Experiments, contingencies, and curriculum: Providing opportunities for learning through improvisation in science teaching

In this article, we examine how, through discourse processes, a third grade teacher and her students come to situationally define science in their classroom. The teacher's use of particular discursive strategies promoted student talk, thus providing opportunities for students to learn about science through the exploration of a set of anomalous results in a life science experiment. Drawing from social studies of science, we used a discourse analytical approach to examine the classroom members' logic of experimentation, their explanations and scientific decisions, and their accounts of the events. These analyses allowed us to identify how particular teaching strategies afforded students opportunities to learn science concepts and about scientific processes.