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Abstract
While educational theorists have long debated the pedagogical value of granting students the authority to construct certain of their own understandings in collaboration with their peers, a lack of empirical markers of student ‘interpretive authority’ has constrained comparative study of the pedagogical tradeoffs at stake. Yet the thoughtful nurture of collaborative knowledge construction processes must represent an essential aim of democratic schools, which are charged with the responsibility of adequately preparing students to participate fully in democratic life. This paper offers a conceptualization of interpretive authority based on an extrapolation of the traditional initiation/response/feedback coding sequence and other reliable discourse measures. The discourse patterns of six pedagogically diverse preparatory school classrooms in the United States are employed to illustrate a range of authority balances within respected classroom practices. A five-part frame for the practical characterization of interpretive authority within classrooms is proposed.
Notes
1. An earlier draft of this paper, which is based on my dissertation research, was presented at AERA 2007.
2. Although important issues remain open within the field of developmental learning theory, broad accord exists regarding the need for educators to reveal and respond to children's and adolescents' divergent perceptions, assumptions, and ways of reasoning.
3. No brief sampling of representative works can effectively characterize the extensive scholarship that has engaged related topics since Dewey so pointedly called for this project over a century ago. Yet all of the central theoretical issues implied remain open within US public school practice. See CitationGutman (1987) for a contemporary philosophical discussion.
4. Educators and educational theorists have debated the roles secondary students should be asked to take in the work literary analysis for most of the past century. See, for example, CitationApplebee (1996), CitationHillocks (1999), CitationLanger (1995), and CitationRosenblatt (1995).
5. Teachers chose their own pseudonyms, which are used here. Students' names are also all pseudonyms. In each classroom, 4–6 class discussions on a given novel were audiotaped. Field notes were used to track the sequence of student participation and to note any distinctive nonverbal cues (such as laughter and a shift of visual focus) that served to shape the discourse flow and any relevant action taken by class members (such as looking a word up in the dictionary). Each teacher was then asked to select the two class periods that he or she felt inspired the richest discussions of the text taught, and these were transcribed.
6. See CitationMayer (2005) for a treatment of the role of material proving grounds in Piagetian method. In CitationMayer (2004), I focus on the role of material artifacts in critical exploration.
7. I also interviewed each teacher twice. The first interview centered on how each teacher viewed his or her role in class discussions of assigned literature and the extent to which that teacher focused on various pedagogical priorities during such discussions. The follow-up interviews focused on each teacher's thoughts about the two transcripts from his or her classroom. In several cases, I also used this opportunity to confirm speculations I had made about a teacher's beliefs and purposes based upon my observations and upon the previous interview. Results of the interviews and further methodological details can be found in my thesis (CitationMayer 2006).
8. I employ CitationSinclair and Coulthard's (1975) original, and more inclusive, IRF characterization rather than Mehan's IRE modification. In the IRF sequence, the teacher makes some form of initiation move, such as asking a question; a student responds, and the teacher then provides some form of feedback.
9. Individual subcodes were found to vary as to reliability and bear review at this point; co-coding found the fundamental FDE distinctions, however, to be over 85% reliable.
10. At its broadest level, a participation structure analysis takes note of any institutional characteristics and guidelines that shape student participation during a given type of classroom lesson. At this level, all six participating teachers expected a similar quality of participation from their students. In all six classrooms, the students sat roughly in a ring, in four cases around a table; in all but one case, the teacher took a seat within this ring. In the sixth classroom, Randy stood in the front of a horseshoe-shaped ring of desks. In all six classrooms, nearly the entire class period was given over to discussion of the assigned text, a format that accounted for the great majority of class periods across the semester. Students were all expected to have read an assigned section of text, participate in the entire conversation, and respond to various kinds of queries from their teachers.
11. Although the ‘directing’ move (see Appendix 1) proved to be the only coded move to be employed exclusively by teachers, this move was not employed to frame discussion topics. I would therefore locate a move that directs the class to reference the material proving ground within the development category in future Framing/Development/Evaluation research.
12. Clearly, this to some extent reduced the number of Yale's evaluative moves. As implied in note, though, all four SC and CE teachers, at least on occasion, employed the ‘challenging’ move in a non-evaluative manner, which can arguably be seen as having unnaturally inflated their evaluation move totals. Future iterations of the FDE coding system should take such considerations into account.
13. Malcolm considered this pattern atypical of his classroom, a result of the relative difficulty of Faulkner's prose even for accomplished high school readers.
14. See the video Off track: Classroom privilege for all (CitationFine et al. 1998) for a suggestive case in point. It is also worth noting that CitationO'Connor and Michaels (1996) have introduced the ‘participant framework’ analytic, which is suited to the investigation of interpersonal dynamics, to the world of classroom discourse analysis.
15. Mayer, ‘Reinventing structuralism’; see also CitationDelpit (1995) for one argument regarding the need to construct authority differently in certain circumstances based on sociocultural variables.
