Classroom Interactions That Support Learning Over Time in a Sixth-Grade Classroom

• In Event: Reflection and Refraction in the Teaching and Learning of Academic Literacy Practices Across Grades

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the ways that members of a sixth-grade classroom co-constructed a cultural model that opened opportunities for interacting with literature texts in ways that supported the acquisition of complex academic knowledge. Current research is focused on how teachers and students act and react to and with each other in the course of classroom discourse events. Boyd and Rubin’s (2006) exploration of contingency questioning, Michaels, O'Connor, and Resnick’s (2008) research on accountable talk, and Nystrand and Gamoran’s (1991) report on “uptake,, among others, have contributed to what is known about the ways teachers evaluate and respond in question/answer patterned interactions. This study broadens the perspective beyond teacher-student responses and examines how students, when given opportunity to “play” and interact, take up (reflect) and adapt (refract) the cultural models of academic literacy practices didactically presented by their teachers.
Zaharlick & Green (1991) posit that culture is not simply transmitted from one person to the next. Instead, all members of a social group are cultural beings serving as resources for each other. This study examines how class members interactively construct culture and patterned ways of “perceiving, believing, thinking, acting, and feeling” (cf., Goodenough, 1981), ways of using spoken and written language through daily interactions.
The study is framed within interactional sociolinguistics (cf., Gumperz 1986) and uses ethnographic principles (cf., Green & Bloome, 1997) to study life in a sixth-grade language arts classroom. Microethnographic discourse analysis (cf., Bloome et al., 2005) is used to examine how a teachers’ implicit and explicit modeling of social and academic discourse and literacy practices combined with opportunities for small group interactions, opened opportunities for students to discursively adopt, adapt, and add complexity to discourses about texts by “generating analogies, hypothesizing, predicting, drawing on personal experiences in daily life and applying knowledge to new situations” (Chinn & Brown, 2002, p. 541) .
As a participant observer, I collected audio and video data over the course of an academic year. The data was analyzed to examine how, where, and when students took up the cultural models enacted by their teachers. Further, I examined how group members in a culture that valued time for interaction, acted and reacted to one another, and took up opportunities for initiating dialogues that led to the co-construction of deep, complex academic knowledge.
Within this classroom there were cycles of activity in which didactic instruction was alternated with peer instructional groups in which the students “played with” and refracted the academic literacy practices. Within their peer instructional groups students modeled and scaffolded each others’ attempts to refract given academic literacy practices creating shared expectations and standards for how to take up an academic literacy practice. Employing the refracted literacy practices provided the students with ways to construct a broad range of interpretations, responses to, and understandings of the literature they were reading. As instructional cycles evolved layers of depth and complexity were generated in how the students refracted the given academic literacy practices.

Author

• Marlene Beierle, The Ohio State University