Expanding Knowledge or Grant Support
This Course is Helping Us All Arrive at New Viewpoints, Isn’t It?: Making Meaning Through Dialogue in a Blended Environment
This qualitative study explores how individuals made meaning of their life history experiences while in dialogue with others in an online learning group that was part of a graduate course on adult development. All online discussion forum postings exchanged by the group over the 3-week assignment period were downloaded and analyzed through phenomenological thematic analysis and discourse analysis. Our goal was to better understand both what happened in this online dialogue and how it took place. Four aspects of how the participants made meaning through dialogue emerged: noticing, reinterpreting, theorizing, and questioning assumptions, each with specific speech acts. These findings expand our understandings of how individuals transform meaning through narrative and dialogue.
With NCLB in mind, excerpts like the one above add fuel to the fire. But it does support the notion that education spending may focus too much on developing careers and grants.
Stanford Matthews
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