According to the Oxford English dictionary sense-making is “the action or process of making sense of or giving meaning to something, especially new developments and experiences.” The Dervin article that we were assigned to read was complex with a lot of unfamiliar technical language and references which made it very difficult for me personally to understand. When I first started to read the article I really struggled to work out what it was talking about, so after reading the first few pages, I then googled the word sense-making and took a look at diagrams explaining it, dictionary definitions and I also watched a couple of short YouTube videos. Having done that I returned to the article which I continued to read, systematically trying to underline and highlight some key concepts and then made summaries of those points at the side of the document. For me the important thing was to try and break it down into basic concepts in an effort to understand what was being discussed. Here are some images that I found helpful when initially looking for insight into what sense-making was: I continued to read and these visuals did help me somewhat but it was still really tough going. There were several concepts that she was trying to convey, but they all seemed to come back to the same thing. At the beginning of the article she described sense-making as “a set of methods which have been developed to study the making of sense that people do in their everyday experiences.” She explained how we all see and interpret things in a variety of ways and how what we perceive initially can be translated differently by different parts of our body and we can get many messages to interpret. She suggests that by discussion and observation that humans can arrive at more stable observations. She tells us that sense-making really just focuses on behavior and the steps taken to understand the world around us. When we have a new situation to solve, different people will want to resolve them in a variety of ways depending on their past behaviors and experiences. Situations can also be interpreted differently depending on when they happen and what the actual situation is.
According to Dervin life is unpredictable and we create new responses to situations depending on our class, income and education. As humans we are trying to bridge the gap, by using former knowledge and behaviors, to solve a problem. Dervin is trying to define what actually helps us do this and she gave 6 exemplars to demonstrate this; from the 1st exemplar she determined that race can predict what channels and sources would be used to get answers. She shows us that people’s predisposed opinions affect how they perceive people and places. She suggests that sense-making has both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Certainly the key to understanding this article is to break it down into bite-sized chunks. If I were to introduce it to a group of high-schoolers, first of all I would find graphics and videos that explained the concepts succinctly so that they would get an initial impression of the theme of the article. I would then get students into pairs and I would assign them a small part of the text to read together. I would get them to underline and highlight the main ideas together and then get them to discuss what was being said in their portion. While the pairs were working as a teacher I would circulate the room in an effort to give them advice and guidance and act more as a facilitator. Once they had formed their conclusions I would then ask them to present their findings to the class by making some kind of PowerPoint or visual aid to describe what they had understood from their part of the article. They could also share this document with the class for later reference and review. While listening to these presentations, students would then take notes and ask questions. At the end of all of the presentations students would have complete notes on the full article. At home they could then read the article themselves and ask further questions during the next class.
1 Comment
Kristina Bautista
3/5/2019 01:15:46 pm
Hi Natasha,
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AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
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