Playing With Power: Collaboration and Conflict in Small-Group Interactions

• In Event: 26.059 - Critical Sociocultural Studies of Classroom Discourse

Abstract

Purpose
These studies explore how students jockey for power during classroom interactions and with what consequences. Study One considers: How do students position themselves and connect productively across differences? Study Two considers: How, if at all, do students negotiate social practices within their interactions? Both studies highlight how youth dialogically “play” with power, at times asserting, challenging and/or reinscribing positions of authority in the classroom.

Theoretical Perspectives
Both studies draw upon sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1995; Bakhtin, 1981) as well as discourse analysis as a lenses for revealing the social practices performed within students’ informal small group interactions. Study One uses activity theory to understand the values and rules of the class (Engestrom, 1999; Lewis/Scharber, 2011), and discourse analysis to see how they are legitimated (Gee, 1999; Van Leeuwen, 2007). The study also employs narrative discourse analysis (Wortham, 2011) to explore the multiple constructions of self. Study Two draws on several aspects of mediated discourse and multimodal analysis (Kress, 2011; Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Van Leeuwen, 2007; Wohlwend, 2011).

Methods, Data Sources and Results

Study One:
The focus in this study is a middle-school science classroom in a racially and economically diverse all-girls urban charter school that values inquiry-based, collaborative, and dialogic learning. Data sources include student interactions, teacher interactions, teacher interviews, and field notes. The findings suggest that the talk is dialogic, and that this dialogic talk is made productive through multiple, often competing, voices (Nystrand, 1998). The teacher’s desired object—science talk and work (Kelly, 2008)—results in two simultaneous outcomes: a dialogic and collaborative classroom and a community of students with relatively low proficiency. Thus, the study reveals an activity system that is at once discouragingly ineffective and highly successful and generative.

Study Two:
Study Two focuses on one social episode within a kindergarten classroom to highlight interactions that repeatedly occurred during informal “active learning” centers. This paper comes from a two-month study in an urban elementary school. Data sources include observations, field notes, audio and video recordings. Within the early elementary classroom, young students interpret and perform a multitude of social practices (Wohlwend, 2009a; Wohlwend, 2009b; Wohlwend, 2011). One of these social practices includes the portrayal of authoritative interactions between the classroom teacher and student. Findings suggest students interpret and produce distinct roles and rituals through their gaze, gestures, and talk during their informal playtime.

Significance of Studies
For students to become scholars, whether in word or deed or both, they must leap into the conversation, which places them somewhere within a community. While their conversation is frequently tension-filled as they assert power and take up multiple roles, they also exhibit good will and patience toward each other. In their interactions, collaboration is frequently more evident than academic proficiency. More research is needed on how to sustain what is working so well in dialogic classrooms, and add to it opportunities for learning that are recognizable as imaginative, thorough, and appropriately complex.

Authors

• Anne Crampton, University of Minnesota

• Jana LoBello, University of Minnesota