Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences in a Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater and lesser “fidelity,” and informed by the cultures of school, teacher, and students. This study of a middle school science classroom in a racially and economically diverse urban charter school looks at how the laudable practices of dialogic, inquiry-based STEM instruction and the concomitant agenda of collaboration and inclusion were exceeded and transformed by students in moment-to-moment interactions. The focal students engaged in talk that carried them beyond disciplinary boundaries to explore stereotypes and create new narratives around racial identities, all while asserting their own positions within the power dynamics of the classroom and small group. As activity systems analysis and narrative discourse analysis revealed, the larger classroom culture permitted this kind of extradisciplinary knowledge construction; the teacher’s practices gave rise to the emergence of alternative, student-made practices, resulting in unintended consequences that remained largely unmonitored and unsung. We have much to learn from such creative and engaged acts as examples of student work that constitute a worthy academic discourse, a deviation from the imagined best path to a different route that was unpredicted by the teacher, and only owned in the moment by students, as makers and users, and primary practitioners. 1 Crampton: Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences in a Dialogic Published by Western CEDAR, 2016 The notion of a “best practice” is kind of a set-up in any field, but especially in education. Declaring that we know the best way of working of students is not like saying we know how to make the best coconut cake; there isn’t a recipe. To suggest that we can duplicate success, neatly, again and again when working in dynamic contexts, with real people in all of their variety, exposes the tendency of best practices to bend toward standardization. And, as a reminder, the recoil from standardization on the part of teachers and students is not rooted in a desire to avoid measurement; rather, it emerges from lived cultural, historic, and biographical differences. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. What about instructional approaches that attempt to disrupt the drive toward conformity? Progressive practices that promote flexibility over rigidity, human over machine, and creativity over control seem to admit their lumpiness, allowing for a plurality in how students are able to engage in learning. The classroom in this study advocated for just such practices, forming a dual track of a teacher’s interpretation of best practices. First, the teacher emphasized inquirybased dialogic instruction as best practices in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. Dialogism enlists student talk as key to learning, exploring, and developing understandings, rather than student recitation of already-known facts and concepts for a teacher's evaluation. Student talk, in this way, is interactive and inherently unpredictable. At its most expansive, it can change or alter the direction of curriculum, contribute to new knowledge, and create occasions for new enactments of self. Second, and arguably more central to her teaching practices, were this teacher’s efforts to create and maintain a classroom culture that consistently reflected the linked values of collaboration, inclusion, and kindness. In the spirit of dialogue, however, we must also consider that even the most seemingly non-constraining teacher practices contain the likelihood of coemergent student practices. We would do well to pay attention to these, while acknowledging that they may be inconvenient, may cause a breakdown in the imagined lesson, and may veer away from the teacher’s desired aim. This unruliness is difficult in practical terms, since any variability in outcomes becomes noteworthy in a system where all, in the end, are ranked. This study endeavors to hold that uneasiness at bay, asking to what extent the practices of dialogic instruction and collaboration allowed for not only different routes, but also different destinations, bearing in mind the risk in entertaining this idea with our serious societal inequities both within and without schools. Put differently, what can be learned from a commitment to freedom for student talk?