Negotiation in classroom conversations: An examination of teacher and student engagement
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2023
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Educators are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity for providing students opportunities to engage in content-area dialogic talk, even when the conversation runs the risk of being emotionally uncomfortable. Students need the mindsets and skills to be able to enter into respectful dialogues with individuals from diverse backgrounds in order to find common ground where it exists, and to disagree civilly and productively where common ground is absent. For teachers to effectively facilitate these dialogues, they must make decisions in creating and designing spaces for talk to occur, effectively navigating challenges that arise during classroom talk. The literature suggests that teachers negotiate tensions in four key areas: (1) diminishing their experiences to honor students’ experiences, (2) developing a classroom culture and expectations conducive to dialogic inquiry, (3) balancing the linguistic and cognitive demands of rationality and argumentation with storytelling and humor, and (4) intervening effectively during talk time to provide support for students. Many teachers who are experienced facilitators can navigate these tensions in order to encourage productive student-centered conversations. However, the current body of literature lacks a framework to guide teachers in making these decisions. This dissertation explored the decision-making processes of five experienced teachers in secondary-level content areas in Hawaiʻi to develop a model of decision making for inexperienced teachers interested in learning how to similarly facilitate dialogic talk in their classrooms. Data were collected from audio recordings of intensive interviews to elicit a rich description of their teaching philosophies and experiences, their language use, and their relationships with their students. From these sources, the data were analyzed using qualitative methods blending tools to capture common themes. The analysis of interview data details the factors that enable these teachers to persevere in opening dialogic spaces despite the challenges, strategies they use to create conditions for productive talk, and ways in which they view the nature of teacher intervention during dialogues. The study concludes by generating a framework for decision making in which teachers use their knowledge of their students to flexibly set short-term cognitive, linguistic, and social emotional goals for student talk, moving students through successive stages of a spectrum ranging from teacher-controlled talk to student-led talk.
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