Resistance and the Development of Scientific Practice: Designing the Mangle Into Science Instruction

This article addresses how we can develop learning environments that establish a need for scientific practices and provide a context for developing content knowledge through practice. It argues that Pickering's (1995) notion of “The Mangle of Practice” informs these efforts by focusing our attention on how resistance, or push-back from the world, destabilizes practices and ideas, creating a need to re-evaluate each in light of the other. I describe the design of science instruction for an elementary school classroom, showing how it built from attention to the mangle and established principles in the fields of education and the learning sciences. I then explore how three forms of activity emerged, were taken up by students, and developed as practices in the classroom community. Implications for the design of learning environments include attending to why students engage in practices and building resistances into students’ work to support the co-development of practices and content understandings.