The Social Construction of Authority Amo

The Social Construction of Authority Among Peers and Its Implications for Collaborative Mathematics Problem Solving Jennifer M. Langer-Osuna

One lens through which I read this paper was as a researcher, paying attention to the elegance and clarity with which the author positioned her work with respect to a bunch of different theories. As I read, I was making a diagram of the theorized relationship between status, authority, merit, influence, and positioning. My diagram helped me understand the theoretical implications of the case study. Several of the theories introduced will be valuable for my own purposes. I have been reading Wortham on Interactional positioning, with a basis in Bahktin. It’s pretty new to me, and I wasn’t aware of the work of Davies and Harré (1990). 

I was also reading as a computer scientist; the paper’s theoretical precision was sufficient that I could see how it could be implemented as a computational model, following Figure 6 on page 121. This left me imagining the possibilities of combining this qualitative work with collecting a lot more of these interactions and testing them empirically by implementing the model. I would be particularly interested in seeing the longitudinal interactions of these factors. How do students use influence bolster their authority, or even their intellectual or social merit? Does this model hold more for some students than others? It seems to me like showing change across scales (for example, how interactional positioning contributes to long-term learning) is one of the big promises of the learning sciences. 

Finally, I would be curious to talk about the kinds of warrants this kind of argument can rely on. It seems like the argument is of the kind that suggests how things might work—an elaboration of theory. But can the paper say that the case study was driven by these causes, or even that this interpretation is better than other possible interpretations? Would it be desirable for it to make these kinds of claims?