Consensus Construction as a Collective Task in Mexican Science Classes

In this article, discourse analysis focuses on the orientation of teachers' and children's classroom discourse toward the construction of a consensual version of science knowledge, even though a consensus is not always reached. This orientation, in which children and teachers shared as active participants the activity's proposals, can be seen as a collective way of developing the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in a cooperative context where the ZPD is the social product of the interaction, rather than the individual effect of the action undertaken by an adult on a child. Discourse orientation toward consensus can be seen as a cultural feature of the interactional dynamics in some school classes in Mexico.