Abstract
Circular seating arrangements can help instill a sense of belonging within classroom communities with overall positive effects on learning, emotions, and wellbeing. Yet students and their teachers within certain language classroom contexts, due to sociocultural limitations, may be relegated to learning in antisocial environments instilled partly by rank-and-file seating. Attributions for teacher demotivation can often lie in student misbehaviors, while student demotivation, silence, and resistance relate strongly to lack of bodily displays and physical affordances of interpersonal care, understanding, and trust that, if present, would contribute positively to many social aspects of their learning and identity formation. Specifically, rank-and-file seating constricts the area in the classroom most likely to dispose attention and interest to the learning and to others, whereas circular seating potentially expands this area, known as the action zone, to the whole classroom. Seating arrangements therefore can play an important role in the formation of interpersonal dynamics and identity formation among students and their teachers. In this paper, the purposes and ways of using circular seating in language classrooms will be explored from a social psychological perspective. Language teachers are invited to imagine and experiment with possibilities for uses of different seating arrangements in their own classrooms.
Highlights
Rules forbidding rearrangement of classroom furniture and equipment, discouraging remarks from senior colleagues, fear of committing a culturally insensitive practice, and a recurring notion that it makes students squirm, stammer, and shrink; against these counterforces, whole-class circular seating arrangements seemed patently unsuitable for Japanese classrooms of English as a foreign language (EFL)
After establishing key educational deficiencies in university EFL classrooms in Japan, this paper explains from a social psychology perspective the inherent and universal engagingness of circular arrangements of people and the related positive potentials for students
Japanese EFL students may be best known in the field of applied linguistics for exhibiting motivational crisis (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011; Ushioda, 2013)
Summary
Rules forbidding rearrangement of classroom furniture and equipment, discouraging remarks from senior colleagues, fear of committing a culturally insensitive practice, and a recurring notion that it makes students squirm, stammer, and shrink; against these counterforces, whole-class circular seating arrangements seemed patently unsuitable for Japanese classrooms of English as a foreign language (EFL). Circular seating helps me to transform apathy and resistance in my classes into participation and enthusiasm through what I call the social crux, which is the “sustained connections between people through mutual engagements of imagination that sparks communities into learning and action” After establishing key educational deficiencies in university EFL classrooms in Japan, this paper explains from a social psychology perspective the inherent and universal engagingness of circular arrangements of people and the related positive potentials for students. The paper builds a principled approach, which I call classcraft, for applying circular seating arrangements in language learning classrooms within contexts both acquainted and unacquainted with this practice. One of the aims of this paper is to invite teachers to imaginatively expand their own flexibilities in rearranging student locations and activities within given sociocultural and physical boundaries inherent to their context of teaching, for the purpose of improving teaching, learning, and living
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