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 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 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).
(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) / Parentheses enclosing text contain notes, usually about contextual and nonverbal information.( ) / Empty parentheses indicate unintelligible words or phrases.
abc / An underlined word indicates a stressed word.
ABC / A capitalized word or phrase indicates increased volume
… / 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.