grad student supervision
update: JAN-28-10

My responsibility as university faculty member includes working with graduate students to allow them to become part of a community of scholars. Of course, working with others is nearly impossible if the graduate students' research is outside the domain of the supervisor. Graduate students who join my team work on problems and research topics closely aligned with the laboratory's topics, to a great part determined by the grants that fund our research.

To agree to supervising someone, the potential graduate student has to commit to write, under my close guidance, a series of publishable articles. In the past, MA students wrote about 3 articles (which they also present at national and international conferences whereas doctoral students generally write 5-6 research articles for publication. In some form, these articles constitute the body of their thesis, and are complemented by introduction, theory, method, and conclusion/implication chapters that the student writes on his/her own.

My current preference will be to work with students in an interdisciplinary program run by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, which allows the student to develop competencies across departments. There will have to be two supervisors, one from each of the two main departments.

 .Here you find a description of my research team, past and present, and some of the projects they are (have been) working on and the publications that issued from them.

Some of the topics that have been researched

1. Learning transitions in different settings   How do people learn in different settings such as in schools and workplaces? What are mechanisms allowing people to make transitions successful?
2. Cultural resources for talking science   What are cultural resources for supporting science talk?
3. Theorizing teaching and learning   What are theoretical concepts that can authentically capture the praxis of teaching and learning?
4. Emotion as resource and outcome of social interaction   The sociology of emotion; tracking emotions via prosodic features
5. Gestures and prosody as interactional resources   How are gestures and prosody (pitch, speech rate, pitch contour, F1, speech intensity [volume] used as resources for conducting interactions, for producing context and text?
6. Levels of competence in scientific representation (e.g., graphing, using averages) from elementary to high school levels   Paper-and-pencil testing and video taping of pairs of students as they work on selected tasks.
7. Learning from laboratory activities   For example, how is it possible that students engage in hands-on activities and learn something that we usually ascribe to mental qualities?
8. Learning in communities   What are the mechanisms by means of which individuals learn within communities? How does what one person knows come to be shared by another? What are the processes by means of which individual situated cognition is coordinated to bring about what might be referred to as social cognition?
9. Developing competence in ecology   What are the mechanisms by means of which individuals become competent in ecological issues? This competence could be that of an ecologist, a First Nations person and his/her traditional ecological knowledge, or that of an environmental activists. How is the competence a function of the culture in which individuals participate?
10. Examination of teaching through the eyes of the teacher   That is, what is it that makes praxis so different from considering teaching theoretically?

update: APR-15-11

talks, workshops, & new articles

making trouble
(((the most oppressive hegemony comes from where you least expect it: your friends)))

new pieces
- ZPD
- Dynamic of life
- Solidarity
- What more?
- More reflexivity
- «Mosh»
- Science hegemony
older pieces
- Identity & Community
- Mêlée & literacy
- Radical passivity
- On responsibility . . .
- On editing . . .
- Ethics as social practice
- Political ethics, unethical politics
- Vagaries and politics of funding 1
- Vagaries and politics of funding 2
- Editorial power/authorial suffering


Martin Heidegger


Jacques Derrida


Jean-Luc Nancy


Hélène Cixous


Che Guevara


Benazir Butto


Aung San Suu Kyi

preprints

Science studies
- Struggle over water 2
- Struggle over water 1
- Science and the good citizen
Scientific literacy
- Allgemeinbildung: Readiness for living in risk society
- Citizenship and science education
Gesture studies
- Gestures: The leading edge of literacy...
Workplace math
- The meaning of meaning...
- The emergence of graphing...