Learning-Teaching Agreement as a Condition for Dialogical Learning

• In Event: What Is the Value of Classroom Talk?

Abstract

Objective
These days, learning scientists seem to be taking for granted that a classroom in which students talk to one another is the setting of choice for learning. The indiscriminate enthusiasm about the purported benefits of classroom dialogue does not subside in spite of the inconclusiveness of the relevant empirical studies (see, for instance, the state-of-the-art AERA publication, Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke, 2015). In this talk, we address the question of “Under what conditions is classroom conversation likely to generate substantial learning?” We begin by theorizing the relation between learning and talking. We then deduce some answers from the relevant theoretical tenets and corroborate them with empirical findings.

Perspective
As of now, the preference for the talking classroom has not been grounded in a rigorous analytic argument (ibid). In this paper, after arguing that the turn towards “talking classroom” reflects current social and cultural trends rather than a well-argued theoretical position, we claim that in order to answer our question, we need to conceptualize the relation between learning and talking. The basic tenet of the framework proposed in this paper is that school subjects are historically established forms of communication, or discourses (e.g. Foucault, 1978; cf. Vygotsky, 1978). Thus, to learn mathematics or history is to try to become an agentive participant of the respective discourses. Consequently, being in conversation with others, either synchronic or asynchronic, becomes a necessary rather than optional condition for mathematics learning to occur. This said, only those classroom interactions are likely to generate learning in which the learners honor an unwritten learning-teaching agreement; more specifically, there must be consensus among the participants on the following three issues: (a) Whose discourses should be considered the leading one, (b) What are the respective roles of the participants, and (c) in what way and at what pace can the learning be expected to occur.

Methods
Our framework comes with its own methodological apparatus, enabling a study of high-fidelity transcripts of classroom interactions with the help of high-resolution special-purpose discourse analysis. In the vignettes from two studies to be presented in the rest of this talk, rigorously designed graphical representations of dyadic interactions are used in examining learning-teaching agreement and detecting its violation. Our data are taken from two 7th grade classes in which children were solving mathematical problems in pairs. One of the studies was conducted in 1993 in Montreal, Canada and the other in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia.

Findings
In spite of the fact that the two events could not be more distant in time and space, thus also in the cultural context, they seem to be pointing to the same conclusion: unless special thought is given to the organization of the interactions, dyads of students are unlikely to keep learning-teaching agreement, and when this agreement is violated, the interaction obstructs rather than supports students’ learning.

Scholarly Significance
With the help of the proposed conceptual-methodological framework and of our preliminary findings on classroom conversations we hope to advance both theory and practice of dialogical learning.

Authors

• Anna Sfard, University of Haifa

• Man Ching Esther Chan, The University of Melbourne