From a critical multimodal approach to communication (Machin, 2014), and drawing on the situated learning theory of the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), this paper analyses daily practices and discourses of scientist practitioners in order to uncover what ‘learning by doing’ stands for in science.
This paper analyses daily practices and discourses of scientist practitioners in order to uncover what ‘learning by doing’ stands for in science. The participants of this study are members of three multinational research teams in the field of natural science, two of them located in Catalonia (Spain) and one in Germany, and ranging from 12 to 50 members each. From a critical multimodal approach to communication (Machin, 2014), and drawing on the situated learning theory of the community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), we aim at examining how participants’ learning processes are structured and how these are perceived by the actors themselves. Data, which were collected throughout 11 months of ethnographic work, consist of a collection of video- and tape- recorded events during laboratory activities where teaching and/or learning became rather explicit, and several interviews with members of the three scientific teams. Results indicate that practical learning in natural science takes the form of an acculturation process through socialisation, and thus communication, consisting in (1) the mastery and combination of a complex system of communicative modes related to embodied action, (2) an ongoing mentoring throughout successive try-and-error rehearsals, (3) the acquisition of communicative competence in specific multimodal genres through the accommodation to the correcting feedback of multiple agents, and (4) practitioners’ ideologies on successful (communicative) practices. Making the implicit explicit in scientists’ learning may contribute to maximise the efficiency of learning and teaching practices in science. REFERENCES Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Machin, D. (2014). What is multimodal critical discourse studies? Critical Discourse Studies, 10(4), 347–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2013.813770
