2.5 Findings: Language ontologies from educator and student perspectives
2.5.1 Ms. Hammer and her students: Critical thinking around open-ended questions
A concern for teachers was reconciling their idealized conception of academic conversation with concerns about student engagement and accountability. Several of the teachers we interviewed described a stark contrast between the ways they expected academic conversation to
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look in their classrooms (e.g., engaged students using critical thinking and analysis in the process of actively teaching and learning from each other) and the ways those conversations played out in reality (which often included minimal student participation and recitation of surface-level answers). Ms. Hammer, an educator with three years of experience teaching sixth-grade English, highlighted this struggle during our conversation:
You see a few kids not participating, and you see a couple kids giving the right answer, and you could do it a good eight times, and your classroom is still not engaging in the way that you want it to be. And so, it's easy just to say, okay, never mind. I can't be at all tables, ensuring that they have those conversations and holding them accountable to it.
Navigating this tension was frustrating for Ms. Hammer. She expressed ontologies surrounding the use of academic conversation as an instructional tool and showed a thoughtful attention to the importance of growing students’ self-sufficiency as learners and thinkers:
I think successful conversation looks like students taking initiative to discuss first just the comprehension of the text, but then to eventually be able to ask and respond to higher order questions that they come up with and that they generate themselves. And, learning off of each other where there are questions where there's no particular correct answer.
Ms. Hammer’s description of successful academic conversation shows a deep grounding in theory, a focus on critical literacy that asks students to move beyond low-level comprehension, and an understanding of students’ ability to serve as agentic learners when they are “learning off each other where there are questions where there's no particular correct answer.” According to Matusov et al. (2016), “The authorial notion of agency resolves the dichotomy of the given vs. the innovative because the given serves as the material for transcendence” (p. 435). Ms. Hammer describes a view of students’ comprehension of a shared text as an important resource to be leveraged in transcending the interpretative bounds of curriculum-mandated knowledge.
Yet, as her reflections on engagement and accountability show, she was frustrated that the reality in her classroom did not match her ideal. In our observations of Ms. Hammer’s classroom, she demonstrated her commitment to academic conversation by inviting students numerous times to collaboratively engage in higher-order thinking surrounding texts in small groups; however, many students seemed to wait for whole-class discussions to engage in the conversation, if they engaged at all.
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Our discussions with Ms. Hammer’s students revealed that they also possessed thoughtful conceptions of the purpose of academic conversation, regarding it as a means of supporting content, language, and metacognitive skills, as in the transcript excerpt below. We include this excerpt because it was representative of many responses surrounding students’ perceptions of academic conversation’s purposes.
1 Researcher: Okay. What are the things that you learn from academic conversation?
2 Elena: How to say it better.
3 Luis: Like how to stay on topic.
4 Researcher: Okay. How to stay on topic, how to do better. What could you be doing better at?
5 Luis: Focusing on the- 6 Elena: Reading better.
Elena, a native Spanish speaker, originally focused on the role of academic conversation in developing communicative language skills. Such a focus may represent her communicative goals for learning in English class or may be an artifact of the implicit messages she receives as an EL in an English-only state. She later added that academic conversation can support reading skills, though she did not elaborate on how. The brevity of these student responses was, in general, a pattern we witnessed across focus groups. Metalinguistic reflection is a challenging task, and the difficulty students had in using language to talk about classroom discussion may be the result of having had few prior opportunities to engage in metalinguistic talk. Elena’s perception of academic conversation as supporting language and content skills represents a valid conception (Murphy, Wilkinson, & Soter, 2011), but it does not align with Ms. Hammer’s. Nor does Luis’s, as he primarily focused on self-regulation skills that are commonly valued by the dominant culture of schools—specifically, staying on task and focusing.
While both Elena and Luis expressed aims that could conceivably be achieved by engaging in academic conversation, Ms. Hammer, as the architect of classroom instructional practices, was designing academic conversation with differing goals in mind. Working towards differing ends may impact the perceived value of academic conversation for both students and teachers (Song et al., 2007). This may result in decreased engagement from both parties, as Elena attempts to find
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the language and content skills she is supposed to be learning from academic conversation, while Ms. Hammer seeks evidence of students’ critical thinking and agency.
Reconciliation practices might serve to structure academic conversation in a way where both parties feel that their goals are being met, and thus support greater engagement from both students and teachers (Song et al., 2007). Ms. Hammer’s and her students’ goals are not incompatible, but unless they make these goals visible, there is little opportunity for both to work in ways that support these aims. Student engagement may diminish when they perceive that teachers do not support what they believe to be meaningful learning (Song et al., 2007).