Stories from and of the field: Developing teachers’ discursive practices of science

Graphs and data tables play a central role in the formation and communication of scientific findings. Competent graph users interpret graphs by understanding the limitations of the representing role they play and other “real world” factors that may influence depicted relationships, using personal experience to contextualize unfamiliar graphs. This suggests that improved competency with using data inscriptions (i.e., data tables, graphs, maps, drawings, illustrations, and pictures) develops as one accumulates a repertoire of research stories that can be used to support interpretations of graphs and data. This study examines the discursive practices of teachers—how they talk, what language they use, and what they gesture towards—while discussing academic posters representing the research work of field biologists they did fieldwork with. The data suggest that the teachers developed rich “stories” drawn from their field experiences, which they used to describe their participation and to contextualize the findings that emerged from the field study. However, despite a preponderance of graphs and tables on the posters, they made few direct references to them. We suggest this occurred because the teachers had participated almost exclusively in the data collection aspects of the research and not in the generative claim-making part of the research. Nevertheless, the teachers’ narrative stories of their fieldwork suggest that they appropriated many of the discursive and research practices of scientists through developing their own stories-from-the-field—“Stories of Me”. They can relate these stories to their own students as firsthand narratives demonstrating nuanced understandings of the practices of real-world research and also use them as a foundation for planning inquiry activities for their own students. We conclude that more participation in the generative, claim-making aspects of science research might further enhance the ways in which teachers discuss research and research findings.