Learning Culture and Social Interaction最新文献

Family interactions constitute an arena for children's moral development: it is indeed through ordinary talk, and shared, task-oriented activities that children are socialized into moral orders and culturally informed ways of thinking and acting. Drawing on a video-based study on the everyday life of 19 middle-class families and adopting a discourse analytic approach, the paper sheds light on the socializing function of a domestic activity: homework. We illustrate that, when it unfolds as a family activity, the issues at stake go far beyond its school-oriented goals: homework provides ‘ethical affordances’ that make relevant moral talk whereby parents introduce children to some unquestioned principles such as homework must be done neatly and it is part of the child's duties. We contend that, by participating in morally loaded homework interactions, children are socialized not only into a school-aligned cultural list concerning what is right and what is wrong about homework, but moreover into a constitutive, taken-for-granted pillar of human sociality: the moral assessability of human conduct, i.e., its being subject to evaluations informed by the ‘right vs. wrong’ category. Implications for teacher training and parent education programs are discussed in the conclusion.

This conversation analytic paper explores how students in pair and groupwork tasks produce and respond to claims of insufficient knowledge (CIKs). Based on 7 h of video recordings of peer interaction from 18 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Czech secondary schools, we analyze how students express and negotiate their epistemic status using CIKs: when producing a CIK, the current speaker assumes a not-knowing status, thus making the imminent speaker change more relevant, as the next speaker then typically reveals his or her epistemic status. We also show that when a CIK is produced dyadic interactions in second position, the first speaker then produces a knowledge display response, or another CIK, resulting in abandoning the question, which differs from sequences that can be found in frontal teaching. The findings also show that CIKs can be used to resume task-related talk and initiate repair sequences focusing on language issues that the task comprises. Thus, CIKs can be viewed as central interactional resources for students to manage the task, i.e., to invite others to contribute, to resume their talk, or to abandon the current question, and to initiate repair sequences focusing on problematic items from the task.

This article describes the use of dialogic teaching in a rural Tibetan school in China. Using ethnographic data from a school that serves socially disadvantaged Tibetan youth, we demonstrate that dialogic teaching is a powerful pedagogy even in a resource-deprived learning environment. We describe how oral commentary, interpretive discussions, and debate form the core of effective school practices. Inspired by traditional monastic training, schoolteachers have transformed the century-long indigenous oral practices into a culturally-appropriate form of pedagogy, infusing it into modern academic subjects. This article aims to enrich the growing literature on dialogic teaching by presenting a case outside Anglo-American societies. We examine an indigenous form of dialogic teaching by considering Alexander (2017, 2020)'s framework. Our analysis shows that while the specific pedagogy is developed indigenously, it is compatible with the dialogic philosophy. The findings suggest that the dialogic approach is a general pedagogy rooted in distinctive human societies. However, indigenous development also limits the school practices to a small repertoire.

The critical role of teacher agency in curriculum reform among high school teachers remains under-researched. Drawing on an ecological perspective, this study investigated the difficulties senior high school EFL teachers faced and their agency enacted during the implementation of curriculum reform. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 senior high school EFL teachers in two developing regions of southern China, and qualitative content analysis was applied to analyze the data. The findings identified four key difficulties perceived by the teachers, and their passive or active agency enacted in response to diverse factors in the micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems. This study underscores the need to enhance EFL teachers' active agency to ensure equitable English education access for students in developing regions.

There is a call for more interactive and student-centred pedagogy in higher education. This also concerns physics laboratory work, where student investigations are too often passive repetitions of close-ended tasks with little guidance from teaching assistants. To address this gap, a laboratory course was designed to enhance active student participation and interaction between students and teaching assistants. A seminal part of the course was the whole-class teaching sessions within which students had the opportunity to reflect on and orientate towards experimental work. Whole-class teaching sessions of four physics laboratory teaching assistants were carefully explored to determine how student-centredness was apparent during these sessions. Particular attention was given to the interactions and communication between teacher assistants and students. The results revealed different ways in which student-centredness can be facilitated in physics laboratory settings through communication, including dialogic elements. These elements consisted of eliciting students' ideas and explicitly linking their experiences to the discussions. Teacher assistants with a pedagogical background implemented dialogic communicative approaches when orchestrating instructional dialogue and linking different activities. Implications for teacher assistant training are discussed.

The present study examines English language pedagogy as a Janus-faced phenomenon based on interviews with 40 English language teachers in one province of Pakistan. The study draws on Foucault's writings on power relations and agency. The findings suggest that besides disciplinary techniques of surveillance and examination, states of domination maintained through officially sanctioned discourses and apparatuses, teachers also seem to exercise their agency by engaging in struggles against the institutionalized discourses that underpin the very existential question, e.g., ‘who are we?’. Such a question facilitates learning experience of diverse learners in classrooms and help them negotiate their identities. The study has implications for the similar global contexts where state-led ELT education is often studied in terms of the dominant ideologies obscuring the fact that they are also sites of contestation. English classes thus can be viewed as fields of force relations where teachers exist in a strategic relation with textbook content and diversity of learners subject to the states of domination as well as capable of countering such dominations and social hegemonies.

A growing number of studies have investigated play in early childhood education, with some bringing forward the development of emotions in imaginary play situations. Of significance, is the creative pedagogy of play developed by Lindqvist (1995) who drew on a cultural-historical concept of play to bring forward emotions in Playworld. This paper investigates how children experience different perezhivanie within the Playworld settings in Indonesia. The cultural-historical concept of play, perezhivanie, and the social situation of development are used to understand how a 4-year-old boy experienced contradictions during collective imaginary play. Eight hours of digital-visual observation data selected from 98 h of group-play activities were used to show how nine teachers interacted with 38 children during the play (3.5 to 5 years old, mean age 4.4 years). The findings show how the cultural device used in the Playworld provides rich opportunities and conditions for children to experience different emotions in play, and where a dynamic perezhivanie emerges through the contributions of the play partners to the play that results in development of emotional regulation. By drawing attention to children's perezhivanie, Playworld can be seen as a promising play pedagogy that offers rich social interactions in play that support children's development.

This study aimed to investigate the instructor-student interactions in a secondary level mathematics teacher education course through a critical ethnographic perspective. Participants in the study were 16 pre-service teachers at one of the large midwestern universities in the U.S. The data for the study consists of the transcribed audio recordings collected in four classroom meetings as well as exclusive field notes. It was revealed as a result of the current study that negotiation - re-negotiation mechanisms mediate the communications, which occur in accordance with the lifeworlds of students and instructor while system subordinates the lifeworld of these actors through its two main roots, contractual and normative systemic relationships. In addition, the reflection of these relationships on the instruction was also discussed. It is highly suggested for future researchers to investigate these interactions with extended sample sizes as well as in different learning environments.