear, the theoretical underpinning of their work relies heavily on the prior contributions of critical theorists and critical feminist scholars. The novel contribution of this body of work is the development and deployment of methodological tools, such as micro-identities and ideological convergence, which empirically make visible and accentuate the dynamic processes through which identity and ideology are co-constructed. These detailed, microgenetic, and interactional examinations of the processes of co-construction are then poised to further nuance, contextualize, and complicate the theories on which they build. They caution us against the tendency to slip into claims that the historical, structural, and ideological aspects of power are simply embedded in the organization of a learning environment, that they inherently exist in tools, resources, and human bodies and are waiting to be activated. Rather, in analyses, such as Philip et al.’s (2018) examination of nationalism within the context of an undergraduate classroom, these researchers empirically show how it is in interactions that the cultural and historical traces of power are rendered visible, remade, and/or challenged. This approach shifts the lens from efforts to change the macro-identities of students or the presumably stable ideologies of teachers and students to nuanced attention to the interactions between participants through which micro-identities and microcontestations of ideology emerge in spaces of learning.

Another set of articles in this category emphasized the co-constructed nature of disciplines, like mathematics and science. Rahm’s (2007) analysis of conversations among teenage youth in a summer gardening program documented that male participants distinguished between different kinds of scientific work along racial lines and female participants constructed the differences in scientific work along gendered lines. Through these utterances, Rahm argues, the youths’ own gendered and racialized selves in relation to science were constructed and made visible. Similarly, Archer et al. (2010) examined how in elementary school students’ discourse about what counted as science, there emerged a distinction between science in elementary school and “real” or “grown-up” science. Students co-constructed the science that they did in school as “safe,” “immature,” and not real science. Such science was contrasted with real science that was dynamic, unpredictable, and involved taking risks (including physical risks) and was taught at higher grade levels or practiced by professional scientists. Drawing on poststructural theorizations of gender (Butler, 1990), Archer et al. (2010) argue that these discourses layer “school” versus “real” science with gendered meanings, with masculinity mapped more strongly onto real and grown-up science.

Complementing Rahm’s (2007) and Archer et al.’s (2010) studies of how students conceived of science, Due (2014) examines the practices in a science classroom that positioned students differentially. Due illustrated how girls, in observed physics group work, tended to focus more on understanding, expressed uncertainty, and asked more questions, constructing themselves as responsible students but also putting them at risk for being positioned as less competent in physics. Boys, on the other hand, had a larger range of positionalities available to them, from an irresponsible student, to playful, to being a competent and competitive student in physics, and, as a result, their contributions were less frequently questioned by self or peers. While there were contestations to these positionalities in some groups, in most cases, they limited the ways in which female students could come to see themselves as competent physics learners or as having trajectories that allowed for more central participation in the physics community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Due (2014) argues that these cases illustrate that “theories concerning ‘situated learning’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) must be supplemented with theories about power relations” (p. 457). Similarly, Archer et al. (2017) drew on critical discourse (Burman & Parker, 1993) and gender theory (Butler, 1990) to show how power is organized within talk and the social implications of particular constructions. They document how the everyday actions that are celebrated or considered exemplary in the science classroom are often masculine and aggressive, demonstrating what they call “muscular intellect.” The celebration of these performances legitimizes them, narrowing the possibilities for who gets to be seen as a science person (Carlone et al., 2014).

In a similar vein, Ideland and Malmberg (2012) compare the discourses that students from a Swedish urban middle school and a Swedish suburban middle school engaged in during same-gender focus group discussions on body and health. They note that the positionalities that were available and taken up by students in terms of being a good student were entangled with their conceptualization of gender performance. Girls at the urban school questioned the normative characterizations of body and health, resisted stereotyped notions of Muslim girls from immigrant and low-income families as weak and passive, and created and made available alternate versions of femininity through “othering” the stereotype.

These studies show local constructions of science and their alignments with dominant representations of race and gender in science rather than assuming the inevitability of gendered and racialized exclusion in science. While the resonance between the local construction of science and its hegemonic representation is disheartening in both studies, they problematize assumptions of top-down determinism and suggest the possibilities of localized constructions that are robust enough to mitigate or resist the effects of dominant ideologies.

Talk and action in science classrooms thus embody cultural understandings and norms of gender, class, and disciplinary identities and epistemologies, constituting the “doing” of specific aspects of identity (Butler, 1990; Paechter, 2007). These discourses simultaneously constrain and enable what participants can do and say, the positionalities available to them (Foucault, 1979), and, ultimately, who gets positioned by self and others as legitimately belonging in science (Carlone et al., 2014). Identity, thus, is not conceptualized as an internal sense of self but as constituted in and remade by interactions and participation in local cultural practices (Esmonde, 2009; Nasir & Hand, 2006).

Much of the work in this category examines shifts in identity and ideology across relatively short timescales. Notable exceptions, Gresalfi et al. (2009) and Carlone et al. (2015) show that microlevel interactions have the potential to sediment into more durable identities over time. In their analysis of competence, Gresalfi et al. (2009) shift the lens of analysis from an individual and individual traits to the social organization of a classroom by considering the system of competence that gets constructed as students and teachers negotiate the following:

(1) the kind of mathematical agency that the task and the participation afford, (2) what the students are supposed to be accountable for doing, and (3) whom they need to be accountable to in order to participate successfully in the classroom activity system. (p. 52)

They thus bring attention to the “interaction between the opportunities that a student has to participate competently and the ways that individual takes up those opportunities” (Gresalfi et al., 2009, p. 50).

Carlone et al. (2015) study girls’ identity development in elementary grade science classrooms. While they do not attend to micro-interactions in detail over very short timescales, they attended to “patterns of girls’ discursive performances of femininity in school science from fourth to seventh grade” (p. 478). They collected field notes, interviews with students and teachers, and videos of classrooms. They analyzed these data for academic performances like “good student,” and particular performances of femininity often associated with distancing from a scientific identity such as pleasing adults and making one self submissive or invisible. Their analysis honed in on one student, Mirabel, over the course of 3 years of schooling. They show how her identity shifted from being one of the class’s “smartest science students” and from being actively engaged in Grade 4 to being constructed as “flighty” and a “social butterfly” whose interest in “girly stuff took [her] away from intellectual engagements” in Grade 5. By Grade 6, Carlone et al. argued that Mirabel was playing with a more “heterosexualized identity” and positioned herself as helpless and in need of assistance. In their assessment, by sixth grade, Mirabel played up heteronormative sexual performances and downplayed her academic side, using her agency to “walk away from her possibilities in science in favor of her primary social goal to fit in with peers” (p. 485). The authors situate these changes in the performances of Mirabel and other girls within “classroom organizational, ideological and interpersonal structures,” particularly narrow constructions of who is good at science. They argue that Mirabel’s fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms put severe constraints on Mirabel’s agency, leaving her without a “viable academic/scientific subject position” that allowed her to still fit in, encouraging her to choose to be “more social and girly,” a social position that afforded recognition from her peers and teacher.

Reading this body of work prompts us to examine how hegemonies of race, gender, and class (and other dominant power structures) are co-constructed within classroom interactions and “acquire” (McDermott, 1993) learners and/or the discipline through discourse and participation structures. They also present openings that have potential to disrupt these hegemonies. The articles in the next section take up the question of whether and how the organization of the learning environment more broadly reproduces and/or challenges these hegemonies.

Attending to the Organization of a Learning Environment

This set of studies is more diverse with overlapping attention to the organization of a learning environment. At one end of the spectrum are infrastructural elements that embody relationships of power. As an example, Archer et al. (2016) studied the design of particular exhibits at a museum and how students interacted with these spaces. Their discourse analytic approach looked for “how power is organized within (the boys’) talk” to draw out “the social implications of particular constructions” (p. 451). Their analysis asked the following: “What is the talk doing? What is being normalized or defended? Where is the locus of power within a particular construction—whose interests are being asserted? Who or what is being othered? What is normalized or closed down?” (p. 451). In their data, Archer et al. identified performances and tropes of masculinity and the ways in which they were supported or challenged by others. They attended to how these forms of masculinities existed in relationship to performances of science identity and intersections with classed and racialized discourses. Their analysis suggests that the design of the exhibits promoted masculine displays of “laddishness” by certain boys visiting the museum. In some cases, such performance of gender also opened up opportunities for the boys to engage in science discussions. Archer et al.’s (2016) analysis draws on poststructural gender theory to show how “hegemonic masculinity is normalized within the museum space,” shaping who gets to do science in that space and how. Similarly, Dawson (2014) studied interactions between museum staff and visitors from low-income racial minority backgrounds within the context of the design of exhibits and the assumptions and practices embedded in museums. Through this examination, Dawson highlighted differences in the cultural, linguistic, economic, and social capital (Bourdieu, 1998) of the visitors and how they were co-constructed through assumptions built into the exhibits and modes of interaction. The organization of the learning space led to a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1990) that tended to exclude visitors from low-income backgrounds or made it more difficult for them to identify with the museum space.

Archer et al.’s (2016) analysis forefronts infrastructure such as the physical environment and the “stereotypically masculine objects in the museum” that emphasized competition and “afforded boys a platform from which to assert performances of hegemonic masculinity” (p. 468). The organization of a learning environment is not only physical, it also entails how the shared activity is locally structured to collectively address certain types of problems. Horn (2007) highlighted the problems of practice that teachers encounter and how they solve these problems in consultation with their colleagues. In particular, she showed how conceptions of students, mathematics as a subject, and teaching are all embedded and interactionally reconstructed in teacher’s daily work. She explored how the conversational category systems at schools mediated the ways in which teachers took responsibility for students’ learning at one school site and how they constructed students to be at the root of the problem at another school site. Methodologically, Horn studied the categorization of students and its relation to teachers’ practices and their conceptions of their subject through a unit of analysis she termed episode of pedagogical reasoning—“units of teacher-to-teacher talk in which teachers exhibit their understanding of an issue in their practice” (p. 46). Horn’s work shifts the focus from the presumed beliefs of individual teachers (and efforts to change them) to the collective meaning making that emerges from the everyday practices of teachers.

Related to Horn’s (2007) problem of practices, Jackson’s (2011) inquiry demonstrates the implications for students when sites of learning are organized such that knowledge and practices flow in one direction, particularly between sites with differential forms of power. In her study, Jackson extensively observed one student, Timothy, at home and eventually in his school context. At home, Jackson observed a collective effort on the part of Timothy’s parents to arrange and rearrange situations for him to successfully complete his homework, given the consequences that noncompletion presented for him at school. Yet Timothy’s teacher attributed his challenges with homework first to a presumed disability and then to “coddling” on the part of his parents. Jackson argued that the student’s shortcomings in the classroom were produced not only in the classroom but also through the teacher’s unwarranted interpretation of what was happening at home. Jackson’s study suggests the importance of examining how different sites of learning are organized and interact with each other.

The organization of a learning environment can also be relational. Bruna and Vann (2007) and Bruna (2010) suggest that a friendly relationship between the teacher and the students can allow students to interject with their ideas and questions, leading to the transformation of the activity system. Takeuchi (2016) takes on this theme more substantively. Takeuchi documents that when English language learners work with friends in small-group problem-solving activities, they had access to a wider range of roles, including that of an expert. In teacher-assigned groups, the same students were positioned as incapable and their contributions were often not recognized, which limited their opportunities to learn.

Differences in epistemologies and the values attributed to different practices also play a role in organizing a learning environment. Bruna and Vann (2007) and Bruna (2010) examine the experiences of immigrant middle-school students of Mexican origin in their science classroom. Focusing on a lesson on pig dissection, Bruna and Vann (2007) show how the framing of the lesson by the teacher was situated in the race and class divisions of the town whose main industry was a meatpacking plant with majority White administrators and majority Mexican immigrant workers. The teacher–student interactions, the structure of the activity, the tools involved, and the knowledges forefronted, reified this racial and classed framing. The organization of the classroom made it difficult for students to draw on their personal experiences and community knowledge as epistemic sources. These authors demonstrate through their analyses that power is never fully deterministic and that the intersectional nature of power allows students to position themselves and get positioned by others along multiple axes. For instance, Bruna (2010) further developed this analysis to show moments when the class’s normative patterns were resisted and temporarily transformed by a student, who drew on his transnational cultural resources and his recognized proficiency in English.

As in Bruna (2010), many of the articles in this cluster (Andrée, 2012; LópezLeiva et al., 2013; Meacham, 2007; Puvirajah et al., 2012) show how shifts in the activity system allowed for the emergence of different positionalities and possibilities for authoring different selves. For example, LópezLeiva et al. (2013) showed how a shift in attending to and elaborating on English language learners’ hybrid linguistic resources (from judging or dis-acknowledging them) allowed students to make sense of complex mathematical ideas around probability and to author identities as competent mathematics learners. In their study of a dual-language after-school mathematics program, they examined when students decided to work in mostly Spanish or English, the strategies they employed across these instances, and “patterns across groups in how the students’ multidimensionality was accounted for and legitimized as well as how students and their facilitators participated [. . .] during probability problem-solving tasks” (p. 924). Puvirajah et al. (2012) examined how the shift in the activity system from a science classroom to the context of a robotics competition reduced the power imbalance between students and teachers, opening up ways in which to participate that more closely mirrored professional science practices.

Resonant with articles in the previous category, Jackson and Seiler (2017, 2018) emphasized the co-construction of disciplines and identities. They draw on the figured worlds framework (Holland et al., 2001) alongside critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) to examine how students who enter postsecondary science through nontraditional journeys (“latecomers”) struggle to find ways to achieve status as “good student” or “being good in science” in the classroom. They argue that the elitism of science as constructed in the figured world of the institution and the dominance of teacher-centered and sink-or-swim cultural models of learning made it more difficult for latecomers to science to author science identities. In the 2017 article, Jackson and Seiler highlight two cases where the “latecomer” student subverted the dominant models to gain status as a student and a science learner. In their 2018 article, they showed how a similar transformation in status and affinity to science could be achieved collectively by a group of students through online dialogue, by building solidarity, and by recognizing the value of asking questions.

Further problematizing static conceptions of disciplines, Rosebery et al. (2010) develop the construct of epistemological heterogeneity. They highlighted through their study of a class of third and fourth graders how classrooms are “spaces in which whole systems of meaning or ways of seeing the world come into contact with one another in both planned and unplanned ways” (p. 337). They drew attention to how “instructional encounters” can be designed with “the aim of fostering contact among varied languages and points of view to generate learning of disciplinary ways of seeing the world” (p. 351). Rosebery et al.’s theorization of learning as heterogeneous meaning making is resonant with Van Horne and Bell’s (2017) study of the design of a high school biology classroom that engaged youth in culturally expansive epistemic practices of science. The design of the classroom provided youth with multiple entry points that supported the development of their disciplinary science identities and their possible future selves. Their analysis examined how particular subject positions became meaningful to participants within the setting they studied. Van Horne and Bell coded for how students “were positioned to engage in specific kinds of work over time, the kinds of persons that were related to that work, and a tracing of the self-reflection and social recognition work that unfolded over time” (pp. 452–453). They also paid particular attention to the outside expertise students brought to bear to disciplinary practices and how it was meaningful or not to their goals within the setting.

While the articles above problematize the exclusionary practices of “Western science” in schools, Bang and Marin (2015) and Marin and Bang (2018) examine the new possibilities that emerge when Indigenous ways of knowing are centered. Marin and Bang (2018) explored a Native American family’s experience on a walk in an urban forest preserve and how learning unfolded in this place. They make “an argument for walking, reading, and storying land as a methodology for learning about and making relationships with the natural world” (p. 111). Their analysis is situated within a deep recognition of the complex ecological challenges facing the globe. They suggest that making progress on these ecological challenges “requires attending to the microgenetic processes that give rise to human-nature relationships in activity and practice” (p. 113). Drawing on design-based work rooted in a framework of Indigenous ways of knowing, Bang and Marin’s (2015) study of everyday parent-child interactions led them to argue that organizing learning environments so that they “expand the boundaries of reality and possible futures for students is both vital and possible” (p. 542). They argued that normative practices create moments of interaction that tend to reinscribe inequalities while demonstrating the political and ethical significance of reorganizing talk-in-interaction for practices such as “memory traces.”

The articles in this section considered the organization of the learning environment as a whole, which includes the physical space, the available resources, the organization of social relationships, particular types of performances and recognitions, and access to resources. While the articles in the first section highlighted the moment-to-moment co-constructions of identities and ideologies, articles in this section take a slightly broader unit of analysis—the organization of the learning environment. They highlight how the mesolevel organization mediates the contact of micro-interactional processes with macrocategories and constructs. In the section below, we explicitly highlight a set of articles that focuses on how tools are used, adapted, and refashioned to exercise power.

Leveraging and Repurposing Tools

The set of articles in this category explored how representational, meditational, and discursive tools afforded opportunities and constraints through which power and learning were co-constructed. In particular, Rubel et al. (2016), Rubel et al. (2017), Hostetler et al. (2018), and Philip et al. (2016) explore how these co-constructions emerge within the context of new digital technologies. Rubel et al. (2017) and Philip et al. (2016) draw attention to how representations of data through maps are interpreted through ideological systems where space is highly racialized. They show how disciplinary meaning making about the data was integrally connected to students’ meaning making about themselves as sociopolitical actors and about systems of power in which they lived and moved. Their analysis at the level of turns of talk—drawing from Goodwin’s (2007) participation framework in the case of Philip et al. (2016) and Morris’s (2013) map reading framework in the case of Rubel et al.—demonstrate the opportunities for disciplinary learning and learning about power that were afforded and limited by the use of the representations. These pieces add to a rich tradition of scholarship that has emphasized that tools and representations embody power and politics. They trace how these representations are leveraged and contested in interaction to co-construct opportunities for learning and meaning making about power.

Hostetler et al.’s (2018) work highlights the use of new digital tools to create representations that allow learners to take on the perspectives of others. Their agent-based computational models of ethnocentrism and racial segregation allowed preservice teachers to “discuss critical socio-political issues in the classroom without forcing themselves to reveal their personal experiences or assumptions” (p. 145). They argue that once the learner locates themselves in the simulation, they identify with a certain type of agent and in turn construct the remaining agents as “others.” By attending to the learning opportunities afforded through this set of tools and representations, the authors show the range of empirically informed discussions that learners engage in as they consider, through a process of objectification, the perspectives of the multiple agents in the simulation. Reasoning about the world of computational agents afforded opportunities for the learners to “build discourses that included critical perspectives, debate relevant conflicts, and develop nuanced understandings of the underlying socio-political-economic mechanisms that may be responsible for the emergence of ethnocentric behavior” (p. 140).

Emphasizing the importance of mediational tools, Lewis (2014, 2017) examined the construction of mathematical learning disabilities (MLDs). Based on her analysis of tutoring interactions with two students with MLDs, she showed that standard instructional representations most commonly used in mathematics classrooms are inaccessible for these students and thus co-construct the MLDs. She conjectured that the re-mediation (Gutiérrez et al., 2009) of tools to account for and build on students’ understandings might expand learning opportunities for students with MLDs. Lewis’s (2014, 2017) work demonstrates that an interactional analysis that focuses on the affordances and limitations of mediational tools for different students can elucidate the co-construction of forms of power such as ability and disability. With similar attention to mediational tools, Oliveira et al. (2014) examined how the representation of animal death in elementary school read-aloud sessions through lenses of predation or as an agentless outcome was viewed as natural and morally good, while representations of animal death as pollution-related were viewed as unnatural and immoral. Oliveira et al. demonstrated that representations of death mediate relationships of power between humans and other forms of life. Similarly, Oliveira et al. (2012) analyzed how “specific textual elements in the design of environmental dilemmas (types of prompts used, decision-makers’ identities, statements of intentionality and outcome, moral complexity, values of nature, and social representation or cultural images of animals)” prompted either nonadversarial argumentation between students or argumentation that involved contestations over sexual identities, combative disagreement, and “conflict resolution on social rather than rational grounds” (p. 869). As another example, Buchholz et al. (2014) documented the culturally embedded gendered meanings of tools, which were reinscribed and renegotiated in interactions between students in an e-textile maker environment. Their analysis examines how the use of these tools opened up opportunities for students to learn and access positions of leadership.

A second category of tools that we examined was discursive in nature. These discursive tools, both social and disciplinary, were leveraged to co-construct status in classrooms and negotiate relationships of power among students and between teachers and students. Engle et al. (2014) trace the contributions of one student in a mathematics classroom. Through a framework that highlighted (a) the negotiated merit of each participant’s contributions, and each participant’s (b) degree of intellectual authority, (c) access to the conversational floor, and (d) degree of spatial privilege, the authors demonstrate that influence in argumentation emerged dynamically through social interactions. Their analysis showed that while the normative quality of the focus student’s arguments was lower than that of his peers, his arguments garnered more influence because of his perceived intellectual authority and his ability to “command the interactional space and conversational floor” (Langer-Osuna, 2017, p. 240; see also Langer-Osuna, 2015, 2016).

Similarly, Bishop (2012) closely examined the discourse patterns in small-group interactions. Her framework draws attention to (a) using an authoritarian voice, (b) making statements of superiority or inferiority, (c) using face-saving moves, (d) building solidarity and providing encouragement, and (e) controlling problem-solving strategies. Her analysis of two students, Teri and Bonnie, showed that through Teri’s “control of discourse at the microlevel and their repeated and joint positioning of Bonnie as mathematically incapable with little to contribute, the girls enacted their respective identities of ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’” (p. 66). Bishop’s analysis shows how microlevel patterns in students’ discourse shaped the mathematical identities they enacted.

Distinct from Engle et al. (2014) and Bishop (2012), Schoerning et al. (2015) documented the power asymmetry between the teacher and the student by attending to “language markers related to power and agency, including both non-grammatical factors such as tone and tempo of speech as well as the characteristics and qualities of that speech’s dialog” (p. 244). They show how it was ameliorated over time, in the case they studied, through “an immersion approach” to argument-based inquiry, where “students develop questions, design experiments, gather data, and generate evidence to support claims that address their initial questions” (p. 254). Schoerning et al. showed that by “actively inverting some of the conventions of formal language” (p. 256), teachers can create new avenues for access and power for their students and engage them as stakeholders who are more able to engage in argumentative aspects of disciplinary negotiation. Highlighting intersections of power, Enyedy et al. (2008) showed the unintended consequences of the practice of revoicing students’ contributions in a multilingual classroom and how this discursive tool operated at the intersection of linguistic and racial forms of power to inadvertently marginalize the African American students in the class.

Bridging the multiple tools across both categories, Vossoughi (2014) made an explicit link between artifacts developed in a learning environment and the deepening of the collective analysis of social problems in her study of an educational setting designed for high school–aged migrant students. She attended to how “social analytic artifacts”—“tools or habits of mind that deepen and propel the collective analysis of social problems”—were made and appropriated in real-time talk and interaction (p. 353). She analyzed “how classroom discourse, printed texts, and social relations created an environment where social analytic artifacts were codeveloped and appropriated over time” (p. 353).

Collectively, these articles draw attention to tools as imbued with power and with the potential to be contested and repurposed for different goals. Rubel et al. (2016), Rubel et al. (2017), Hostetler et al. (2018), and Philip et al. (2016) made evident the emergent possibilities and challenges of new digital tools and representations as they enter learning environments. Lewis (2014, 2017), Oliveira et al. (2014), and Buchholz et al. (2014) reminded us of the ways in which power is deeply embedded in the tools and representations that mostly go unquestioned as well as the importance of remediating them toward more equitable and just purposes. Engle et al. (2014), Bishop (2012), and Schoerning et al. (2015) highlighted how discursive tools are deployed constantly to enforce and challenge power and status. Finally, Vossoughi (2014) explicitly attends to how tools can be codeveloped toward collective social analysis and political learning. Collectively, these articles remind us of the dynamic nature of the organization of learning environments and of learners’ agency in these spaces. In these articles, tools, which could be linguistic tools, digital technologies, representations, etc., become the locus or site where macrocategories and constructs are entangled with microlevel interactions.