AUTORIDAD ADMINISTRATIVA DEL AGUA MARAÑÓN

1.4.1 Contexts and participants

Data for this study were collected from two secondary English class sections of a course taught by one teacher who valued the role of discussion as an instructional tool. I drew on

Although I was particularly interested in understanding how students were able to reflect on their

own learning during the interview, I was keenly aware of the influences of power dynamics and social desirability issues that may arise during such interviews. In the hopes of limiting the biasing effects of these forces, I sought to establish “conversational partnerships“ (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. 83) as I conducted responsive interviews, (Rubin & Rubin, 2005) with students, emphasizing the fact that I was interested in understanding what students meant rather than evaluating the accuracy of their responses.

recommendations from teacher educators to identify the teacher for this study. Using the Student Background Survey (Appendix D), I identified six focal students (three students in each condition) whose participation in this study I traced closely throughout the investigation. Focal students in this study had to have turned in their consent forms, completed the Student Background Survey, and attend classes regularly.

1.4.2 Procedures

Prior to the implementation of multimodal projects and classroom discussions that were the foci of my analyses in the treatment condition, I collected data from multiple sources sources during the first four weeks of the study to provide a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of each classroom condition as a sociocultural context in which the students’ and the teacher’s epistemological stances toward learning were revealed through the everyday interactions that occurred in each classroom setting. During the first half of the semester, I (a) observed two class meetings per section, (b) videotaped and transcribed two whole class discussion of literature, (c) distributed Student Background Surveys, and (d) wrote field notes focusing specifically on the norms for interaction in each classroom context (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995).

During the second half of the semester, I examined the implementation of three cycles of multimodal or unimodal project work, followed by whole class discussions. For each cycle, I (a) audiotaped planning and debriefing meetings with the teacher, (b) audiotaped, videotaped, transcribed, and coded small group multimodal or unimodal project work to examine how

students mediated and transmediated literary understandings in each condition,2

1.4.3 Data sources

(c) videotaped, transcribed, and coded whole class discussions, and (d) conducted end-of-the-semester interviews with three focal students in each condition.

Data sources in this study included the following: (a) video and transcripts from three cycles of small group multimodal and unimodal collaborative activities, (b) video and transcripts from three whole class discussions in both conditions, (c) interview transcripts with focal students in each condition, (d) field notes from classroom observations during the first half of the semester, (e) transcripts from planning and debriefing meetings with the secondary English teacher, (f) student data from a background survey in which students reported their out-of-school and multimodal literacies, and (g) students’ multimodal and unimodal project work. Data sources “c,” “d,” “e,” and “f” were used to triangulate data collected through analyses of small group and whole class discussions and students’ multimodal and unimodal project work.

1.4.4 Description of data analysis and interpretation

Data analysis was ongoing throughout the study. During the first half of the semester, I drew on my field notes, Student Background Survey, and selected classroom discussion transcripts to describe the discourse environment of the two classrooms that I studied. I shared these findings

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I videotaped focal students while all other small groups were given digital voice recorders to use while they work collaboratively. One digital video recorder was also set up so as to capture the entire class from a stationary position in the classroom.

with the classroom teacher in preparation for the implementation of students’ multimodal or unimodal projects and the subsequent dialogic discussions.

For the first two cycles of project work, students in the multimodal condition engaged in collaborative multimodal activities followed by whole class discussions of literature. During the final cycle, however, students who had previously completed collaborative multimodal activities prior to whole class literary discussions completed collaborative unimodal activities before they participated in a whole class discussion of literature. Students who had completed collaborative unimodal activities during the first two cycles of this study completed a collaborative multimodal project during the last cycle. This design decision allowed me to analyze the particular role that the modality of the collaborative activity played in shaping students’ talk during these classroom activities as well as the whole class literary discussions that followed.

I transcribed and coded students’ talk during small group multimodal and unimodal project work using the scheme provided in Appendix B. The dialogic or monologic character of whole class discussions was determined using the dialogic engagement coding scheme provided in Appendix A. Finally, interviews, field notes, planning and debriefing meetings with the teacher, and students’ multimodal and unimodal products triangulated findings that emerged from my classroom discourse analyses.

Transcribed data were uploaded to a Microsoft Excel worksheet. Each turn at talk comprised a row in the worksheet. Each teacher turn received one code from Appendix A. When two or more codes were appropriate, the code that best captured the essence of the discursive move was used. Student turns at talk received three codes. First, student turns were coded for the discursive move that described the turn at talk (e.g., uptake, challenge, elaborate, etc.). Next,

made (inference, prior knowledge, or text). Finally, student turns were coded for the types of reasoning that were provided during students’ responses during the whole class discussion (character, event, hypothetical, personal, or language). The coding scheme was adjusted as it became clear that some codes were never used while other codes overlapped consistently with one another in these particular transcripts. Overlapping codes were subsumed under other codes or eliminated altogether. A doctoral student in education and I met to discuss the codes and practiced coding one transcript together. The doctoral student and I then coded and debriefed two additional transcripts before inter-rater reliability was established at an appropriate level (.70). During these meetings codes were refined to most faithfully represent participants’ meanings. After inter-rater reliability was established, I coded the remaining whole class discussion transcripts for dialogic engagement.