Teaching and Learning Research Programme
Annual Conference Papers
5th Annual Conference, 22-24 November 2004
Cardiff Marriott Hotel
Naturalistic Observation of Small Group Work in Key Stage 1 Classrooms.
Part 1:The Social Semiotic Landscape of the Primary Classroom
Steve Hodgkinson
University of Brighton
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Naturalistic Observation of Small Group Work in Key Stage 1 Classrooms. Part 1:The Social Semiotic Landscape of the Primary Classroom
The physical environment of the classroom is one of many diverse social contexts encountered by a child; recognisable in many shapes and forms across the world, its core features have remained essentially unchanged throughout centuries of concomitant social change. Whilst such durability stands as a powerful testament to the success of the classroom as a mode of social organisation and learning (Kushner, Simon et al. 2001), it is also indicative of how decades of curriculum research, innovation and reform have failed to significantly change the fundamental organisational principles of the classroom (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999). Although as a physical environment classrooms vary enormously, they all seem to possess the same essential features that vividly reflect the discontinuities of power and authority that shape classroom organisational practices (Galton, Simon et al. 1980); (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999); (Hastings 2002), that legitimate teacher control of classroom ‘dialogue’ (Barnes 1976); (Mehan 1979); (Wood and Wood 1984); (Denscombe 1985); (Brierley, Cassar et al. 1992), that establish and enforce the rules governing the ownership, organisation and negotiation of knowledge, and what should be claimed as ‘valued’ knowledge (Cullingford 1991). This presentation will outline some of the social semiotic determinants of effective group work in of Key Stage 1 classrooms that have emerged from a series of naturalistic observations undertaken over a period of 2 years.
Classrooms reflect to a greater or lesser extent, the dominant contemporary issues that society engages with. They illuminate debates regarding the social stratification of discourse and the disenfranchisement of certain groups of children (Bernstein 1973)(Gregory and Williams 2000); gender inequalities in talk in the classroom that reflect wider (gender-based) societal inequalities (Swann and Graddol 1994), the negative impact that political imperatives have had upon the nurturing of relationships in the classroom (Osborn 1997); (Galton and Fogelman 1998), and the value of ‘unofficial literacies’(Delpit 1988); (Biggs and Edwards 1991); (Gregory 1999). At a macro level, such discontinuities are predicated upon, and reinforced by the reproduction and reification of middle and upper class values in schools (Bernstein 1971), and the way in which these ‘accoutrements of the culture of power’(Delpit 1988), remain hidden from the majority, and only accessible by the few. At a micro level, these reified values cause asymmetries in the classroom, where some pupils (and adults) hold tacit knowledge not available to others. Douglas Barnes and Frankie Todd describe how this ‘ control of relevance’ is placed in the hands of dominant individuals (during pupil – pupil or teacher - pupil dialogue) and how this effectively determines who may participate in or is excluded from classroom dialogue, and crucially, frames what is deemed suitable for discussion (Barnes and Todd 1977).
These discontinuities drive the currents, and establish the counter-currents of human socialisation. Pierre Bourdieu suggested that these discontinuities are deeply enshrined in extant social structures, and act in a way that very effectively casts the conditions for their reproduction (Bourdieu 1977). The social groups that coalesce around such social structures (the boundaries of which seem mainly to reflect the delineations established by social class) are therefore schooled in competencies that reinforce certain discourses (identity, gender, culture, education etc.), and determine which social and cultural capital available to them. Education is just one form of social reproduction, with its own social mediations and processes. Some social groups are effectively disenfranchised from educational opportunities by pre-existing social inequalities, which allow them only a limited access to (and accumulation of) social and cultural capital. As Basil Bernstein suggested in his article ‘Education Cannot Compensate for Society’(Bernstein 1970), the challenge for a deficit model of education, which is based upon certain cultural (and essentially middle class) values, is not to make assumptions about the value of certain sources of knowledge over others, which effectively disenfranchise some children from participating fully in the discourse of the classroom.
‘ If the culture of the teacher is to become part of the consciousness of the child, then the culture of the child must first be in the consciousness of the teacher’(Bernstein 1970)
In the context of the classroom, Lisa Delpit suggests that such inequalities are realised through a ‘culture of power’, with its own codes / rules of participation, and which reflect the rules of those that have the power (and she adds, ‘that are usually the least aware or perhaps least willing to acknowledge this power’) (Delpit 1988). This can, and often does lead to a hiatus in the dialogic process, what she calls a ‘silenced dialogue’, where certain social groups become effectively disenfranchised from the decision making process. She argues that these children needed to have access to, and also (critically) an awareness of the ‘codes’ in order to participate fully in mainstream education. A range of different discursive styles codes, and strategies are evident in the classroom (Biggs and Edwards 1991). The sociocultural origins of these styles, codes and strategies, lay their effective social stratification (Hymes 1971), and Hymes, and others have suggested (Malinowski 1923); (Gumperz 1971) that certain social groups are able to develop a colloquial language that has the same functionality, but parallels, and is distinct from the ‘mainstream’.
All language (or more appropriately discourse) then, has implicit situational and cultural cues. In this sense at least, the term ‘code’ used by Delpit, seems to extend the concept of linguistic codes developed by Bernstein and Hymes (Bernstein 1971); (Hymes 1971) and adapted in the work of Labov, to incorporate a much more explicit link with the later concept of discursive practice (Foucault 1977), where a tacit selection of appropriate discourses appropriate for a particular occasion is made by the individual (Labov 1966). Delpit suggests that the relative success of this alternative style in terms of negotiating meaning, is contingent on them (the ‘speakers’ of the code) being able to acknowledge and negotiate their own expertness (and here I draw the attention of the reader to Lave and Wenger’s notion of legitimate peripheral participation.
Further Defining the Classroom Environment
Robin Alexander has argued that certain issues raised by studying classrooms, seem removed from the influence of their cultural or geographical location. For example, he asks ‘how does one characterise the ‘typical’ whilst at the same time preserving the authentic’? He suggests that this is possible, that is to ‘capture’ both the insightful and the typical aspects of classroom ‘life’, but only if the researcher is prepared to acknowledge that cultural norms and imperatives have a powerful influence on the character of classroom ‘life’, and at the same time also be open to, (and part of) the varied forms of communication and interaction that occur in the classroom (Alexander 2000). Thus, in any social semiotic analysis of classrooms, we need to clearly identify these two facets of classroom ‘life’. First, we must make conceptually explicit just what is meant when we talk about ‘classrooms’. Are we in fact just talking about the bounded physical space in a ‘typical’ school, or are we talking about any virtual or physical space? And second, and perhaps more importantly for those of us interested in the nature of discourse, we need to recognise the enormous diversity of opportunities for meaning making, and adopt a concept of the classroom where we challenge, modify or even abandon competing discourses? Thus the classroom may be seen as a transient and dynamic discursive space, what Gunther Kress calls;
“…the material expression of the motivated (cognitive and affective) choices of teachers and students from among the meaning-making resources available in a particular situation….at a given time”
(Kress, Jewitt et al. 2001)
Therefore it seems evident that to understand how meaning is signed and signified in the classroom, we have to first understand how different layers of contextual complexity are interwoven into the discursive practices of the classroom, and how these layers conflate in the negotiation of meaning that takes place therein. For example, the starting point of a Key Stage 1 classroom represents a ‘physical space’ that can be observed and annotated, where the temporality of space and action can be characterised; and where we might search for the ‘interactional choreography’ that facilitates the situated negotiation of meaning and the transformation of identities.
Classroom Discourse as a Dimension of Negotiated Meaning
From a sociocultural standpoint, the attribution of negotiation of meaning and identity transformation extends to a much wider context than the physical space of the classroom. The classroom is just one of a ‘constellation’ of discourses a child engages with, and these discourses are diverse, there may well overlap in terms of membership, or they may exhibit commonalities of practice, temporality or physical location, they may have distinct ‘boundaries’ or seem to coalesce. The negotiation of meaning in the classroom is the result of an amalgamation of all these discourses, each child contributing (brokering), to a greater or lesser extent, situated meanings from many different discourses, some of which overlap with other children in the class, some which do not. We should also start with a working definition of discourse. In its narrowest sense, discourse refers to the ‘spoken and written forms of language use as social practice’(Wood and Kroger 2000), and the way in which social perspectives are syntactically (through social structures) and semantically (in metaphorical narrative) embedded in discourse (Sacks 1984). Discourse in a broader sense may be viewed as a socially constructed knowledge of reality that moves beyond language to encompass different (extant) semiotic modes, and is also evolutionary as new discourses may develop from transformations of existing modes of representation (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). This perhaps better characterises the complex contribution of social, cognitive and pedagogic processes to any observed discourses in the classroom, in broader terms the concept of a ‘community of discourse’, and how it might be established in the classroom (Swales 1990). Wenger developed a sociocultural theory of learning from his work on the concept of communities of practice, and identified four underlying components (meaning, practice, community and identity). His observations suggest that the identification of characteristics representing the three theoretical dimensions of a CoP (mutual engagement, negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire of resources) would provide a useful starting point when designing an analytical framework for observations conducted in the context of the classroom, and to the influence of social background of the learners on their participation in the community of practice (Perret-Clermont 1980); (Bell, Grossen et al. 1985)
Bernstein’s characterisation of the communication that occurs in different social groups (shaped as it was by indicators such as social status, occupational function, communal bonds, collective rather than individual action, physical manipulation and control rather than symbolic organisation and control), led him to suggest that in certain (lower socioeconomic) groups there was an emphasis placed on the verbal exposition of communal rather than individual identity, of the practical rather than abstract (Bernstein 1975). Although the narrow socioeconomic definition of social groups used by Bernstein would need extending to incorporate more directly other mediators of identity such as culture and religion, nevertheless, it does suggest that the discontinuities that arise between home and school discourses, may be the result of the members of these groups having to realign rather than to renegotiate their identities.
Thus an exploration of the concept of identity is critical to further understanding the underlying processes of collective, negotiated meaning. Wenger (Wenger 1998) posits identity as a ‘nexus of multi-membership’, a composite of our negotiated experiences of the world, and reflecting, like the changing landscapes of a long journey, our passage through life. As such, the notion of identity is more than just a reification of the social discourses of different communities, which often represents their ‘public’ persona, but also the participation in and (lived) experience of being a member of these different communities. Identity represents a duality of identification (investment of the self by association with and differentiations within various practices) and negotiability (the degree to which we become invested in, and are able to fashion meaning making). Sometimes, these elements of identity do in fact seem to coalesce, and become something tangible. For example, in Life Narratives (which may be viewed in this context as a reflection of our individual trajectories through the various CoPs we are members of) often include (retrospectively) the ‘logical steps’ that we assume were necessarily there, and that represented coherence and closure at different times in our lives (Linde 1993).
There is no doubt however, that whatever perspective we view discourse from, the view is contextual and dialogic in nature (Bakhtin 1981). Traditionally, socio-cognitive research has focussed upon the individual’s role in the ‘interpretation’ of competing discourses, whether alone or as a member of a group, and not, with a few exceptions, on the group as a collective (Doise and Mugny 1984)(DeVries 1997). Thus the social context is seen, essentially as Piaget had suggested in his earlier work (Piaget 1932) as an arena for the individual to structure their own understanding by comparing and interpreting their views against the views of others (relational and social decentring) (Perret-Clermont 1980); (Smith 1993); (Mackie and Smith 1998). Previous work by Doise and Mugny suggested that the contrasting views held by children about the same concept or event, lead to a cycle of socio-cognitive conflict, conflict resolution and subsequent cognitive restructuring. In this way, the intentional learning of an individual occurs in two phases; first (interpersonally) through interaction with other people or artefacts, a dynamic that establishes what Vygotsky has termed the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This ZPD represents a period of intellectual reciprocity consistent with Doise and Mugny’s conflict – resolution stage. Second, there is an intrapersonal phase (cognitive restructuring) where new knowledge is incorporated into the individuals’ cognition (Vygotsky 1978); (Tharp and Gallimore 1988). Whilst it is apparent from his writing that Vygotsky placed great emphasis than Piaget on the primacy of the social world over the individual (and the importance of cultural tools and artefacts) for cognitive development (Cole and Wertsch 1996), the lack of a collective context for learning in his ‘sociocultural’ theories of cognitive development is problematic.
From a socio-cultural perspective, all human endeavour is viewed as intrinsically social, and the synthesis of, alignment to, and reproduction of competing discourses then becomes situated in the context of the group rather than the individual. Here group is used in its most informal sense to represent a practice, a community, a coalescence of identities. Groups are not therefore identified by rigid boundaries of size, location, time or style, but by the negotiation of, and participation in meaning making, they are the simultaneous articulation of structure and discontinuity. The meaning making that occurs in these ‘communities of practice’ is thus a transformation, reflecting changing participation in and alignment to the discourse(s) of the community. If meaning making then refers to our changing ability to engage in different discourses that delineate and structure our ‘world’, what is such engagement contingent upon?
James Gee (Gee 1992) talks about semantic mediational theories (mediating between words and the world) as being essentially ideological (involving assumptions about ‘value’, tacit or otherwise), setting up as they do central and marginal cases, hierarchies of experiences, things, and people. These are essentially cultural models (Holland and Quinn 1987) that establish definitions and norms, but they also reveal counter definitions and identities that are ‘threats’ to the norms of a culture (Holland and Skinner 1987). By a process of heurisis, or what Tharp calls the ‘Great Cycle of Social Sorting’(Tharp, Estrada et al. 2000) some practices become accepted, privileged and protected (enshrined as social practices by those that are not marginalised by them, and in turn creating (inducing) the cultural models). Social practices, and the cues that are aligned with them, vary across both social groups and across time (Rogoff and Lave 1984)(Giddens 1991). They form ‘threads’ running through the different discourses we participate in (discourses are interpreted here to include people, tools and artefacts, ways of talking and interacting, values and interpretations) that might sometimes coalesce into broader notions, such as say success(Gee 1992).
Practice then is about shaping and reshaping of shared historical and social resources. Situated social practices provide nested and hierarchical apprenticeships (for example, the social practice of reading at home acts as an apprenticeship into the social practice of literature) that are shaped by complex and reciprocal patterns of discourse. That these social practices moderate, and are in turn moderated by different discourses, is a reflection of the way in which discourses too are ideological (related to the distribution of power and the hierarchical structures present in society) (Gee 1996). Bernstein observed that ‘how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates educational knowledge it considers public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’ (Bernstein 1975). The ‘validation’ of particular forms of educational knowledge is illustrated in what Bernstein calls the ‘collected curriculum’, and exemplified for example in contemporary primary education by the discourses that underpin the National Literacy Strategy, and in the dominant discourses of the education system which deny the value of home or school communities of practice, their rich social and cultural capital, and where the spontaneous use of genres, registers and other symbolic transformations that are characteristic of children’s play are much more widely exhibited (Wood 2002).