Dealing With the Contradiction of Agency and Control During Dialogic Teaching

• In Event: 68.026 - Researching Student Agency in Educational Interactions: Sociocultural Approaches and Methodological Insights

Abstract

This study investigates the contradiction between student agency and teacher control in classroom interactions during dialogic teaching. Here, dialogic teaching accounts for
positioning students as actors and authors of their learning (authors). This involves creating opportunities for students' personal interests and experiences to be interwoven with instruction to advance students' agency in collective meaning-making and knowledge creation.

We define student agency as interactions that contribute to transforming interactional events and ultimately instructional practices. We posit that agency emerges in a dialectical relation to social structure (Sewell, 1992). In classroom interactions, agency-structure dialectics is manifested as the contradiction between agency and control that teachers and students need to manage in daily educational practice (McNeil, 1986; authors). Teachers are subject to institutional demands, and thus, their possibility to foster student agency is constrained by institutional framings and structures.

Specifically, we investigate how a teacher who is implementing dialogic teaching in a third grade classroom deals with student agency when it does not align with the teacher's pedagogical agenda. The study focuses on students' oppositional initiatives by hypothesizing that the contradiction between agency and control becomes particularly evident in moments when students oppose the teacher or the instructional activity. Traditionally, students' opposition has been framed as an indication of a deficit in their adaptation to society. In contrast to such a deficit perspective, we hold that it is important to frame student opposition as an educational challenge and in terms of its transformative potential to develop student agency and more meaningful educational practices.

The video data were collected in a heterogeneous Finnish third-grade classroom and analyzed with interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). The data are from a semester-long science project on the forest. Seven and half hours of video data, comprising all whole-class discussions, were selected for a detailed analysis. Interactional episode constituted the unit of analysis and was defined as a thematically meaningful unit of interactional exchange. Using analytic induction (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), we categorized episodes of students’ oppositional initiatives (N=153) into five types, paying attention to their forms and objects. We also inductively identified three distinct responses that the teacher displayed toward students' oppositional initiatives. In our detailed analysis and interpretation, we paid attention to how the teacher drew on institutional resources and recognizable patterns of interaction in his responses to the students' oppositional initiatives.

The results show how promoting student agency is a contradictory endeavor that requires balancing between the aspirations of dialogic teaching and institutional demands. The results showed that the students' criticism and questioning of instructional activity were targeted at the contents, procedures, and purpose of the instructional activity. We found inconsistency in the teacher's responses to the students' opposition according to the type of opposition. Providing space for negotiation created opportunities for achieving student agency. Conversely, the teacher also silenced students' opposition by enforcing his institutional authority or disregarding student opposition, resulting in interactions that suppressed student agency. This study adds to the understanding of what is at stake when students' agency is promoted in classroom interactions.

Authors

• Antti Juhani Rajala, University of Helsinki / Department of Teacher Education

• Kristiina P. Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki

• Anna Pauliina Rainio, University of Helsinki

• Jaakko Hilppö, Northwestern University

• Lasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki