Studying Student Framing of Content Questions Across Classrooms

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

Abstract

Student participation in traditional recitation formats has been found to depend “heavily … on such factors as gender, ethnicity and history of attainment” (Howe & Abedin, 2013, p. 34). One important set of questions, then, involves the extent to which dialogic pedagogical approaches might broaden and balance student participation and, to the extent they do so, the means through which they accomplish this.

Critical Exploration in the Classroom (Duckworth, 2006), a pedagogical adaptation of Piagetian method, provides teachers with reliable means for accessing and supporting student questions and understandings, thereby creating new kinds of discursive openings for even reticent and resistant students. This qualitative study closely examines the nontraditional participation patterns that CEC generated during four whole-class discussions within each of two classes in a mixed-income middle school during a two-week poetry project.

We compare participation patterns across two classes of 11 to 12 year olds: one composed of an untracked mix of students that the teacher had identified as particularly strong academically; the other composed of students with a full range of learning profiles, including a number of students with diagnosed learning challenges. The same teacher taught both classes; he had attended two three-day CEC teacher workshops (criticalexplorers.org) and had taught the same poetry unit the prior school year.

This teacher, like others who have studied CEC, expressed some concern that his more academically challenged students might not be able to handle the novel and intellectually serious demands of a CEC investigation. As we have seen in other classrooms, however, and intend to show through this analysis, struggling students often respond capably and with considerable interest to these challenges, which encourage and provide support for students to interact with academic material on their own terms.

Even in dialogically oriented pedagogies, teachers generally frame the questions that organize class discussions (e.g. see Wilkinson et al, 2010, who recommend this). A distinguishing characteristic of CEC is that the teacher supports students in the work of framing discussion questions themselves (AUTHOR, 2012). As students discuss their observations, they build toward student questions and ideas and, eventually, toward the framing of focused issues to explore together. The teacher supports these efforts by: 1) providing a conceptually significant object or phenomenon of study; 2) asking that all students share their observations about it; 3) encouraging students to connect all their observations, ideas, and questions to observable features of the object or phenomenon under consideration.

Our study compares and contrasts the content questions and related lines of inquiry that students framed and developed during two-day discussions of each of the same two poems in the two classrooms. Classroom observations and initial analysis of the audio recordings indicate that both groups of students framed and pursued several intellectually interesting investigative questions and developed related lines of inquiry. Analysis and findings will primarily focus on the framing and development of these lines of inquiry as represented by the content of the student contributions in the two sets of class discussions. Cross-class participation patterns will also be analyzed.

Authors

• Alythea McKinney, Critical Explorers

• Susan Jean Mayer, Critical Exploration Press