Compelling Student Voice: Dialogic Practices of Public Confession

• In Event: 53.026 - Broadening Opportunities for Classroom Learning With Dialogic Pedagogies

Abstract

Objectives
Encouraging and developing voice in the classroom is a key aim of dialogic pedagogy, but teachers’ elicitation of student voices is not always empowering. This study explores the risks and constraints of compelling students to express their voices by pressing them to adopt and articulate a stance. Through close examination of three classroom episodes, we address the following questions: (1) Which educational aims are served by this practice and which are undermined? (2) In what ways do questions of power and resistance come into play within this practice? (3) What ideas about voice emerge from these interactions?

Theoretical perspective
We approach dialogic pedagogy as a problem space, in which competing educational goals, knowledge claims, discourse genres, and voices create practical dilemmas for teachers and pupils (AUTHORS, 2010; 2014). We adopt a broadly Bakhtinian perspective (e.g. Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Wertsch, 1993) on discourse, investigating the production of voice.

This paper builds upon our previous work on voice in the classroom, in which we have identified conditions for realization of voice: (a) opportunity to speak, (b) expressing one’s own ideas, (c) on one’s own terms, and (d) being heeded by others. Our empirical work has shown that even ostensibly dialogic classroom discourse may not meet these conditions (AUTHORS, 2016), and has explored the rare (in our dataset) emergence of student voice (AUTHORS, in press). Building on this work and Foucault’s investigations of the practice of confession (Foucault, 1978; also Fejes & Nicoll, 2015), we analyze the social dynamics and dialogic educational implications of teacher compulsion of student stance-taking.

Method
This linguistic ethnographic study (Rampton, Maybin & Roberts, 2014) is based on a corpus of 112 lessons collected in seven secular Israeli upper primary classrooms. The paper centers upon events in three different classrooms, in which teachers appear to compel students to find and express their voices. Data include video-recorded, transcribed lessons and field notes.

Results
Preliminary analysis indicates that voice is constructed by the teachers as animating one of the proffered options (“Do you think A or do you think B?”), while students wishing to opt for a middle ground between extremes are denied this possibility. Stance-taking demands draw justification from both affective curricular aims, such as fostering identity or peer relations, and specific literacy skills, such as writing a persuasive text. Student reluctance to express an unpopular opinion may be one reason for reticence and equivocation, with teachers engaging in multiple mitigation strategies. However, the data further suggest a fundamental tension between dialogic imperatives emphasizing specific outcomes at a given moment in time and a more nuanced understanding of voice as something that develops with time and experience.

Scholarly significance
The anticipated contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we add an element of what we term "voluntarity" to theory of voice, problematizing the project of developing student voice. Second, we offer a means of operationalizing the micropolitics of confession in the classroom.

Authors

• Adam Lefstein, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

• Aliza Segal, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev