Learning to participate in disciplinary discourses: What happens when the conversation ends?

Current research has found that participation in meaningful, disciplinary conversations in the classroom helps students develop their conceptual understandings of the subject matter. These findings are often shown through descriptions of design interventions that have taken place in ordinary classrooms. Little attention has been paid, however, to the diverse experiences of individual students within these contexts and what they take away from participation in such discourses. This longitudinal study followed two students who were active student participants in a design intervention that promoted disciplinary engagement in science and history through the following school year. The study found that the style of student participation in classroom discourses depended on the unique dispositions of the students themselves, but that this participation could be either encouraged or stifled by the participant structures that were made available by the curriculum and the teacher