Transformations In Teachers’ Discourse About Their Students During A School-Led Pedagogic Intervention

Abstract

Many pedagogic interventions aim to counteract the problem of students' disengagement in learning but often fail to take into account the perceptions and practices of educational practitioners. In this article we analyse teachers' collaborative talk as an important part of developing school practices. We examine how teachers construct students' engagement as a goal of their work and how they, in the course of a research-based, school-led pedagogic intervention, begin to redefine this problem and their perceptions of their students. Using a discourse analytic framework, we analyse nine video-recorded group discussions with 30 teachers in a socially disadvantaged urban secondary school participating in a 2-year intervention study. The analysis focuses on teachers' talk of their students as the teachers constructed obstacles, preconditions and possibilities for the development of their work. We categorize the teachers' talk about their students' engagement as emphasising (1) Students as autonomous choice-makers; (2) Students as active doers and participants in school; and (3) Students as whole, embodied beings. During the intervention, teachers' talk shifted not only from negative to more positive talk of their students but also to seeing their students as more complex and embodied beings whose problems in school are not inevitable obstacles for classroom work but as something that the teachers can start to do something at. In this paper we call this change in teachers' talk as "envisioned ideology". In pedagogic interventions there need to be what we call "latent supporting factors" that can enable the development of this kind of "envisioned ideology".

Pedagogic change by Zambian primary school teachers participating in the OER4Schools professional development programme for one year

“…Noticing the effects of trying something new is also important for more sustained change (ibid. ; Rainio & Hofmann, 2015). An interesting question here is whether the new observations arising through trialling new pedagogic strategies can lead to challenging the shared values and norms of practice of the local setting (cf.…”

“…It is well established that CPD benefits from external expertise linked to school-based activities (Cordingley et al, 2003). This can help to avoid groups becoming overly inward looking, to expose them to new ideas, and to challenge local norms of practice and even shared values (Rainio & Hofmann, 2015). Recognising potential discordance in values may hereby act as a driver for change (Watson, 2014).…”

“…Using video non-prescriptively and using multiple instantiations of theory can help teachers to abstract and understand the underlying pedagogical principles (Randi and Corno, 2007, p.336-7); their interpretations may inform pedagogical decisions. However, making alternative values and pedagogical principles explicit is necessary to avoid interpretation within the confines of teachers' and schools' current frameworks of reference and cultural values (Rainio & Hofmann, 2015).…”

Challenges and opportunities for teacher professional development in interactive use of technology in African schools

“…We suggest that these affordances can be considered as latent supporting factors of the PD programme (Rainio & Hofmann, 2015). The PD programme facilitated and framed the discussions and infrastructures that made these new creative ways of thinking and action possible but they only came into being through the teachers' own active engagement with the programme.…”

Teacher interventions in small group work in secondary mathematics and science lessons

“…Such expectations cannot be simply ignored if participants are to remain able and motivated to take part. Such implicit contextual frameworks are often quite well established, and so they can make it difficult to change the ways teachers and students interact, even if there are good educational reasons for seeking such changes (Hofmann 2008;Rainio and Hofmann 2015).…”