Finding Voices and Emerging Agency in Classroom Learning

This paper describes the development of a class as a learning community that transits from one established classroom practice that elevated monologic voices of authorities to another practice that encouraged dialogic participation. The project illustrated in this paper took a design-based approach in nurturing a learning community in a classroom, with which we re-designed the Secondary 1 Geography curriculum with teachers around six design principles. This paper proposes that the effort of a teacher, Nicole, helped learners find their inner persuasive voices and developed their conceptual agency in learning Geography. The transition of Nicole’s Geography class is examined by comparing episodes from different periods of the project implementation, with the goal of finding out how students’ agency emerges from this transition. Nicole: 24 hours (referring to North Pole’s time without daylight). Ok, now looking at this, when do you think the date would be? Which month would this occurrence happen? Student 1: December Nicole: December? Why December here? Why, why not. Student 2: ’Cause the video says so. Student 3: Because the book says so. (During a lesson on ‘Day and Night’, 21 Jan 2010) Nicole: We're going to hear Luke and John (students) explain to the class. Hopefully they are better teachers than Mrs. Toh (herself) who will not confuse you. Can? Student 4: What if they confuse us even further? (During a lesson on ‘Atlas and Grids’ ,9 Feb 2010) The above excerpts are taken from the lessons conducted in two different days with a Geography teacher, whom we call Nicole (or Mrs. Toh) in this paper – they provide a picture of the existing learning practices as we began the project. In the first excerpt, Nicole tried to open a dialogue with the students on why North Pole does not receive daylight for 24 hours, during particular time of the year. However, students closed the dialogue (up to this point) by answering that they already accepted this factual information from authoritative sources (i.e., video and textbook). In the second excerpt, Nicole invited two students to provide their explanations on how longitudes differ from latitudes. That had the potential to open up a critical discourse. However, one student expressed his reservation toward this practice as he thought that multiple explanations might be more confusing. These two excerpts demonstrate that students were comfortable with monological voices of authorities (i.e., teacher, textbook, and media) and were still dubious of a dialogic practice in their learning. Nonetheless, drawing from Bakhtinian thought, the language of the authoritative voice is “half someone else’s” until it is incorporated with the hearer’s own “intentions” and “accents” (Bakhtin, 1992, p. 294) – or, in Nicole’s own words: until they are “internalized. and [not just] regurgitated. [from] the textbook”. Preparing the grounds for dialogic competencies “Voyage to the Age of the Dinosaurs” is a design-based research project that has grown over the last four years It was implemented around a Secondary One (for students aged 11-12) Geography curriculum, covering topics from the Earth Sciences. We started with an informant design approach (Kim, Tan, & Kim, 2011a; Scaife, Rogers, Aldrich, & Davies, 1997), with which we conducted a series of five workshops over the years 2007−2009 to develop an educational game. During our third year, we worked closely with teachers from one of the collaborating schools. Aims of the curriculum design were: (a) to help learners understand and advance their own resources (i.e. experiences and ideas) as epistemic communities and (b) to engage learners in meaning-making and experiential learning activities that integrate a computer game and other tools developed through the informant design workshops. With these aims, we set out principles for our design of curriculum to prepare a space where a dialogic discourse might naturally emerge. These principles are: (i) Engage students in group activities to develop epistemic communities; (ii) start with open-ended questions that could encourage the use of their preconceptions and their own approaches; (iii) engage them in activities that provide relevant experience using tools and hands-on activities; (iv) require them to produce group or individual artifacts, thus encouraging their ownership © ISLS 451 ICLS2012 Volume 1: Full Papers