Prof. Dr. Rainer Kokemohr October 99 (2010)
Seminary and workshop on:
Classroom Interaction Analyses
10/29; 11/05; 11/12 – Friday, from 9:00 h to 12:00 h
and 11/6–11/7; 11/ 13~11/14, 09:00 h –16:00 h
What is and how can we analyze classroom interaction?
Some introductory remarks
Interaction in general means communication processes in their social and individual complexity. People communicate and interact in order to construct, to organize or to reorganize their relationship to the social and physical world and to themselves as well. Corresponding processes and forms can vary very much. Consider e.g. the narration of somebody resuming his life, the gossip of neighbors accidently meeting on the way, the intimate exchange of lovers or the parents’ constant reminder on manner and social conduct.
Classroom interaction is a particular and very interesting case. It is artificial in the sense that it has been invented in order to provide young people with the necessary knowledge and competences for their future life. Traditional societies do not know classroom interaction in the modern sense of the word. For them, education was a practical process embedded in every day life.
Schools organize classroom interaction in year groups together with a teacher. The conditions are specific. Classrooms are different from other rooms and seating is particular. There are specific rules of speaking and listening. And mostly, there is a specific topic to learn. Normally, we think classroom interaction to be a process of knowledge transfer from a teacher to pupils.
But here, we meet a jungle. Knowledge can’t be simply given to another person. It is unlike an object such as a ball, food or a book. Knowledge can be offered. But it must be acquired and constructed by the learner him- or herself.
Psychology of learning focuses the individual learner and his or her cognitive processes. But during the past decades we have learned that knowledge construction must also be taken into account a social process. Knowledge construction is a socially shared process. It is a co-construction in the sense that different persons interact and collaborate in constructing knowledge. How do people co-construct knowledge?
Let us take an example. A mother with her child of about two years goes shopping in a food store. Passing the checkout the child detects sweets that the staff of the store have placed there in order to seduce customers. But the mother wants to make understand the child that sweets are expansive. So she wishes that the child will learn and know that sweets are more than food. They are embedded in an economic context. What may happen? The child may point the finger on the sweets and show his intention of getting them by crying. The mother may try to transform the child’s knowledge (sweets as particular food only) into something within an economic context that must be paid. Accordingly, she may show the little money she actually has in her wallet and add that this money must be paid to the salesclerk for the other food she bought for the family. She wants the child to learn that sweets must be paid. They are particular food. But food is not only food, it is connected to money and economic exchange.
The example shows that a learning process can be analyzed in accordance to different aspects. As it is embedded in the equipment of a store with all the offered goods, the checkout and articulated by opening hours buying food (and learning what food in the economic circle of exchange) is an institutionalized process that is performed by the customer and the controlling staff. Even if the staff does not utter any word, the control is effective in the mind of the mother and via her uttered feelings, her “presuppositions” it becomes effective in the mind of the child, too. If this child learns that food is more than food, are threefold process is working. If we face the fact that there are at least three interacting individuals – the demanding child, the reacting mother and the controlling staff member – , we get the social or more precisely: the sociogenetic aspect of the process. If we focus only the baby’s individual process of transforming the raw food into food as an economic good we get the ontogenetic process. Finally, if we focus the symbolic means constituting the process of interaction – that is the linguistic and pragmatic elements, the gestures and the conditions of space and time on that interaction, we get the semiotic process with its microgenetic elements.
Let us turn to classroom interaction. There, we easily can distinguish the mentioned aspects. Learning some knowledge in classroom interaction is a process of constructing that knowledge by students. But they do not construct knowledge as isolated individuals. There is a teacher, there is a particular classroom with a blackboard and so on, there are classmates. Indirectly parents, the school’s principal, colleagues of the teacher, the programs and the ministry of education or other authorities are present. That is why classroom interaction represents in a particular way a section of the whole society. Besides the acquisition of knowledge it can show how children are invited and become (or do not become) responsible members of the society.
In order to understand this process we have to go into a detailed analysis. Then, we can learn that classroom interaction is a very complex process where teaching and learning steps interfere with moments of non-understanding, with procedures of reproduction, of undergoing changes of a topic, of transforming its semantic and/or its logic structure and of social control that can be helpful or not.
The article of Saxe and others, A Methodological framework and empirical techniques for studying the travel of ideas in classroom communities, taken from the book Transformation of Knowledge Through Classroom Interaction, edited by Baruch Schwarz, Tommy Dreyfus, and Rina Hershkowitz, London, New York (Routledge) 2009, can help us. The framework is targeted towards the social character of classroom interaction without forgetting the individual and the semiotic aspects. But the authors are right in underlining that it is a framework. It is not offered in order only to be applied on some documents. A “technical” application of whatever we may take as methods is not enough. Any good empirical analysis will face additional problems, questions, or aspects and often we’ll have to add or even to “invent” other methods (I’ll propose some). But we should not take that phenomenon as an obstacle. It is productive in the sense that it invites us to take a given situation seriously into account and to learn from it instead of reading it accordingly to a given theory that lets us believe that there is nothing new to detect. Being a teacher is a lifelong adventure if we take classroom interaction (as well as all pedagogical interaction) as a promising jungle. Thanks to the preparation of the seminary, there is a video of a lesson. Let us try to read and to decipher it a bit.
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