Classroom Conversations Research Articles

Playing as Argument Architects: Bridging a Learning Gap in the Research Process

This article reports on the design process and initial results of a project to create a board game, Argument Architect, that bridges the gap between librarians’ and students’ understanding of research and rhetoric. Some students perceive research as a step-by-step, linear process; in contrast, however, most librarians view it as an iterative, dynamic activity. In order to use Argument Architect as a springboard to a classroom conversation, we designed it to avoid the competitive/destructive nature of most board games in favor of a cooperative/constructive schema that fostered a flowing, playful, and reflective dialog between students and librarians about the “messy” nature of research. We also kept in mind our practical needs, as instruction librarians, for a game with flexibility, scalability, portability, and intuitive play that we could efficiently deploy multiple times in composition classes with different class lengths and assignments. We share details and images of the game in multiple stages of development, student and instructor reactions, and future plans.

What’s Hot in Literacy Instruction

What’s Hot in Literacy Instruction

Triadic labour in teaching for the prevention of gender-based violence

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use the Deleuzian notion of assemblage as an analytico-methodological framework to examine different types of ‘labour’ that teachers are called upon to perform when they implement a programme that teaches about gender-based violence. Drawing on interview data gathered from 129 teachers from primary and secondary schools in the Australian context, we trace the affective forces which interact to both drive and constrain teacher action. We examine the forms of emotional, political and pedagogical labour that teachers exert when required to open silenced topics in the face of resistance to gender equity initiatives, and concerns about evoking distress among affected parties. Our analysis highlights the importance of a providing an assemblage of institutional and relational support that can help create the conditions of possibility needed for teachers to open classroom conversations on sensitive matters relating to gender-based violence.

Examining Patterns in Teacher-Student Classroom Conversations during STEM Lessons

Teacher-student conversations are central to student learning within the science classroom. Educational literature recommends teachers aim to build a common scientific language and, through dialog, develop shared meanings with students. This study examines teacher-student conversations in the specific situation of an integrated science and engineering curriculum, involving lessons on heat transfer. The findings identify critical nuances and discourse patterns in the conversations that may pose barriers to student engagement and learning. The study illustrates the need for teachers to plan dialogic, authentic interaction with students to build shared meanings about scientific concepts in order to enhance STEM learning.

Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading

Theories of literary ethics often emphasize either content or the structural relationship between text and reader, and they tend to bracket pedagogy. This essay advocates instead for an approach that sees literary representation and readerly attention as interanimating and that considers teaching an important aspect of an ethics of reading. To support these positions, I turn to Katherena Vermette’s 2016 novel The Break, which both represents the urgent injustice of sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls and also metafictionally comments on the ethics of witnessing. Describing how I read with my students the novel’s insistent thematization of face-to-face encounters and practices of attention as an invitation to read with Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil, I explicate the text’s self-aware commentary on both the need for readers to resist self-enlargement in their encounters with others’ stories and also the danger of generalizing readerly responsibility or losing sight of the material realities the text represents. I source these challenges both in the novel and in my students’ multiple particularities as readers facing the textual other. Ultimately, the essay argues for a more careful attention to which works we bring into our theorizing of literary ethics, and which theoretical frames we bring into classroom conversations.

College Coaching and Salary Restrictions: Using Law to Teach Current Events in the Classroom

Each year, the college football season ends with hiring and firing moves. These transitions raise questions about the million-dollar salaries prevalent in college sports. Current events like this tend to dominate classroom conversations. Navigating these issues and their relation to class content can be challenging. Although the amount of money spent on coaches is not surprising, any discussion to provide new strategies may not be legally viable. For example, when students propose ideas about limiting coaching salaries, they may not realize the legal implication of that action. This case study uses the legal case-study model to address questions related to intercollegiate athletic coaching salaries and the possibility of a salary cap. Providing legal application in other courses will address these questions for both students and for faculty members who might not have the legal background to answer these questions.

Leveraging Microaggressions in the Classroom as Teachable Moments

In this article, the author examines current tensions and controversies on college and university campuses regarding microaggressions. She provides an overview of the construct and impact of microaggressions and the positions on both sides of the issue. She asserts that even with the creation of safe spaces and raising awareness about the damage microaggressions can inflict, there is no way to eliminate or ban microaggressions and that doing so would not address the underlying beliefs and biases that result in microaggressions. Instead, she argues that we need to have difficult and uncomfortable conversations that tackle microaggressions and the underlying beliefs head on. Doing so creates opportunities for learning and change in the classroom. The author provides multiple classroom vignettes, both from her own experience and those of other educators, about what this process looks like. She concludes by offering guidelines and recommendations for fostering these difficult and uncomfortable conversations in your own classroom.

Building blocks of infant-toddler conversation skills: using the Conversation Compass© to drive innovation in Early Head Start classroom conversations

ABSTRACT We collaborated with Early Head Start (EHS) coaches to qualitatively explore the feasibility delivering a professional development approach designed to enhance the quality of conversations in infant-toddler (I/T) classrooms and family child care homes. First, we reviewed empirical literature about oral language discourse skills in infants and toddlers. Second, we examined the frameworks and evaluation tools EHS practitioners and programmes used to guide conversations, e.g. the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework and the Quality of Caregiver-Child Interaction for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT) Scale. Third, we adapted the Conversation Compass© approach for ages birth to 24 months. Lessons learned were (1) teachers report that the Conversation Compass approach was user-friendly, (2) due to teachers’ limitations with computer skills the online course was difficult for them to complete independently, and (3) the approach can be used to facilitate and model conversation in mixed-age group settings with infants and toddlers.

Grabbing a Tiger by the Tale: Using Stories to Teach Financial Literacy

Teaching financial literacy represents an important expectation of K–12 public school educators. Financial literacy is usually defined as having the knowledge and ability to function monetarily within the existing economic system. This system can be hierarchical and inequitable, if not oppressive. We argue that stories have been used throughout history to inform people about the fulfillment of challenging the social structures founded on traditional economic principles of greed and control. We suggest that teachers facilitate classroom conversations based on such stories as a means of teaching about financial literacy and its social applications. We present for classroom use a sample story about two sons and offer debriefing questions that invite conversation about money and social responsibility.

Exploring critical communication approaches through Grandmama’s birthday: An application of the self-reference effect through public and personal timelines

ABSTRACTIn many classroom conversations when exploring critical communication issues such as gender and race, students are often unable to identify the relevance of past events and uninterested in exploring the concepts. This activity was created as a way to help students uncover the significance of events and movements from which they feel disconnected. At its core, this activity provides students with a meaningful and personal way to explore historical events related to course concepts through a single in-class activity that utilizes the creation of overlapping public and personal timelines. By viewing this information through the lens of personal familial connections and by engaging the self-reference effect, students are provided a vehicle for making strong connections to numerous critical communication concepts.Courses: Organizational Communication, Critical Communication, Gender Communication, Introduction to Communication Theory and History, Communication and Careers, Rhetoric of Race, Rhetoric and Social Change, Research Methods, Family Communication.Objective: This activity aims to provide students with an active-learning process for making personal connections to foundational critical communication concepts and approaches.

The Segregation of Foreigners in U.S. Mainstream Classrooms

(1) This study investigates the norms of speaking in the classroom by examining the speaking practices of Japanese international students (JIS)—a nonnative English speaking group—in classroom conversations with native English speakers (NES). (2) Semi-structured interviews in Japanese were conducted with 12 JIS in undergraduate programs at a predominantly White university in the United States. (3) The use of speech codes theory and Hymes’s SPEAKING framework, coupled with the grounded theory, reveal that all the interviewees dealt with conflicting feelings of eagerness and dread when deciding whether or not to participate in classroom conversations. The JIS revealed threatening classroom dynamics that made them feel inadequate, isolated, and intimidated. The norms for speaking in the classroom subjugate the JIS into silent observers and subalterns who lack colloquial English skills or local cultural knowledge. Unforgiving sanctions, including discrimination, exclusion, ignorance, and silent treatment, are used by the NES to illegitimize JIS membership in the classroom community. (4) These micro-level nuances of classroom culture are discussed in relation to the macro-level institutionalized structures of U.S. higher education that are, in turn, embedded in the socio-historical dynamics of the nation.

Connecting knowledge spaces: Enabling cross‐community knowledge building through boundary objects

AbstractA learning community works with a collective knowledge space where members contribute and interact with one another's ideas to advance their community's knowledge. This study aims to explore designs of collective knowledge space to support cross‐community interaction. A design experiment was conducted in four grade 5 classrooms with the support of Knowledge Forum over a school year. As students conducted focused inquiry and discourse within their own community, they reviewed productive threads of ideas and created “super notes” (idea thread syntheses) for cross‐community sharing and interaction. A set of “super notes” from previous classrooms studying human body systems was also posted in the cross‐community space. Qualitative analyses results showed that the students wrote and posted “super notes” to capture substantive idea progress and deepening questions that had emerged from their inquiry. Social network analysis of who had read whose “super notes” revealed extensive social interactions between the four classrooms as well as among the students within each classroom. Analysis of the classroom conversations that followed the “super notes” reading elaborated how students built on the insights gained from the cross‐classroom interactions to develop deeper understandings in their home classroom. Analyses of teacher interviews and observation data documented the teachers’ roles to contextualize the purpose of the cross‐classroom space, support “super notes” reading and writing, and scaffold cross‐classroom connection and conversation.Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Students work with a collective knowledge space where they contribute and interact with one another's ideas to advance their community's knowledge. Existing designs of collective knowledge spaces focus on supporting students’ interaction in individual classroom communities, which is often organized as relatively short inquiry activities lasting over a couple of weeks. What this paper adds A multilevel emergent interaction design for connecting the knowledge spaces of different communities. Elaborated classroom processes and technology support for enabling knowledge building across classroom communities. Implications for practice and/or policy Teachers can facilitate collaborative knowledge building in each classroom and further create cross‐community connections for mutual learning and idea build‐on. It is important to support student‐driven efforts to develop interconnected knowledge spaces in order to enable sustained knowledge building and deep inquiry across classrooms.

From TurnTalk to ClassTalk: the emergence of tangibles for class conversations in primary school classrooms

ABSTRACTPrimary school curricula teach children conversation norms for promoting positive social interactions, such as turn-taking and turn reserving, while curricula discourage other aspects of conversations, such as overlapping in turns. However such norms are abstract and difficult to master. Recently, interactive tangible solutions (briefly, tangibles) have been used to sustain the scaffolding of conversation norms. This paper continues this line of investigation. It discusses how meta-design and action research complement each other and tackle trade-offs in designing tangibles for conversations in primary schools. It reports on the emergence and genesis of tangibles for class conversation, named ClassTalk. Then it focusses on usages and actions with ClassTalk in 2018 in primary school classes, and it discusses them in relation to children's and teachers' engagement and usages of tangibles. It concludes by reflecting on the entire experience, and considers trade-offs and lessons learnt for meta-design and action research, as well as for the design of such tangibles per se.

Brilliant or Bad: The Gendered Social Construction of Exceptionalism in Early Adolescence

From kindergarten through college, students perceive boys as more intelligent than girls, yet few sociological studies have identified how school processes shape students’ gender status beliefs. Drawing on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 interviews conducted at a racially diverse, public middle school in Los Angeles, this article demonstrates how educators’ differential regulation of boys’ rule-breaking by course level contributed to gender-based differences in students’ perceptions of intelligence. In higher-level courses—where affluent, White, and Asian American students were overrepresented—educators tolerated 6th-grade boys’ rule-breaking, such that boys challenged girls’ opinions and monopolized classroom conversations. By 8th grade, students perceived higher-level boys as more exceptionally intelligent than girls. However, in lower-level courses—where non-affluent Latinx students were overrepresented—educators penalized 6th-grade boys’ rule-breaking, such that boys disengaged from classroom conversations. By 8th grade, lower-level students perceived girls as smarter than boys, but not exceptional. This article also demonstrates how race intersected with gender when shaping students’ perceptions of intelligence, with students associating the most superlatives with affluent White boys’ capabilities. Through this analysis, I develop a new theoretical understanding of how school processes contribute to the gendered social construction of exceptionalism and reproduce social inequalities in early adolescence.

Exploring Economic Diversity and Inequity Through Picture Books

AbstractA significant percentage of students have families from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, yet the experiences and practices of such students are often not reflected in the curriculum. To create more equitable literacy learning environments, students need opportunities to explore economic diversity and to challenge harmful discourses about people experiencing economic hardship. The authors discuss how picture books can be used in elementary classrooms to reflect economic diversity and to facilitate critical classroom conversations on economic hardship. The authors also discuss the importance of teachers attending to students’ economic backgrounds, highlight promising trends in contemporary picture books on economic hardship, and provide critical considerations for teachers when planning for student dialogue on economic inequity.

Representations of students becoming as writers

In order to study students' learning to write as becoming across time and modes, we study writing as an artifact of participation. We employ an intertextual method of analysis that foregrounds students' writing activity and traces back to curricular opportunities, classroom conversations, and classroom interactions while composing. We share how this analysis makes visible how four students across two classrooms were becoming as writers. This analysis complicates understandings of how students compose over time, redefines the writing process to a set of interrelated, relational and intertextual processes that collide around the classroom, and raises questions about how we might better enact teaching and assessment practices that account for ways students participate in becoming as writers.

Instructor Humor as a Moderator of Instructors’ Inappropriate Conversations and Instructional Dissent

This study (N = 326) was conducted to examine the associations among instructor humor, inappropriate conversations, and instructional dissent. First, results showed students are more likely to employ rhetorical dissent when they perceive their instructors as humorous in the classroom. Second, using expectancy violations theory as a guide, results also indicated that students’ perceptions of instructor-relevant humor moderated the relationships between enactment of inappropriate conversations and students’ expressive and vengeful dissent. These findings support the importance of employing relevant humor in course instruction, especially when instructors engage in inappropriate conversations in the college classroom.

How Classroom Conversations Unfold: Exploring Teacher–Child Exchanges During Shared Book Reading

ABSTRACTResearch Findings: This study examined how teacher–child conversations unfold during shared book reading in Head Start classrooms as well as the relations between that talk and children’s vocabulary learning. Book reading experiences in 27 Head Start classrooms were videotaped and coded for teacher talk, child responses, teacher follow-up remarks, and teacher wait time; we also assessed children’s vocabulary learning. Findings indicated that Head Start teachers infrequently asked open prompts or provided book-related comments; the predominant tool used in shared reading was the closed prompt. Teachers generally accepted 1 answer per question, and children’s answers were nearly always correct. Wait time was rarely observed. Across the sample, more child talk was predictive of stronger child vocabulary learning. For children with low initial vocabulary skills, learning was also linked to more expository comments by teachers. Practice or Policy: Findings help to map out the sequence of instructional events that make up preschool classroom conversations and provide insight into potential levers for improvement.

Dialogic teaching: towards reconfiguring classroom talk about sexuality

ABSTRACTDrawing on Robin Alexander’s theory and method of ‘Dialogic Teaching’, this paper engages with debates about the need to reconceptualise the teaching of sexuality education. By exploring the complexities of educating about sex and sexuality it calls for attention to be paid to the how patterns of talk may function to open up spaces for more robust pedagogies. Dialogic Teaching is presented as providing opportunities to mitigate the ideological conflict endemic to sexuality education today. Using examples of classroom conversations between a teacher and his group of students involved in a recent Australian study this paper critically analyzes one teacher’s opportunities (or missed opportunities) for dialogic teaching, including opportunities for students to explore, challenge, reconsider, extend and enhance their learning of the myriad and complex issues relevant to sexuality such as negotiation and consent, pleasure and desire. As a form of pedagogical ethics, dialogic teaching offers a radical model for the future teaching of sexuality education.

Repair sequences in ‘off-task’ conversations in an EFL university classroom in Japan: Japanese language resources and learning opportunities

ABSTRACTIn this article, I use conversation analysis (CA) to focus on how Japanese language resources are used in repair sequences that occur in ‘off-task’ English interactions in a lower-level EFL classroom at a Japanese university, considering how this may create opportunities for learning. While previous research has found that ‘off-task’ peer interactions in EFL classrooms will often be in the L1, I show how the participants in this study can display an orientation to speaking in English, even when ‘off-task’. However, L1 resources were more likely to be used when ‘off-task’ than when on-task. In ‘off-task’ talk, Japanese language resources were made use of in a number of ways: during other-initiated repair to clarify the meaning of an English word; as a placeholder in a word search; and to elicit help in forward-oriented repair sequences, among others. I describe how an orientation to speaking in English combined with some L1-use allowed for repair sequences that involved translation between the L1 and target language, and how ‘off-task’ talk may provide learning opportunities that occur less often in the on-task interactions in my data. I argue in the discussion that ‘off-task’ conversations may have a useful role to play in the EFL classroom.