Tracing Literate Activity across Physics and Chemistry: Toward Embodied Histories of Disciplinary Knowing, Writing, and Becoming

Abstract

: Scholarship animating both WAC/WID (Allan, 2013; Gere, et al., 2018; Hendrickson, 2016; Kells, 2007; Reid, et al., 2016) and STEM (Roth, 2003; Roth & Jornet, 2013; Tsui, 2007) has increasingly called for pedagogical attention to learners’ lived, embodied experiences of knowing, writing, and becoming in and across disciplinary worlds. As one response to such calls, this article argues for “literate activity” (Durst, 2019; Prior, 1998, 2015; Prior & Shipka, 2003) as a productive approach to addressing people’s embodied engagements with semiosis in unfolding moments that are historically dispersed across people, tools, times, and places. To illustrate what attention to literate activity offers for understanding writing and learning, we present analyses of learners’ embodied actions across an array of semiotic resources including texts, talk, images, and gestures for two different STEM settings: physics and organic chemistry. In addition to foregrounding the wealth and variety of semiotic modalities that mediate students’ embodied engagement with disciplinary science, our analyses illuminate the extended histories of semiotic activity that learners continually build as they fashion disciplinary ways of knowing, writing, and across multiple moments of their collaborative lab work. This analysis illuminates the embodied semiotic activity animating physics students’ learning and writing that can easily be overlooked without attention to the diversity of communicative resources that are woven and rewoven across even brief spans of time. Drawn from Kevin’s longitudinal case study of Samuel, a microbiology major, the second vignette elaborates how Samuel’s embodied engagements with scientific diagrams for an organic chemistry class weave together his experiences with religious worship and his investment with science in ways that have long-term consequences for his disciplinary knowledge and identity. This analysis foregrounds the richly embodied semiotic practices shaping students’ learning that can easily be occluded without attention to the variety of representational practices people act with and the enduring consequences they have for knowing and becoming. Together, these case studies reveal the richly semiotic histories that weave across a few minutes in a physics lab and of a lifetime of engagement with religion and science. When we expand our attention beyond people’s engagements with any single semiotic modality and any single community to view disciplinary enculturation as involving multiple histories reaching across the lifespan, what comes into view are richer, more complex maps of writing and learning that surface the semiotic practices students bring to and develop in disciplinary spaces and the long-term implications they hold for students’ lives across multiple communities. Making these practices more readily visible, we hope, will allow both students and teachers to better see, value, and stoke the various community-based repertoires they bring to and carry forward from their disciplinary work. For WAC and STEM practitioners, such knowledge can support the design of pedagogies that better account for students’ diverse practices and communicative contexts, as we will discuss in more detail in the conclusion.