REVIEW ESSAY

A review of Wolff-Michael Roth’s ‘‘In search of meaningand coherence: A life in research’’

Preeti Gupta Æ Christina Siry

Received: 16 January 2009 / Accepted: 16 January 2009 / Published online: 30 January 2009� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Wolff-Michael Roth’s In Search of Meaning and Coherence: A Life inResearch, presents a selection of his previously published key works layered with current

commentary and analysis. In this book review, we explore themes that emerge through the

text to trace Roth’s development as a theoretician and as a researcher. We recommend this

book for all those who are interested in Wolff-Michael Roth and the trajectory of his

career, in particular those who are just beginning their journey towards academic

scholarship.

Keywords Scholarship � Coteaching � Cultural-historical activity theory �Gestures � Polysemicity

Wolff-Michael Roth has dedicated the past two decades to science education research and

has pushed the boundaries of the field through systematic and in-depth inquiries that have led

to new perspectives for the science education community and new understandings and

questions for Roth himself. In Search of Meaning and Coherence: A Life in Researchpresents a selection of Wolff-Michael Roth’s previously published key works layered with

current commentary and analysis by Roth himself. This volume exemplifies the parallel

emergence and growth of Roth as a theorist, and the influence he has received from, and

provided to, the field of science education. He reflects on major developments through his

career and traces the development of science education related themes that have become

central to his current work. As the title indicates, it is his search for meaning and coherence in

science education research that have been the driving force of his research and his writing.

P. Gupta (&)New York Hall of Science, 47-01 111 Street, 11368 Queens, NY, USAe-mail: pgupta@nyscience.org

C. SiryGraduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USAe-mail: chrissiry@gmail.com

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Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2009) 4:487–493DOI 10.1007/s11422-009-9174-9

Through the exploration of 11 articles, Roth describes his inquiries, methodologies,

methods, analyses and approaches to the study of science education. Reading this book

provides an in-depth exploration into how his research endeavors have unfolded and

influences in his life that have played a role in the direction of his work. He allows the

reader to follow him along his path of inquiry, as he ventured into different areas of

interest, and tapped into disciplines outside of science education, thereby informing and

enriching his own research agenda. Roth begins by describing his years as a student, as a

teacher, and then his journey into academia. He reveals theoretical shifts that have taken

place within his work, and traces his theoretical development starting with Piagetian

frameworks, moving towards social constructivism and situated cognition, and then

towards Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). His open portrayal of the many

twists and turns his theoretical explorations have taken leaves us to wonder in anticipation

where he might be headed as he continues to evolve his scholarship in, and understanding

of, many complex and intertwined aspects of science education.

A key message reverberating throughout this book is how critical thinking and interests

develop for a researcher. Reading this book has shed light on the importance of famil-

iarizing oneself to a wide variety of theoretical perspectives in order to evolve as a

researcher. For example, exposure to the writings of Jean Lave, Bruno Latour and Steve

Woolgar grounded Roth’s shift from Piagetian frameworks towards a social constructivist

approach. The book The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School(Newman et al. 1989), led him to consider researching his own classrooms using video

cameras to document how thinking emerges from the participants’ interactions. Another

example of how Roth’s approach to entertaining new ideas influenced his theoretical

development is when he describes that although he had not yet adopted CHAT as a

theoretical lens to examining social life, he had read writings of Paul Ricoeur concerning

questions of identity and self. Thus, Ricoeur’s ideas were influencing his research agenda

before he formally used CHAT as a lens to his work. The book has solidified for us the

value of recognizing that perspectives and understandings can change, and that such

change can be valuable if grounded in research, literature, and observations. Roth is

considered a prominent researcher and theoretician who has made significant interdisci-

plinary contributions, and we can imagine that an impetus for these contributions is his

ventures into other fields and exposure to different scholars and theoretical frameworks

that encouraged him to think in unique ways.

Two major related themes emerge through this book: the evolution of Roth’s theoretical

frameworks and the evolution of his methodological approaches to his research. In the

following sections we present examples and discussion of each of these themes and

conclude with our thoughts as to the relevancy of this book for a variety of readers.

Roth traces his development as a theoretician

The first theme that emerges throughout this book is Wolff-Michael Roth’s theoretical

evolution over the years. As he revisits his major works, he explores questions or unre-

solved issues that emerged through his teaching and his research and discusses his

approach to exploring alternate theoretical perspectives to advance his own theoretical

understandings and standpoints. This exploration is woven throughout the book, as he now

looks back and provides a critical commentary on the ways the papers in this book

represent key works that demonstrate shifts in his thinking.

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As readers, we get a longitudinal sense of Roth’s development of theoretical perspec-

tives as he discusses his initial exposure to social constructivist theory and explores how

sociological perspectives contributed to his developing cultural understandings of science

learning. Commentary on selected published works show an evolution of Roth’s theoretical

frameworks from an initial grounding in Piagetian perspective, to a consideration of social

constructivist theory, to the recognition of the value of CHAT in his work.

Roth begins this written odyssey by revealing events that led him to social construc-

tivism and considers what these perspectives brought to the field of science education

research. Chapter 2 focuses on the article The Social Construction of Scientific Concepts orthe Concept Map as Conscription Device and Tools for Social Thinking in High SchoolScience, which represents an initial shift in his framework from a psychological towards a

social constructivist approach to teaching and learning. He explores the social construction

of knowledge through the use of concept maps, and also presents an approach to under-

standing concept maps ‘‘from a sociological point of view’’ (p. 38). Concept mapping in

his research served to provide students with the opportunity to collaborate, connect, and

organize what they had learned in a unit. Roth’s use of concept mapping was intended to

explore individual learning as well as social interactions within groups, and this use of

concept maps for the social construction of knowledge was a departure from the more

commonly accepted use of concept mapping as a tool for individual learning.

This original article from 1992 examines concept mapping and provides an example of

the way in which Roth allows the reader to get a glimpse of his developing interests from

their earliest stages. In his critical review of this particular article, he mentions that he first

became cognizant of the concept of studying gestures in science education during the study

of students’ investigations with concept maps. Exploration of gestures at that time was a

new approach to his work but was prevalent in linguistic anthropology and among those

who were interested in the pragmatics of everyday conversations. Exposure to Jay Lemke

during an annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in 1990,

followed by regular communications with him for years, supported his investigations of the

role of language and gestures in science education. In his paper, The Interaction of Stu-dents’ Scientific and Religious Discourses: Two Case Studies, Roth ventures into a study

with the intent to examine how talking about science and religion help reveal how students

negotiate different knowledge. Further in his career, his paper, From Gesture to ScientificLanguage, documents research that provides evidence that in the absence of scientifically

appropriate discourse, students use gestures as a way to describe scientific phenomena. As

scientific discourse makes its way into a lesson, deictic and iconic gestures precede

utterances in discourse. Finally, as students grow more familiar with scientific talk and it

takes on more importance in their ability to communicate, the gestures begin to coincide

with that talk. As doctoral students and members of Ken Tobin’s research squad in New

York City, much of our work focuses on investigating social life through the study of

gestures and associated talk.

From Roth’s focus on exploring social constructivism in Chap. 2, he moves on to

present the reader with descriptions of his initial theorizing of cognition as situated and

distributed, and explores how he considered situated cognition as it relates to science

education. In Chap. 4 he describes an article entitled Art and Artifact of Children’sDesigning: A Situated Cognition Perspective, which was his first paper that was fully in the

situated learning paradigm. The purpose of the article was to demonstrate that learning

processes are, in fundamental ways, situated in social and material settings. In his current

reflection on this article, he says that this study was a turning point for him methodo-

logically because it demonstrates his entry in the community of researchers looking at

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learning sciences. In this study, he realized that students who participated in a science

activity with a goal or a challenge, and had access to resources that created both affor-

dances and constraints, were able to engage in new forms of science discourse and

demonstrated cognitive understandings because of their work products. This study

prompted Roth to revisit his views of scientific literacy and realize the power to an

approach in science education in which students investigate, problem-solve and learn for

the purpose of accomplishing a goal. These considerations led him to the recognition that

science learning goes beyond being a participant in the science activities and that it is also

significant for students to be involved in the design of activities. This solidified for him the

value of having students and teachers work together to co-construct meaning and

knowledge for a shared purpose.

The study on situated learning that is highlighted in Chap. 4 is grounded in Roth’s

experiences coteaching with a classroom teacher, and thus it exposed Roth to new ways of

thinking about teacher education. By working at the elbow of another teacher, he realized

that the teachers working with each other learned from each other. This research was

influenced by practice theory, which is grounded in Bourdieu’s work (see outline of a

Theory of Practice 1977, for details). Roth worked alongside Ken Tobin to theorize what

learning to teach would look like from a CHAT perspective, and through this lens he

denoted the activity to be that of students learning science. He articulated motives for the

activity, which were comprised of the goals of the individuals composing that collective.

The goals for coteaching were to improve the teaching as well as the learning of science.

He placed both of these goals in a dialectical relationship, thereby allowing research to

inform praxis rather than to be about praxis. In coteaching, as two or more teachers work

‘‘at the elbow’’ of each another, they can learn new ideas and new approaches from each

other, with the goal of teaching children. One cannot learn from the other unless the goal of

teaching children is pursued. However, for the children to be taught effectively, the

coteachers need to be working, learning, sharing and teaching alongside each other. The

two goals, learning to teach and teaching children, therefore presuppose each other. In

activity theory, it is understood that human activity cannot be compartmentalized. Indi-

viduals, rules, tools, community are not separately functioning; rather, all of these things

mediate each other, and if one of these entities is changed or removed, it affects the whole

activity system. Participation in the activity system also changes those entities so that they

will never be the same again. Therefore, human activity, teaching, and learning, are

dynamically and relationally always emergent, affected by many factors that are socio-

culturally, and historically situated.

Roth traces his development as a researcher

The first theme that has been explored is Roth’s theoretical evolution, and this is inter-

twined with the second theme that emerges throughout this book, his evolution as a

qualitative researcher. The continual development of research approaches is evident

throughout the book, beginning with his initial research using video vignettes and moving

into a discussion of his extensive note taking, both for record keeping and for publication

purposes. His developing focus on issues of representation and positionality becomes

evident in the paper, The Local Production of Order in Traditional Science Laboratories:A Phenomenological Analysis, in which he incorporates a focus on phenomenology and

discusses how watching videotapes of classroom episodes led him to realize that students

perceived activities in the classroom differently than he had intended. This research was a

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turning point for him as it led him to think about the connection between students’ life-

worlds and how they learn science.

Throughout the chapters of this book, Roth explores the application of new methodo-

logical approaches to both research and writing about research. For example, in Chap. 6,

The Postmodern Condition: Alternative Ways of Writing, he describes how he was con-

cerned about a lack of polysemicity in writing about research grounded in social

constructivism. He explores his search for ways to include the voice of those involved in

the research and how his recognition of the importance of bringing multiple perspectives to

his work, led him to many attempts to find ways to represent in writing the polyphonic

nature of his research. Roth was able to demonstrate how researchers could coherently

describe the writing of research, research methods and theories with maintaining multiple

voices through the process of metalogues. Such metalogues are written conversations

within a text designed to retain individual coauthors’ perspectives.

Coupled with his focus on representation, Roth developed his interest in gestures and

utterances, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. As early as 1992 when Roth

publishes his study on concept mapping, a key motivator in shifting him to be a social

constructivist is his focus on students’ utterances and conversations. He states that Jay

Lemke’s concepts on science talk (1990) were evidenced by his own observations where he

noticed how important talk was in students constructing a concept, debating and agreeing

on it, and using everyday words to make their case. The minute-by- minute creation and

recreation of social reality serves as a tool and a resource for students in the construction of

scientific concepts. Discourse analysis and conversation analysis both serve as tools, the

first to examine texts and transcripts and look for patterns, and evidence of a certain

content and the second to understand the interactions between and capture the utterances in

between words and the emphasis on certain words (Roth 2005). Roth revisits his research

and reexamines artifacts and transcripts with these analytic tools as in the case of his study

of mathematics education and analysis of ecology lectures.

Highlighted in Chap. 7 is a study, From Gesture to Scientific Language, which Roth

published in the Journal of Pragmatics. Primarily for an audience of linguists who were

interested in the pragmatics of everyday conversations, this study provided evidence that

students use gestures to select, describe and explain scientific phenomena even without

having scientifically appropriate and generally accepted language. When scientific dis-

course is being developed, deictic and iconic gestures precede the associated utterances

and as a student’s familiarity within a scientific domain increases, associated science talk

takes on greater importance and coincides with the use of gestures (p. 203). Roth continues

his exploration of issues of gesture and linguistic studies in science education. He writes:

Gestures are an extensively studied feature of human communicative behavior, but

science educators have yet to fully appreciate the role they play in articulating and

therefore making sense as well as in the development of talk over and about science-

related phenomena. It is perhaps an excessive concern with scientific language in its

textual forms that mediates the interests of science educators for the spoken

dimensions of language. Most importantly, an appropriate appreciation of spoken

language as a point of departure in developing written forms of science language

remains yet to be developed (p. 233).

Roth suggests science educators and researchers distinguish between talking science

and writing science. He probes us to think about resources that are needed to encourage

those students who are able to articulate science concepts through talk, associated gestures

and utterances leading to subsequent articulations of those ideas in writing.

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Moving away from grand narratives

Complementing his theoretical transformations, we see a transition in the approach that

Roth has used through the years in writing about his work. He recognizes that traditional

writing is ‘‘inconsistent with social-constructivist and postmodern epistemologies’’

(p. 243), and as such his work moves away from more conventional forms of text as he

attempts to develop formats to represent the multiplicity of perspectives in the writing of

the work. The reader sees the ways that his writing develops through the years, and how it

begins to present a polysemic view that presents the voice of the authors along with forms

of data such as field notes, and analysis and interpretation. In particular, the genre of

metalogue creates a way for him to explore the bricolage nature of the work that he has

done, and to represent the life world of participants through writing that is in conversa-

tional form. The metalogue approach provides a reflexive approach to writing research, in a

way that can move theory forward while retaining the voices of the authors.

Roth describes how he was inspired by two books, Opening Pandora’s Box: A Socio-logical Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse (Gilbert and Mulkay 1984) and Discourse andSocial Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour (Potter and Wetherell 1987) leading

him to reframe his thinking in the form of dialectical relationships (p. 68). His under-

standings about the relation between individual and collective began to evolve as he

recognized that since individuals exist within a collective, they can only venture into the

realm of possibilities that is imaginable within that collective. Similarly, a collective’s

mind and possibilities within that culture are only as possible as can be stretched by the

individual. If others in the culture could not intelligibly understand the proposed possi-

bility, it could not exist. One presupposes the other. Given the dialectical nature of the

individual and collective, Roth discusses the role of the individual researcher in relation to

the research community:

My presence contributed to shaping these communities, but the communities med-

iated what I could and wanted to do and write. The research questions address needs

of the communities, and the articles and books an individual member of the research

community writes are not just his own but address the needs of the community as

well -why otherwise should journals print a study if it did not respond to a gen-

eralized intellectual need? (p. 367)

This emphasized for us as readers the importance of connecting the potential dissem-

ination of research with careful consideration of the appropriate journals. We take away

from Roth’s writing about his manuscript submissions throughout the years the importance

of selecting a journal, exploring the philosophy and mission of the journal, and examining

the styles of writing, genres and general mood of the journal. Writing specifically for a

journal can provide the opportunity to be able to contribute to the knowledge of the

collective, and this is perhaps best accomplished by connecting research to the interests of

the collective.

In conclusion

The title of this book includes the words, A Life in Research, but Roth writes that for him

research is also in his life. For him, research is not for the other, but for himself also and his

‘‘being-with/for-others’’ (p. 367). As a scholar, he is able to think philosophically and

theoretically, but equally importantly, he is able to relate the theory to everyday life.

492 P. Gupta, C. Siry

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According to Roth, his peers, fellow researchers, leaders of thought and editors of high

impact journals applaud him for being able to do that and assist emerging scholars make

sense of the theory.

The purpose of this book is to show a career in the making. Roth does this well, as he

discusses ways in which he has overcome adversity, and traces his movement from the

practical to the theoretical. His contributions to theory are immense, and they have not

stopped. At the time of writing this review, we find that he has authored 36 books, over a

hundred chapters, and over two hundred research articles, and thus we imagine that his

evolution as a scholar will continue.

We consider this book to be engaging to read, and recommend it for masters-level and

doctoral students interested in becoming familiar with Wolff-Michael Roth and his

research. He demonstrates through this book that scholarship is something one develops

through many years of hard work and dedication to the realization that knowledge is

constructed, and that this construction is not separate from culture and the collective in

which one exists. Each time we have revisited this book, we each discovered something

new, gained a new perspective, and have ruminated over new understandings. This book

not only gives readers a glimpse of Roth’s narrative history as a researcher and scholar of

science education, but also supports new scholars and graduate students to map their own

journey towards becoming researchers and scholars of science education.

References

Gilbert, G. N., & Mulkay, M. (1984). Opening Pandora’s box: A sociological analysis of scientists’discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lemke, J. (1990). Talking science: Language, learning and values. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.Newman, D., Griffin, P., & Cole, M. (1989). The construction zone: Working for cognitive change in school.

Mass: Cambridge University Press.Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour.

London: Sage.Roth, W. M. (2005). Doing qualitative research: Praxis of method. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Preeti Gupta is senior vice president for Education and Public Programs, New York Hall of Science and adoctoral candidate in urban education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Herinterests focus on informal learning, teacher preparation and youth development and her research documentsidentity development in pre-service science teachers who conduct prolonged fieldwork experiences in ascience center.

Christina Siry is a doctoral candidate in urban education at the Graduate Center of the City University ofNew York. Her interests focus on the use of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue in science teacherpreparation, and her research examines the emergence of solidarity and the transformation of identity amongnew elementary teachers.

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