Sharma and Anderson, 2005
Paper 4: Developing classroom learning environments and teaching
strategies: The Student Agency Perspective
By Ajay Sharma and Charles W. Anderson, Michigan State University
Presented as part of the Paper Set: A Longitudinal Study of Science Teacher Preparation:
Year 3; at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science
Teaching, Dallas, TX, April, 2005.
This work was supported in part by grants from the Knowles foundation and the United
States Department PT3 Program (Grant Number P342A00193, Yong Zhao, Principal
Investigator). The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position, policy,
or endorsement of the supporting agencies.
Introduction
Of the many difficult challenges interns face while making a transition as a science teacher, one
of the most daunting is developing intellectually vibrant, emotionally safe, and inclusive
classroom learning environments, and acquiring a repertoire of teaching strategies that support
learning science with understanding for all students. Though many candidates begin their teacher
education programs concerned with finding teaching activities to teach the topics in their
curriculum, they soon realize that having a repertoire of ‘good’ teaching activities, “learning
cycles” and “inquiry cycles” is important but hardly adequate to be an efficacious science teacher
or in achieving their designated professional identity. They soon realize that these resources are
effective only if they are able to manage their classrooms productively in consonance with their
professional identity, and according to their expectancy (of success) and (satisfaction) values as
regards science teaching. As a result, interns make different situated decisions in the way they
develop their approaches to the problem of practice of developing classroom environments and
teaching strategies.
This paper focuses upon the secondary teacher candidates’ approaches to this problem of practice,
and explores the nature of classroom learning environments they are able to create in their
classrooms, and the teaching strategies they adopted for this purpose. It analyzes this problem of
practice along four dimensions. These are: (a) classroom management by the intern; (b) intern’s
relationship with and influence over student peer culture in the classroom; (c) the nature of
classroom discourse set up by her; and lastly, (d) her repertoire of teaching strategies. The paper
takes the perspective of student agency in viewing the classroom events. Thus, it sees the problem
of practice of constructing classroom learning environments in terms of teachers devising their
own situated ways to deal with students’ attempts to exert and express their own agency in the
classroom teachers in myriad ways, such as through questions, expressions of their personal
ideas, attempts to change the focus of the class discussion, and various "off task" behaviors.
All teacher candidates that we studied strove to go beyond the minimal expectations of managing
professional roles and obligations while constructing classroom learning environments. They all
wanted to teach science subject matter knowledge more substantially, and tackled expression of
student agency accordingly. However, these teacher candidates differed in ways they sought to
deal with student agency as they went around constructing their own situated solutions for the
problem of developing classroom learning environments and evolving corresponding teaching
strategies. These differences reflected the situated decisions candidates had made towards
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developing a pattern of science teaching practice for themselves. As mentioned in the
introduction to this paper set, three candidates developed primarily School Science patterns of
practice, three candidates were on their way to develop a Cognitive Apprenticeship approach to
teaching, and three candidates were in the middle. The three cases in this paper represent these
three different categories of responses to the challenge of teaching school science.
Theoretical Framework
This paper subscribes to a sociocultural perspective on how humans interact with their immediate
environment. That is, it sees “people as actively engaged with the environment” (Holland,
Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). This engagement is mediated by cultural means, i.e. tools and
signs (Vygotsky, 1980). Further, each person is seen as possessing a cultural ‘toolkit’ of
meditiational means that both guides and constrains her engagement with the world (Wertsch,
1991). This theoretical framework attributes a natural impulse to humans that propels them to
explore, understand and influence their interactions not only with other human beings but also
with objects and material phenomena of the natural world. Thus, just as scientists can be seen as
desirous of a socioculturally mediated and mutually constitutive access to and engagement with
nature (Gooding, 1990; Pickering, 1993), so are science students viewed as equally and
potentially endowed with an inherent though individually varying interest in exploring,
understanding and influencing/manipulating objects and phenomena in the natural world.
The engagement of people with their environments is in general mutually reciprocal/constitutive,
creative and rife with contingent improvisation (Harper, 1987; Holland et al., 1998; Wertsch,
1991). Further, this engagement is much influenced by the person’s ideological orientation and
her positionings in the power and ideology saturated spaces of sociocultural practices (Bakhtin,
1981; Holland et al., 1998). Thus, in the theoretical framework of the study human agency is seen
as essentially dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. That is, the paper views agency in terms of
capacity for engagement in a socioculturally mediated dialogue with both the natural and the
social world. This agency finds expression in dialogic events that are nested in situated practices
and mediated by a multiplicity of discourses.
Further, this perspective rejects the dualism of agency and culture/structure in its account of
agency in favor of viewing both agency and culture as contingently emergent features of situated
action. Thus, as Ahearn says, “Words or texts are socially situated by, not created by, individuals”
(Ahearn, 2001). Similarly, culture is seen as created and re-created continually in dialogic
interactions between its members (Gjerde, 2004; Tedlock & Mannheim, 1995).
Lastly, the theoretical perspective of the paper sees agency as more than resistance to hegemonic
discourses by insisting that not only is pure resistance an abstraction as human motivations are
always complex and contradictory (Ahearn, 2001), but also human responses to hegemony are far
more improvised and creative than simple resistance (Holland et al., 1998; Levinson & Holland,
1996).
Research Questions
This paper aims to describe and compare the different patterns of practice as regards constructing
classroom learning environment and developing teaching strategies, of three teacher candidates. It
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specifically probes how these three teacher candidates responded to expression of student agency
in order to construct classroom learning environments in accordance with knowledge, values, and
teaching circumstances.
Methods
(a) Participants
Jared is an Earth Science major with a minor in History. Teaching was his first career. He got
inspired to teach following his experiences as a sports instructor for swimming. Being an Earth
Science major he is naturally more confident about his content knowledge in Earth Science than
in Physics – a subject he has been asked to teach during his internship. Jared aspired to teach in a
suburban school, and as so happened he got to intern in just such a school with a not particularly
diverse student population.
Lynn didn’t join the teaching profession straight out of college. She had worked in a cytogenetics
lab as a technician for four years before she decided to return to school to pursue a teaching
degree. Being a biology major with a minor in mathematics, she is confident about her content
knowledge in Biology. Lynn interned in a large urban school with a diverse student population
where she taught a lower-track biology class.
Kendra majored in General Science and had a minor in Theatre. She carried out her senior-year
work in a suburban high school earth science classroom. Under the guidance of the same mentor
teacher, but divided between earth science and chemistry, Kendra did her internship in another
suburban district.
(b) Researcher Role
The researchers in this project were a multinational team with members hailing from several
nations, besides U.S.A. Some of us who were citizens of other nations, never had an experience
of being a student in an American school, and thus may have failed to notice several pertinent
cultural details pertaining to the site, participants and the discourses present in the classroom.
However, we believe, that also gave them the advantage of perspicuity that unfamiliar
surroundings bring forth in us. Last but not the least, our observations and inferences were also
ineluctably framed and molded by our own theoretical perspectives.
(b) Data Collection Procedures
The teacher candidates in our study naturally revealed their evolving patterns of practice as
regards developing classroom learning environments and teaching strategies in the way they
taught as interns in schools. Thus, much of the data for our analysis came from classroom
observations and video recordings of their classroom teaching. The data from classroom teaching
was supplemented by data culled from semi-structured interviews conducted with them, their
teaching plans and other assignments they completed as part of their required coursework, and the
teaching philosophy statements that formed a part of their teaching portfolio. The analysis focuses
on the second year of the study during which time our candidates were interns for the entire
academic year.
The data was collected during the period 2001-2003. We visited the classes of teacher candidates
once a semester for a total of 4 times. We also took scratch notes while observing the class and
also video recorded the classroom discussions. To establish a place for ourselves in the
classroom, we, like Dyson, hoped to rely on “on being regularly present, unobstrusively, quiet,
and too "busy" to help children with their work, but never too busy to smile, acknowledge their
presence, and say "hi" (Dyson, 1997).
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(c) Data Analysis Procedures
The theoretical perspective of the paper posits agency in terms of a socioculturally mediated
dialogue with both the natural and social worlds. The mutuality of the individual and
environment, in this framework, requires a unit of analysis that preserves and manifests the
mutuality and interrelated roles of the individual and the environment in all time frames. For a
sociocultural Vygotskian perspective Rogoff recommends use of ““activity” or “event” as the unit
of analysis – with active and dynamic contributions from individuals, their social partners, and
historical traditions and materials and their transformations” (Rogoff, 1995). According to her,
using “activity” or “event” as the unit of analysis “allows a reformulation of the relation between
the individual and the social and cultural environments in which each is inherently involved in the
others' definition. None exists separately” (1995, p. 140). The theoretical perspective of the paper
then is sociocultural with distinct Bakhtinian overtones. And since agency is defined in terms of
Bakhtinian dialogicality, a ‘dialogic event’ where participants can be seen as engaged in dialogic
and socioculturally mediated action was used as the unit of analysis for the paper. These dialogic
events are to be seen as nested in dialogic practices mediated by a multiplicity of discourses.
Further, in such events and practices, indicators of expression or exercising of agency might
include:
1) Student(s) initiations, requests for a classroom discussion, and actions that appear
unanticipated by the teacher, and/or take classroom discussions or activities in a
relatively unscripted directions;
2) Students’ responses to teacher instructions, comments and actions that have an
identifiable element of improvisation, creativity and expression of their wishes, and
agenda (i.e. dialogic overtones in response are clearly identifiable);
3) Students’ dialogic engagement with other participants on matters of science and science
learning. That is, students describing, explaining, predicting, controlling or designing in
the context of science or nature related activities, such as hobbies (including household
ones), for the sake of understanding and manipulating/influencing of objects, events,
organisms and/or phenomena of the natural world. If operating under the instructions of
the teacher, the students’ actions/responses are of “re-voicing” rather than “re-telling”
nature, i.e. there is an identifiable element of the students’ intentions, knowledge and
discourses in their responses.
The analysis needed use of speech data along with classroom notes and other data sources. Now
speech data can be transcribed in varied more or less detailed ways depending upon the nature of
the arguments one is hoping to make on their basis. On the issue of the level of detail one must
present in the transcribed data, we find ourselves agreeing with Gee when he says, “The validity
of an analysis is not a matter of how detailed one’s transcript is. It is a matter of how the
transcript works together with the other elements of the analysis to create a “trustworthy”
analysis” (1999, pp. 88 – 89). We found an abridged version of conventions used by Dyson
(1997) in her study of elementary children’s social and textual lives, as adequate for our analytic
purposes.
Table 1: Conventions Used in the Presentation of Trancripts
(abc)
()
abc
ABC
Parentheses enclosing text contain notes, usually
about contextual and nonverbal information.
Empty parentheses indicate unintelligible words or
phrases.
An underlined word indicates a stressed word.
A capitalized word or phrase indicates increased
volume
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Ellipsis points indicate omitted data.
…
Conventional
punctuation
marks
Indicate end of sentences or utterances.
Dashes interrupted sequences
--
Two periods indicate a hearable pause.
..
Results
Jared:
The arrangement of space in Jared’s class was pretty traditional – straight rows and columns of
neatly aligned desks and chairs with each student having one pair under her possession. In the
front was the big teacher table with some equipment, books and papers kept in no particular
order. The topic for the day was LASERS. The whole class period can be roughly divided into
two distinct phases. In the first phase, the students are called upon by Jared to share, with the
whole class, their responses to questions in two worksheets handed to them in the previous class
period. As students read their answers, Jared responded by evaluating and elaborating upon them
with his own comments, examples and diversions. In the second phase, Jared had the students
read out aloud, one by one, sections from the textbook. His interjections in this phase, frequent as
they were, took again the shape of comments, elaborations, examples and diversions. This phase
and the science period ended rather abruptly with no recognizable sense of closure with the
ringing of the (class period) bell.
J: All right! Who wants to read the first paragraph.
Couple of hands go up.
J: Mr. G you had the hand first, then it will be Ila, and then Dustin. Do go ahead Mr. G.
(sitting on his chair)
G (reading from the text): Lasers have uses in medicine, manufacturing, communications,
( ), entertainment, and even measuring distance to the moon. Lasers are used in audio
and video discs, computers and printers. In the future, lasers may be used to produce
almost limitless supply of energy from nuclear ( ).
J: Perfect. Thank you.
As the brief student-teacher exchange mentioned above indicates, Jared, following the stereotype
of a traditional school science teacher, largely stuck to teaching strategies which depend upon
highly lopsided power relations between the teacher and the taught, and wherein the students are
largely expected to learn passively by following teacher’s instructions. For much of the class
period, the student-teacher interaction occurred in the classic Initiation-Response-Evaluation
(IRE) mode. For instance:
J: Who has it? Mr. G. you look like you have got lot of written down. What do you say?
G.: I got too much written down.
J: All right. We’ll do as much as you can. … Go!
G.: Do I have to read the question first?
J: I just read it. Just read the answer.
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G: OK, I have put laser light is produced when a photon hits a normal atom, its energy is
absorbed and the atom becomes excited. When another identical photon hits the excited
atom, the atom does not absorb the additional photon ….
Another student: I got that far.
J: Sshhh…
G: (continuing) it emits the extra energy so that there are two identical photons traveling
in-step with each other.
A student: Exactly.
J: Right. And those two photons will hit other atoms, and then those atoms will emit other
photons so you’ll have … so on and on. And so it just grows. And that’s why you get so
many photons to create so much light.
A student: Cool!
As we see in this dialogic event in the official space, the student-teacher interaction largely
occurred as initiated and structured by Jared. The student from whom response was sought was
picked by the teacher. Further, the nature of answer given by the student shows that the questions
asked of students gave them little scope of infusing their responses with their distinct voices.
Thus, as Bakhtin distinguished, the nature of response expected from students was more of “retelling” rather than “re-voicing” of scientific knowledge (Bakhtin, 1981). Thus, communicative
events in the official space were largely determined by Jared. He alone largely decided: (a) how
a lesson was supposed to progress during the class; (b) how the teacher and the students were
supposed to interact and behave while class is in progress; (c) what and whose voices are to be
legitimized and included in or de-legitimized and excluded from the official space; (d) the power
and sociocultural relationships in the official space; and (e) the construction and legitimization of
the situated identities of both the teacher and the taught. And as the dialogic event mentioned
above shows, while students did have a role and were indeed expected to participate in the
teacher initiated communicative exchanges, the nature and extent of their participation was pretty
much preordained by the teacher. Jared’s teaching strategies sought to exclude unscripted
students’ responses from the official space.
As Bakhtin (1981) realized, however monologic an utterance may be it is always filled with
dialogic overtones inserted by the speaker. Thus, though the authoritative official classroom
discourse desired and enacted by Jared demanded complete allegiance of the students in terms of
desired monologic responses, the dialogic overtones in students responses were distinctly audible
on many occasions. For instance, Jared did a demonstration that showed how atoms in a laser get
excited and reach higher energy levels on being struck by photons. This demonstration involved
a student acting as an atom being struck by a photon (Jared’s hand represented the photon). The
student was only expected to follow teacher’s instructions. The event occurred as follows:
J: Ok! A photon strikes an atom. (Pointing to G.) He is an atom. I am a photon.
J lightly hits G with his hand, and says “ting!”.
Students laugh.
J: OK. Now after that photon strikes that atom, that atom is now excited, and is vibrating.
G starts shaking.
J (to G): Now become excited and start vibrating.
G: I am excited (and starts shaking a bit more vigorously now.)
J: All right! So when another photon comes back in its place. So I am photon 2. All right?
J: Photon 2 comes back right this way, and he is going to run into … oh! (J comes and
jokingly collides with the student.) Mr. G again. The atom. He (the atom) is so excited.
J: the energy from the photon isn’t going to be absorbed like it was the first time… Some
of his energy is going to be transferred to me. And I am then going (foosh!) to go that
way (J enacts the whole collision and bouncing back of the photon). OK?
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J: So any photons that hit this excited G. atom are now going to be given that sort of
energy, and that energy is going to go (foosh!) the other way. And that’s how you get a
laser beam.
J: (to G) Now take your seat.
However G had kept on shaking even after the demonstration was over. Students laugh at
G’s overacting.
In this event Jared speaking to the class said, “OK. Now after that photon strikes that atom, that
atom is now excited, and is vibrating.” The student even before Jared asks him to do anything,
started acting as an excited atom by shaking. And when Jared asked G to “become excited and
start vibrating”, G responded by shaking more vigorously and indicating that the atom is truly
excited by saying to the whole class, “I am excited” (even though the atoms don’t speak!). Thus,
in the authoring of response, one can see that G creatively improvised and added something of his
own intention to the response. Such dialogic overtones in the student’s response are also clearly
visible later in the event when J after having given his explanation behind the phenomenon asked
G, “Now take your seat.”. However, G keeps on shaking acting like an excited atom for some
time, and thus delays complying to J’s instructions for just enough time to inject the classroom
environment with some humor that students could relate to.
As mentioned above, our responses always carry dialogic overtones of our intentions, agenda and
ideological orientations. These dialogic overtones are not always discernible to an observer.
However, in this event they clearly are. As Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain say, “Agency lies
in the improvisations that people create in response to particular situations, mediated by these
senses and sensitivities. They opportunistically use whatever is at hand to affect their position in
the cultural game in the experience of which they have formed these sets of dispositions.”
(Holland et al., 1998). In this event, we see G doing the same. By using his position as a
participant in a just concluded demonstration, and a shared understanding of child humor, G
improvised in his responses to the teacher’s instruction to act as an atom, and thus expressed his
agency by injected humor in the official classroom discourse.
Thus, we find that within in the official space, Jared’s enacted lesson plan largely worked to
marginalize students’ agency. As the dialogic event mentioned above shows, students’ responses,
however, even in such an authoritative classroom discourse, had dialogic overtones and thus did
carry signatures of their agency. Such expressions of agency reflected their capacity for
socioculturally mediated engagement with the social world rather than the natural world, and can
only be seen as attempts to influence events in the social world. They were, thus, not aimed at
improving their understanding or control over the natural world. Predictably, there were very few
instances in which students tried to express their agency for furthering their understanding of the
natural world. For instance, the dialogic event given below was one such attempt by a student:
J: All right. So … You have the Earth during the winter, during the winter … During the
winter the Earth is closer to the Sun, but we, the northern hemisphere is tilted away. ….
S: Oohh! I get it.
J: (to the student) Ok? The earth is tilted away. So … in the summer, we are farther
away, but … we are tilted towards … No! The Earth is still farther away from the Sun,
but we are tilted towards the Sun. So we get the rays of light better than everybody else
does.
Several students talking: “I guess that”. “(It is really weird to me.)”. (“We are falling
…”).
J: It has always been that way.
S: How come people living in the (southern) pole don’t fall off or something?
J: Because of the gravity. Just the same reason why you don’t fall off your chair going
that way.
S: (See, we are walking, we don’t even think we are going like that? Why not?)
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J: Because we have always known it. Just like you know you are always going to be,
going to go to Bath Middle School. It doesn’t change.
Students: ( ).
J: But, for now you are going to school here.
A student: Oooohhh, not Morris.
In this event we see a student initiate a discussion with the teacher that was off-topic and took the
classroom discussion in a relatively un-scripted direction. The teacher was engaged in an effort to
make students understand how seasons occurred on earth. A student uses this classroom talk
about earth as a planet to ask a question that related earth’s shape with his experiences of gravity
and how things fall on earth. He asks, “How come people living in the (southern) pole don’t fall
off or something?”. The teacher forced off his topic replies, “Because of the gravity. Just the
same reason why you don’t fall off your chair going that way.” This is a stock reply that just
throws a scientific word, ‘gravity’, at the student by way of explanation. Predictably, the student
isn’t convinced, and not willing to let go the opportunity to have his puzzlement resolved,
responds, “(See, we are walking, we don’t even think we are going like that? Why not?)”. Here
the student is using his everyday knowledge to counter the counter-intuitive scientific explanation
offered by the teacher. It is common among children (and even adults) to think of north as ‘up’
and south as ‘down’. Thus, according to the student, people living near the southern pole are
literally hanging up side down, with just gravity holding them up. That is, the student reasons that
people should feel the effect of their location on the earth’s curvature. The student’s questions
reveal a thinking, probing mind eager to understand nature. However, the teacher not prepared to
deal with student’s concerns at length, uses his authority and smarts to end the unsolicited
discussion in the following manner: “Because we have always known it. Just like you know you
are always going to be, going to go to Bath Middle School. It doesn’t change.” The student in this
episode thus manifested a capacity to engage in a socioculturally mediated dialogue with his
teacher, and also to further his understanding of the natural world – a clear expression of his
student agency.However, as the reader may have noticed that in this dialogic event, attempts by
the student to exercise his agency in furthering his learning, for instance by asking questions,
were not given due recognition and legitimacy by the teacher, and thus did not lead to substantive
learning of science on his part.
Students’ agency, thus thwarted in the official space, repeatedly sought expression in their
attempts to take the classroom discussions off on tangents unrelated or only vaguely related with
the topic at hand.
J: All right. No. 4.
J gestures a student to speak out her answer to the question no. 4.
The student: Do I have to say it? …. Ok.
The student: Holography is a technology that uses laser beams to form 3 dimensional
images.
J: Correct!
A student: What is it?
The first student and J: Holography.
The first student: it’s a hologram …
J: (interrupting the student) Or just say holograms.
J: Ela?
The student: You know how back, way back in the cave they would light up the ( ). In
the ‘Monk’ ( ). Have you ever seen the ‘Monk’?
J: Oh, that!
The student: Can you do that with a laser?
J: Oh, yeah!
J: Well, the thing is … I don’t think a laser emits …Sshh…
Some students: (laughing) Sorry!
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J: … emits enough light to light up a room because as you can tell I can turn off all the
lights, and I can show this laser right here (pointing to laser kept on the teacher’s table).
It’s not gonna light up the room. All right? But what you can do exactly is that you can
bounce it off a number of different mirrors.
A student: Cool!
J: Uhmm.
Another student: Did they do that on ‘CSI’?
J: (Mockingly) Probably.
Another student: Yeah, they did.
J: Hey, you guys, did you hear that on ‘CSI’ there is actually a ( ).
A student: It’s on tonight.
J: There is actually a way of … let’s see … there is actually a machine that was being
developed at Michigan State, through the Engineering Department.
J: through one of my friend’s professor, who is kind of a criminologist, just like these
guys are on television. And they are actually going to use that in one of the shows.
A student: Really?
J: Yeah! I don’t remember what the machine is. I completely forgot what it is. But the
whole point is that they were going to use it on the show, and they were going to give
credits to MSU.
J: it was kind of neat. They were going to wear Spartan MSU t-shirts or something like
that. But I haven’t heard if they got it in and they are going to use it or not. … But they
were supposed to.
A student: Cool!
Another student: What does it do?
J: I don’t know what it does. Because I forgot.
A student: It’s on tonight, people. It was not yesterday night.
Another student: After ‘Survivor’.
J: Sshhh… All right, guys, let’s go.
As we saw, in this event, students were rather successful in derailing the official agenda for a
while, and in even roping in the teacher to participate with them in an unscripted dialogue only
loosely related with the topic at hand. The nature of classroom discourse was such that unofficial
and nonacademic expressions of agency were tolerated by Jared to an extent, and thus one find
many other instances where students try to inject the official space with their unofficial
utterances, voices and intentions. Jared too interacted with students in the unofficial space of the
classroom, thereby indicating a friendly convivial relationship with them. For instance, in the
beginning of the period as we went around the class, he exchanged banter with them, and let them
take liberties, like letting them say “hello” into the microphone he was wearing for recording (of
classroom discussion) purposes.
However, students weren’t always successful in their attempts to exercise their agency in these
directions. In the following event the communicative exchange between a student and Jared is in
the context of a question in the worksheet that asked students to list four features common to all
lasers.
The student: what’s the second one?
J: the second one?
J: No. 2 is that they contain materials to create identical photons. So remember that that
material could be a gas, liquid or solid. All right?
A student: Why don’t we get reclining seats?
J: Why? So that I can let you fall asleep? I don’t think so.
Another student: You know that science place at ….. (unclear) …
J: Yeah … that new building.
The student: they have such chairs and …
J: Oh, I know!
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The student: And they even have wheels!
J: No! And you know what, those are for college students who stay awake in classes.
The student: I stay awake.
J: Uhmm.
Some students: I stay awake.
J: Sshhh…
As this event shows, a student expressed his agency in trying to take the classroom discussion in
an unofficial, tangential direction. However, Jared’s ability to participate and even dominate
unofficial discourses of the student allowed him to effectively contain and regulate such
expressions of student agency.
Thus, we find that Jared dealt with students’ agency, as learners of school science, by containing
and diverting it away from the official space. Teaching activities and strategies chosen by him
established an official classroom discourse that was authoritative and sought to deny legitimacy
to students’ attempts to dialogically engage with the natural and social world as learners of
science. Student agency, thwarted in the official space then could only find expression in
unofficial, non-science related directions where it reflected students’ attempts to influence and
regain at least some measure of control over events in the social world (of the classroom).
In this way, Jared’s response to student agency is quite in consonance with his official intentions,
orientations and perspectives. For instance, his vision of school science corresponded quite well
with how he presented it in the class. When asked to elaborate upon the big ideas of the topic of
which the lesson analyzed above was a part, Jared responded as follows:
I think the main points are basically what is light, what is it made of, um, then I think it
leads into refraction and reflection, which is you know, a confusing point. That’s a main
one. And then it works more of its way into um, the types of reflection and refraction that
can be used, mirrors and lenses, and then it talks about uses, so fiber optics, lasers, and
then what lasers can be used for. (Teaching Observation Interview, Spring, 2003)
When further quizzed about the role of this lesson in the general story line for the topic, Jared had
this to say:
This specific lesson talks about the last two sections of the book. I’ve been going over
them for about two days now, and the, one of the sections talks about um, how reflection
and refraction are used in things like telescopes, microscopes, and in cameras, and then
also how, and then basically lasers at the end, and how those are used too. (Teaching
Observation Interview, Spring, 2003).
Evidently, Jared thought of school science as a linear narrative comprising ‘stories’ of related
concepts backed by suitable examples, and supported by procedural and metaphorical reasoning.
Analysis of his written lesson plans and observations of his teaching clearly show that textbooks
exercised powerful influence in how he structured his lessons and taught them. If the textbooks
presented science as an inert rigid body of knowledge basically comprising facts, definitions and
problem-solving algorithms, then that was evidently fine with him too. Predictably, his topmost
concern regarding classroom activities and teaching strategies was incorporation of activities and
teaching approaches that emphasized correct use of problem solving algorithms and procedures,
and gave relatively low priority to learning how to create situations that help students engage in
scientific inquiry (Priorities Interview, Spring, 2003). School science conceived in this manner
becomes highly monologic in terms of the discourse patterns it establishes with the students.
As observations of his classroom teaching show, Jared evidently had little problems in practicing
such a conception of school science. The classroom discourse he sat up lacked intertextuality and
dialogicality as much as his conception of school science. Jared’s conception of school science
was also in striking harmony with how he perceived his role as a teacher. When asked about what
kind of teacher he expected to be Jared hoped that, “I’ll be able to not just be able to gain the
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respect of my students by respecting them, but also their attention, you know. Through labs that
excite them, trying to bring in more about who they are, or things happening in their life that can
help to relate to the science, you know.” (Classroom observation interview, Spring, 2003). When
further quizzed about how did he felt about his progress towards becoming that kind of teacher,
Jared said, “I still think that I have a little ways to go when it comes to class management. Um,
the teaching aspect I think I can lecture with the best of them, I think. Um, I think overall I need
to get some more work on class management. I mean, I can get the attention of class, but can I
keep it? That’s another thing, I think it’s … can I keep the attention of my students depending on
the topic, no matter what it is.” Thus, Jared wanted to become a teacher who was respected and
listened to attentively by his students when he lectured or did labs with them. Jared gave high
priority to getting his students’ motivated about and interested in science (Priorities interview,
Spring, 2003). But in his perspective, students’ motivation and interest was to be a result of what
he did or did not do in the class, and not a consequence of students exercise of their innate agency
as inquirers of the natural world.
Thus, we find that Jared was on its way to developing a primarily School Science patterns of
practice in constructing classroom learning environments wherein students were expected to
respect the teacher’s social and expert authority, accept the official school science version of
nature, participate in class activities as ordained by the teacher, complete work assigned to them,
and restrict their human agency to unofficial spaces. Students obviously found ways to infuse
their participation in the authoritative classroom discourse with their dialogic overtones. But this
dialogic engagement was more with the immediate social world than with nature, and thus didn’t
further their understanding of science and nature.
Lynn:
Lynn interned in a lower track biology class. The class had 24 students who sat in clusters around
lab stations. Lynn was teaching the unit on Evolution, and the specific topic for the day was
Natural Selection. The class had been on this unit for a while, and thus the teacher expected the
students to be familiar and somewhat knowledge with the main concepts and examples of
Evolution. Students did an activity on natural selection during the class, but before the activity
began, there was a discussion session in which Lynn revised the big ideas of the topic with
students.
Throughout the class, Lynn exerted a firm control over the classroom discourse directing it
according to her plan for the day. Right through the class, the teacher-student exchanges were
initiated largely in the IRE mode by her. However there were many events in which not only
students managed to but were also allowed and encouraged by Lynn to hold the floor and take the
teacher-student dialogue in an unscripted direction. So, the resulting classroom discourse bore an
uneven character with strings of episodes marked by an authoritative classroom discourse with
low degree of dialogicality that were repeatedly punctuated by events with social heteroglossia
and a high degree of dialogicality.
For a fair portion of the teaching time, communicative exchanges among the teacher and the
taught were regulated by Lynn in a way that allowed only limited space for students to officially
express their agency as science learners. For example, a typical classroom episode hegemonised
by the official and authoritative school science discourse ran as follows:
Lynn: And Tuesday just before we started the activity. We were talking about types of
selection. Different ways that environment can interact with an organism. All right.
Remember … Sshhhh….”
Lynn: You will have to remember three types of natural selection. You have them written
down. And I gave you a story for each of them. One of them was ‘directional’. All right.
And that story was the one I think about the woodpecker. And how there was a selection
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against the birds with small and average beaks. So over time only long beaked wood
peckers survived to produce. And so they had long beaked wood pecker babies, and so
over many, many years and generations, you end up … you are going in one direction.
That was like in our simulation. We had directional selection for ‘tall’.
Lynn: Kelly?
Kelly: ( )
Lynn (not responding to what Kelly said): All right what is another type of selection?
A student: Stabilizing selection.
Lynn: Who does that favor? If ‘stabilizing selection’ is going on which individual is at an
advantage?
Another student: The medium.
Lynn: All right. The medium. The average. And the story that I told you about that was of
spiders. OK. Say we are in a field, and we have got small spiders, big spiders and
medium spiders. Big spiders are at a disadvantage because they are easily picked off,
seen and eaten by the birds. And the small spiders are at a disadvantage because they are
having a horrible time finding food because they are so little.
A student: ( )
Lynn nods, but goes ahead with her talk.
As this episode illustrates, the role of the students in such communicative exchanges was limited
to supplying answers to fact-based questions asked by the teacher in a traditional I-R-E (Initiation
– Response – Evaluation) format. Student participation was merely in the form of ‘retelling’
rather than ‘re-voicing’ the official school science text on Evolution and natural Selection. The
initiative to carry the communicative exchange forward between the teacher and the taught
remained with the teacher. Thus, though students’ contribution to the classroom talk was
important, and in fact, necessary for learning of school science as conceived by Lynn, students’
agency was given little official space for expression.
However, even in such an authoritative classroom discourse, students sometimes did manage to
steer classroom discussions in a relatively unscripted directions that showed students’ dialogic
engagement with the teacher and other students on the science topic at hand.
Lynn (L): Kalifa?
Kalifa: The last one is ‘disruptive selection’.
L: Yeah, the last one is ‘disruptive selection’. And what variation does that favor?
Students: Both extremes.
L: Both extremes. Yes. That means if you are average, you are the odd man out.
L: And our story about that was the moths. Our imaginary moths that come in white, grey
and black. And they live in a forest with black and white trees. The white moths are at an
advantage on white trees; the black moths have an advantage at black trees. But a grey
moth? Dang! It’s hard for him. He is always going to be seen, no matter what tree he
lands on. He stands out against white and he stands out against black.
Two students raises their hands. But L ignores them completely.
L: So birds flying around will always be able to see them, and eating them. So that
removes a bunch of them from the reproducing population. So very few grey moths are
going to survive, reproduce and have grey moth babies.
Another student (not the ones that had raised their hands): (something unclear), like grey
(unclear)pigeons (?), because no bird is attacking them birds.
L: (taking cognizance of one guy who had been raising his hands) What’s that?
The student: The natural selection, is it like it just randomly chooses each of each
scenario or is it separately for each scenario?
L: that is a good question. Cleveland is asking if natural selection is always the same. Let
me rephrase your question to see if I have got it right, are you saying that it is always
good to be a tall giraffe?
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The student: I am saying that in a case of a tall giraffe, is it always going to be specific
type of natural selection?
Another student: No, it is not always going to be a tall giraffe.
L: Ok, I still do not … I am still trying to understand Cleveland’s question.
The first student: Ok, spiders. What kind of selection was there?
L: (repeats the question) What kind of selection was the spider’s? That was called
‘stabilizing’.
The student: Will it ever be the same type of situation or a different kind of natural
selection?
L: Yes. There could be another type of selection on the spider. Say … This is an excellent
question. Let’s say there are birds eating me and I am a spider. So, there is a stabilizing
selection going on because it is not good to be big and it is not good to be small. So I am
at an advantage if I am in the middle. But, say, to attract a mate, and have babies, that is
survival. It is good, only if you are big. The bog spiders – only they are the ones that get
to have girlfriends and have babies. So there can be different kinds of selection. If you a
big spider in that kind of situation, you have advantage for mate selection, but you are at
a disadvantage for predator selection. Right!
A student: (makes a joking comment about the situation. Comment unclear. It is
something like: So you know what’s going to happen!
Some students laugh.
L: Right. It is a tough world out there. Right?
A student: For animals! Not for me.
L: For animals. All right.
In this event, the classroom is engaged in a teacher-led discussion of ‘disruptive selection’. A
student who had been raising his hand for some time finally manages to get teacher’s attention.
The teacher asks, “What’s that?” Taking advantage of the opening offered by the teacher, student
asks, “The natural selection, is it like it just randomly chooses each of each scenario or is it
separately for each scenario?” This question, though related to the overall topic of natural
selection, is not directly related to what was being discussed at that moment in the classroom.
However, the teacher recognizing the importance of the question and wishing to encourage all
students to take such interest in learning science responds, “that is a good question. Cleveland is
asking if natural selection is always the same. Let me rephrase your question to see if I have got it
right, are you saying that it is always good to be a tall giraffe?” And then an interesting dialogic
exchange gets initiated between the students and the teacher in which initially the student
couched his question in very general terms. However, when he notices that the teacher and
possibly the students too aren’t understanding his question, he reframes his question more
concretely, first in terms of giraffes and then again in terms of spiders. Thus, the student engages
the whole class in a discussion that met his agenda and wishes, and made use of his understanding
of natural selection and knowledge of animals. Such events that showcased students as serious
agents in pursuit of science learning were facilitated in no small measure by the teacher. Thus,
one finds that though teacher-student interactions in the IRE mode dominate the classroom
discussions. However, attempts by students to voice their queries are encouraged, acknowledged
and responded to with sincerity by Lynn thereby lending to the classroom discourse an uneven
character where dialogic events with full expression of student agency interpellate with studentteacher interactions in IRE mode.
During the class period, one didn’t see many instances of Lynn interacting informally with the
students. There was a social distance between the teacher and the taught that remained unbridged
for most of the class duration. Further, the video recordings of Lynn’s classes show students as
not being very engaged in the learning process. There is a visible resistance to the teacher’s
authoruty among them. It was almost as if the teacher and the taught didn’t share a consensus on
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the aims and objectives of learning science in particular and schooling in general. Lynn had to
spend a lot of her time in disciplining or motivating students to learn. On many occasions this
resistance coupled with social distance between Lynn and her students led to students’ defiance of
teacher’s instructions and official agenda.
L: “He was explaining how fossils supply evidence for evolution. They can be put
together in a sequence, kind of like a puzzle. All right. And we can follow the skeletons
that we have, and see how a creature has changed over time.”
L: (pointing to a student) “Don’t make me talk to you again.”
The student: “ I didn’t make you talk to me.”
L: “I am talking to you now.”
The student: “But I didn’t make you!”
Some students snigger and pass comments to each other.
L: All right!
.
In this small dialogic event, the teacher interrupted her teaching and pointing a finger to one of
his students, told him, “Don’t make me talk to you again.” The student responded, “I didn’t make
you talk to me.” Here the student was deliberately ignoring the semantic content of the teacher’s
statement, and interpreted the teacher’s command in a literal, technical manner. The effect of the
student’s response was to deflect the focus of the dialogue from what he did or didn’t do to merit
teacher’s disciplinary action to the trivial issue of whether the student really made teacher talk to
him. The teacher falling into the trap laid by the student got sidetracked in her response and
retorted, ““I am talking to you now.” To which the student had a ready response: “But I didn’t
make you!” In this dialogic event, the challenge to the teacher’s authority was not overt and total.
The student ultimately complies and modifies his behavior. However, before he does so, the
student engages the teacher in an unconnected (with the student’s actions that invited teacher’s
attention in the first place, that is) dialogic exchange that dead-ends. This exchange invites
sniggers and passing of surreptitious comments among the fellow students. Thus, the teacher’s
authority is publicly undermined and mocked by the student in a limited way that stops short of
open rebellion. This limited defiance is sufficient to communicate to all present in the classroom
that the teacher’s control over the students is limited and can be challenged. The student’s
response to the teacher’s challenge is creative and clearly betrays his wishes (of not becoming a
“good” student) and agenda (limited subversion of the teacher’s authority), and in doing so his
agency in gaining some control over the social events in the class was clearly manifested.
It wasn’t that Lynn didn’t recognize the importance of allowing and encouraging students to coconstruct their own learning experiences. For instance, in her unit plan on cancer, she
conscientiously aimed to include students’ experiences and stories in her teacher’s script by
planning that, “Students will be given about 10 minutes of class time to write everything they
know about cancer. I will ask them to write what it is, who "gets it", where cancer occurs, why
and/or how a person "gets it", I will also ask them to relate any personal stories about cancer or
what questions they would like to investigate about cancer.” (Unit 2 plan and report, spring
semester, 2003). Enthused by her experience of including students’ discourses in one of her unit
plans, she even concluded, “I also learned what a good idea it is starting big units with
conversations and incorporating student ideas and activities." (Unit 1 plan and report, spring
semester, 2003). But lacking pedagogical expertise and practical knowledge, Lynn wasn’t always
able to effectively implement such ideas. She was acutely conscious that her lesson, of which the
bead bug activity was the most crucial part, had been a failure. Reminiscing about how her lesson
had went, Lynn admitted, “Oh, it was terrible. It was awful. I hated it. The fire drills were
awesome.” (Spring interview, 2003). Of course, lack of student responsiveness to classroom
activities and discussions wasn’t only because of what Lynn did or didn’t do. The general
apathetic (or even antipathetic) orientation of the students to schooling and teacher script may
have discouraged at least some students to dialogically engage with the teacher and school
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science discourse because of the fear of being seen as “acting white” in front of their peers. In
such a class even expert teachers wouldn’t have found creating productive “third spaces” in
which students’ agency finds expression in furthering their own learning. Knowing that many of
her students weren’t quite excited about learning science, Lynn still planned for dialogic
engagement with her students in her lesson plans. Making such lesson plans a success requires
both skill and courage on part of the teacher. Courage she definitely had; and skill was something
she hoped to gain with time.
Thus, while school science discourse tended to hegemonise official social space in Lynn’s
classroom, whenever students made an attempt to exercise their agency as science learners, Lynn
did encourage them to dialogically engage with the scientific discourse and take the classroom
dialogue in unscripted albeit productive directions. An unscripted dialogue because of inherent
uncertainties can be potentially disruptive and unproductive. However, Lynn always managed to
make such dialogic encounters meaningful and productive. It was on these occasions that students
expressed their agency by succeeding in making their own discourses interact with the scientific
discourse to create a classroom discourse marked with a high level of dialogicality. At other
times, however, students’ agency could find expression only in the unofficial space, and often in
form of resistance to or subversion of the official agenda of the classroom.
Lynn clearly aspired to have a classroom where she could practice a cognitive apprenticeship
approach to teaching. However, both her circumstances and her limited skills and knowledge
often militated against her success. Thus, Lynn was able to co-construct classroom learning
environments that could only provide restrictive opportunities and partial encouragement to
students to exercise their agency as science learners in the official space of the classroom. Lynn’s
case showcases the difficulties that inexperienced teachers undergo in trying the kinds of lessons
that we encourage - lessons that rely on students expressing agency in ways privileged by the
teacher and avoiding unsanctioned expressions of agency. When an inexperienced teacher “opens
the door” to student agency, she often has a hard time controlling what comes through.
Kendra:
Kendra taught Earth Science to 9th graders in a suburban high school. She was teaching glaciers
that day. At the beginning of the class period, Kendra gave an open-ended and non-graded
exercise to students in which they were required to write in their own words their ideas about how
glaciers form and how did they vanish from their native state. Students were allowed to discuss
their ideas with the neighbors before jotting down their responses. After collecting responses
from the students, Kendra led a discussion on students’ ideas about glaciers as expressed by them
in this class assignment. Thereafter, Kendra showed to the students a demonstration of how
glaciers are formed and how they flow. In the next phase, Kim did with them another open-ended
activity in which she made a powerpoint presentation with photographs of her driveway, and
asked students to explore on their own and find out the reasons, backed by scientific evidence, for
sinking and cracking of the driveway of her home, and also for the presence of sediments on one
end of the driveway. Students are asked to do a little bit of research before presenting their
findings before the entire class the next day. After presentation students were given some time to
work out their initial ideas and seek answers to their queries about the driveway from the teacher.
In the last segment of the period, a group of students are called upon to present their project on
“Red Sea Tectonic Geography Project” – an assignment given to them some days back.
Unlike Jared and even Lynn, Kendra designed and executed her lesson plan in a manner that
allowed plenty of opportunities and invitations to students to exercise their agency as science
learners in the official space. Kendra scripted the classroom discussions and activities in such a
way that in each communicative situation, after she had set up the basic context and parameters
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for the activity or the discussion, the rest of the communicative exchange happened in a fairly
unscripted manner with active contribution of both the teacher and the taught. The addressivity of
her uttarances, i.e. its quality of being addressed to the students and the social relationship and
social attitude it thereby enacted, was such that it immediately opened up the official space for
productive (or unproductive) heteroglossia. The students had a role in carrying the classroom talk
forward and the agency to infect it with their knowledge, agendas and voices.
For instance, in the activity titled “What the heck? II”, Kendra made a powerpoint presentation
with photographs of her driveway, and asked students to explore on their own and find out the
reasons, backed by scientific evidence, for sinking and cracking of the driveway of her home, and
also for the presence of sediments on one end of the driveway. Students were asked to do
independent research before presenting their findings before the entire class the next day. After
presentation students were given some time to work out their initial ideas and seek answers to
their queries about the driveway from the teacher. As she told students “On Wed. you will finish
this project; at the end of class, we will share our theories. I will share what my theory on Wed,
too.” Further, students were allowed to work on this project in groups if they so wanted. The
students were then left to discuss this assignment among themselves for sometime while Kendra
walked around the classroom chatting with students and responding to their queries about the
driveway. Kendra seemed ready to provide factual information about her driveway to the
students. A student asked Kendra the age of the driveway. Kendra replied that she was not very
sure how old the driveway was, but her guess was that it was about 10 to 15 years old. For other
queries she asked students to find out the answers for themselves. For instance, she readily told
the students that her house was on an esker, but when students asked her what an esker was,
Kendra refrained from answering it for them, encouraging them to explore and understand for
themselves what an esker was.
Similarly, other classroom activities too appeared designed to allow students use of official space
for excercising their agency as learners. For instance, the students had been given an assignment
some days earlier in which working in teams they had to do research on the tectonic geography of
the Red Sea and then report their findings to the whole class through a power point presentation.
In this assignment, the student teams had the near complete freedom to interpret and execute the
task as they deemed fit. A freedom they definitely made use of. For instance, one team made their
presentation that day. Their presentation showed that they had researched biblical references to
the Red sea in their presentation. The team had tied this information with the current geography
of the sea. This was not required of them by Kendra. But students exercising their agency as
learners of science deemed it a worthy issue for exploration and presentation.
Thus, Kendra’s lesson plan as enacted and conceived invited students to exercise their agency as
explorers of the natural world, in the official space in the classroom. Kendra consistently prodded
students to take responsibility for their own learning – an insistence received enthusiastically by
the students as reflected by the large number of queries students posed to Kendra about her
driveway. In all the classroom activities, students also got plenty of opportunities to interact
among themselves. For instance, in Kendra’s driveway project as well as the initial assignment in
which students had to express their ideas about glaciers, students were explicitly given time and
opportunity in the official space to discuss their ideas among themselves. Kendra’s instructions
after she had introduced to them the problem in the driveway project were as follows:
Kendra: So that’s it, have fun. .. Today, we will be at 12, oh, I am sorry, at 11
O’clock, we are going to hear Geena’s group. They are going to be presenting
our final project. So we are going to meet here. You have got 15 minutes. You
can work in a group with as many people as you want. You can work as an entire
class, you can work by yourself, you can work with 4 people, 3 people, 2 people,
.. it is up to you .. work on this (some students talking) Ladies and gentleman,
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please I have not finished the project. … As soon as everyone goes through ..
what you will do is tomorrow you will present with scientific evidence meaning I
think it is this because I looked up on the internet in the ‘capa-lab’ and I
believed it can be .. OK? Or I called the concrete contractor and he said that this
.. You can do that. .. I talked to a geologist at MSU and he told me that this ..
that’s fine too.
Such encouragement and directions from the teacher naturally broadened the canvas available to
them for the expression of their agency as science learners.
Further, Kendra throughout the class period also interacted with the students on an informal,
unofficial plane. She joked with them, made fun of herself, enquired about them and so on. For
instance, while showing the students her demonstration of how glaciers are formed, and how they
flow, Kendra asked a student to pour more ice on the slanted tray. But as the student began doing
that, Kendra in a sing-song voice joked, “you toppled a blend of scotch. … Scott put a blend of
scotch.” Similarly, when a student jokingly asked Kendra if her driveway was haunted, Kendra
without batting an eyelid repeated aloud the question, and said that that was a good one, and
maybe students could call ghostbusters and they would tell them something about the condition
of the driveway. Kendra also kept in touch with the private lives of her students. For instance, she
enquired about the health of one student and sympathized with him during the class. Thus, we
found that Kendra shared a good rapport with her students. This contributed to friendly and nonantagonistic relationship between them. Absence of antagonistic and defiant expressions of
agency by the students may perhaps be partly attributed to this healthy convivial relationship
between the teacher and the taught.
Kendra placed a great priority on enabling her students develop a sound understanding of science
through inquiry-based activities. For instance, her main objective of adding the activity, “What
the heck!”, to the lesson, was, “to be able to back up any kind of, to use their scientific
knowledge, to be able to use scientific knowledge, and to be able to use scientific thinking and
back statements up with evidence.” (Interview, Spring, 2003). Further, she didn’t follow a
textbook or any prescribed lesson plan to teach the class. She first decided what the main learning
objectives should be and then structured her lesson around those objectives, liberally borrowing
activities from varied sources or coming up with some (as in “what the heck!” activity) on her
own. When asked how she planned for this lesson, Kendra had this to say, “Um, well I knew
roughly what my objectives were, and I knew that I wanted them to see what happens with
glaciers. I didn’t want them to just study it in a book, so um, and I had talked to one of the other
teachers here about something that they had done before and I said, okay, well, we’ll try it, and
we’ll do it, and so that’s what we did, and um, the what the heck too is something I just came up
on my own. I just decided I want them to do this, I want them to think scientifically and here’s
what they’re going to do and so.” (Interview, Spring, 2003). Similarly, when asked about her
teaching priorities, Kendra reported scientific inquiry and science appreciation as her two topmost
priorities (Priorities interview, Spring, 2003). Her mentor teacher rationalized Kendra’s giving
high priority to scientific inquiry in following words, “Scientific inquiry is something that she
feels is an important process for students to find and discover things, and by discovering things,
they have more of an understanding about scientific processes that uh, kids go through, and I
think she wanted the students, by science appreciation, I think, I mean students enjoy and get
excited about science and nature, and that may not be exactly what that means, but she really
wanted kids to be motivated to learn science, because they love science. So she fostered a love of
science.” (Mentor priorities interview, Spring, 2003). Obviously, one cannot do inquiry if one
does not have the freedom to exercise one’s agency in pursuit of learning. Kendra’s keenness to
help her students become young scientists in the class, and her structuring the lesson around
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learning objectives made her teach in a way that gave lots of room for student agency to act in the
official space.
Further, when asked what kind of teacher she expected to be, Kendra replied that she wanted to
be a warm, open kind of teacher, and added that, “Um, I like to get to know all my students
individually, and I like to get to know them all personally. Um, so, in doing that, and I’m always
very kind. I mean, I joke around sometimes, harshly with some of them, but only the ones who I
know can, they dish it out too. So, we play around a lot.” (Interview, Spring, 2003). With such a
professional identity in the making, and her preference for inquiry activities, Kendra couldn’t
have preferred an authoritative classroom discourse that didn’t recognize and encouraged
students’ agency in furthering their own learning.
Thus, observing her teaching, it is obvious that Kendra was making serious attempts to develop a
cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching and building classroom learning environment. Her
activities were designed to help students learn through scaffolded participation in inquiry and
application activities, in tandem with public sharing of personal ideas and questions. Kendra’s
sought to build a classroom learning environment that actively facilitated inclusion of students’
ideas and practices in the official space. Kendra rated student motivation in class as high, and also
claimed support of her mentor teacher and field instructor (Interview, Spring 2003). Thus, it
helped that the school circumstances Kendra was working under were conducive to teaching for
understanding and provided supporting resources.
Equipped with a strong commitment to reform oriented science teaching, and belief in allowing
students their own space to “find and discover things” on their own, Kendra was well on her way
to teach in the manner her teacher education program wanted her to. However, she was still a
novice in the fine art and science of expert teaching, and there were occasions when her praxis
fell short of high principles. For instance, in the beginning activity of her lesson, when she invited
students’ initial ideas regarding formation of glaciers, she didn’t always legitimize students’
responses even when they constituted a direct and relevant response to the questions she had
posed, and thus merited recognition and a fitting response by her. The student-teacher exchange I
am alluding to went something like this:
Kendra: Some body say they floated from the North Pole, and that’s a really
common answer. Paul, what did you write?
Paul: I wrote once the great lakes were all together, ( ), and then they warmed
up ( ).
Kendra: Now that’s a very interesting theory. I like that one.
Another student: I don’t know what a glacier is.
Kendra: Some people don’t know what a glacier is. I’ll tell you what. .. Theresa,
what is your theory?
Theresa: They were probably higher up and the bottom melted so it is like ( ) ..
Kendra: That .. that is very .. I like that a lot. Are you looking at what we have
going on going here? (pointing to a demonstration in the classroom)
Theresa: ( )
Kendra: So you have read the science book. So she knows what is going on? Part
of that is very accurate. .. OK! She said that the higher up .. the higher up
glaciers, kind of slid their way down .. And that’s partially true. But this is the
thing from a higher up area. .. This is what glaciers basically are .. you are
ready? .. You look outside right now, what do you see on the ground?
As can be seen in this dialogic event, Paul’s ideas regarding formation of glaciers are inexplicably
brushed aside and denied legitimacy in the official space by Kendra, while recognition is
conferred to some other students’ responses. This selective inclusion of students’ voices in the
official space could well act as a discouragement to some students in the classroom, and reflects
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the distance Kendra still had to travel in her quest for teaching expertise. Also, though Kendra did
an interesting class activity that simulated formation of glaciers in a tilted pan during the period,
she did not integrate students’ observations and ideas emanating from that activity into any sort of
whole class discussion of glaciers. And thus a great teaching opportunity was lost. Thus, like
other interns there were still some kinks that needed to be ironed out in her approaches to the
problem of practice of developing classroom learning activities and teaching strategies. Teaching
science for understanding is a big challenge even for seasoned teachers, and Kendra’s had just
begun to learn to teach. From the evidence we have, we have strong reasons to believe that she
was indeed on a sharp learning curve that ends in a cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching
science.
Discussion
To summarize, in this paper we focus on secondary teacher candidates’ approaches to the
problem of practice of developing classroom learning environments and teaching strategies, and
exploreed the nature of classroom learning environments they are able to create in their
classrooms, and the teaching strategies they adopt for this purpose. The paper takes the
perspective of student agency in viewing the classroom events. Thus, it sees the problem of
practice of constructing classroom learning environments in terms of teachers devising their own
situated ways to deal with students’ attempts to exert and express their own agency in the
classroom teachers in myriad ways, such as through questions, expressions of their personal
ideas, attempts to change the focus of the class discussion, and various "off task" behaviors.
All teacher candidates that we studied strove to go beyond the minimal expectations of managing
professional roles and obligations while constructing classroom learning environments. They all
wanted to teach science subject matter knowledge more substantially, and tackled expression of
student agency accordingly. However, these teacher candidates differed in ways they sought to
deal with student agency as they went around constructing their own situated solutions for the
problem of developing classroom learning environments and evolving corresponding teaching
strategies. These differences reflected the situated decisions candidates had made towards
developing a pattern of science teaching practice for themselves. As mentioned in the
introduction to this paper set, three candidates developed primarily School Science patterns of
practice, three candidates were on their way to develop a Cognitive Apprenticeship approach to
teaching, and three candidates were in the middle. The three cases in this paper represent these
three different categories of responses to the challenge of teaching school science.
We find that Jared dealt with students’ agency, as learners of school science, by containing and
diverting it away from the official space. Teaching activities and strategies chosen by him
established an official classroom discourse that was authoritative and sought to deny legitimacy
to students’ attempts to dialogically engage with the natural and social world as learners of
science. Student agency, thwarted in the official space then could only find expression in
unofficial, non-science related directions where it reflected students’ attempts to influence and
regain at least some measure of control over events in the social world (of the classroom). Thus,
we find that Jared was on its way to developing a primarily School Science patterns of practice in
constructing classroom learning environments wherein students were expected to respect the
teacher’s social and expert authority, accept the official school science version of nature,
participate in class activities as ordained by the teacher, complete work assigned to them, and
restrict their human agency to unofficial spaces. Students obviously found ways to infuse their
participation in the authoritative classroom discourse with their dialogic overtones. But this
dialogic engagement was more with the immediate social world than with nature, and thus didn’t
further their understanding of science and nature. Jared’s response to student agency in the
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classroom was in line with his official intentions, orientations and perspectives. Cases like Jared’s
are instructive in the sense that they afford educators insights about teacher candidates who find
traditional school science form of teaching practice appealing and thus resist reform oriented
cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching science. Such cases also afford us an understanding
of how many students when denied legitimate avenues of expression of their agency may tune off
learning school science from their personal agenda.
Lynn in contrast to Jared was much influenced by the cognitive apprenticeship approach to
science teaching. However, both her circumstances and her limited skills and knowledge often
militated against her success. In particular, she taught students who were more alienated, more
prone to expressions of agency in unsanctioned directions, and less prone to sanctioned
expressions of agency than Kendra’s or Jared’s students. As a result, Lynn could only manage to
construct a classroom learning environment where school science discourse tended to hegemonise
official social space. However, whenever students made an attempt to exercise their agency as
science learners, Lynn did encourage them to dialogically engage with the scientific discourse
and take the classroom dialogue in unscripted albeit productive directions. An unscripted
dialogue because of inherent uncertainties can be potentially disruptive and unproductive.
However, Lynn always managed to make such dialogic encounters meaningful and productive. It
was on these occasions that students expressed their agency by succeeding in making their own
discourses interact with the scientific discourse to create a classroom discourse marked with a
high level of dialogicality. At other times, however, students’ agency could find expression only
in the unofficial space, and often in form of resistance to or subversion of the official agenda of
the classroom. Lynn’s case highlights the strong need teacher candidates have for continued
support from their mentor teacher and the teacher education program in order to overcome
considerable challenges they face while teaching and learning to teach at the same time in a real
classroom.
Kendra in contrast to both Lynn and Jared had made substantial progress towards developing a
cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching and building classroom learning environment.
Kendra’s lesson plan as conceived invited students to exercise their agency as explorers of the
natural world, in the official space in the classroom. Kendra consistently prodded students to take
responsibility for their own learning. Her teaching strategies involved students learning through
scaffolded participation in inquiry and application activities, and sharing of personal ideas and
questions publicly. It also helped that the school circumstances Kendra was working under were
conducive to teaching for understanding and provided supporting resources. However, like most
other interns, Kendra too wasn’t always successful in translating her precepts into practice. Her
failures reflect the challenges of teaching science for understanding for novice teachers.
Cases of Jared, Lynn and Kendra are instructive in informing educators the necessary and
sufficient conditions needed to make cognitive apprenticeship approach to science teaching a
realizable goal for most novice teachers. Finally, viewing the teacher candidates’ classroom
learning environments from a student agency perspective helps us appreciate the role students
themselves play in co-constructing the learning environments in their own classrooms, and their
own learning experiences. This perspective also helps us understand students’ responses to what
the teacher does or doesn’t do in the classroom, and the role their responses play in their own
learning.
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