Students’ agency and the creation of third spaces in classroom dialogues A. Rajala, K....

Students’ agency and the creation of third spaces in classroom dialogues

A. Rajala, K. Kumpulainen, L. Lipponen, , A. Rainio, and J. Hilppö

Learning Bridges Research NetworkDepartment of Teacher EducationUniversity of Helsinki

ISCAR 2014

Introduction

• A crucial challenge for schools: how to make instruction personally meaningful to students?

• Students frequently experience a gap between their out-of-school experiences and interests, and the school knowledge. This gap may contribute to their alienation from school learning.

• Nevertheless to some extent, the gap between students’ world and the schools’ world can be bridged employing pedagogical approaches that take students’ local knowledge and experiences as a starting point

Säljö, 2012; Engeström, 1991; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010; Barton & Tan, 2010

Introduction

• But implementing such approaches in activity systems of regular schooling can provoke tensions and conflicts between the given and the new activities.

• Pedagogical designs can seldom be implemented in a linear fashion towards desired developmental outcomes given in advance, nor is this desirable if the intention is to adapt the instruction to students’ desires and personal senses.

• Teaching and learning in school is embedded in a “contradiction of control”. The teachers are not free to pursue only educational goals but need to balance these with another set of goals serving the social control of students.

• These tensions and conflicts have seldom been the focus of detailed analyses, however.

Engeström, in press; Rainio, 2010; Sannino, 2009; Rajala et al., 2013

Introduction

• In this study, we analyze my own emerging instructional practice into which I intended to incorporate child-centered and dialogic elements.

• We explore if the dialogical pedagogy as contextualized in the studied third grade classroom provided opportunities for the students to construct and elaborate their personal sense of the tasks they were facing.

• In studying the implementation of this pedagogical approach, we will focus on the potential emergence of tensions and conflicts between teacher’s control and students’ agency.

Personal sense of task

• Students need to develop their personal sense of meanings related to school tasks to fully appropriate these meanings.

• This involves constructing new subjectively established and personally experienced connections between “the people, objects, and phenomena that surround a person in the time and space both of current and previous or anticipated events” (Bratus, 2005).

• If the task does not resonate with students’ lives, they probably interpret it as uninteresting, irrelevant, or even nonsensical. In these situations, students may engage in resistant or disruptive behavior.

Vygotsky, 1998; 1987; Leontiev, 1978; Rajala & Sannino, forthcoming

Student agency and the elaboration of personal sense in classroom dialogues

• Personal senses cannot be taught; but they can emerge as the outcome of an educational process

• To externalize their personal senses of a task in the public classroom dialogues, students need to enact agency

• Such agency enactment is always a social construction:

• it is responsive to and constrained by other people’s actions and talk that precede it, and

• in order to have an effect on the unfolding of events, it need to be taken up by others.

D. Leontiev, 2013; Edwards, 2011; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011; Wertsch et al., 1996

A third space can overcome the contradiction between agency and control

• Agency and social structure are dialectically related and constitute each other.

• Teachers’ work is contradictory: both to control and educate the students. The teachers are themselves subject to institutional demands and control.

• Yet, complete instructional control is impossible. Students’ agency emerges in the gaps and struggle between teacher’s preplanned and projected course of events and students’ divergent interpretations and actions.

• The contradiction between agency and control takes different – sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive - forms and can be partially and momentarily overcome through the creation of interactional third spaces

Sewell, 1992; Rainio, 2008; 2010; Engeström, in press; Bruner, 1996; McNeil, 1986

Research questions

• Did the classroom dialogues provide interactional spaces for the students to articulate and elaborate their personal sense of the tasks?

• How was the contradiction between control and agency manifested in the creation and sustainment of these interactional spaces?

Classroom community

• The participants were 18 third-grade students from a Finnish elementary class, and their teacher.

• The students were a representative sample of children in Finnish society in terms of socioeconomic background.

• A dialogic pedagy was used:

• Training of students in the use of exploratory talk

• The learning project was inspired by the pedagogical model of Progressive Inquiry

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Wells, 1999; Dawes, Mercer, & Wegerif, 2004; Hakkarainen, Lonka, & Lipponen, 2004

Analysis methods

• Step 1: Transcription and repeated viewings of video records of whole class dialogues. Segmentation of these dialogues into topical episodes.

• Step 2: Identification of episodes of elaboration of personal sense, or expressions of a lack of it

• Step 3: Grounded interaction analysis of the relationship between teacher’s control and students’ agency in these episodes.

• Step 4: This analysis was supported by the analysis of secondary sources:

• Texts used and produced by the students

• Documentation of the teachers’ planning and reflections10 Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Linell, 1998; Erickson, 2006

Criteria of the episodes of elaboration of personal sense, or expressions of a lack of it

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Elaboration of personal sense of task

- Contesting an authoritative knowledge source (e.g., teacher or textbook)- Taking an affective stance on the topic - Connecting the topic to personal experiences or observations outside of school- Pursuing a personal interest by initiating new topics or posing questions that extended or expanded the topic- Exploring and expanding the topic through imagination- Incorporating personal knowledge to the task

Expression of a lack of personal sense of task

- Mocking other students’ contributions - Making ironic comments about the teacher’s talk- Making noise- Resisting the task- Asking for the reasons for doing the task

Forest project

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Phase of the project Activities

Formulating and discussing the research questions (1 Feb – 8 Feb)

- A field trip to nearby forest (taking photos and formulating research questions)- Collective discussions of the research questions

Trees and Wood (13 Feb – 12 March)

- Writing down prior knowledge of the topic- Museum visit to Museum of Technology- Collective and small group discussions- Reading and discussing newspaper articles

Rocks and Stones (18 March – 8 Apr)

- Collective discussions- Reading textbook and completing assignments in small groups- Visit to Science Center - Museum visit to Museum of Technology- Examination of the topics of Trees and Stones in groups (essay)

Ecology of Forest (30 Apr – 5 May)

- Reading textbook- Collective and small group discussion - A field trip to a forest- Examination of the topics of Ecology of Forest individually (essay)

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Phase of the project Realizations of the tension





Tension 1: students’ knowledge and experience vs. rigid school knowledge

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The teacher constructs an opposition between students’ personal knolwledge and experiences, and the school knowledge





The teacher constructs an opposition between students’ knowledge and school knowledge

Teacher: so after we have um thought first about what we know initially which can be incorrect knowledge but it is really great that you have

courage to put your own idea here now. Because when we investigate the matter for example by

visiting Museum of Technology like we have done so then we know much more about how paper is made. And it is knowledge based on investigation because it is told to you in the

museum.


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Unpacking the institutional consolidation of the school knowledge



Discussing the museum guide’s claim: Money is made from wool

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1 Teacher: Let’s see now, um, was there [in the museum of technology] something that someone had clearly

noticed that it is incorrect knowledge from these.

Roope

2 Roope: That money is made

from wool

3 Teacher: … Roope can explain why you

think that?

4 Roope: Well there, when we were at the museum of technology, the guide said that they don’t make

money from paper, but from wool

Unpacking the institutional consolidation of the school knowledge: Contesting the premises of the task

10 Saara: I can say that, even if it is scientific, I don’t

believe that

18 Saara: I don’t believe it, whoever

the guide is

34 Saara: And I don’t have to believe that

35 Teacher: No you don’t have to believe it.

If you get a good explanation, then

maybe you can change your mind.

Unpacking the institutional consolidation of the school knowledge: introducing doubt and conditionality

13 Kimmo: Yes it can be true. If they put it into some kind of machine, and the

machine makes them

24 Teacher: Yes, relating to this, could someone tell me why they might

make it out of wool instead of paper, even though it might be easier just to make it out of paper, with

a photocopier

16 Aaro: well, I think they make it, well, maybe out of wool, I’m not sure

An interactional space is opened for elaboration of the students’ personal sense of the task

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28 Saara: Yes. I don’t understand how they could make it out of wool, I once

cut one of those foreign notes, which was useless, I cut it in half. Or then, I’ve cut a Finnish note, too, once, when mum said I can cut just the one, so I cut it and it wasn’t durable at all, and I tore it

and it wasn’t durable at all.

29 Roope: Well it isn’t that durable in that sense, but

from what I’ve heard, paper is weaker, so should they make money out of some metal, so that you need some kind of

cutters to break it

22 Roope: I know, it lasts longer, from what I heard, because money

circulates a long time, so if you buy something from the store, pay

with money, then it circulates, they give cash back to someone who buys something else with it.

So it needs to be durable.

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The teacher’s disillusionment

with the pedagogical approach

resulted in the adoption of a more

teacher-led approach


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Punctuating the teacher’s scientific story with articulations of personal sense



Punctuating the teacher’s scientific story with articulations of personal sense

• After the shift in the instructional form, the lessons were structured in terms of a scientific story that the teacher was developing (Scott, Mortimer, & Ametller, 2011).

• The classroom dialogues consisted mainly of the teacher’s lectures and triadic dialogues (Lemke, 1990). These patterns of classroom dialogue did not elicit nor project room for the elaboration of the students’ personal sense of the tasks.

• However, the students were able to excercize their agency to interrupt the course of the lesson. These interruptions created interactional spaces for students to articulate and elaborate their personal sense of the task.

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A momentary shift in the teacher-led dialogue pattern

• The conditional mode of the teacher’s responses to Oliver (e.g., Could it be then sometimes in the morning and late in the evening) marks a shift in the triadic and lecturing dialogue pattern.

• For a moment, the teacher leaves his role as provider and evaluator of ready-made knowledge to articulate his personal sense of the matter.

• The teacher’s hesitation opens room for other students to join in, and Saara volunteers to share her experiences that contradicts what the teacher just said.

• The teacher finally closes the topic and moves on to talk about the formation of the moon, after punishing Oliver for making noise.

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Tension 2: Students’ expressions of a lack of personal sense of task

• Oliver’s resistant and disruptive behaviour indicates that some of the students may have experienced the tasks as lacking personal sense.

• Oliver and a few other students engaged in such expressions of a lack of personal sense of task throughout the project.

• Despite his valuing of students’ agency, the teacher did not consider this kind of resistance as a form of agency (cf. Rainio, 2008) but as merely disruptive behaviour and responded with disciplinary actions.

• These kinds of expressions of tacit and open resistance are common in classrooms (e.g., Gutierrez et al., 1995; Rainio, 2008). Students’ agency and teachers’ control take oppositional and destructive forms. 2

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1 Maija: Yes that why do we do the forest

proje- forest project? We have to just from forest you have and

when we do this project is only about

forest or

13 Teacher: Educat- like you have the minister of agriculture and forestry that leads the National

Board of Forest and Park Services, then you have minister of education that leads National Board of Education, which in principle in the last analysis my boss, too, which decides that um what you study in school, so they thin that it is important le- for people to know about forest because in

Finland you have so many forests and In Finalnd you have forest industry so that many get, many get a job from the forests, in the forests you can reshen up, to get joy in your life, you can pick

berries and then you can learn about how trees grow and why they have roots and everything, in Forest you can find those sontes and rocks, isn’t it quite interesting that you can start to investigate more, and it is very important issue about forests, parl-, Jimi said that in Parliament they are talking

about it, here you have um, you get to read a newspaper article in Helsingin Sanomat

newspaper soon


1 Maija: Yes that why do we do the forest

proje- forest project? We have to just from forest you have and

when we do this project is only about

forest or


14 Kimmo: Do we have to?

16 Teacher: Yes

15 Kasperi: No

17 Many students: Yes

(Someone whines) 18 Teacher: Now stop

Discussion

• The contradiction of agency and control took several forms over the whole semester learning project.

• We identified two recurrent tensions through which this contradiction was manifested:

• Students’ knowledge and experience vs. rigid school knowledge

• Students’ expressions of a lack of personal sense of task

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Discussion

• The teacher was more open for the students’ agency to deal with the first tension. In these negotiations, the contradiction of control and agency was momentarily overcome to enable elaboration of students’ personal sense of task.

• The students’ agency helped the teacher partially overcome the limitations of his way of presenting school knowledge. Official meanings were transformed into more flexible.

• However, despite the teachers’ intention to make the project child-centered, he was unable to deal constructively with some students’ expressions of a lack of personal sense of task.

• Students’ resistance and even constructive questioning of the purpose of the task were met with rebuttals and disciplinary actions. This shows that despite its expansive potential for constructively transforming education into more personally meaningful, it is risky for the students.

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Thanks for your kind attention!

Interested in the full paper? [email protected]

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