In the vignette that follows, Ms Chetty from School A was conducting the planning stage of the writing process to introduce her learners to the topic and type of text that they had to write. To prepare her learners to plan their own stories about nightmares using a mind map and then develop these stories, she modelled the text by engaging them in a discussion in which they co-created an imaginary nightmare. What follows is the beginning of the discussion. In this vignette we see how Ms Chetty takes up
‘scenario-creator’ and ‘animator’ positions, and in turn positions learners as ‘co- creators’, to help them cognise ‘the nightmare’ as the object of cognition.
Vignette 2: Ms Chetty positioning her learners during the planning phase 1
2 3 4 5
T Alright. Hmmm, let’s create the nightmare. You are standing at the beach.
You are dreaming, right? You are standing at the beach, right? Okay, standing at the beach, mother called you and gave you ice cream, then there was KFC, you went and you had lunch. Right, very happy, the waves were so calm. Suddenly you heard this thunderous sound.
6 LBs Xai booom booom bah bah bah!
7 8 9 10
T Good like that, a thunderous sound and what do you do when you hear the sound? What do you do, Diana? You get scared, you get shocked, you jump, you turn around, you want to see where the sound is coming from. Then what did you see? You saw this…
11 LB Wave 12
13 14
T Wave! You saw this wave coming towards you. You saw this huge wave coming towards you and then what happened? First let’s talk about the motion.
15 LB Mam, it’s making a big noise.
16 T It’s making big noise and coming. Then what happened? Mr Osman?
17 LB Mam they were screaming.
18 T The wave knocked you over, you so thin.
19 All (laughing) 20
21
T The wave knocked you over. It carried you away. And then how do you feel? How are you feeling when that wave took you away? How do you
22 feel? Let’s talk about your feelings. How are you feeling, Lushen?
23 LB Scared.
24 T Feeling scared, try to think of more.
25 LG Frightened.
26 T Frightened, you are frightened. Someone else. You are?
27 LG Feeling suffocated.
28 T Ok feeling suffocated. Ok.
29 LG You are panicking and running.
30 T You are panicking, what else? Darian, how are you feeling in this
31 nightmare. Darian? You supposed to be in this nightmare with me Darian.
32 What’s wrong with you? Are you sleeping?
33 LB No mam.
34 LG Full of tears.
35 T Full of tears.
36 LB Terrified.
37 T Terrified.
38 LG You dunno what horrible thing is coming next.
39 T You dunno what horrible thing is coming next. Right. Ok so all your 40 feelings ok. Feelings right. Then suddenly now you see the shark fin 41 coming towards you.
42 All Oooooh! Aaaaah!
43 T What you gonna do? Njabulo? What you gonna do, the shark is coming 44 for you, Njabulo?
45 LG Mam, mam, mam?
46 LB Start running.
47 T Now you can’t run in the water!
a. Dialogue
In Vignette 2, Ms Chetty positioned her learners, using her knowledge of the topic and pedagogical knowledge of discussion techniques to get them excited and interested and start thinking about the topic. She began by using the word “let’s” (let us) (see line 1) which positioned her as part of the class (Let you and me together..). In so doing, the teacher assumed the position of discussion-guide to facilitate her learners’
understanding of the topic and how to approach the writing so that they could successfully and independently complete their own writing. It was found that the purpose of the lesson was achieved, as an analysis of the boys’ stories showed that they all had understood what the teacher expected them to do and were able to complete the writing activity.
Ms Chetty set up an interpersonal dialogue with the whole class of learners to try and create a mind picture to stimulate the learners’ imagination and thoughts to enable them to write their own stories. She used the plural you (see lines 1 and 2) unless she was speaking directly to a learner (see line 8). Although the setting was the classroom, the dialogue took the learners to another setting, the beach, by tapping into their imaginations. Ms Chetty took them out of the classroom setting and into their imaginations by stating: “Hmmm, let’s create the nightmare. You are standing at the beach. You are dreaming this right. You are standing at the beach right.” (see lines 1 and 2). Occasionally, they were brought back to the classroom setting if their teacher needed to regulate their behaviour or, for example, when she said things like: “Now you can’t run on water” (see line 46).
During this interpersonal dialogue (communication between two or more people), the learners created an intrapersonal dialogue (communication within oneself) to negotiate how to respond and contribute to the interpersonal dialogue; an intrapersonal dialogue was created between the learners’ writing and imagination—
the role that imagination plays in writing. For example, when the teacher asked Njabulo what he would do as the shark was after him, Njabulo would have had an intrapersonal dialogue wherein he would have considered a few options, such as trying to fight the shark or swim as fast as he could, and then he would have evaluated which answer would be most suitable to provide a response to the interpersonal dialogue taking place between the teacher and the class (see lines 43 to 47). Njabulo said that he would have run away, to which the teacher responded that he could not run on water.
Perhaps in his haste to provide a response to the interpersonal dialogue, he had not carefully engaged in his intrapersonal dialogue. Another possibility could be that there was an interlanguage conflict in Njabulo’s dialogue, as English is his second language, so he would also have had an inter-language dialogue between English and IsiZulu before he was able to provide a response to his teacher’s question in English.
b. Positioning
Ms Chetty, in this episode, positioned the learners as co-creators of the story by saying
“let’s” and did not just facilitate but also participated in the discussion by offering her ideas to further stimulate the learners. She positioned them in a new place, at the beach (“You are standing at the beach right.”). The learners embraced and accepted this positioning by enthusiastically listening and contributing to the discussion. Next, she positioned them as listeners when she said, “Suddenly you heard this thunderous sound.” Again, they accepted this position, as we can see in the vignette above, when the boys made sound effects that they imagined to be appropriate to the situation being described by their teacher (see line 6). Ms Chetty appealed to different senses like hearing, feeling and seeing to engage and position her learners in a dream about an incident that occurred at the beach. She solicited sights (“wave”), sounds (“boom”) and feelings (“terrified”, “suffocated”) from them as they constructed this imaginary object together. The learners, in turn, adopted, inhabited and responded to those positions, which she confirmed and responded to, so further developing the story.
Humour was also used to engage the learners and keep them actively interested in the progression of the nightmare, as when she said, “The wave knocked you over, you so thin.” and the learners responded by laughing. This also made the story real because she used a fact about the physical appearance of the boy as part of the imaginative story. However, even though the learners were laughing and excited and speaking, it was clear that there were boundaries set which all contributed to the success of this classroom discussion. Ms Chetty maintained the dominant position of teacher of writing, with multiple auxiliary positions, and maintained control of the interpersonal dialogue, and to a large extent guided the learners’ intrapersonal dialogues.
c. Cognition
This vignette is an example of successful intercognition if one considers the purpose of this episode, which was to carry the learners over the boundary to her expectation of the story that they needed to write. The object of cognition was “trying to know the nightmare”, where the teacher and learners co-created this imaginary object. In this
instance, the teacher herself did not know what the outcome would be, as she led the interpersonal dialogue while at the same time following their lead. The intercognition happened in stages to build up the object of cognition: standing at the beach, hearing the thunderous sound, seeing the wave, feelings experienced. Ms Chetty used
“intercognitive markers” to check if the children were apprehending “the object” that she positioned them to apprehend: “right”; “okay”.
By the end of the dialogue, a very vivid imaginary experience full of sense perceptions was created, which the learners took with them to complete the writing process. Thus, being positioned as co-creators of the imaginary object became a springboard for their own writing, so they moved from the interpersonal dialogue of the discussion during the planning phase to the intrapersonal dialogue of writing their own stories during the drafting phase.
The vignette that follows occurred during the planning phase in School B. Ms Naidoo was meant to be instigating the learners’ cognition to enable them to understand the object of cognition, which in these lessons was to know how to write a story using the writing process. After reading a definition of planning from their activity books, Ms Naidoo explained the definition to the learners, then proceeded to explain what a mind map was used for, and then continued into a lengthy discussion about a story called
‘The Bump’ that the learners had read the previous Friday. Although not made explicit, her intention seemed to be to use this story to familiarise her learners with the structures and conventions of the narrative genre such as the setting and characters to model what she wanted her learners to write.
In School B there appeared to be little intercognition, as most learners seemed not to grasp Ms Naidoo’s expectations and instructions in most instances. This was evident in stories that the boys submitted for marking (see Chapter 6) and in the responses that they provided to questions posed during discussions (see Vignette 3 below, line 5). In the vignette that follows we see Ms Naidoo’s use of questioning to position her learners to provide the expected response.
Vignette 3: Ms Naidoo positioning her learners during the planning phase
1 T We do know that it’s a group of boys deliberately bumping into children. Where?
2 All Rosewood School 3
4
T Ahh very good now can anybody tell me why Rosewood School is written in capital letters or begins with capital letters? Yes Mthokozisi?
5 LB1 It’s a pronoun (class chuckles) 6 T No such! Think again, think again!
7 LG It’s a proper noun 8
9 10 11
T A proper noun. Please don’t get confused they very close so I don’t blame you but you need to also think before you answer. And you are not wrong by trying and by trying you will not make that mistake again, alright! So it is good that you are trying, alright! It is a PROPER?
12 All NOUN!
13 T And we know that proper nouns are always written in?
14 All CAPITAL LETTERS!
15 T The whole word?
16 All No
17 T Is the whole word written in capital letters?
18 LB2 The first letter 19
20
T The first letter. Ok so coming to our characters and our setting. Where would the name of the school fall into?
21 LB2 Setting 22
23
T Very good the SETTING cause now we know that we not just talking about my school we are talking about?
24 All Rosewood School
25 T Rosewood School (writes on board) Rosewood School!
26 All Rosewood School.
27 28
T So ‘The Bump’ is taking place at the Rosewood School. Now remember we said we had a?
29 All Gang of boys 30
31 32
T Gang of boys then we had a…a…a the student or the learner that had been bumped into so we know it’s got to do [ with ] students and it’s got to do with a gang of boys. Where?
This vignette is an example of how the teacher positioned the learners to respond to questions in the manner that she expected, as when she said “Proper” and the class responded by saying “noun”. They knew that she expected them to say noun because she had just told them that Rosewood School was a proper noun, so it was almost as if they were expected to fill in the blank using the answer that she had just told them.
Thus, questioning was not used effectively as a scaffolding and assessment tool, and could be an indication that Ms Naidoo’s general pedagogical knowledge in this regard is an area for development.
a. Dialogue
In this interpersonal dialogue between Ms Naidoo and the class the discussion was limited to the teacher posing closed-ended questions and the learners responding with one-word answers that their teacher expected them to say (see lines 11 and 12), “It is a PROPER? NOUN”). Thus, their intrapersonal dialogues would involve them in decisions about what their teacher wanted them to say rather than them evaluating what the response should be. According to Bakhtin (as cited in Rule, 2014, p.105), “all of each individual’s words are divided into categories of his own and others’, but the boundaries between them can change, and a tense dialogic struggle takes place within the boundaries”. This dialogue between Ms Naidoo and her learners was more like a monologue as it involved the learners incorporating the words of “the other”, in this case, the teacher, into their own voices rather than contributing their own words in the responses. Thus, Ms Naidoo was almost saying, “you must learn my words and repeat them”, so the learners were essentially “filling in the blanks” using words provided. At times the learners guessed the incorrect word (Vignette 1), some of the learners saying “Yes”, while some said “No” because they were not sure which response she expected. By comparison, in School A, Ms Chetty encouraged her learners to use her words and their own words and combine them to create an imaginative story, perhaps an indication that active learning was taking place. In School B, the learners were expected to passively accept their teacher’s words and then repeat them to her.
Learning was reduced to guessing the correct response.
b. Positioning
Ms Naidoo began her lesson by saying: “Our aim this morning is to practice your writing skills…there is a format or procedure that we have to use…to get our writing skills correct.” In Vignette 3 above, she positioned the learners from readers (they read the story ‘The Bump’), to thinkers (they thought about answers to the questions posed), and to listeners (they listened to their teachers’ instructions, explanations and questions), to respondents (they answered questions posed by their teacher) all in one short episode. More than being positioned as respondents, this vignette shows that the learners in School B seem to be conformers as they are positioned by their teacher to say what she expected them to say. Ms Naidoo positioned herself as listener (she listened to the learners’ responses), instructor (she corrected mistakes in grammatical knowledge), and leader (she led the discussion) of the interpersonal dialogue.
Although this lesson was the planning phase of the writing cycle, Ms Naidoo deviated, going back to reading a comprehension passage that they had read the previous week. In her interview, Ms Naidoo said that she kept referring to this story because she wanted her learners to understand how a story is written. However, it may be that she did so because it was something familiar for her to fall back to, instead of trying to figure out how to progress through the writing cycle. She then began an interpersonal dialogue, questioning the learners, focusing particularly on the boys, about vocabulary, language elements, structural conventions and comprehension aspects of the text, so the focus of the lesson almost completely shifted from planning to write a story, to reading a previous story. Thus, she repositioned the learners from planners of a story to readers of a story. At one point in this planning lesson she even positioned the boys as actors when she asked them to dramatise an incident from the excerpt of the story.
Shifting between multiple positions during short episodes within the lesson, occurred quite frequently, often not giving the learners sufficient time to make the transition between positions and not giving them the opportunity to find a position to connect to.
King and Gurian (2006) state that boys take more time to transition between tasks and become irritable when teachers continually move them from task to task, so the frequent transitioning between positions may result in them eventually rejecting the position and not benefitting from the episode.
She also positioned herself as a regulator at various points of the lessons, as can be
seen below in Excerpt A (This is Chapter 4,p138). In Excerpt B, the same positioning happened in School A, where Ms Chetty made a point, reprimanded the learner and immediately moved back to the task at hand. However, in School B, Ms Naidoo interrupted her interpersonal dialogue by going into detail about inappropriate behaviour and used the opportunity to teach classroom etiquette, morals and values.
Excerpt C: Ms Naidoo
Here Ms Naidoo positioned herself as regulator of learners’ behaviour and spoke to them about proper behaviour.
Excerpt D: Ms Chetty
In this excerpt, Ms Chetty positioned herself as regulator of the learners’
behaviour but immediately repositioned herself to co-creator of the nightmare so as not to break the momentum of the discussion.
In these excerpts, both Ms Chetty (“Saleem, keep quiet”) and Ms Naidoo (“Son, please don’t shout out”) regulated the interaction. However, the regulatory discourse dominates the excerpt with Ms Naidoo, whereas it is an interpellation in Ms Chetty’s. Thus, by the
Son please don’t shout out I know you are excited I know you want to answer and I know you are correct. But please give the others a chance. I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to you. HELLO! The others haven’t said a word to me from the morning, it’s either you are not thinking or you are not following! Now I am going to ask a question those of you have answered me already, I know you are following I know you are paying attention, I want to chat to the children that are quiet. Now my question again! Can you very simply describe Jamal to me?
Yes Mfundo?
You trying, you trying, you trying to get away from this. Saleem, keep quiet, I told you keep quiet! So you are trying to get away.
That’s your nightmare. Suddenly…what happens next? You don’t know if you made pee in the bed or if you were fighting with the blanket.