Power and knowledge-building in teacher inquiry: negotiating interpersonal and ideational difference

Abstract

Professional collaboration in schools features prominently in contemporary approaches to educational change. Advocates highlight the importance of situated knowledge to continuous teacher learning, sustained school reform and improved student learning. Critics portray collaboration as an invisible and coercive means of official control. The framework presented in this paper aims to treat these perspectives not as ideological positions but as starting points for empirical investigation into the dynamics of power in professional collaboration. The framework draws on social semiotic theories of language and functional linguistics to portray the ways in which the development of ideas and the development of social relations – ideational and interpersonal meaning – move in concert. Excerpts from an in-depth study of interaction among science teachers and teacher-leaders in a secondary school undergoing broad reform illustrate the application of this framework. Attention to the dynamics of support and challenge in the most generative of these interactions reveals distinctive patterns of the negotiation of interpersonal and ideational meaning. These patterns of control provide a means of connecting the microprocesses of building knowledge with the broader dynamics of power at play in educational change.

Keywords:

• teacher collaboration
• learning processes
• semiotics
• knowledge base for teaching
• educational change
• group dynamics

Notes

1. Moves do not necessarily correspond to clauses, although in many cases they do. The delineation of moves depends foremost on tonic patterns in speech. The work of Eggins and Slade (1997, 186–9) contains a useful section on move identification.

2. The codebook and examples of application of the codes are accessible online at http://go.bath.ac.uk/codebook.

3. For detailed discussions of mood, see Chapter 6 in Eggins (2004, 141–88) and Chapter 3 in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, 64–105).

4. In characterizing sequences, I drew on the work of Horn (2002), who uses the term ‘episodes of pedagogical reasoning’ to define a unit of analysis in her study of collegial interaction in teacher teams.

5. Information about CLAN is available on the website of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) project at Carnegie-Mellon University (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/). I used the MLT (mean length of turn) program to calculate the number of moves, turns and words per speaker for a given sequence or exchanges within the sequence, and I used the FREQ (frequency) program to calculate the frequency of different codes. The GEM program, used in combination with the preceding programs, allowed me to mark particular exchanges within a longer sequence for analysis.

6. For a more detailed explanation of each of the exchange sets presented here, please see Eddy Spicer (2006).

7. Please see the appendix for transcription conventions.