Activity and discourse in museums: A dialogic perspective on meaning making

This dissertation describes a theoretical framework and the methodological tools for studying group learning activity in informal learning environments. Harnessing the tools of a sociocultural approach to human activity and a dialogic approach to human discourse, it analyzes three kinds of resources groups use for making meaning: the structure of activity itself, the situation definition that expresses “what's going on” in the activity, and the relationships among voices and voice types, heteroglossia, exploited by both museums and visitors. It provides a method for studying the processes of group learning activity in a wide variety of settings. Because it focuses on how people negotiate multiple Discourses as part of making meaning, it contributes to a variety of fields of research. For language theorists it offers a method for transcribing and analyzing activity AND talk as they co-occur in meaning making. It also offers a more complete account of the construct of situation definition and how the meaning of utterances is a matter of active contextualizing and recontextualizing more or less generic features of language. For those interested in Critical Discourse Analysis, it demonstrates how a microgenetic approach to activity can be included with an analysis of talk to produce a more appropriate theory of learning as appropriation of voices.; This dissertation demonstrates that visitors (both adults and children) can be quite proficient at recognizing, appropriating, and strategically deploying well-known and novel contextual resources that will legitimize (give meaning to) their actions, sub-activities, and activities. They are in this sense strategic actors “poaching on” the territory of privileged Discourses for realizing personal goals in the public, hybrid activity spaces of the museum. In Critical Discourse Analysis terms, these visitors are potentially empowered agents since they demonstrate an ability and willingness to pursue collective or individual strategies as part of discourse. Whether that critical potential actually leads to individual or collective empowerment, demographic changes in career and educational resources, or habits of strategic questioning and critical consciousness of social hierarchies and the Discourses that (re)produce or transform them for these visitors and other visitors are matters for further study.