Teachers’ collective construction of students: an investigation of student positionings reinforced in a teacher study group

ABSTRACT

Researchers have been drawing attention to the power of collegial interaction for teacher professional development for some time. Yet collegial interaction should not be taken as a perfect solution absent of any drawbacks. In this study, the author examines teachers’ collective construction of students to examine whether counter-productive patterns were being developed. To this end, the author analyses transcripts from whole group discussions of a teacher study group in which secondary mathematics teachers in the US participated. Teachers more often positioned students as more incapable than capable of doing mathematics or of communicating mathematical ideas. In addition, they tended to reinforce such deficit-based positionings more often than ability-based positionings. In this study the author suggests that deficit-based positionings tend to restrict teachers from exploring possible teacher moves. This study provides an example of a counter-productive interaction pattern which teacher educators could use to prepare themselves for facilitating productive teachers’ collegial interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher study group
• collegiality
• discourse analysis
• positioning theory
• secondary mathematics teachers

Acknowledgments

I thank NSF (Award #0918117) for their support. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the granting agencies. I also thank Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Corey Drake, David Wagner and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Researchers using and advancing positioning theory have been using a range of alternative terms: act-action (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999); acts (Harré, 2012); speech act (Moghaddam & Harré, 2010); and social act (Harré et al., 2009) to list but a few. In this study, I chose to use the term communication act, which is inclusive of other forms of interactions (e.g. gestures) while highlighting the interactive nature of the act (see Herbel-Eisenmann et al., 2015 for more detail in this account).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [0918117].