Teacher professional dialogues during a school intervention: From stabilization to possibility discourse through reflexive noticing

Background: Teachers' limiting conceptualizations of students influence students' learning opportunities. We analyze teachers' professional conversations to understand how dialogues can expand teachers' conceptualizations. Methods: We examine professional dialogues from nine whol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the learning sciences 2021-10, Vol.30 (4-5), p.707-746
Main Authors: Rainio, Anna Pauliina, Hofmann, Riikka
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Barriers
Dialogs (Language)
Disadvantaged
Discourse Analysis
Educational Change
Faculty Development
Foreign Countries
Ideology
Information Technology
Intervention
Learning
Meetings
Middle School Teachers
Peer Relationship
Resistance (Psychology)
Students
Teacher Attitudes
Teacher Collaboration
Teacher Student Relationship
Teachers
Technology Integration
Urban Areas
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Summary:Background: Teachers' limiting conceptualizations of students influence students' learning opportunities. We analyze teachers' professional conversations to understand how dialogues can expand teachers' conceptualizations. Methods: We examine professional dialogues from nine whole-school intervention meetings. Drawing on discursive psychology and activity theoretical notions of learning the study conceptualizes teachers' collective assumptions as a lived ideology actively sustained by stabilization discourses. We analyze the discursive devices through which the teachers' talk about their students limits/expands their sense of what is possible in their teaching and their dialogic effects. Findings: Our analysis finds a range of discursive strategies that sustain or re-stabilize the lived ideology. Even when challenged by contrary evidence (e.g., surprises), dilemmatic tensions and reframing repair actions are found to close potential dialogic openings. Importantly, we identify a form of discourse that avoids immediate closure, characterized by sustained reflection on the students' challenges developing a need to change. We term this reflexive noticing: it is enabled through sustained puzzle, constructing dilemmas as origin of change and discursive consciousness of stabilization. Contribution: We illustrate why contrary evidence often fails to shift limiting conceptualizations about students and show the discursive mechanisms generating possibility knowledge. Implications for teacher learning are discussed.
ISSN:1050-8406
1532-7809
DOI:10.1080/10508406.2021.1936532