Equity in Group Work: The Social Process of Creating Justice in a Science Classroom

• In Event: Social Design Experiments, Third Space, and Sociocritical Analysis Across the Disciplines

Abstract

There has been an international focus on productive talk in science classrooms over the last few decades, encouraging teachers to use dialogic instructional methods. Studies promoting a dialogic approach propose that students have conversations in student-led groups. Student-led learning spaces, like groupwork, may provide opportunities for students’ voice and sociocritical perspectives to shift the often didactic science classroom. However the literature in education regarding groupwork has highlighted that students can struggle to work collaboratively without the proper scaffolds--particularly around equity (Webb 2013). Equitable interactions during groupwork are linked to increased learning among all members during a group task (Cohen 1994). Thus, equity in quality and quantity of talk becomes the goal for groupwork. Indeed, I argue that equity in group interactions requires justice that is socially constructed, the flattening of social hierarchy, and includes three key features: student voice, visibility (of all students), and student authority. Group interactions between middle and high school students from a suburban California city are used to highlight these features.

I used sociolinguistic discourse analysis to analyze students’ voice in group interactions which were video recorded. Images from video recorded data, event maps from student dialogue, and data from student interviews are used to examine the role of visibility, voice, and authority in creating equitable interactions in groupwork. The analysis of the group interactions confirmed standard findings within the groupwork literature: overall, there is an imbalance in the kinds of talk as well as the amount of talk students engaged in with their peers. That is, students that are deemed as being popular and smart by their peers express their voice more than those students who are not (Cohen & Lotan, 1995). These findings illustrate that even when teachers’ abandon monologic instruction and allow space for multiple forms of knowing (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995) in student-led activities, official script of the discipline still becomes the marker of high status and knowledge. The teacher must work with students to actively disrupt views that dominant forms and expression of knowledge as the primary markers of intelligence. In analyzing student interaction with each other this paper might have implications for teachers who strive to create more sociocritical analysis in their classrooms.

Implications from this study point to equity as a process--a transformative social process where students use their words (reflection + action) (Freire 2000) to shift inequities and increase communication in science. Equity as a process does not mean the absence of inequity but that students use their words to address inequity when it arises to transform the space. What, then, is the role of the teacher in allowing for this transformative work to take place amongst the students? What does it look like to organize this kind of classroom? I engage with questions such as these and conclude with a discussion of how teachers can create the classroom conditions necessary to cultivate productive and equitable talk in science classrooms. Particularly, I highlight the transformative power students’ words have and their ability to create equity through voice, visibility, and agency in student-led spaces.

Author

• Alexis Danielle Patterson, University of California - Davis