Using Tools From Discourse Analysis to Understand Change in a Teacher Study Group

• In Event: Understanding Change Within Discussions of Mathematics Teacher Professional Learning Communities: Methodological Frameworks

Abstract

This study is situated within a year-long PD project focused on secondary mathematics classroom discourse. The PD curriculum was designed to prompt discussion and reflection on mathematics classroom discourse and to provide tools that support the teachers’ engagement with particular ideas. We analyzed change over time with respect to the ways teachers talked about key ideas from the PD, specifically, talk related to the mathematics register (Halliday, 1978)--the forms of meaning and styles of communicating characteristic to the mathematics community (Pimm, 1987). The purpose of this session is to describe the analytic technique we used, illustrate it with data excerpts, and show what this technique reveals regarding teacher change.

We used thematic discourse analysis (Authors) to trace change in the teachers’ talk over time. This analytic technique is based on Lemke’s (1990) work wherein learning is viewed as the process of coming to use language as a system of meaning to create “webs of relationships” among and between ideas, because specific ideas and concepts make sense only in terms of their relationships to others. More broadly, our theoretical perspective is that learning is inseparable from participating in a discourse community (Lave & Wenger, 1991) because context and language use are intertwined. Thematic discourse analysis, then, involves identifying the thematic items (e.g., terms, phrases) in the discourse and mapping the semantic relations between terms (e.g., one term is synonymous with another, a phrase may exemplify another). In the present study, we compared the teachers’ own thematic items and relations from different points in time across the PD project.

The data for this study were video recordings of the PD sessions that most directly addressed the mathematics register, which included fourteen 30-60 minute activities over the course of the year. Nine teachers from three school districts participated in the PD sessions. After creating mappings of the thematic items and semantic relations for each segment of video focused on mathematics register, we identified recurring themes in the mappings and examined shifts over time.

Our analysis highlighted two particular discourse practices that the teachers used to make meaning of the mathematics register: providing specific examples of characteristics associated with the mathematics register (MR) and utilizing comparison and contrast as a means for talking about what they noticed with respect to the MR. We also saw increasing complexity in the ideas the teachers were connecting to the MR--for example, moving from MR as specialized vocabulary to MR as related to many aspects of communication. In the session, we illustrate with data excerpts how the analytic technique revealed these shifts and how it allowed us to consider both individual and collective changes.

The scholarly significance of this work relates to the alignment between views on teacher learning and means for tracing that learning. Because the PD was based on learning as coming to participate in particular ways, the analytic technique presented is one way to examine the ways in which teachers are communicating their ideas.

Authors

• Samuel Otten, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Beth A. Herbel-Eisenmann, Michigan State University

• Kate Johnson, Brigham Young University