Dialog‐constraining institutional logics and their interactional manifestation in the science classroom

Abstract

AbstractThis study seeks to understand why dialogic argumentation has not been adopted as a legitimate means of instruction by science teachers. To answer this question, this qualitative case study examines the mutually constitutive relationships between macrolevel phenomena, such as the taken‐for‐granted institutional mandates that teachers and schools call upon to maintain their legitimacy in society, and microlevel routinized teacher–student classroom interactions. Integrating ethnography with the analysis of classroom interactions, we seek to capture the social structuring that informs instruction and classroom interactions. Based on an inductive analysis of observations, interviews with teachers, and documents, three types of macrolevel institutional logics that mediate against the implementation of dialogic argumentation emerged. These included the logics of (a) accountability, (b) tracking, and (c) the profession. These logics give rise to instructional practices that run counter to the pursuit of dialogic argumentation. Classroom observations were analyzed to examine how these logics are conveyed through institutionally bounded interactions between teachers and students. Shaped by these institutional logics, instruction in classrooms is narrowed to mostly direct instruction of terminology and absolute facts, and is stratified into various status levels according to classroom tracking. We argue that teachers may resist dialogic argumentation primarily because it violates the fundamental rules, norms, and practices that grant them individual and organizational legitimacy. This contextualization of teacher–student interactions as motivated by institutional logics may explain in greater detail the absence of dialogic argumentation from science classrooms.