Classroom Discussion as Participative Thinking: Challenges for Teacher Education

• In Event: 45.046 - Teacher Learning to Position Students as Capable in Class Discussions: Looking Across Subject Matter Domains

Abstract

Purpose. We examine discussion in elementary classrooms as a form of transdisciplinary practice that involves remaking relations among teachers, students, disciplines and the world to emphasize withness over aboutness (Shotter, 2006a) in ways of thinking and being for both teachers and students. This remaking of relations works to disrupt settled expectations of disciplines and schooling that perpetuate structures of inequality rooted in whiteness as property (Harris, 1995) and Cartesian logic (Mignolo, 2007; Shotter, 2006b) in part by controlling what counts as valued and properly constructed knowledge. We explore the implications of this reframing for teacher education.

Grounding Framework. In the essay, “Participative Thinking,” John Shotter (2006b, p. 110) posed this question: “What if, rather than as Descartes’s self-centered and self-controlled, subjective minds, standing…over against a voiceless, objective world, we begin to view ourselves as living, embodied, participant parts of a larger, ongoing, predominately living whole?” With this question, Shotter urges a shift in thinking away from a singular focus on constructing representations of a world “over there” (“a desire for explanation”) toward a focus on living in communicative relations as participants in a world around us “here” (“a desire for understanding”). In this poster, we explore how this argument reframes the challenges of disciplinary discussions in classrooms to involve ongoing attunement to epistemic heterogeneity, epistemic openness, and dialogically structured presence as critical aspects of participatory forms of inquiry.

Method and Data. We are engaged in long-term investigation of how elementary teachers learn to engage their students in expansive discussions of complex disciplinary phenomena in ways that disrupt settled expectations of who counts as intellectually capable and what counts as properly constituted disciplinary knowledge and thinking. Using discourse and interaction analysis, we have analyzed selected examples of video and transcripts of classroom discussions from existing corpora in which teachers and students are engaged in expansive meaning-making in the disciplines of science, social studies, and mathematics. One goal is to specify the forms and functions of “withness-relations” that support participative thinking -- thinking that is engaged, responsive, expressive, open -- across disciplines in elementary classrooms, and to rethink teacher education and teacher learning accordingly.

Findings. Our analyses bring to light some common aspects of teaching practice manifested in the focal classroom discussions in elementary science and social studies. Being communicatively engaged with one’s students in these classroom discussions took the form of: a) holding the thinking space open to multiplicities of meaning; b) weaving multiple orders of connectedness between and across students, their words, and their ideas; c) anticipating that which has not yet been spoken, i.e., orienting to thinking and discourse as unfinalized (see Bakhtin, 1981); d) cultivating attentiveness to disciplinary phenomena among all participants; e) expressively responding with students’ words in mind; e) intentionally disrupting hierarchies of power that structure relations among people, disciplines, and the world.

Significance. This work suggests the importance of engaging teachers in learning to be with their students in participative relations answerable to each other, expansive disciplinary knowledge and thinking, and the larger world.

Authors

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Andrea Caroline Bien, Boston University

• Ann Rosebery, TERC

• Rebecca Gadd, Boston Public Schools

• Maria C Olivares, TERC

• Sarah Yeates Arnold, Boston University