Continuity, change and workshop

Previous research has pointed to the value of studying the details of teachers’ changing mechanisms towards dialogic teaching (Sedova et al, 2016). According to Engestrøm (1999), the expansive cycle of learning starts when subjects start questioning their established

practice. Inspired by Activity Theory, this thesis has argued that the participating teachers appear to be in an unarticulated need state where they problematize their established

practices, without pointing to alternative strategies to overcome tensions. Even though there are a few signs of teachers approaching the researcher’s object, they are primarly exploring the need state and showings signs of destabilizing their practice.

Pete reports a positive change in perceived value of TalkWall due to applying it in practice, but he does not elaborate on how his perception changed after realizing how things were connected. Jack seems to treat the use of TalkWall and classroom dialogue seperately when talking about potential change in his interactions with students in the future. Claire reports that she does not consider her use of TalkWall in the classroom to have changed, that she has used it the same way most of the time and that she does not consider to have

challenged herself to a large extent. She exemplifies her use as being a replacement of other methods (Tondeur et al, 2013). She is also concerned that the effect of TalkWall and ground rules for talk, will not turn out big and suggests that this might be due to the fact that it fits too well, but she also find the rules to potentially be more effective for exploratory talk. In any case, Claire seems to struggle to make sense out of the intervention. This indicates that she’s trying out different explanations as part of exploring the need state (Engestrøm, 1999).

Claire does however consider the biggest change in her practice to be starting with students’

contributions instead of using more established tools such as PowerPoint or Keynote, where she as a teacher has decided the content. She seems to address TalkWall as supporting students’ agency in the classroom, but she still emphasizes the teachers’ responsibility of making sense and use of the distributed cognition (Pea, 2004), rather than equipping students with tools they can apply in addition to her support. Claire also report uncertainty about both content and intention in the workshops, and it might not seem logical for Claire to regard herself as a co-researcher if she perceives herself to be the research object. She makes an interesting comment about being open for a future effect of the project that she herself is not able to grasp. This might reveal a form of passivity and can be connected to her perception of being a research object in the project. It could also serve to highlight an expressed uncertainty about the researchers’ object. Teachers’ overall positioning in the project in terms of either explicitly problematizing the point of the project, assuming the role of being a test bunny or

expressing an acceptance to follow a given program, reflects the asymmetric relationship between researchers and teachers in such collaborations (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990).

In a normative sense, one could argue that ground rules for talk needs to be defined as a prerequisite for the teachers in the following stages of the research project, in order to make use of the distributed cognition (Pea, 2004) for synergistic scaffolding (Tabak, 2004) that the combination of ground rules for talk and TalkWall potentially affords. A part from Pete’s conceptual connection of the intervention, the teachers are still trying to make sense of the elements in light of their established and implicit efforts in classroom talk (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). This could indicate that they are not looking for how this combination of methodology and technology might be used to change their practice towards increasing students’ agency in classroom talk, because this do not seem to be their main object as of now. Moreover, they do not seem aware of how they are affected by their implicit use of language (Edwards, 1997) and rightfully so seeing how tacit knowledge is often hard to make explicit (Polanyi, 2009).

Implicit knowledge about talk needs to be explicitly scrutinized in order to become aware of how talk can be used as a tool for teaching and learning (Edwards & Mercer, 2012) and how meaning is co-constructed through dialogue (Linell, 2009). It seems necessary for teachers to make their implicit efforts explicit in order to recognize how the intervention differs from their established practices. Seeing how experienced teachers are less prone to return to a detailed approach in their practices (Zimmerman, 2006), the move from implicit to explicit could be a challenge.

On the surface it might have looked like ground rules for talk was the missing link between TalkWall’s distributed cognition and enhancing students’ agency exploratory classroom talk.

Through analysis and discussion however, it turns out that this was just a symptom of the greater discrepancy which at this point in the research project, is localized between teachers’

and researchers’ respective object for activity. It’s also a possibility that if the teachers should transform into an articulated need state, they will not define ground rules as a prerequisite, but rather point to other aspects in need of change in their established practice. Intervention studies seem to cultivate the affordances of a co-inquiry (Engestrøm, 2011). However, like pointed out by Cochran-Smith and Lytle, (1990) teachers and researchers tend to hold different perspectives on issues’ relevance. As long as ground rules for talk are directed towards different objects for teachers and researchers, it could be an arguable possibility that teachers will perceive the given technology as a tool with limited support. The main object for the researchers is to investigate how the intervention might result in a change for the

students’ dialogic practice towards critical thinking and collaboration across subjects. The main object for the teachers seems to be to figure out how to make the intervention fit with their efforts to guide the students towards more advanced content knowledge. Thus, there are obvious tensions in the interconnected activity systems (Engestrøm, 1999). In addition, these teachers do not seem to be fully aware of this discrepancy and the fact that they are driven by different motivations because of different objects (Blackler, 1995). In light of

recommendations to make the content of professional development familiar in order for teachers to approach a new practice willingly (Ertmer & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010), the findings in this thesis offers a more complex picture. The teachers in this thesis participate in an intervention-program on a voluntary basis. At this point, the content of the professional development seem familiar to them in terms of their attempts to align the intervention with their established practices. The researchers target an object beyond changing teachers’

mindsets to include that effective teaching is dependent on appropriate use of technology.

They implement technology and methodology in certain ways to investigate how this might transform practice to improve the quality of teaching and learning (Rasmussen et al, 2016).

In closing this part of the discussion I would like to return to the word cloud from the initial phases of working with the interview transcripts illuminating the word “perhaps” as the highest frequent word (4.3.5). This could indeed be a figure of speech. However, in light of my interview analysis and the subsequent discussion, I argue that the word supports teachers being in an unarticulated need state and exploring the need state at this point in the research project, as they try to make sense of the intervention. In this sense, the word “perhaps” refers both to dilemmas in teachers’ activity systems and to dilemmas and tensions that arise when their practice is intervened. The model underneath illustrates how teachers are in the initial phases of problematizing their practice and how they negotiate with the DiDiAC-intervention of ground rules for talk and TalkWall, thus resulting in signs of destabilizing their practices.

It is worth noting that Claire seems to struggle more with grasping the intervention, which could indicate that she is destabilizing her practice to a greater extent than the others so far.