Supporting Students in Framing and Pursuing Investigatory Questions

• In Event: Relationality in Multilingual Language and Literacy Learning

Abstract

Systematic educational change requires integrating new pedagogical lenses and forms of practice. In order to learn how to listen and respond to their students’ unfamiliar patterns of reasoning, most teachers will need opportunities to experience and study these kinds of transactions as they unfold in situated classrooms in real time. This paper portrays a pedagogical practice that positions students as fully authorized knowledge creators, providing access for teachers to students’ existing understandings and ways of knowing. A grounded coding system focused on teacher moves was paired with narrative study of content construction in order to reveal the ways in which this accomplished humanities teacher supported her middle-school students’ original interpretive work over the course of a single class period.

Author

• Susan Jean Mayer, Critical Exploration Press