5.1 “TECHNICALLY, I’M THE ONE WHO CAME UP WITH THE GROUP.”
The data analysis generated three major findings about how student interactions led to the development of a classroom culture of reading and writing in which students introduced academic talk into social spaces and social talk into academic spaces. Underscoring students’ social and academic talk was a consistent expectation of demonstrating respect and care for all members of their classroom community. Through the literacy practices in which the students engaged, they reshaped the originally social expectations of Morning Meeting Share to incorporate academic endeavors, and they reshaped the originally academic expectations of Academic Choice to incorporate social endeavors. Of course, the students did not co-construct their classroom culture without their teacher. Therefore, although I try to maintain the focus on students in this chapter, I also briefly examine how Mrs. Cooper contributed to some of the developing storylines.
5.1.1 Finding
The first finding is that, in this classroom, storylines of joint intellectual curiosity and of student authorship helped to alter the participation structures of Morning Meeting Share. I use the term,
teacher as well) engaged everyone in the class in discussion to gather more information about something that was of interest to them. Thus, the storyline of joint intellectual curiosity describes how the force of students’ and Mrs. Cooper’s speech acts positioned speakers and listeners as working together (jointly) in order to objectively examine something about which they were curious. Usually, the topic of discussion pertained to content matter they were learning in school. Specifically, student interactions during Share led to a shift from talk that focused solely on socially driven topics, to talk that included academically driven topics. Additionally, through student interactions around informational texts and student-written fiction texts—brought from home for Share—students took up positions as readers, authors, and idea exchangers. This finding aligns with Dyson’s (1993) findings about students, to borrow a term she used throughout that book, “composing” themselves into the various worlds of their classroom through the use of different tools of interaction. Finally, along with the positions that students in my study took up, storylines developed in which the books that students wrote were afforded similar authority to that of published trade books. I will examine this finding in detail in section 5.2.
5.1.2 Second Finding
The second finding, which I will unpack in section 5.3, is that collaborating with peers to write became a major part of the classroom culture. Storylines of mentorship, friendship, and group membership developed along with student individual positions as experts, esteemed writers, leaders, and dissenters. Thus, writing was not confined to particular spaces and times, nor was it an activity that students separated from other academic and social areas of their school day. Rather, writing afforded students ways to explore the real drama and play of their daily life in
school. Through consistent writing collaborations, students negotiated social norms of what was acceptable behavior between friends. Also, through consistent writing collaborations, the students in my study negotiated how to define their groups, which did not always end in agreement. For example, the quote, “Technically, I’m the one who came up with the group,” was spoken as one group, that had originally been close-knit, was in the process of unraveling. My second finding aligns with Dyson’s (2003) findings about writing as a social activity that encompasses a range of complicated social work done by children. At the same time, however, my finding is a somewhat inverted version of Dyson’s (1989) finding that the children in that particular study used their social interactions to eventually negotiate their writing. Simply put, social practices informed writing practices. In my study, the children took writing into social spaces, or to once again put it simply, writing practices informed social practices.
I want to be careful here that my juxtaposition does not simplify the work that the children in Dyson’s (1989) study and in my own study did or simplifies the reported findings. This is not a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg—or, in this case, the writing or the socializing. At the heart of why the children in my study grew so keen on writing were social practices that made writing appealing. When the students in my study wrote independently, they had the expectation that they would share their writing with peers in a safe and encouraging space. Even those students who told me in one-on-one interviews that they did not often share their writing said that they enjoyed collaborating with peers to write. Students also expressed that they enjoyed trying to make their writing better by incorporating strategies learned in writing workshop mini-lessons, and that they enjoyed writing about things they had learned, read, and experienced. Thus, students wrote to explore that which they knew or that interested them. They collaborated to write to further enhance that exploration.
5.1.3 Third Finding
The third finding, which I will examine more closely in section 5.4, is that positioning analyses of student interactions show that students appropriated language from various sources— including texts, the teacher, and each other— most commonly across data and over time while enacting storylines of care and acceptance, of literacy-based talk and exploration, and of gaining social and/or academic influence. In alignment with the efforts that Mrs. Cooper made to help shape the classroom community into one that valued respect and care, storylines around kindness and acceptance were more prevalent across interactions than storylines around power in terms of any students claiming or exerting more speaking rights than any of their peers. Unlike previous research findings on I-R-E structures (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) in which the teachers initiated talk with a question related to the academic content matter, students gave responses, and the teachers evaluated students’ responses (Cazden, 1988; Mehan, 1979), Mrs. Cooper’s follow- up turns at talk were not evaluative in nature. Instead, she generally offered another Initiation in the form of a question, or she repeated, with no evaluative language, what a student had just said. She positioned herself as more of an interested listener than an evaluator. Additionally, she also used I-R-I in order to scaffold student discussions about what respectful and caring talk and actions looked and sounded like. I argue that the time that Mrs. Cooper spent on social talk, in addition to academic talk, contributed significantly to the apparent lack of power positions in this classroom community. Given other research findings that students tend to use instances of social interaction during instruction in order to gain or assert power (Orellana, 1996; Zacher, 2008), this finding from my study may bear significant relevance for examining how to most effectively prepare students to engage in academic talk in ways that are respectful of everyone and that place all members of the classroom community on equal footing.
Throughout this study, I have used the term, classroom culture, to describe the simultaneously nominal and verbal (Heath & Street, 2008) ways in which students engage in talk and activity that establishes norms for membership within their classroom community. Nominally, a classroom culture is a thing to which students belong. Verbally, students in a classroom culture each other as part of belonging. Students in any classroom use available cultural tools that are both semiotic (such as language) and material (such as physical items like tables and chairs) to interact in particular ways. Through those interactions, students either maintain the meaning of or redefine the cultural tools in their classroom community. Students’ use of tools leads to a history of interactions, and in this manner, students’ interactions simultaneously shape and are shaped by their ever-evolving classroom culture. The students in this study used books, language posted around the room and spoken by the teacher, meeting structures, and classroom spaces in order to define their classroom culture as one in which they were all valued contributors to the reading and writing practices in which they engaged. In this chapter, I describe detailed interactions and patterns across students and time to demonstrate how the three major findings help to define the classroom culture of my study.