Realising student voice through dialogic engagement with a microblogging tool

ABSTRACT

The realisation of voice is a particularly challenging aspect of dialogue. The aim of this study is to explore how a microblogging tool creates conditions for the realisation of student voice. Drawing on data collected as part of a larger international study, analysis of student focus group interviews (aged 11–12 years) in two schools in England (n = 36) suggest that the use of a microblogging tool can develop student agency, helping to realise student voice by removing the struggle to capture and maintain the floor and enabling students to become attuned to the ideas of others. However, some students were concerned about the tool's democratic use. Guided by this finding, a detailed micro-analysis of interactions of video data, lesson transcripts and microblog meta-data explores how students' microblogging contributions were heeded by three teachers in one school. We consider the pedagogical implications of these findings, exploring the juxtaposition between a school culture that celebrates individual achievement and the culture of a dialogic classroom. For such classrooms, this research indicates that student commitment to dialogic interaction is encouraged where the ideas of all students are, as far as possible, acknowledged by the teacher and used in developing collective ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Student voice
• dialogue
• pedagogy
• microblogging
• inclusion

Introduction

‘Voice’ is as much a stance as an act (Alexander 2020). It can refer both to the act of speaking, in which ideas are verbalised (Lefstein, Pollak, and Segal 2020), but also to the right of students in educational settings to express their ideas and the obligation of others to listen and treat them with respect (Alexander 2020). This paper draws on data collected as part of a larger four-year (April 2016–August 2020) international study into the dialogic use of a microblogging tool, ‘Talkwall’,¹ investigating how exploratory talk is supported or modified in relation to the use of the tool in the classroom. The design-based research involved collaboration between teachers, researchers and technology developers in Norway and the UK. Talkwall, which was designed for use specifically within the context of a dialogic pedagogy, enables students to easily share, and build upon, each other’s ideas. Empowering student voices is central to a dialogic pedagogy, where increased student participation, in terms of both number of voices and the length of individual turns, is seen as crucial for learning (Segal and Lefstein 2016). However, the realisation of student voice is a particularly challenging aspect within classroom dialogue (Lefstein, Pollak, and Segal 2020). Ideas must also be heeded by others; if a voice is not heard and attended to it drops out of the conversation and exclusion occurs (Segal, Pollak, and Lefstein 2017).

In this paper, we are interested in how student voice relates directly to teaching and learning in classrooms (Warwick et al. 2019) and begin by listening to what students have to say about their experiences using Talkwall. This approach enables students to ‘identify and analyze issues related to their schools and their learning that they see as significant’ (Fielding and Bragg 2003, 4). As Rudduck and Flutter (2003) found in their work over several years, engaging with students’ perspectives in this way is the first step towards fundamental change in classrooms. Secondly, and in response to students’ experiences, we explore how student voice is realised through Talkwall in the classroom.

Thus, we ask:

1. How do students perceive the use of a microblogging tool in the sharing and development of ideas in the classroom?

2. How are students’ microblogging contributions heeded by the teacher in whole class contexts?

We consider the pedagogical implications of these findings, exploring the juxtaposition between a school culture of individual achievement and the culture of a dialogic classroom.

2. Literature review

The sociocultural tradition recognises the importance of language as both a cultural tool (for the development and sharing of knowledge) and a psychological tool (for the development of individual thought) (Vygotsky [1934] 1962, 1978). Vygotsky’s work espouses an important educational principle, that children learn to think individually through first learning to reason with others. Dialogue is a type of language usage that encourages the development and sharing of knowledge. A dialogic approach to teaching is founded on the idea that knowledge and understanding are collaboratively constructed, predicated on the active involvement of teachers and students in the classroom (Mercer, Hennessy, and Warwick 2019). However, talk in the classroom is multifaceted, reflecting a range of different purposes and contexts (Warwick and Cook 2019). As Mortimer and Scott (2003) argue, teachers may adopt different communicative approaches in different phases of a lesson, all of which have important roles to play. A dialogic pedagogy encourages the development of educationally productive forms of talk in groups such as ‘Exploratory Talk’ (Barnes 1976; Mercer 1995), or ‘Accountable Talk’ (Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick 2006). Such talk enables people to ‘interthink’, facilitating an understanding of one another’s knowledge and perspectives as they co-construct knowledge together (Littleton and Mercer 2013). The perceived benefits of a dialogic pedagogy are supported by recent research that suggests positive effects on attainment (EEF 2017; Howe et al. 2019; Muhonen et al. 2018), reasoning and problem-solving skills (T'Sas 2018) and the development of student voice (Siddiqui, Gorard, and See 2017).

In problematising idealistic approaches to dialogic pedagogy, Lefstein and colleagues argue that the realisation of voice is particularly challenging. Drawing upon Hymes (1996), Blommaert (2006) and Bakhtin (1981), they identify four aspects of voice: ‘(a) opportunity to speak; (b) expressing one’s own ideas; (c) on one’s own terms; and (d) being heeded by others’ (Lefstein, Pollak, and Segal 2020, 2), all of which involve some element of struggle, namely ‘the struggle to capture and maintain the floor, the struggle between student and classroom language, and the struggle to have one’s ideas recognized and addressed, among the sea of competing voices’ (2). In response, Alexander (2008) notes the importance of developing a classroom ethos that is collective, reciprocal and supportive, to enable children to voice their opinions, share ideas and learn from their mistakes. As we note elsewhere (Warwick and Cook 2019), without the agentic environment that such an ethos creates, students rarely get the opportunity to ‘actively participate in the negotiation of both the content and structure of classroom discourse’ (Aguiar, Mortimer, and Scott 2010, 174). Importantly, research over a considerable period has shown that such an ethos can be strongly supported by establishing and respecting ‘ground rules’ for productive classroom talk (Mercer 2000), which emphasise reasoning, rational argument, building on the ideas of others, querying, explaining and justification in co-constructing knowledge (Howe and Abedin 2013; Mercer and Dawes 2008; Mercer et al. 2004).

A dialogic ethos in the classroom, supported by ground rules for talk, helps to foster a safe environment in which students are able to articulate their ideas freely. Synthesising recent research on the science of learning and development, Darling-Hammond et al. (2019) argue that school and classroom communities that offer safe, personalised settings for learning help to foster the supportive relationships that enable children to take advantage of learning opportunities. They argue that the development of collaborative community practices helps to strengthen relationships with the result that ‘members feel personally connected to one another and committed to each other’s growth and learning’ (106). This reflects the idea that the classroom might become a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger 1998), with shared domains of interest, relationships that acknowledge that we know and can do more collectively than individually, and shared repertoires of resources. Darling-Hammond and colleagues highlight the active role played by the teacher in this process, co-regulating students’ learning behaviours and scaffolding their development towards self-regulation. We argue that this move to the classroom as a community of practice requires dialogic engagement in the classroom, both teacher-to-student and peer-to-peer.

So where might technology in the classroom fit within this picture? The relationship between talk and digital technology use in the classroom is complex. Students are used to interacting or talking using digital technology (e.g. in messaging or via social media sites). The language used for communication in such environments is likely to differ from the talk for learning that is expected in the classroom (Kleine Staarman 2009). Nevertheless, the familiarity with such tools may be seen as advantageous as teachers increasingly look to forms of digital technology to support and enhance dialogic interaction in the classroom. Underpinned by a strong collaborative and cooperative ethos, digital tools may be used to enable students to easily share ideas, gain insight into each other’s perspectives, and develop ideas together. For example, externally representing ideas on large screens has been seen to be productive for grounding and sustaining attention, facilitating on task collaborative engagement (Beauchamp and Hillier 2014; Mercer, Hennessy, and Warwick 2019), the visualisation of ‘interthinking’ (Gillen et al. 2007) and supporting the co-construction of knowledge (Hennessy 2011). Microblogging tools can be used for whole-class sharing in this way, for group activities, or in a combination of both, where group activity leads to whole class sharing. In their review of 21 microblogging studies published between 2008 and 2011, Gao, Luo, and Zhang (2012) concluded that microblogging can promote a collaborative learning environment in which ideas can be easily shared. The sharing of ideas is facilitated through the creation of concise posts, or tangible artefacts, in which thinking can become visible and the focus of shared attention (Mercier, Rattray, and Lavery 2015). This suggests that the use of digital tools may help to resolve some of the issues identified by Lefstein regarding the realisation of voice. Indeed, researchers are beginning to turn their attention to the intersection between digital technologies and student voice. A recent special issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology, for example, identified a range of tools used to improve student voice and participation (Manca et al. 2017), including the use of email and online forums to facilitate virtual dialogue between teachers and students (Cook-Sather 2017). This paper seeks to contribute to this growing area of research interest, focusing on the realisation of student voice in the classroom through dialogic engagement with a specific microblogging tool.

Talkwall is a free cross-platform microblogging system for engaging students in digital classroom interaction. Developed by the University of Oslo, Talkwall’s design is underpinned by a dialogue-based approach to the development of children’s learning that enables ‘thinking together’ (Littleton and Mercer 2013), with students easily able to share, and build upon, each other’s ideas. Using Talkwall, a teacher formulates a question or a challenge for students, working in groups, to discuss. Following their collaborative discussion, students post contributions to a shared feed, making their ideas visible to the whole class. Contributions can be interactively arranged in various ways as students pin contributions from the feed to their own group ‘walls’. Group walls can be viewed by the teacher and shared with the whole class via a large screen or projector. The teacher can also pin contributions from the feed to their own wall and share these with the class. Using Talkwall, students can discuss and work with their own ideas or those of other groups.

Analysis of the content and language of students’ posts appears in other papers associated with this research project. Here we explore how a microblogging tool creates conditions for the realisation of student voice through (i) providing the opportunity and a focus for dialogue, both oral and written; and (ii) providing the opportunity for being heeded by others, both within a small working group and more widely across the classroom community.

3. Methodology

3.1. The research study

This study is part of a wider international design-based research project. This paper reports on data collected in two schools in England, where three teachers from each school attended a series of four university workshops focused on sharing effective strategies for promoting classroom dialogue. Collaboratively establishing ground rules for talk with students was an important first step in the research process in schools. In each school, one English, science and geography teacher worked with their class (aged 11–12 years) to integrate Talkwall activities into their usual curriculum.

In each class, the teachers selected two focus groups of three students (n = 36). Three lessons were video recorded and transcribed, with one camera focusing on the interactive whiteboard and the second focusing on one of the two student focus groups. The video data were accompanied by low-inference field notes from the research lessons. Following the completion of the project, the two student focus groups from each class were interviewed. The use of semi-structured group interviews enabled flexible questioning, designed to elicit responses in a more natural, conversational manner. Working with established working groups, and asking more open questions, potentially reduces the possibility of acquiescence response bias, where students give answers that they think the interviewer wants to hear. Conducting the interviews as a group may, of course, lead to some influencing of answers between the students, but the collaborative nature of the discussion was intended to provide a richer dialogue than would be gained from a one-to-one interview (Warwick and Chaplain 2017).

The data for this paper is drawn from field notes, video data from lessons, transcripts from lessons and student focus group interviews, in addition to Talkwall meta-data containing logs of interaction from one school. Ethical procedures were followed throughout the research process, informed by BERA (2018) guidelines and the specific requirements of the funder, with voluntary informed consent obtained from all participants. All student names used in this paper have been anonymised.

3.2. Analytical approach

For this paper, each transcribed student focus group discussion was coded by the lead author and key themes arising from the data were derived and revised iteratively (see Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2018). Guided by the key themes emerging from this data, a detailed micro-analysis of interactions of video data, lesson transcripts and Talkwall meta-data was conducted, focused on students’ experiences of sharing ideas using Talkwall in School B. Following Jordan and Henderson (1995), repeated viewings of video extracts enabled a fine-grained analysis exploring how students’ contributions were heeded by the three teachers in whole-class contexts. Further refinement of the data occurred at this stage, when the decision was made to focus on the third research lesson in all three classes. This lesson was chosen because there were whole class discussions of Talkwall in all classes and the Talkwall log data was the most complete for all lessons.

4. Findings

4.1. Student agency and attunement to others

The student interview data reveals how the students saw the role of Talkwall in relation to their collaboration with others in the classroom. In both schools, students frequently spoke about how the tool allowed them to easily share ideas, enabling them to become attuned to the ideas of others as they considered different perspectives. For example:

Tom

I would say, I mean it's quite good that we're having the discussions because we get to see everyone else's opinion and everyone else's ideas, because sometimes you agree with those ideas, and think like ‘I've never really thought about that.'

The sharing of ideas enabled the development of collaborative classroom learning communities in which students took shared responsibility for their learning. Editing contributions enabled students to build upon each other’s ideas, benefitting all learners:

Mark

And what I like on Talkwall is you can add to other people’s things, so maybe they've gone like typed in ‘it was built in 18..’ whatever, you could put ‘it was built in 18.. there, by some constructor people’ or whatever.

Peter

Yeah. You can add to different people's (—)

Mark

ideas to make them better, so it's easier for everybody else as well as you.

The use of group walls also enabled students to work with both their own, and other groups’, ideas:

Tony

I feel like it's easier to concentrate when you're doing it as pairs, and then you're using it on the screen. Because you can pin your ideas and other ideas on your own board, so if you were talking about poetry let's say, you could pin up different bits and then you could put them all together.

In addition to sharing ideas with their peers, in both schools the students spoke about sharing their ideas with their teacher. In one focus group, both Tony and Mary discussed how Talkwall enabled them to get more of their ideas to the teacher:

Tony

You also get more chances to make contributions, because if there's one teacher, she can only pick one person at a time, but then if you're on Talkwall you can just write your answers up and they'll pop up.

Mary

Yeah, that's like the same as me. Like I thought that when you put your hands up there's not always a chance that you can be picked, but like when you have Talkwall you can just like put your answer down and it will be seen. And then like people can have opinions, and Miss also mentioned stuff like ‘oh I think that this one is good because … ’ or ‘I don't think this one, because … ’ so like she gets to see them all and give her opinion and other people get their opinions on it. So everyone gets, you know, like their idea out.

Talkwall therefore enables students to explore their voice, removing the need to compete for the teacher’s attention through the raising of hands. However, students frequently noted that the sheer number of contributions on the feed could become a little overwhelming, with the result that sometimes the teacher could not quickly locate them:

Iris

It takes quite a while for everyone else's ideas to come up and then they all suddenly come and you're just like ‘we don't have time to read all of this.’

Ralfe

It does take a long time for it to like show up there […] Like sometimes like it would get lost. Because you think it would (send) and like you'd re do it, and like other people would put loads up and then, for example, you might have had a good idea when Miss asked a question and then it would be like at the back after five others and she wouldn't find it.

Students discussed how sharing their ideas with their teacher through Talkwall enabled the teacher to more easily feedback on their ideas. Students generally felt that the teacher’s treatment of groups’ contributions was balanced and fair:

Elizabeth

Yes because it means you don't have to put your hand up and wait, and like sometimes you forget, or you can put it up and then everyone will hear it and understand it because a lot of times a lot of people can't hear you as well.

Sophia

Unless it's like a really silly comment, and then the teacher will delete it.

Elizabeth

Yeah, you can always just delete the comments.

Harry

Um, Miss reads out the questions on the board, from Talkwall, and then she'll like say what's good about that and what's bad about it. So, and then she'll give a fair like opinion on how she thinks about that one. And then she also pins them to her wall, the ones she thinks are the best ones.

Sophia

Yeah.

Harry

So she'll pin like maybe three or four to her wall, and then she goes onto other people's walls, which I think is a really good like feature […] that she can check out and put on the board everyone else's walls. So if you've pinned some that you think are really good, she can see the ones that you think are really good as well.

Elizabeth

Yeah, and she normally clicks on most boards, and like it really shows how different people think like the best ones are.

However, in the geography class in School B, the school’s reward system was used to incentivise students with respect to their individual achievement during the use of Talkwall. The students in this class talked about how this system was unfair when several groups frequently contributed the same idea to Talkwall, but the teacher only awarded achievement points to one group:

Iris

I think having it on your own iPad's like good because you can pin your own suggestions up. Like, ‘oh that's a nice idea so we'll put that on.’ And you can also put your own on if you think they're good. Then also when Miss, because you can obviously look on them on her screen because she can click on each group, and when you've like got just yours, she kind of goes ‘well aren't there any other good ideas?’ Like ‘oh yes, but they're the exact same as ours.’ So that just annoys me when we all have the same idea, and we've all put it on.

Laura

Like one person gets picked.

Oliver

Yeah, like the smiley board, when she puts the names up. Because the whole class had that idea, it's just luck.

Oliver explained how the school’s reward system worked:

Oliver

Basically, when we say something interesting or something, Miss will put our names up. But then say, not that this has happened at all, but if Iris gets picked like ten times in the lesson and everyone else in the whole class says the same thing, then like that's like three achievement points like (—)

Iris

for me.

Oliver

Yeah, but I deserve some achievement points too, so does Laura, so does everyone.

Iris

So she's got a smiley face and a sad face, and a smiley face is she wrote my name. That would be one point. If I got a tick that would be two points. If I got two ticks and my name I get an achievement point.

Laura felt that the reward system was unfair when it was used with Talkwall because the teacher did not necessarily scroll through the whole contribution feed to read through all the groups’ ideas before awarding these points:

Laura

Well on Talkwall it's exactly the same because she picks only one person, but it depends how far down, or how far up you are.

Iris

[…] I kind of think Miss needs to scroll down it all and then have a look and put them on.

The group’s sense of disenfranchisement was captured by Oliver, who concluded that the teacher should ‘either give no one or everyone one [achievement point]’.

Beyond simply expressing ideas, student voice also involves the obligation of others to listen to these ideas. Having listened to students’ experiences of sharing their ideas with their teachers through Talkwall, the following section explores in more depth how students’ contributions were heeded by all three teachers as they each taught a single lesson in School B.

4.2. Democratising Talkwall use

4.2.1 English class

In the English class, which was a smaller low ability class of 15 students, there were five groups and a total of 10 contributions posted to the Talkwall feed throughout the lesson. In the first task, the groups had to guess who or what was being described in a riddle read out by the teacher. The groups first discussed and agreed their answers before posting their contributions to Talkwall. Correct answers were pinned to the teacher’s wall. In the second task, students worked in groups to write words describing an object or person from the class text. Each group then had to select one ‘best’ sentence and submit this to Talkwall. At the end of the lesson, the teacher read out each contribution from the feed and the rest of the class had to guess who or what each sentence was describing:

Teacher

((reading contribution)) ‘I've seen an interesting scene between Zero, Mr Pendanski, Zigzag and Caveman, I need to go and paint my nails.’ That was group 3. What did you write down for that one? Fiona's group, who did you decide that was?

Fiona

I think it's the Warden.

Teacher

Warden, correct?

Samantha

Yeah.

Teacher

Excellent. What was the clue?

Samantha

‘I need to go and paint my nails.’

Teacher

'I need to go and paint my nails’. You didn't actually say ‘I'm the Warden’, you were using that to show her viewpoint and what she was going to go off and do. Well done.

This allowed students to elaborate upon other group’s ideas whilst also providing an opportunity for the teacher to give feedback to each group. In this way every group had at least one of their contributions heeded, and built upon, by the teacher during the course of the lesson (Table 1).

Table 1. Group contributions and how these were attended to by the teacher during whole class discussion.

Group	Total contributions created (minus deleted messages)	Contribution pinned to teacher’s wall	Contribution discussed with the whole class from the feed
Group 1	2		1
Group 2	2		1
Group 3	2		1
Group 4	2		1
Group 5	2	1	1

4.2.2. Science class

The science lesson on plants was a mixed ability class of 26 students. There were 69 contributions throughout the lesson from 12 Talkwall groups (Table 2).

Table 2. Group contributions and how these were attended to by the teacher during whole class discussion.

Group	Total contributions (minus deleted messages)	Total contributions pinned to teacher’s wall	Group wall focus of whole class discussion	Contribution discussed from the feed
Gr 1	11		1	8
Gr 2	6	1	1	4
Gr 3	6		1	4
Gr 4	6			4
Gr 5	4		1	1
Gr 6	5			1
Gr 7	8		1	3
Gr 8	7			2
Gr 9	6			5
Gr 10	2	1		1
Gr 11	5			2
Gr 12	3	1		1

The first Talkwall task was for students to discuss in groups what facts they knew about plants and agree those to become contributions to the feed. The teacher emphasised that she did not want groups repeating the same facts and encouraged the students to review the feed to avoid repetition. At the end of the first task the teacher read through all of the contributions on the feed, giving reasons for deleting some, building on ideas or revoicing them. The teacher took a methodical approach to ensure that all contributions from the feed were included, and every group therefore had at least one contribution read out from the feed (Table 2):

Teacher

Now, I am going to quickly scan through some of them, I'm going to select some of them, ok, and then I'm going to tell you what your next task is […] So I'm going to look through all of them, because I'm not just going to start picking from the top.

The second Talkwall task was to pin contributions from the feed and organise them, after group discussion, based on similarities and differences, using a wall divided into four. The positioning of contributions on each group’s wall enabled each group’s interthinking to be visualised, and after this task the teacher focused on group walls in turn, asking the students to explain how they had organised the contributions (Figure 1):

Teacher

OK, now, can I have one of you two explain your wall to me and your reasons for your four groups?

Helen

So that one's about reproduction, that one's about (—)

Paula

living.

Helen

Like living

Teacher

Being living?

Helen

Yeah. That one was about the stem and the water, and that was (—)

Teacher

What have you got here? Look what you've chosen. You've chosen chloroplasts and photosynthesis, and where does that take place?

Helen

In the leaves.

Teacher

In the leaves. Ok, so again, quite different. Similarities – signs of life. And then you've looked at some organs. Ok, they've looked at some organs.

Groups were audibly pleased to have their walls selected by the teacher. The teacher worked with a total of three groups’ walls in this way. When the teacher picked the third and final group, there were some disappointed cries from other groups about not being chosen:

Teacher

I'm going to pick one last group. ((Disappointed outcries)) Remember, we're going to be doing this more than once […] I do like the enthusiasm of you guys wanting to show your work though. Ok, let's have a look.

After selecting the third group wall, the teacher then asked the class if any groups had categorised the contributions differently. This led the teacher to select and discuss a further two groups’ walls. The final Talkwall activity was to describe adaptation for seed dispersal using different photos. At the end of this activity the teacher again read out contributions from the feed, revoicing them, building on them or, with explanation, deleting them:

Teacher

((reading contribution)) ‘Savanah, roots will be longer because it's very dry and it will be hard to find water.’ Now, I'm going to get rid of that one purely because it's not about seed dispersal. Ok? It's right, but it's not seed dispersal.

Following this whole class discussion, the teacher gave the students a few more minutes to continue with this task, focusing specifically on how seeds travel. At the end of the lesson, the teacher pinned three contributions to her wall, noting that she had chosen these because they captured different methods of dispersal (animals and wind). The teacher read one of these contributions aloud to the class (‘The seeds would be aerodynamic so they could travel easily’), noting (without further elaboration) that this was her ‘favourite contribution of the day’, to the audible delight of the group concerned.

Figure 1. Recreation of Talkwall: the teacher focusing on a group’s wall.

4.2.3. Geography class

The geography lesson focused on sustainability, with three Talkwall tasks during the course of the lesson. This was a larger mixed ability class of 29 students. There were ten Talkwall groups in total, with 80 contributions created throughout the lesson (Table 3).

Table 3. Group contributions and how these were attended to by the teacher during whole class discussion.

Group	Total contributions (minus deleted messages)	Total contributions pinned to teacher’s wall	Group wall focus of whole class discussion	Achievement points awarded for contribution pinned to teacher’s wall
G1	9		1
G2	7
G3	14	2	1	1
G4	10	1
G5	14	2	1	1
G6	9	3		2
G7	6
G8	7	3		2
G9	4	1
G10	No data available	2		2

Note: N.B. ‘no data available’ is due to technical issues experienced by one group in the lesson.

The first Talkwall task involved each group adding three contributions from their homework that summarised their impact on the environment during a typical day. The students each took it in turn to add one idea from their homework, again reviewing the feed to ensure that there was no repetition of ideas. At the end of this task the teacher pinned her ‘favourite’ contributions to her wall and commented on these:

Teacher

Right guys, these are some of my favourite ones that I've picked and you've explained them really well. I particularly like the one that Fi added at the top, so ‘drives to school in an eco-friendly mode in the car, so no extra fumes pollute the environment.’ That's a really good one. And then I liked this one where Vicky's talking about (hands down) eating food that has perhaps been shipped in from other countries and that has to use fuel to get it here. That’s a really good one. Penny leaves her bedroom light on and wastes energy – that's absolutely appalling. Appalling!

In total, 14 contributions from seven groups were pinned to the teacher’s wall throughout the lesson, which were either individually read out and elaborated by the teacher, or simply pinned to the wall without further discussion. The next task for the students was to collaboratively discuss contributions from the feed, categorising them as either sustainable or not sustainable and pinning them to their vertically divided group wall. Again the positioning of contributions on each group’s wall provided a visualisation of interthinking, and after this task, the teacher focused on three groups’ walls, asking each group in turn to explain the categorisation of their ideas (Figure 2):

Teacher

Right so, can you talk me through then your ideas. So Claire or Pippa or Poppy, I don't mind. Why have you guys sorted them in this way?

Pippa

Um

Teacher

So is this your sustainable or not sustainable column? ((pointing to the right hand side of the wall))

Pippa

Not sustainable.

Teacher

So, if you limit your showers, is that sustainable, or is that not sustainable, Claire?

Claire

Um.

Teacher

If you limit the amount of time you spend in the shower? Is that more sustainable or less sustainable?

Claire

Less sustainable?

Teacher

Is it better for the environment or worse for the environment?

Claire

Better.

Teacher

Better, so that would mean it is more (—)

Claire

sustainable.

Teacher

Sustainable, ok. So think about that one. Right, well done girls.

Through careful questioning the teacher was able to scaffold the students’ understanding, identifying a possible misconception regarding sustainability.

Figure 2. Recreation of Talkwall: the teacher focusing on a group’s wall.

After this discussion, the teacher introduced the third and final Talkwall task of the lesson:

Teacher

Right guys, what I want you to do now, the last Talkwall task today. ‘How can you make your actions more sustainable?’. So, if you get the car to school, how could that action be made more sustainable? Now I heard some great conversations then when I was walking around, much, much better. Let's make sure the last five minutes worth of discussion is really top quality, so asking each other lots of questions and making sure we're building on ideas and working together as a group. Ok? I'm going to select the best ones for achievement points at the end. Off you go.

The awarding of achievement points clearly mattered to the students, with the field notes recording the delight of students at having their ideas selected (as we have previously discussed, not all students saw this as a democratic system). At the end of the lesson, the teacher pinned eight contributions from five different groups (Figure 3) and awarded these achievement points:

Teacher

Right guys, these ideas are absolutely fantastic and it shows me that you've understood what it means to be sustainable and what things are not sustainable and how we can correct these issues. So, can everyone shut the iPads for me.

Throughout the course of the lesson, two groups did not have any of their contributions heeded in any way by the teacher (Table 3).

Figure 3. Recreation of Talkwall: the teacher’s wall at the end of the lesson.

5. Discussion

Understanding how students perceive the use of Talkwall for the sharing and development of ideas in the classroom involved us in listening to the voices of the students. What became clear in analysing their views was that, whilst acknowledging constraints, Talkwall was seen as a tool that can be part of the encouragement to participate, collaborate and ‘find their voice’, not least by removing the struggle to capture and maintain the floor (Lefstein, Pollak, and Segal 2020). Since its development and intended use is underpinned by a dialogic pedagogy, intended to empower students to play an agentive role in the joint construction of knowledge (Snell and Lefstein 2018), the fact that the students themselves felt that they were easily able to share and build on each other’s ideas is an important validating finding for this project.

Talkwall, perhaps most importantly, enables students to become attuned to the ideas of others, widening the social connectivity of the classroom as they access ideas beyond the confines of their own group and explore the perspectives of others, taking shared responsibility for each other’s learning as they build on ideas and made connections between them. However, echoing Darling-Hammond and colleagues (2019) who noted the central role of the teacher in establishing collaborative community practices, students repeatedly spoke about the importance of sharing their ideas with their teacher. Findings from the micro-analysis of all three classes in School B suggest that the students appeared most motivated by having their ideas heeded by the teacher, rather than their peers, suggesting that, for the students at least, the epistemic authority rests with the teacher (Segal, Pollak, and Lefstein 2017). As Shaw (2019) noted in her study of two early years classes, engaging with children’s voices can help to illuminate children’s perceptions of inclusion in pedagogical activities, helping to create environments for learning that are more inclusive. In our study, students’ perceptions of inclusion focused on the democratic use of Talkwall, particularly with respect to the struggle to have one’s ideas recognised and addressed by the teacher. Listening to the experiences of students, it was evident that the influx of ideas to the feed could quickly become overwhelming for both teachers and students, creating what Lefstein and colleagues (2018) call a sea of competing voices. The skill of the teacher, as we have seen above, is in finding ways to equitably manage the flow and amount of student input, so that student agency is maintained in tasks and important ideas are not side-lined.

With this in mind, and turning to our second research question, in the science and English lessons the teachers adopted a systematic way of attending to contributions from the feed, thus ensuring that no groups’ ideas went entirely unheeded. When attending to these ideas the teachers either revoiced them, built on them, queried them, invited elaboration or deleted them entirely (whilst explaining why). Pinning contributions and focusing on group walls did not ‘cover’ every idea in both classes; however, because of both teachers’ work with the feed, all groups had at least one idea heeded by the teacher throughout the course of the lesson. In contrast, the third teacher did not work with ideas from the feed. Her use of pinning contributions and focusing on group walls did not address contributions from every group, with the result that two groups did not have any of their ideas heeded by the teacher throughout the course of the lesson. Furthermore, in this class the teacher took a more active role in regulating students’ behaviour through the use of the school’s external rewards system. Here, students sometimes felt that they struggled to have their ideas ‘heard’ by their teacher, whose agenda was more influenced by the backdrop of the wider school culture. The use of achievement points added a competitive element to the task that led to a sense of disenfranchisement among students and a sense that some voices were randomly privileged over others. Allowing voices to drop out of the conversation in this way risks excluding students from the community (Segal, Pollak, and Lefstein 2017), undermining the culture of participation and the realisation of student voice.

This raises a potential dilemma, where the dominant culture of the school, in this case geared towards the celebration of individual achievement, may be at odds with the culture of a dialogic classroom, where collaborative endeavour is celebrated because it leads to individual achievement (Vygotsky [1934] 1962, 1978). In this context it is important to note the impact that the learning environment and classroom ethos have on intrinsic student motivation, with motivation supported where individual competition and comparison is minimised (Blumenfeld, Puro, and Mergendoller 1992). Indeed, Ryan and Deci (2000) note that students’ intrinsic motivation for a task may be reduced where extrinsic motivation based on external rewards, used to control students’ behaviour, are employed. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that students expressed a sense of disenfranchisement in the class where a competitive edge to the task was introduced by awarding some groups’ contributions achievement points. Although used to recognise individual achievement, the rewards system clearly reduced students’ intrinsic motivation for the use of Talkwall, leading to a sense of injustice that some groups’ ideas were favoured by the teacher over others.

Interestingly, all three teachers in this discussion were potentially ‘constrained’ by this school’s competitive ethos of individual achievement (Shaw 2019), yet two managed to emphasise more strongly the relationship between ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ or ‘action’ (Holdsworth 2000, 357), through changes in pedagogical practice that created a more appropriate classroom environment for dialogue and the sharing of ideas (Cook-Sather 2020; Ferguson-Patrick 2020). In these two classes, students had a sense that the teacher’s use of Talkwall was a generally equitable way of ensuring that they could ‘get their ideas’ to the teacher, enabling their voices to be heard. The collaborative use of Talkwall was itself intrinsically motivating for students in these classes, as evidenced by the students’ responses to having their contributions discussed by the teacher or having their group walls shared with the whole class. Knowing that the two teachers promoting genuinely dialogic interactions with Talkwall were more experienced than the third teacher may be a clue here. Perhaps their professional maturity allowed them to resist the siren call of competition in lessons.

6. Conclusion

The aim of this study was to explore how a microblogging tool creates conditions for the realisation of student voice through creating purposeful opportunities to speak and be heard by others. Our findings, which are based on a limited data set and therefore cannot be more widely generalised, suggest that the use of a microblogging tool can develop student agency, helping to realise student voice by removing the struggle to capture and maintain the floor and enabling students to become attuned to the ideas of others. However, the democratic use of the tool was identified as an important issue for students, particularly with respect to the struggle to have their ideas recognised and addressed by the teacher. In one school, whilst noting the different approaches adopted by teachers when attending to students’ microblogging contributions, it was the use of achievement points that led to a sense of disenfranchisement among students and a sense that some voices were randomly privileged over others.

Classroom talk, which serves a variety of different purposes, is contextually bound. Our findings suggest that a dialogic classroom ethos may be successfully developed within a wider school culture that celebrates individual achievement. However, this requires changes in pedagogical practice that celebrate the sharing of ideas, emphasising the relationship between voice and agency in collaborative knowledge construction. Furthermore, whilst it is of course prudent to recognise that it is neither feasible nor possible to ensure that every student’s voice will be heard in every whole-class discussion, it is very clear that it is of crucial importance to students that certain voices are not privileged over others (Segal, Pollak, and Lefstein 2017). To do so risks the perception by students that the adoption of a more dialogic stance by the teacher (Boyd and Markarian 2011) may be less than authentic.

Acknowledgements

The DiDiAC research project is funded by the Research Council of Norway [FINNUT/Project No: 254761] and is registered and approved by the Norwegian data protection service (NSD): http://www.nsd.uib.no/personvernombud/en/notify/index.html. The authors particularly wish to thank the teachers and students who took part in the project for their enthusiastic involvement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The DiDiAC research project is funded by the Research Council of Norway [FINNUT/Project No: 254761].

Notes

1 Other educational tools that include microblogs, such as Padlet, IdeaBoardz or Google Jamboard, might have been used. However, part of the wider research project was focused on the design-based development of Talkwall as a dialogic tool, with contributions by teachers, researchers and software engineers.