Composition in Scientific Inquiry: SeuratSpots, Disco Balls, and the Making of Meaning in Science

Composition in Scientific Inquiry:
SeuratSpots, Disco Balls, and the
Making of Meaning in Science
Dr. Kim Jaxon & Dr. Leslie Atkins
California State University, Chico
CCCC March 2014
Thursday, March 20, 14
Kim Jaxon, Assistant Professor in Composition & Literacy at Chico State. My colleague, Leslie is a physics and Science Education professor. We also work with a biologist and Science Ed professor Irene Salter
on this NSF funded project. For the past two years, we have rotated through team teaching or taking the research lead in the course in alternating semesters. Background: NSCI 321, Scientific Inquiry, is a course
Leslie originally created for future elementary school teachers. Not many science majors, but a few. The course is truly scientific inquiry...not about answers but about asking questions and pursuing curiosities
as scientists would do. Last few semesters, we’ve studied color, light and the eye. Often start semester with the question: “Is every color in the rainbow?”

NSCI 321: Scientiﬁc Inquiry future elementary school teachers
Lots of writing structures: notebooks, whiteboards, silent science, homework, exams (take home and group), reading, peer response, gallery walks. Large activity space. Room has
lasers, maglites, rulers, lenses, microscopes, etc. Write all the time; every day.
We’ll talk about the inﬂuence of composition pedagogy in this course and show an example of how writing is used to support students pursuing science related questions. We
fully embrace the work of composition scholars before us who argue for students rights to their own language and meaning making, even though this idea may be a bit
foreign in science classes.

scientists write...
Scientist
s write.

Sir Charles Darwin Alexander G. Bell
They scribble on chalkboards; construct representations; annotate graphs and photos; jot ideas in notebooks; try on, revise, and reject those ideas; send emails; scrawl notes in the margins of papers;
write grants; draft conference proceedings; put together presentations; and, if all goes well, tidy up this work into a publishable journal article —

Albert EinsteinLinus Pauling (on the structure of hemoglobin)
all in a living, iterative process of idea-development. In this way writing in the sciences is not just a means to communicate knowledge, but a way to build knowledge within the scientiﬁc community; it
generates, persuades, critiques, challenges, and defends ideas in conversation with other scientists.

Manhattan Project NotebookLinus Pauling (on the crystal structure of bottinoite)
Science does this using a specialized language (a scientiﬁc discourse), with its own vocabulary and organization that is embodied by a community of scientists working together to make sense of the
natural world, communicate those ideas, and construct arguments in defense of them (Latour & Woolgar, 1979).

Discourses: “...ways of behaving, interacting, valuing,
thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and
writing.”
Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses
In terms of the literacy practices that make up scientiﬁc discourse, Gee argues that the use of reading and writing is always connected to a larger set of discourses, which are never simply a
matter of vocabulary and syntax, but “ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing” (Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, 41). Writing, in a
huge variety of forms, is an essential, inextricable part of the discourse of a scientist.

Historically, the approach, at most universities, has been to delegate the responsibility for teaching “academic writing” to English or Composition departments. An instructor in science, then,
may assign tasks that require writing but often does not provide any explicit attention to teaching writing: the belief is that writing is a skill that is learned in one class, put in a student’s pocket, and
taken out when there is a need “to write.” In fact, many faculty outside the ﬁeld of composition expect that the ubiquitous “freshman comp” course will solve the writing problems found in students’
texts, teach students “to write,” and prepare students with “the basics” so they are ready to write in any discipline. The physics instructor, in such folk theories of writing, teaches “content” that
populates students’ well-written essays; the writing skills, it is imagined, are taught elsewhere.

Learning to write is not a generic skill, widely applicable in
a range of disciplines and settings, but 1) must be taught
within the community of practice that uses writing, and 2)
is an ongoing process, learned over and over again as
people encounter and solve problems that call for writing.
Unfortunately, years of research in composition and literacy leads us to an understanding that learning to write is simply not that tidy. Learning “to write” means understanding the ways in which a
particular community uses inscriptions to make meaning. Therefore, “learning to write” is not a generic skill, widely applicable in a range of disciplines and settings, but 1) must be taught within the
community of practice that uses writing, and 2) is an ongoing process, learned over and over again as people encounter and solve problems that call for writing. A student can successfully complete a
ﬁrst-year writing course, but the practices learned in that course are not easily transferred to other contexts.

“To try to teach students to improve their writing by
taking a [general writing skills course] is something like
trying to teach people to improve their ping-pong,
jacks, volleyball, basketball, ﬁeld hockey, and so on by
attending a course in general ball-using. Such a course
would of necessity have a problem of content. What
kinds of games (and therefore ball-use skills) should
one teach? And how can one teach ball-using skills
unless one also teaches students the games, since the
skills have their motive and meaning only in terms of a
particular game or games that use them?”
Russell, “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction”
David Russell, in “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction,” uses an Activity Theory framework to explore the problem of teaching writing as a generalized skill and ultimately argue
for more institutional support for Writing Across the Curriculum programs. As part of his argument, Russell compares the analogy of teaching a course on ball-using skills to our traditional approach to
teaching writing in the university: quote
For Russell, and other literacy and composition scholars, the purpose and goals associated with writing in a discipline only make sense within the activity system of that discipline. Again, as Russell
argues in relation to evaluation of writing, “...ways of using a ball that worked well in one game (volleyball, for example) would bring disaster in another (such as soccer)” (10). Similarly, what worked
well in a composition course (the kinds of statements that require support; what support “counts;” how sources are embedded within an argument, etc.) would “bring disaster” to another discipline, such
as science, with its own ways of crafting an argument with claims, data, citations, and models. Teaching students to write well in science class is, then, something that can only be taught in science class.

“...lose more than we gain by preempting their control and
allowing our own Ideal Texts to dictate choices that
properly belong to the writers.”
“...undervalue[s] student efforts to communicate what they
have to say in the way they wish to say it.”
Brannon & Knoblauch, “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response”
More than thirty years ago, the field of composition began to focus attention on the role of student agency in writing instruction and argue for students’ rights to their own language (Sommers,
1982; Brannon & Knoblauch, 1982; Straub, 1996). Rather than assignments and feedback designed to correct student ideas, fix student grammar, impose particular structures, or enforce strict
conventions, it is argued, faculty “lose more than we gain by preempting their control and allowing our own Ideal Texts to dictate choices that properly belong to the writers” (Brannon & Knoblauch,
159). When these choices about the structure and content of student texts are made by the instructor, and not the student, it “undervalue[s] student efforts to communicate what they have to say in the
way they wish to say it” (Brannon & Knoblauch, 159).
The implication for the teaching of writing within the disciplines is that students’ ideas and their efforts to communicate those ideas must be taken seriously, and further, it is assumed that
students, like any writer, intend to make meaning when they write. The challenge in responding to student texts does not lie in determining whether students have a right to try on and play with ideas or
to make their own choices in their writing, but how to respond to student texts in a way that both preserves student agency and furthers their development as nascent scientists. One strategy regularly
employed by composition faculty is to create a classroom where students are asked the same questions we would ask of any colleague who needed feedback on a draft: What is the purpose and who is
the audience for this text? Where is this draft in the writing process? What kind of feedback is needed? The student writer often knows what kind of feedback she needs, especially when she views her
writing as intentional and worthy of being taken up as a serious attempt at constructing and communicating scientific ideas.

© DK Publishing [2010]
$
35
The bad and ugly microbes
Background knowledge
Some microbes, often called germs, can cause illness or disease. Chickenpox,
mumps, and measles are caused by microbes. They are infectious diseases.
Some microbes can cause food to decay. Moldy bread or fruit, sour milk,
and rotten meat are examples of decayed food. If eaten, this rotten food
and drink can cause stomach upsets. Other microbes cause tooth decay.
You can protect yourself from harmful microbes by storing and preparing
food properly, cleaning your teeth, washing your hands, and by avoiding
close contact with ill people.
Science activity
Science investigation
Look at the picture above. It shows a number of unhygienic ways in which
germs can travel into food and cause illness. List all of the ways this could
happen in the picture.
Design and conduct an experiment to see what type of bread grows
mold the best. Obtain different samples of bread. Make sure to wash
your hands before and after each time you experiment. Explain why
mold grows better on some bread than on others.
Take extra care - ask an adult to supervise you.
© Dorling Kindersley Limited [2010]
Such strategies, however, run counter to the usual practices of science instruction. The typical problem set and lab report asks that students use canonical ideas in predetermined ways to reach
known solutions. The fact that there is “a” solution set — an idea foreign to composition courses— suggests that the “ideal text” exists and it is a students’ job to find it, usually by mimicking similar
worked examples. In order for science faculty to employ the instructional practices that composition scholars recommend, we must re-imagine how we assign, assess and respond to student writing. In
particular, we must develop practices that support students’ rights to their own texts and allow students to construct meaning in ways that make sense to them. In our Scientific Inquiry course, students’
models and ideas form the content of the course. We argue that, by attending and responding to these ideas—rather than focusing their attention on canonical ideas and disciplinary conventions—
students are fully engaged in the scientific practices—including writing—that characterize science disciplines.

In the design of structures and activities, we pay particular attention to the ways in which multimodal composing—informal science notebooks, diagrams on whiteboards, images shared online, and
conversations around these inscriptions—model and reﬂect the composing practices of scientists.

In doing so, we are interested in how students are developing as “science writers,” (that is, attending to whether students are adopting the speciﬁc practices that scientists use to construct texts),
rather than focusing on improving students’ “science writing” (that is, attending to pieces of writing as evidence for improvement). This distinction is important, and again, one that composition studies
takes as its focus: support the growth of the writer as a way of improving the writing.

We offer an example in which students are constructing models to explain their observations of pinhole cameras. As one group considered how, for example, the image of a tree “ﬁt” through the pinhole,
they began thinking of the tree not as a whole, but made of tiny points of color, each of which sends a ray into the pinhole.

These points students described as “SeuratSpots” because of the similarity to the Impressionist painting style. The model played a central role in further discussions of light and images in our class,
including our descriptions of images and focus. Cassandra, a student in the course, first introduced the concept of SeuratSpots as a way to describe what she thought might be happening on an iPhone
screen. Over the course of the semester, students take up and refine her idea many times in the service of explaining their own ideas about light and focus.
“SeuratSpots” is not a term or explanatory model used across scientific communities to understand focus; however, it is representative of the way scientists construct models to explain phenomena.
Unlike science classes where students memorize terms or follow a lab report template, students in the Scientific Inquiry course take on the habits and ways of being scientists: they construct models and
definitions to support the groups’ understanding of an idea.

There are a variety of structures that support the development of students’ ideas and the “take-up” of those ideas for use by the class. One structure is the role of instructor feedback, particularly early in
the course, that makes it clear that students’ ideas are valued. The science instructor (Atkins) does not focus her feedback on “ﬁxing” the sentences or the ideas, but instead she focuses attention on
asking clarifying questions (real questions she has about students’ ideas), valuing their questions, and taking up students’ terminology as a worthy way to talk about concepts in the class session.

While this may seem ridiculous, I would like to explore
this inquiry through an exploration of technology
screens. For example, a computer monitor or television
can only depict the colors red, green, and blue in each
pixel; however, we are clearly able to see each color on
the monitor. This is created through proximity of pixels
(like a painting by Seurat!) The rainbow may in fact be
like a giant pointillism canvas filled with an infinite
number of dots. --Cassandra (student)
--THIS! THIS IS A QUESTION! Your group started
looking at iPhone screens today, right? I'd love to see
you do more with this. Like: why red/green/blue? How
does a TV screen show a rainbow if it's only using red/
green/blue? --Leslie (Instructor)
Here’s an excerpt from Cassandra’s response to the first homework assignment (which asked students to address the question: “Is every color in the rainbow?”). Cassandra adds this idea at the
end of the assignment. The instructor’s comments are in italics.
There are many ways to respond to Cassandra’s writing. The assignment did not ask for such speculation, and instead called for students to make and defend a claim regarding color. The phrasing “while
this may seem ridiculous…” and the exclamation point in her parenthetical comment are not typical of scientific texts, and an instructor could identify for the student that this kind of language is not
appropriate for science assignments. The redundancy in the first sentence (“explore...through an exploration”) is also not the focus of Leslie’s comment. The idea Cassandra offers—that a rainbow may
be a “pointillism canvas” that gives the illusion of colors not actually present—is, in fact, the opposite of what a rainbow is doing (separating white light into its constituent wavelengths); the instructor
could address this and discourage the student from pursuing this line of reasoning. Alternatively, the instructor could suggest recommended readings that address the students’ misconception or provide a
template for writing that would have avoided such idiosyncratic writing and ideas. All of these possible responses, Brannon and Knoblauch argue, “[tend] to show students that the teacher's agenda is
more important than their own, that what they wanted to say is less relevant than the teacher's impression of what they should have said” (158). Instead of “fixing” Cassandra’s ideas and writing, the
instructor shows enthusiasm for this student’s ideas, attending to the nascent attempts to model color. The comment shows that the idea is indeed not ridiculous at all. The instructor recognizes that the
idea is one that the students have already (since submitting the assignment) begun to pursue and she can imagine the variety of questions that their pursuit raises.

Image from a student’s notebook adopting Cassandra’s pointillism
ontology of images.
“all SeuratSpots make one set of overlapping
round blobs”
Over time, the idea that Cassandra articulates here—that the colors we see are created by the “proximity” of adjacent colors—will be supported by Cassandra’s group through their inquiry, models, and
descriptions of technology screens. They puzzle over why red and green in proximity appear yellow for lights and brown for pigments. The idea primarily stays within their group as they reason through
color mixing questions. In our next unit on light, beginning with the pinhole camera, the idea of pointillism continues to be a productive way of modeling images, and other students begin adopting
Cassandra’s language. In Jonathan’s notebook (one of Cassandra’s lab partners from the color unit), we see him using her term “SeuratSpot” as he reasons through the “blurriness” associated with a
large hole

Kait: But you have multiple light rays
coming off from the same SeuratSpot.
Amy: ...but they're not actually coming
off of like, the exact same spot. Because
a light ray can't like, break. So it's like
two light rays that are really really close
to each other...
Trevor: That's the problem though -
because it's one single spot and it's got
light rays going in all those directions.
It's not a bunch of little spots sending
out a bunch of light rays.
Kait: It's the same exact spot.
Amy: But light doesn't do that.
As we move on to consider the structures in the eye—many months after Cassandra’s original conjecture—class debate considers how it is that images appear in focus. The debate concerns the
following question: does each “SeuratSpot” reﬂect a ray in one direction, (and a collection of spots send rays in multiple directions), or does each SeuratSpot diffusely reﬂect light in all directions?

“SSRP” for “Seurat Spot Reunification Point.”
Students remain divided; among those who believe rays leave a single SeuratSpot, they come to define a “focal point” as follows: “a point of convergence. As for our eye it is a point where all of the light
rays from a single SeuratSpot are angled back to a single SeuratSpot, this focal point being on our retina.” They label their diagram “SSRP” for “Seurat Spot Reunification Point.”

“I never thought of writing down observations as composing. I don't
remember ever really writing in my other science classes. Of course I
wrote down data and occasionally my hypothesis, but we didn't have
papers or journals where we had to explain what was happening.” –
Rachel
“Writing in this class has been very different than other classes. Most
other science classes require very little original thinking. This was really
the only class where I had to put my 100% authentic, personal
theories and ideas into writing.” –Cory
“[Writing] differs from what I have done in my past science class mainly
because in my other science classes we usually had some form of
resource, whether it was a textbook or workbook, or handouts. In this
science class, it was our notebooks, and discussing the topics with
our groups and classmates, and testing our ideas to see if it made
sense. I have learned that the writing practices we did in class were
meant for us to think in a deeper level.” –Barbara
The students’ reflections, and post-course interviews we did with students, demonstrate that students are able to articulate how these diverse forms of writing support their scientific thinking. Students
understand that these forms of writing serve different purposes in the course, but taken together, the writing tasks all contribute to the refinement and sharing of scientific ideas.

By allowing students the right to their own ideas and texts as they construct scientific ideas (as highlighted above, the questionable idea that the colors in a rainbow are a pointillism-like
collection of colors that can be investigated using a pixilated screen) and engaging with those ideas in scientific ways—through investigations described in lab notebooks, conversations captured on
whiteboards, debates that force questions of precisely defined terms—we find that students come to employ sophisticated writing practices in the service of scientific inquiry. Rather than ‘fixing’ the
content or structure of students’ writing, it is through engaging with their ideas that we can support the development of students as scientific writers.

http://phys.csuchico.edu/~ljatkins/SGSI/SGSI.html
kjaxon@csuchico.edu
We wish to thank students from Scientiﬁc Inquiry,
research assistants Andrew Lerner and Tony
DeCasper, and colleague Irene Salter. The project
is funded by NSF DUE-1140860.
http://phys.csuchico.edu/~ljatkins/SGSI/SGSI.html

Composition in Scientific Inquiry: SeuratSpots, Disco Balls, and the Making of Meaning in Science

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