Beyond the dichotomy

Students’ development of routines is essential to learning, particularly in STEM studies where there is a goal of preparing students for directly applying mathematics for practical ends. We hypothesize that this impacts on how they engage with routines. We report from an empirical study which explores different types of routines that undergraduate students engage in when using an animation tool to model motion in a real-world context. Drawing on commognitive theory, we conducted a fine-grained qualitative analysis of the discursive activity of one group of three engineering students. Rather than aiming for a broad generalization, the study uses this dataset to examine the mechanisms through which students shift between deed-oriented and explorative routines. The analysis shows that these routines do not function as separate forms of engagement, rather they developed as a mutually reinforcing dyad – a dyadic relationship. We argue that recognizing this relationship provides a refined lens for understanding how environments may support possibilities not only for practical learning, but also for discursive learning.