Download Starting from a sociocultural perspective on learning

Teaching and Learning Research Programme
Annual Conference Papers
5th Annual Conference, 22-24 November 2004
Cardiff Marriott Hotel
Naturalistic Observation of Small Group Work in Key Stage 1 Classrooms.
Part 1: The Social Semiotic Landscape of the Primary Classroom
Steve Hodgkinson
University of Brighton
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Naturalistic Observation of Small Group Work in Key Stage 1 Classrooms . Part 1: The
Social Semiotic Landscape of the Primary Classroom
The physical environment of the classroom is one of many diverse social contexts encountered by a child; recognisable in many shapes
and forms across the world, its core features have remained essentially unchanged throughout centuries of concomitant social change.
Whilst such durability stands as a powerful testament to the success of the classroom as a mode of social organisation and learning
(Kushner, Simon et al. 2001), it is also indicative of how decades of curriculum research, innovation and reform have failed to significantly
change the fundamental organisational principles of the classroom (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999). Although as a physical environment
classrooms vary enormously, they all seem to possess the same essential features that vividly reflect the discontinuities of power and
authority that shape classroom organisational practices (Galton, Simon et al. 1980); (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999); (Hastings 2002), that
legitimate teacher control of classroom ‘dialogue’ (Barnes 1976); (Mehan 1979); (Wood and Wood 1984); (Denscombe 1985); (Brierley,
Cassar et al. 1992), that establish and enforce the rules governing the ownership, organisation and negotiation of knowledge, and what
should be claimed as ‘valued’ knowledge (Cullingford 1991). This presentation will outline some of the social semiotic determinants of
effective group work in of Key Stage 1 classrooms that have emerged from a series of naturalistic observations undertaken over a period of
2 years.
Classrooms reflect to a greater or lesser extent, the dominant contemporary issues that
society engages with. They illuminate debates regarding the social stratification of discourse
and the disenfranchisement of certain groups of children (Bernstein 1973) (Gregory and
Williams 2000); gender inequalities in talk in the classroom that reflect wider (gender-based)
societal inequalities (Swann and Graddol 1994), the negative impact that political
imperatives have had upon the nurturing of relationships in the classroom (Osborn 1997);
(Galton and Fogelman 1998), and the value of ‘unofficial literacies’ (Delpit 1988); (Biggs and
Edwards 1991); (Gregory 1999). At a macro level, such discontinuities are predicated upon,
and reinforced by the reproduction and reification of middle and upper class values in
schools (Bernstein 1971), and the way in which these ‘accoutrements of the culture of power’
(Delpit 1988), remain hidden from the majority, and only accessible by the few. At a micro
level, these reified values cause asymmetries in the classroom, where some pupils (and
adults) hold tacit knowledge not available to others. Douglas Barnes and Frankie Todd
describe how this ‘ control of relevance’ is placed in the hands of dominant individuals
(during pupil – pupil or teacher - pupil dialogue) and how this effectively determines who may
participate in or is excluded from classroom dialogue, and crucially, frames what is deemed
suitable for discussion (Barnes and Todd 1977).
These discontinuities drive the currents, and establish the counter-currents of human
socialisation. Pierre Bourdieu suggested that these discontinuities are deeply enshrined in
extant social structures, and act in a way that very effectively casts the conditions for their
reproduction (Bourdieu 1977). The social groups that coalesce around such social structures
(the boundaries of which seem mainly to reflect the delineations established by social class)
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are therefore schooled in competencies that reinforce certain discourses (identity, gender,
culture, education etc.), and determine which social and cultural capital available to them.
Education is just one form of social reproduction, with its own social mediations and
processes. Some social groups are effectively disenfranchised from educational
opportunities by pre-existing social inequalities, which allow them only a limited access to
(and accumulation of) social and cultural capital. As Basil Bernstein suggested in his article
‘Education Cannot Compensate for Society’ (Bernstein 1970), the challenge for a deficit
model of education, which is based upon certain cultural (and essentially middle class)
values, is not to make assumptions about the value of certain sources of knowledge over
others, which effectively disenfranchise some children from participating fully in the
discourse of the classroom.
‘ If the culture of the teacher is to become part of the consciousness of the child, then the
culture of the child must first be in the consciousness of the teacher’ (Bernstein 1970)
In the context of the classroom, Lisa Delpit suggests that such inequalities are realised
through a ‘culture of power’, with its own codes / rules of participation, and which reflect the
rules of those that have the power (and she adds, ‘that are usually the least aware or
perhaps least willing to acknowledge this power’) (Delpit 1988). This can, and often does
lead to a hiatus in the dialogic process, what she calls a ‘silenced dialogue’, where certain
social groups become effectively disenfranchised from the decision making process. She
argues that these children needed to have access to, and also (critically) an awareness of
the ‘codes’ in order to participate fully in mainstream education. A range of different
discursive styles codes, and strategies are evident in the classroom (Biggs and Edwards
1991). The sociocultural origins of these styles, codes and strategies, lay their effective
social stratification (Hymes 1971), and Hymes, and others have suggested (Malinowski
1923); (Gumperz 1971) that certain social groups are able to develop a colloquial language
that has the same functionality, but parallels, and is distinct from the ‘mainstream’.
All language (or more appropriately discourse) then, has implicit situational and cultural
cues. In this sense at least, the term ‘code’ used by Delpit, seems to extend the concept of
linguistic codes developed by Bernstein and Hymes (Bernstein 1971); (Hymes 1971) and
adapted in the work of Labov, to incorporate a much more explicit link with the later concept
of discursive practice (Foucault 1977), where a tacit selection of appropriate discourses
appropriate for a particular occasion is made by the individual (Labov 1966). Delpit suggests
that the relative success of this alternative style in terms of negotiating meaning, is
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contingent on them (the ‘speakers’ of the code) being able to acknowledge and negotiate
their own expertness (and here I draw the attention of the reader to Lave and Wenger’s
notion of legitimate peripheral participation.
Further Defining the Classroom Environment
Robin Alexander has argued that certain issues raised by studying classrooms, seem
removed from the influence of their cultural or geographical location. For example, he asks
‘how does one characterise the ‘typical’ whilst at the same time preserving the authentic’?
He suggests that this is possible, that is to ‘capture’ both the insightful and the typical
aspects of classroom ‘life’, but only if the researcher is prepared to acknowledge that cultural
norms and imperatives have a powerful influence on the character of classroom ‘life’, and at
the same time also be open to, (and part of) the varied forms of communication and
interaction that occur in the classroom (Alexander 2000). Thus, in any social semiotic
analysis of classrooms, we need to clearly identify these two facets of classroom ‘life’. First,
we must make conceptually explicit just what is meant when we talk about ‘classrooms’. Are
we in fact just talking about the bounded physical space in a ‘typical’ school, or are we
talking about any virtual or physical space? And second, and perhaps more importantly for
those of us interested in the nature of discourse, we need to recognise the enormous
diversity of opportunities for meaning making, and adopt a concept of the classroom where
we challenge, modify or even abandon competing discourses? Thus the classroom may be
seen as a transient and dynamic discursive space, what Gunther Kress calls;
“…the material expression of the motivated (cognitive and affective) choices of teachers and
students from among the meaning-making resources available in a particular situation….at a
given time”
(Kress, Jewitt et al. 2001)
Therefore it seems evident that to understand how meaning is signed and signified in the
classroom, we have to first understand how different layers of contextual complexity are
interwoven into the discursive practices of the classroom, and how these layers conflate in
the negotiation of meaning that takes place therein. For example, the starting point of a Key
Stage 1 classroom represents a ‘physical space’ that can be observed and annotated, where
the temporality of space and action can be characterised; and where we might search for the
‘interactional choreography’ that facilitates the situated negotiation of meaning and the
transformation of identities.
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Classroom Discourse as a Dimension of Negotiated Meaning
From a sociocultural standpoint, the attribution of negotiation of meaning and identity
transformation extends to a much wider context than the physical space of the classroom.
The classroom is just one of a ‘constellation’ of discourses a child engages with, and these
discourses are diverse, there may well overlap in terms of membership, or they may exhibit
commonalities of practice, temporality or physical location, they may have distinct
‘boundaries’ or seem to coalesce. The negotiation of meaning in the classroom is the result
of an amalgamation of all these discourses, each child contributing (brokering), to a greater
or lesser extent, situated meanings from many different discourses, some of which overlap
with other children in the class, some which do not. We should also start with a working
definition of discourse. In its narrowest sense, discourse refers to the ‘spoken and written
forms of language use as social practice’ (Wood and Kroger 2000), and the way in which
social perspectives are syntactically (through social structures) and semantically (in
metaphorical narrative) embedded in discourse (Sacks 1984). Discourse in a broader sense
may be viewed as a socially constructed knowledge of reality that moves beyond language
to encompass different (extant) semiotic modes, and is also evolutionary as new discourses
may develop from transformations of existing modes of representation (Kress and van
Leeuwen 2001). This perhaps better characterises the complex contribution of social,
cognitive and pedagogic processes to any observed discourses in the classroom, in broader
terms the concept of a ‘community of discourse’, and how it might be established in the
classroom (Swales 1990). Wenger developed a sociocultural theory of learning from his work
on the concept of communities of practice, and identified four underlying components
(meaning, practice, community and identity). His observations suggest that the identification
of characteristics representing the three theoretical dimensions of a CoP (mutual
engagement, negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire of resources) would provide a
useful starting point when designing an analytical framework for observations conducted in
the context of the classroom, and to the influence of social background of the learners on
their participation in the community of practice (Perret-Clermont 1980); (Bell, Grossen et al.
1985)
Bernstein’s characterisation of the communication that occurs in different social groups
(shaped as it was by indicators such as social status, occupational function, communal
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bonds, collective rather than individual action, physical manipulation and control rather than
symbolic organisation and control), led him to suggest that in certain (lower socioeconomic)
groups there was an emphasis placed on the verbal exposition of communal rather than
individual identity, of the practical rather than abstract (Bernstein 1975). Although the narrow
socioeconomic definition of social groups used by Bernstein would need extending to
incorporate more directly other mediators of identity such as culture and religion,
nevertheless, it does suggest that the discontinuities that arise between home and school
discourses, may be the result of the members of these groups having to realign rather than
to renegotiate their identities.
Thus an exploration of the concept of identity is critical to further understanding the
underlying processes of collective, negotiated meaning. Wenger (Wenger 1998) posits
identity as a ‘nexus of multi-membership’, a composite of our negotiated experiences of the
world, and reflecting, like the changing landscapes of a long journey, our passage through
life. As such, the notion of identity is more than just a reification of the social discourses of
different communities, which often represents their ‘public’ persona, but also the participation
in and (lived) experience of being a member of these different communities. Identity
represents a duality of identification (investment of the self by association with and
differentiations within various practices) and negotiability (the degree to which we become
invested in, and are able to fashion meaning making). Sometimes, these elements of identity
do in fact seem to coalesce, and become something tangible. For example, in Life Narratives
(which may be viewed in this context as a reflection of our individual trajectories through the
various CoPs we are members of) often include (retrospectively) the ‘logical steps’ that we
assume were necessarily there, and that represented coherence and closure at different
times in our lives (Linde 1993).
There is no doubt however, that whatever perspective we view discourse from, the view is
contextual and dialogic in nature (Bakhtin 1981). Traditionally, socio-cognitive research has
focussed upon the individual’s role in the ‘interpretation’ of competing discourses, whether
alone or as a member of a group, and not, with a few exceptions, on the group as a
collective (Doise and Mugny 1984) (DeVries 1997). Thus the social context is seen,
essentially as Piaget had suggested in his earlier work (Piaget 1932) as an arena for the
individual to structure their own understanding by comparing and interpreting their views
against the views of others (relational and social decentring) (Perret-Clermont 1980); (Smith
1993); (Mackie and Smith 1998). Previous work by Doise and Mugny suggested that the
contrasting views held by children about the same concept or event, lead to a cycle of sociocognitive conflict, conflict resolution and subsequent cognitive restructuring. In this way, the
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intentional learning of an individual occurs in two phases; first (interpersonally) through
interaction with other people or artefacts, a dynamic that establishes what Vygotsky has
termed the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This ZPD represents a period of
intellectual reciprocity consistent with Doise and Mugny’s conflict – resolution stage. Second,
there is an intrapersonal phase (cognitive restructuring) where new knowledge is
incorporated into the individuals’ cognition (Vygotsky 1978); (Tharp and Gallimore 1988).
Whilst it is apparent from his writing that Vygotsky placed great emphasis than Piaget on the
primacy of the social world over the individual (and the importance of cultural tools and
artefacts) for cognitive development (Cole and Wertsch 1996), the lack of a collective context
for learning in his ‘sociocultural’ theories of cognitive development is problematic.
From a socio-cultural perspective, all human endeavour is viewed as intrinsically social, and
the synthesis of, alignment to, and reproduction of competing discourses then becomes
situated in the context of the group rather than the individual. Here group is used in its most
informal sense to represent a practice, a community, a coalescence of identities. Groups are
not therefore identified by rigid boundaries of size, location, time or style, but by the
negotiation of, and participation in meaning making, they are the simultaneous articulation of
structure and discontinuity. The meaning making that occurs in these ‘communities of
practice’ is thus a transformation, reflecting changing participation in and alignment to the
discourse(s) of the community. If meaning making then refers to our changing ability to
engage in different discourses that delineate and structure our ‘world’, what is such
engagement contingent upon?
James Gee (Gee 1992) talks about semantic mediational theories (mediating between words
and the world) as being essentially ideological (involving assumptions about ‘value’, tacit or
otherwise), setting up as they do central and marginal cases, hierarchies of experiences,
things, and people. These are essentially cultural models (Holland and Quinn 1987) that
establish definitions and norms, but they also reveal counter definitions and identities that
are ‘threats’ to the norms of a culture (Holland and Skinner 1987). By a process of heurisis,
or what Tharp calls the ‘Great Cycle of Social Sorting’ (Tharp, Estrada et al. 2000) some
practices become accepted, privileged and protected (enshrined as social practices by those
that are not marginalised by them, and in turn creating (inducing) the cultural models).
Social practices, and the cues that are aligned with them, vary across both social groups and
across time (Rogoff and Lave 1984) (Giddens 1991). They form ‘threads’ running through
the different discourses we participate in (discourses are interpreted here to include people,
tools and artefacts, ways of talking and interacting, values and interpretations) that might
sometimes coalesce into broader notions, such as say success (Gee 1992).
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Practice then is about shaping and reshaping of shared historical and social resources.
Situated social practices provide nested and hierarchical apprenticeships (for example, the
social practice of reading at home acts as an apprenticeship into the social practice of
literature) that are shaped by complex and reciprocal patterns of discourse. That these social
practices moderate, and are in turn moderated by different discourses, is a reflection of the
way in which discourses too are ideological (related to the distribution of power and the
hierarchical structures present in society) (Gee 1996). Bernstein observed that ‘how a
society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates educational knowledge it
considers public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’
(Bernstein 1975). The ‘validation’ of particular forms of educational knowledge is illustrated in
what Bernstein calls the ‘collected curriculum’, and exemplified for example in contemporary
primary education by the discourses that underpin the National Literacy Strategy, and in the
dominant discourses of the education system which deny the value of home or school
communities of practice, their rich social and cultural capital, and where the spontaneous
use of genres, registers and other symbolic transformations that are characteristic of
children’s play are much more widely exhibited (Wood 2002).
Bourdieu and Passeron 1990 suggest that individuals bring various forms of capital to their
communities in the form of attitudes, values, experiences, brokered knowledge wealth etc.
Such a process is both dynamic and bilateral, and perhaps in some circumstances, may also
act to reproduce and reinforce inequalities in, and boundaries to participation in educational
discourses.
Therefore, the complex semiotic landscape that contextualises a socio-cultural description of
engagement with different discourses, necessitates a reassessment of the role of the
classroom as a context for meaning making. It is clear that whilst classrooms are more often
than not designed as utilitarian spaces (Bennett, Andreae et al. 1980) and not specifically as
contexts for social interaction that children would recognise from other aspects of their lives,
the atmosphere they (classrooms) create has a profound influence upon the children that
occupy them.
1.4 The Dialectical Context of the Classroom
Cedric Cullingford describes classrooms as ‘visually crowded spaces’ that reflect the
juxtaposition of children’s work, books, administrative information (lists, rotas events) and
equipment (Cullingford 1991). Often these colourful wall displays seem to have a purely
decorative function, their significance as artefacts or tools is diminished, and therefore rarely
considered or reflect upon by the children (Cullingford, 1978).
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Classrooms cannot be viewed simply as physically bounded environments, but as dialectical
contexts, with multiple layers of collaboration, negotiation, interpretation and transformation
that together constitute meaning making (Kress, Jewitt et al. 2001). Bronfenbrenner’s notion
of the concentric layers of context surrounding an individual during development
(Bronfenbrenner 1979). This has been adapted more recently by Cole (Cole 1996) to
illustrate how cultural contexts might also influence individual behaviour, and how the
boundaries between these contexts may not be necessarily as distinct as Bronfenbrenner
had originally suggested. Tudge 1997? emphasised the importance of both the hierarchical
and temporal dimensions of the relationships between these layered contexts. Thus it is not
enough to focus on an individual, group or community, without understanding how these
layers of context relate to one another.
Studies of Classroom Interaction
Early studies of the dynamics of classroom interaction tended to focus on the relationship
between the pedagogical approach of the teacher, and the nature of the responses elicited
by this approach from the class (Bellack, Kliebard et al. 1966). Typically, a triadic pattern
was often found, with the teacher initiating a discussion by positing a question (which in fact
was often rhetorical) to the class (the Initiation step). Individual students could then respond
with a suggested answer (the Response step), and this response would then be ‘evaluated’
by the teacher (the Feedback step). This triadic pattern became widely known as the IRF
model (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975), and may be observed in many contemporary
classrooms. However, questions may be asked and are used in classroom settings for a
number of different reasons. They may act as a method of confirming that others have
appropriated the necessary factual information or perhaps understood instructions given to
them (procedural questions). Teachers may also confine or stimulate discussion and the
(joint) negotiation of meaning that takes place in the classroom by the nature of the
questions they ask (Orsolini & Pontecorvo, 1992) (Wells 1993). The work of Douglas Barnes
has provided a much clearer understanding of the role of questioning in the classroom
(Barnes 1976) (Barnes and Todd 1977). Barnes found that teachers often ask questions
which are closed, that is questions that assume that are predicated on their being one
correct answer. He (and later others such as Neil Mercer and Rupert Wegeriff) suggested
that questions which were more exploratory (open) in nature, and which allowed the students
to speculate about the different possible answers to the teacher’s question, fostered a more
critical engagement with the underlying ideas Mercer, 1994 Barnes & Todd, 1995. The
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ORACLE (Observational Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation) studies of primary
classrooms (Galton, Simon et al. 1980) (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999) provides evidence
that, regrettably, in nearly thirty years of pedagogical research and innovation since the
classroom observations by Barnes took place, questioning in the context of the classroom is
largely a means of checking the appropriation of facts or instructions. The ORACLE studies
indicated that between the initial work in the mid seventies, and the subsequent follow up
study some twenty years later, the percentage of closed and procedural questions as a
proportion of all questions asked by teachers changed little (95% in 1976, 90% in 1996),
even though the overall contact time allocated to questioning had increased over the same
period. These data indicated however, that questions relating to general on-task supervision
had decreased dramatically, being largely replaced by closed questions, and a small
increase in the use of exploratory questions. Galton and co-workers suggest that such
patterns are indicative of a contemporary primary classroom where;
“Today’s teachers devote even more of their time to telling pupils facts and ideas or giving
directions than their counterparts of twenty years ago………..at the expense of silent
interactions such as monitoring pupil’s progress and listening to pupils read” (Galton,
Hargreaves et al. 1999)
This inertia, the limited evidence that the student is an active participant in the negotiation of
meaning, is particularly notable given the (contemporaneous) changes that have occurred in
the theoretical perspectives used to describe the dialogic nature of meaning making in the
classroom (Wells, 1999). For some, this change of perspective focuses on the learner being
guided in learning in a premeditated way by a more capable mentor (Kumpulainen & Wray,
2002), which incidentally takes place within the collective activities of a learning community.
From such a perspective then, learning remains firmly situated in the individual, but occurs
and is structured in a social context (Brown and Palinscar 1989; Brown et al., 1996). For
example, Brown and colleagues have developed an approach over many years that
encompasses the notion of the conditional scaffolding of an individual student’s learning
(Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976), but within the context of small group discussions, so called
‘communities of learners and thinkers’ (Brown and Campione 1990). This reciprocal
approach to learning has been widely explored (and been given favourable reviews,
(Rosenshine & Meister, 1994) within the context of the classroom, but does not engage with
the wider connotations of being a member of a learning community. More recent work has
attempted to bridge this epistemological divide by structuring group activities in the
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classroom so that they provide opportunities for collective argumentation and meaning
making (based on the work of Miller, 1987 and developed by Brown & Renshaw, 1996). This
pedagogical approach acknowledges the importance of the transformative nature of dialogue
in the negotiation of meaning, and importantly, situates this negotiation of meaning within the
context of a community of learners, and not an individual (Newman, Griffin & Cole, 1989;
Rogoff, 1990; Lave & Wenger 1991).
This marks a line in the sand, a transition from a sociocognitive, individualistic perspective of
learning, where individual knowledge is shaped by comparison, interpretation and conflict
resolution, a journey that we all undertake, a rite of passage. We now start to embrace a
more sociocultural perspective of learning, one that emphasises learning as taking place
through our joint engagement in actions and interactions. As such learning may now be
thought of as the production, reproduction and transformation of social structures (Wenger
1998), we negotiate access to, and legitimate participation in different social configurations
(social groups) such as our family, the school class, work, teams, countries etc.
Whilst sociocognitive approaches to classroom interaction have tended to investigate
influences on the ‘learning’ of the individual in different social contexts, sociocultural
approaches have highlighted the importance of the collective activities of the social groups
found in the context of a classroom (Resnick 1987) (Brown, Collins et al. 1989) (Bielaczyc
and Collins 1999). This is particularly interesting for those advancing group work as an
appropriate and effective facilitator of collaborative learning, as almost all of the major
studies of formal (structured) group work in the classroom over the last thirty years, have
adopted a predominantly sociocognitive perspective (Kutnick and Rogers 1994) Mercer,
1995} (Mercer 1995). Mercer, reflecting upon this fact, and the fragmented nature of our
current understanding of classroom discourse suggests that;
“…. the kind of theory {of how talk is used to guide the construction of knowledge} which
would be most helpful to researchers and teachers would need to do three things. First it
must explain how language (sic) is used to create joint knowledge and understanding.
Secondly, it must explain how people help other people to learn. And third, the theory must
deal with the special nature and purpose of formal education” {Mercer, Op. Cit.}
In a similar way then, any theoretical treatise on the ‘value’ of group work in the classroom
that is developed from a sociocultural perspective, must also clearly identify how group
participation facilitates the negotiation of understanding, and the constraints of such an
approach in the context of the primary classroom.
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1.6 Group Membership
Groups establish or are established, evolve and dissipate in classrooms according to a
complex set of social imperatives. (Aldridge 2001). Once in the classroom, groups may be
established out of school friendships, or from seating arrangements, whilst others emerge as
a consequence of particular teaching styles or as a result of specific assessments of ability;
each represent distinct but overlapping opportunities for, and influences on the collaborative
negotiation of meaning. Research on the opportunities for, benefits of and issues with groups
in the classroom is vast, but to a significant extent it reflects the recent move towards
sociocultural theories of teaching and learning (Mercer, 2000; Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002),
and the cognitive (and sociocognitive) theories of individual learning of Lev Vygotsky and
Jean Piaget (Cole and Wertsch, 1996). Although both perspectives attribute a degree of
importance to social context in learning, sociocultural and cognitive / sociocognitive
perspectives on the nature of groups and group work are distinct enough to be compared
and contrasted within the overarching organisational framework of classroom-based group
work.
General surveys of classroom-based group work (Galton, Simon et al. 1980) Galton &
Williamson, 1992; (Galton, Hargreaves et al. 1999), have found consistently that the
implementation of grouping practices (by the teacher) in the primary classroom rarely
extended beyond that of being an organisational device. There was little evidence from this
work that the opportunities for collaborative activity was realised when children were seated
together. A clear message to emerge from the (ORACLE: Observational Research and
Classroom Learning Evaluation) research, was that the ‘value’ of group work as a pedagogic
tool was to a large extent determined by several key factors. First, there should be a clear
identification of its ‘fitness for purpose’ (Edwards, 1994). Edwards suggests that practitioners
should view the value of group work in terms of whether or not it has the potential to
enhance pupil learning, whether it will achieve the desired outcomes. However, by focussing
too directly on the prescribed outcomes of group work, there is a danger that the exploratory
dialogue so central to the development of a child’s critical thinking, is largely suppressed or
even absent (Barnes 1976) (Fisher, 1993; Mercer, 1994; 2002). Second, there should be
evidence of prior classroom planning and organisation (Doyle, 1986), so Bennett et al.
(1984) have suggested that classroom-based group work needs to have clearly identified
goals, which are based on some prior assessment of a knowledge deficit. Thus, the purpose
of structured group work (from a neo-Vygotskian perspective at least) is to act as a
constructive framework for individual learning.. Such an approach is consonant with the
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experimental group work designs used by (Slavin 1983; 1990), the Jigsaw Model (Aronson
1978), the Group Investigation approach (Johnson & Johnson 1975), and with the notion of
individualised Assisted Performance developed by Tharp & Gallimore (Tharp and Gallimore
1988); all represent staged applications of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) model
(Vygotsky 1978).
However, and significantly, in adopting this approach, any training in the broader group
working skills that would support general classroom-based collaborative group work, and
that focuses specifically upon understanding group processes, has been omitted (Webb,
1989; Bennett & Dunne, 1990?; Kutnick & Marshall, 1993). But this does not mark the true
epistemological boundary between sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives on group
work, merely a relatively brief period of evolution in pedagogical practices to accommodate a
more socio-constructivist viewpoint of learning, one that is a reflection of the greater attention
now paid to the social context in which learning takes place. A key element of any
sociocultural approach to group work is a recognition of the central importance of the group
as a collective, a whole, an organism that, whilst exhibiting many separable characteristics
and elements, is nonetheless more than just the individuals that it is composed of, more than
the sum of the unique contributions these individuals make to it. Hence the discursive
choreography of meaning making that is so evident when we observe group work in the
classroom (Barnes and Todd 1977), reflects the synergistic interaction of many individual
learning trajectories (Wenger 1998) rather than simply an amalgamation of parts.
Methodology
The strategies, methods and materials employed by a qualitative researcher in the conduct
of their research have often been likened to a Bricolage, an emergent construction of closely
interwoven and reflexive practices that embody (in full representation) the problem they have
before them (Becker 1989; Orr 1996). Thus Levi – Strauss described the anthropologist (and
as such, by custom and practice we can extend this to a generalisation for the qualitative
researcher) as a Bricoleur, as one who adopts a position of establishing the fitness for
purpose of different resources available to them throughout the course of their research. In
this process, experience and practice evolve in a hermeneutic cycle rather than being an
extant set of practices that are applied at any one particular point in time;
‘His (sic) universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game is to always make do
with “whatever is at hand”, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always
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finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no resemblance to the
current project or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the
occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock…….He has to turn (back) to an
already existent set made of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains
and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it…..’
(Levi-Strauss 1966)
The qualitative researcher is engaged at any one moment in time in multiple and evolving
practices and discourses, working between different but overlapping theoretical
perspectives, and in constructing a personal narrative of their journey. Thus qualitative
research is best construed as a collection of interpretive practices containing the distinct
traces of individual historical location and situated meaning, and difficult to refine to a single
discourse. Qualitative research also seems to be held in a constant tension by the embrace
of dominant ideologies that stream across its boundaries from all directions, driven by
changing ethical, economic and political doctrines. These embraces are reified in the rites of
passage. Much of the debate centres on how the negotiation of meaning is interpreted by
the different methodological practices of the qualitative researcher, the deconstruction –
reconstruction heuresis (Goffman 1974). All texts (that is discourses realised through
different modalities) are open to interpretation to a greater or lesser extent in the practices of
the researcher, and whilst different texts afford different interpretations and negotiable
meanings, they are always multimodal in their representations, and they can always be
‘read’ in different ways (Kress, Jewitt et al. 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Thus whilst
the research methodology and methods described in this chapter circumscribes the
interpretation of how meaning is negotiated in the classroom, because it necessarily adopts
a particular epistemological position (that is, one framed by a sociocultural theory of
collectives), it will be argued here that other interpretations have no greater legitimacy when
considering how the complex interaction of discourses within the classroom resolve to the
negotiation of meaning. For example, theories of cognition that render the individual as a
scientist, a traveller locked into predefined cognitive trajectories (Piaget and Inhelder 1958),
or as existing in a definable and monolithic social context (the home, the classroom) (Cole,
Gay et al. 1971; Cole, Hood et al. 1978; Bronfenbrenner 1979), bear no greater or lesser
resistance to scrutiny in an interpretivist framework, they are simply different and competing
accounts. Observing at what happens in a classroom during the course of a lesson, whilst
14
employing a naturalistic observational framework, is therefore the construction of a narrative,
a journey in words and pictures, the traces of interwoven discourses.
Methods Adopted
The approach adopted in this study was to undertake naturalistic observation of a number of
Key Stage 1 classrooms (or their equivalent) at various stages over a period of two years.
Classrooms were observed for varying periods (60 to 120 minutes at a time) using a fixed
video camcorder, audio recorder and comprehensive fieldnotes taken. Some of these data
are presented here, and the nascent themes identified from these observational data, will be
used to further define the developmental dynamics of naturalistic groups in a second round
of comparative analysis undertaken in classrooms in the UK, Germany, Italy and France).
Summary of Findings
That collaboration in the classroom might provide a context for the negotiation of meaning
has of course been recognised for a long time, but the contemporary philosophy of the
educational Establishment still largely reflects an essentially individualistic approach to
learning; an approach originally espoused by the Thatcher government as necessary to
ensure future economic success. It also follows that, if, according to our sociocultural
perspective we situate the negotiation of meaning in the evolving practice of communities,
then it is important to understand how (and why) groups actually form, and how some are
able transform themselves into communities of practice. The focus here then, is not on the
individual within the group (because in sociocultural terms, negotiation of meaning is not a
reflection of individual perspective), but rather on the group itself. To view discourse at the
level of the individual is problematic as it creates a composite identity of the individual rather
than what is in fact a series overlapping but distinct identities. These identities are in a
constant state of flux, and reflect a child’s simultaneous membership of many communities of
practice. Put more directly, who the child is, is resolved in multiple arenas (only one of which
is the classroom), where they negotiate and contribute (to different extents) to meaning
making. Identity is about how learning changes who we are and about the creation of
personal histories. If we intend to model this mutual negotiation of meaning in the context of
the classroom, then it might be better to start with an analysis of how the various texts that
articulate the discourses of the classroom (the teacher, fellow pupils, the family etc.)
coalesce around the three central strands of mutual engagement, shared repertoires and
joint enterprise. Initial evidence suggests that groups of children that come together in the
classroom exhibit some all, or none of these strands. In the absence of specific group
working skills, it seems to be in the groups of children that are physically remote from the
15
influence of the teacher that one finds the greatest degree of mutualitiy, sharing of ideas,
observations and misconceptions, and where there is a sustained effort. This proximity effect
is marked and persistent, and requires further exploration in further comparative
observations as it constitutes a powerful suppressor of the development of group working
skills in the classroom. To the teacher however, these more remote groups are also
perceived as constituting a redundancy of effort (if one simply assesses the success of the
lesson in terms of time on or off task, or whether the completion of a specific task has been
achieved to the level set by the teacher). This might partially explain the reluctance of
teachers to engage in truly collaborative or cooperative groupwork where there is an
absence of preliminary group -working skills training. It is also highly likely that teachers
could enable effective groupworking in the classroom by reassessing their role during
groupwork, and by viewing the discourses (from the school, the home and the community)
that are expressed in the more remote groups and absent in the groups near to the teacher,
as a positive influence on the negotiation of meaning rather than as a deficit in the learning
process.
16
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