Building bridges: coauthoring a class handshake, building a classroom community

ABSTRACT

Collaborative social practices that people participate in to coauthor, or co-create, support, and sustain, a classroom community are challenging to research and represent because they are fluid and emergent, and interdependent and cumulative, as they develop across time and space, across experiences and relations. In this article, we take a year-long look at how a weekly whole class greeting ritual, a Class Handshake, serves as a socio-epistemic-embodied-community building practice. We provide a rich description of the dialogic what and how of the Class Handshake ritual, and articulate connections between the Class Handshake and other classroom values and practices. We explore ways this collaborative social practice enacted values and relations that anchored a dialogic teaching and learning stance in this classroom community. We find that the Class Handshake functions like a “polyphonic web,” manifesting and perpetuating a sense of “We”-ness of this classroom community of practice. This study adds to classroom literature that considers dialogic stance and dialogic teaching and learning practices across time. Importantly, this sociocultural discourse analytic study extends attention beyond procedural moves to a big picture examination of purposeful, accretive, and coherent orchestrations of collaborative practices and relations that, together and across time, build classroom community.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogic teaching and learning
• dialogic stance
• embodied learning
• dialogic flow
• morning meeting
• community of practice

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Spencer Foundation Grant # 201400015. Chris dedicates this work to Donna.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [201400015].

Notes on contributors

Maureen P. Boyd

Maureen P. Boyd is an Associate Professor, Department of Learning and Instruction in the Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo. She examines patterns of classroom talk to better understand the role and impact of teacher questioning and follow-up, and the likely contexts in which engaged, elaborated student reasoning and exploratory exchanges occur. She strives to unpack what a dialogic instructional stance and response-able talk practices can look like in L1 and L2 elementary classrooms.

Christopher J. Jarmark

Christopher J. Jarmark currently is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction and the Science of Learning program in the Department of Learning and Instruction at University at Buffalo. His research interests include arts integration and multimodal studies with a focus on meaningful composition practices and experiential learning primarily within the field of English education.

Brian Edmiston

Brian Edmiston is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State. His research is focused on teaching and learning with drama. He examines drama in literacy, language, and literature teaching, dramatic inquiry as a P-12 cross-curricular pedagogy, and drama as ethical education.