Unintended Consequences of Talk: Playing With Racial Difference in a Dialogic Science Classroom

• In Event: 18.017 - The Unintended Consequences of Historical "Best Practices" in "Post-Truth" Times: A National and International Perspective

Abstract

While “best practices” in education implies some embrace of standardization, not all popular instructional practices promote a one-size-fits-all pedagogy. In fact, certain progressive approaches attempt to disrupt conformity, promoting flexibility over rigidity, human over machine, and creativity over control. This paper comes from an ethnographic study in an inquiry-based STEM classroom that followed two popular practices, dialogic instruction and collaboration, to see what might be learned from a commitment to student talk. Against a backdrop of relentless standardization in schools, and a heightened interest in “helping” historically marginalized students succeed in 21st century STEM fields, this work focuses on a classroom interaction among racially and ethnically diverse students. It offers a micro analysis of the classroom activity system (Engestrom, 1999; Yamagata-Lynch, 2010) and discourse (Wortham, 2001), based on extensive field notes and audio recordings.

Drawing on the notion of interpellation (Althusser, 1969), the best practices used in this setting are seen to “hail” or call for a desired liberal, humanist construction of self. Dialogic instruction calls for students to talk to develop new knowledge and expand identities (Kelly, 2008; Nystrand, 1997). The values of collaboration and inclusion call for students to act as agentic and free subjects in an equitable learning situation, partially ignoring the effects of systemic oppressions. While skeptical about such freedom, this study assumes that students do have access to power, but that power isn’t static in its distribution, nor is it controllable.

The concept of misinterpellation (Martel, 2015) helps frame the discussion about the unintended consequences of these practices, when students responded to the call in unexpected ways. Following the suggestion that “every call is … an exercise of power that we either submit to or do not” (Martel, 2015, p. 508), even the most non-constraining instructional practices are likely to be subverted. Focal students engaged in talk that carried them beyond disciplinary STEM boundaries to explore stereotypes and create new narratives around racial identities, while asserting their own positions within the power dynamics of their group. The larger classroom culture permitted this kind of extra-disciplinary knowledge construction, giving rise to the emergence of alternative, student-made practices, resulting in unintended outcomes that remained largely unmonitored and unsung.

These unintended consequences are viewed optimistically, but not naively, as co-emergent student practices that exceeded and transformed the teacher’s practices in moment-to-moment interactions. We would do well to pay attention to what these students did with their freedom, while acknowledging that student agency is inconvenient as it deviates from the desired aim. This unruliness is difficult in practical terms, since any variability in outcomes registers in a system where all are inevitably ranked and amid the constant tension of serious educational inequities. This study endeavors to hold that uneasiness at bay, seeing such creative and engaged acts as examples of student work that constitute a worthy academic discourse, a redirection from the imagined best path to one that was unpredicted by the teacher, and only owned in the moment by students, as makers, users, and primary practitioners.

Author

• Anne Crampton, Saint Olaf College