George Aranda

Variation in Whole Class, Small Group and Individual Student Work Within and Across Cultures

Teaching and learning occurs in three main instructional settings, i.e., whole class, small group or individual work. Each instructional setting provides affordances and constraints in terms of the types of teaching and learning strategies that can be implemented effectively, which in turn impacts on students’ opportunity to learn. Variation between teachers’ use of instructional settings within a culture is likely to be a reflection of their beliefs and instructional style whilst variation in teachers’ use of instructional settings across cultures is likely to reflect the cultural framing of teaching and learning, and curriculum emphases within those cultures.

Reflections on Video-Based, Cross-Cultural Classroom Research Methodologies

For those researching the nuances of the complex interactions and representations that mediate teaching and learning, video offers rich affordances with its capacity to capture the multimodality of these processes and enables researchers to investigate phenomena in more powerful ways. Video-based classroom research poses a number of challenges including conducting analyses and making interpretations that take into account the full range of contextual factors and perspectives, particularly when researching across cultural contexts. The capacity of researchers to see and understand salient features of teaching and learning in foreign cultures is inevitably limited by their own culturally-embedded experiences of teaching and learning.

Teachers from Diverse Cultural Settings Orchestrating Classroom Discourse

Researchers have long argued that teacher-student interactive talk is critically important in supporting students to reason and learn in science. Teachers’ discursive moves in responding to student input are key to developing and supporting a rich vein of interactive discussion. This Chapter describes the analysis of video sequences for seven teachers across Australia, Germany and Taiwan to develop a coding scheme for these teachers’ ‘discursive moves’ that guide and respond to student inputs, to unpack more completely the strategies used by experienced teachers in each country to develop interactive discussion. The analysis showed the complex ways in which knowledge was transacted, with a range of teacher discursive moves serving three broad purposes: to affirm and mark student responses, to clarify, and to challenge and extend student ideas. The analysis revealed a commonality in the discursive moves of the teachers, but with very different patterns of control of talk and of negotiation of knowledge in response to student claims. The data show clearly that all these experienced teachers’ discourse moves go well beyond the traditional Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) patterns described in the literature, such that all teachers focus strongly on supporting reasoning and higher level learning. However, their patterns of moves differ considerably in the way they develop over lessons, in the way the dialogic-authoritative discourse distinction plays out, and in individual discursive styles related to beliefs. It is argued that the discursive patterns are strongly framed by contextual and cultural factors relating to the way classrooms are constituted in the three countries.