Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Sociolinguistic Examination of Meaning-Making in "Sharing Chair"

Abstract. This study investigated how one exemplary teacher and her 10 students with learning disabilities and two students with the dual label of learning disabilities-emotional impairment socially constructed and reconstructed the literacy event of Sharing Chair. Following a free writing period in their personal journal, students were afforded opportunities to share their writing with a student audience and receive feedback in the form of comments and questions from a peer/teacher audience. Sharing Chair was selected because it is believed to foster the development of conversation as a discourse form, serve as a bridge between students' experiences beyond school and the cultural conventions of the literacy community, and afford a number of literate behaviors not typically found in special education classrooms. In Sharing Chair the roles of author and audience member, with their unique rights, duties, and responsibilities, allow participants to be differentially positioned in the discourse. These various discursive positionings, in turn, require students to engage in different literate behaviors. Conversational strategies such as telling stories, actively listening, questioning, and building intertextual links with others were allowed and privileged in this discourse space. This study contributes to emerging research suggesting that becoming literate is one's developing facility with a number of school-based discourses. Principles of effective teaching and learning drawn from a sociocultural perspective and interpreted through a sociolinguistic lens raise a number of exciting possibilities for researchers, teachers, and students with disabilities (Bos & Fletcher, 1997; Englert & Palincsar, 1991; Forman & McCormick, 1995). One of the most pressing needs for teachers and their students is to understand the qualities of assisting development in students' zones of proximal development, especially the simultaneous influence of various semiotic systems, including the participant structure that is constructed and reconstructed by individuals and that frames the boundaries of the discourse (Bahktin, 1986; Christie, 1991), the moment-to-moment discursive moves that position and reposition speakers to undertake different types of cognitive work (Burbules, 1993; Davies & Harre, 1990; O'Connor & Michaels, 1993; Tannen, 1989; Wells, 1996), and the educational possibilities afforded when exemplary teachers construct meaning with students (Gaskins, Anderson, Pressley, Cunicelli, & Satlow, 1993; Santa Barbara Discourse Group, 1992a). This study of the nexus between activity, context, and discourse as sociocultural artifacts is at the heart of understanding how teachers and students socially construct "what counts" as literacy in their classrooms (Heap, 1991). The past decade has brought together a number of complementary perspectives in the field of special education that are pushing us to understand the socially constructed nature of learning and the centrality of understanding how exemplary practitioners create contexts with their students that lead to cognitive and social development. Four relatively recent strands of research include (a) the important advances in our understanding of how effective teachers use discourse with students as they engage in various types of cognitive strategy instruction (Englert, Tarrant, Mariage, & Oxer, 1994; Gaskins et al., 1993; Mariage, 1995; Palincsar, 1986); (b) the development of entire literacy curricula built around the principles of a sociocultural theory of learning (Englert, Garmon, Mariage, Rozendal, Tarrant, & Urba, 1995; Klenk & Palincsar, 1996; Ruiz, Garcia, & Figueroa, 1996); (c) the recognition of discourse analysis as a methodological tool for studying instructional events in classrooms (Forman & McCormick, 1995; Gee & Green, 1998); and (d) the importance placed upon constructivist and sociocultural theory as additional lenses for understanding teaching and learning in special education classrooms (Graham & Harris, 1994; Trent, Antilles, & Englert, 1998). …