Tracing Context in Student Performance

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Integrating Analyses of Interaction, Texts, Ideologies, and Embodied Ways of Knowing

Abstract

Purpose
This paper illustrates the contextual complexity embedded in student interaction by examining layers of talk, text, and embodied understanding in a performative focal example. The yearlong ethnographic study was conducted with inquiry groups in an urban school with rigid curricular expectations and ability grouped classrooms. In one group, eight fifth-graders produced a documentary style video, The New Kid, which addressed what new students need to know about school from an emic perspective. Topics included: student engagement, school uniforms, and “why there are classes for smarter kids”. Their process involved generating research questions, creating a survey, collecting data, and conducting interviews with students and teachers. They embedded the data in the video, thereby publicly expressing their perspectives and interpretations of collective feedback. This analysis interrogates how students represent their experiences, demonstrating what educators might learn from their students.

Perspectives
From a New Literacy perspective, literacy practices are dynamic, co-constructed and culturally situated (Street, 1984). Drawing from multiple experiences, students subtly critiqued the institution of school within the boundary of their video. Anderson (2013) explains that, “In Situated Literacies, the learning environment, or context, is distributed across various scales of social life and locations with different ways to be with texts (as authors or consumers), understood in light of a purposely com¬plicated sense of context” (p. 19). As in discussion, where each turn presupposes and entails the next (Silverstein, 1993), a contextualized analysis of the video makes new interaction spaces visible. Furthermore, contextualization is dialogical, local, and translocal (Blommaert, 2005). Foregrounding context aims to account for ways people “make sense” in interaction—often through indexical meanings across time and space (Gumperz, 1982).

Method
Students inserted data as they improvised the community circle scene. Analysis examined the “positions and alignments participants enacted in relationship to each other, to the discourses in which they were involved, and the mediated action they were taking” (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. 174). This multilayered contextual analysis examined preplanning discussion, improvised performance, texts, and spatial settings to tease out the conditions for uptake. Each aspect offered explanatory positions or discursive motives for the interaction.

Data
The researcher was both a participant observer across school settings and a practitioner inquirer during the group sessions. Data includes research video and student surveys from the biweekly, hourly sessions over an 8-week span. Surveys were collected from 75 students and informed follow-up interviews used in the video. Other data include: student reflections, ethnographic field notes, and analytic memos from the study.

Conclusions
The group devised a collective voice through the video production as a means to communicate student perspectives with their community. Performance, specifically using data to frame an improvised scene, offered space for resistance and recognition of student knowledge.

Significance
Student production offers a unique look into the representation of experience. Improvisation hangs on a familiar frame. Mapping the frame as contextual layers moves beyond analysis of talk and text. There is work to be done to deconstruct persistent limitations on dialogic interactions as the sole unit of analysis.
(499 words)

Author

• Sarah Meredith Vander Zanden, University of Northern Iowa