Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is widely acknowledged that teaching and learning are organized quite differently in and out of school settings. This paper describes two strips of interaction, selected from a data corpus that documents naturally-occurring work in adult settings often considered to be targets for science and mathematics education. In the first strip (civil engineering), we follow how engineers with different levels of organizational responsibility use an evaluative term, "brutal," in relation to features of a proposed roadway design. In the second strip (field biology), we follow participants' initially conflicting uses of the register terms, "difference" and "distance," as they collaborate across disciplinary specialties. In both cases, disagreements about the use of terms are detected in ongoing interaction, alternative meanings are actively assembled across different types of media, and disagreements are resolved around pre-existing organizational asymmetries. We raise three general questions about teaching/learning in the workplace: (i) What is accessible to participants as teachers/learners under different organizational conditions; (ii) How are disagreements about shared meaning managed, given asymmetries between participants in these events; and (iii) What do these kinds of studies tell us about the acquisition of word meaning as an unproblematic relation between term and referent?