Social representations and pedagogical practices in environmental education

Abstract

In the last decades, the links between writing and learning have been widely studied. In higher education, researchers have focused on students´ productions, on their standpoints towards writing in different disciplines, and on the complex relations between subject contents and writing practices, among others. However, teaching practices that intertwine writing and disciplinary contents have received scarce attention. This work emphasises two key aspects of teaching practices related to writing to learn activities: teaching time and responsibilities in knowledge-construction. A multiple case study was conducted with two first-year courses, one in Linguistics and the other in Biology. These classes were offered in two public universities in Argentina. Data collection techniques included, mainly, classroom documents, class observations and semi-structured interviews with students. Focusing on class observations, this paper shows how the teaching time was extended by intertwining teaching practices with writing as a learning tool. In both courses, writing extended class-time when students had the opportunity to write outside the classrooms and to discuss what they wrote in whole-class discussions. Additionally, these uses of writing helped students and professors to share, in a more symmetrical way, the responsibilities towards knowledge construction.