"Re-Presenting" Student Agency: Multimodal Discourse Negotiation in a Third-Grade Classroom

• In Event: 34.079 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 34.079-12 - Reflexive Multimodal Transcription of Young Children: What Is Made Visible and Possible to Theorize

Abstract

Objective
The researcher set out to understand when and how students attempted to claim discursive authority in one third grade classroom -- the right to speak and be heard, evaluate others, and demonstrate new knowledge to their teacher and peers -- but found that her initial methods and analyses were limited in revealing the full discursive repertoires students employed as they actively negotiated for power in this classroom. Two transcriptions and the theories that underly them as “re-presentations” of classroom talk are compared in order to demonstrate how students’ agency can become more apparent when multimodal aspects of their communicative practices are highlighted in alternative transcription formats.

Theoretical Framework
While teacher authority and control over classroom talk is the expectation and the norm in most institutionalized school spaces, students also have an active role to play in accepting, resisting, or transforming this talk as they take part in the co-construction and negotiation of classroom discourse. Students’ contributions may be less explicit or obscured by the teacher-sanctioned discourse of the classroom (Rymes, 2014), especially when transcriptions focus primarily on direct, verbal communication between teachers and students, ignoring the many ways that students can influence and contribute to classroom discourse through nonverbal communicative strategies (Schultz, 2009).

Methods and Data
Video data from a third grade classroom consisting of mostly African-American students ages 7-9 years old was transcribed two different ways to emphasize different aspects of the discourse negotiation strategies employed by students. The first transcription focuses on verbal interactions, including language, tone, and volume (Jefferson, 2004). At the suggestion of several colleagues, the same data was transcribed again to incorporate more multimodal aspects of the emerging classroom discourse (Jewitt, 2009; O’Halloran, K. L., 2011) into an alternative transcription format that could shed more light on the many ways students were negotiating for discursive authority beyond verbal language.

Results
The comparison of these two “re-presentations” of classroom data generated some important discussion about how different methodological decisions come with certain affordances and limitations for careful attention to student agency. The multimodal transcription highlighted the multiple ways that students leveraged both the language and the nonverbal behaviors of the teacher in order to negotiate for discursive authority, relying not just on the ‘right’ words to use, but also body language, artifacts, and physical positioning as they effectively transitioned from the role of student into the role of authoritative expert.

Significance
Since every classroom is a unique and evolving space where power and discourse are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated, the methodological focus of this presentation can be extremely valuable for researchers and even practitioners seeking to engage in this kind of critical discourse analysis in their own classrooms. Many in the field of teacher education have advocated for an increased awareness by teachers of their own and their students’ discourse practices (Rymes, 2016; Hicks, 1995), and it is important that our methods seek to reveal the multiple ways that students engage in this process.

Author

• Adrian L Allen, University of Illinois at Chicago