Kenneth Tobin

Transforming an academy through the enactment of collective curriculum leadership

Although the transformation of relevant curriculum experiences for youth from impoverished backgrounds in large urban high schools in the US offers many leadership challenges for faculty, few studies have focused on the roles of students and teachers in the creation of distributed leadership practices to build and sustain improved learning environments. Through ethnography, this paper explores the leadership dynamics in one academy within a large urban high school whose students are mostly African‐American. Students in some classes had opportunities to participate in cogenerative dialogues and, in so doing, learned how to interact successfully with others, including their teachers and peers, and build collective agreements for future classroom roles and shared responsibility for their enactment. The study highlights the centrality of successful interactions among participants and the extent to which co‐respect and co‐responsibility for goals occur. Initially, a lack of trust within the community undermined tendencies to build solidarity throughout the community, despite a commitment of the academy’s co‐ordinator to be responsive to the goals of others, listen to colleagues and students, and strive for collective goals. It is argued that all participants in a field need to take responsibility for accessing and appropriating structures to achieve positive emotional energy through collective curriculum leadership and climates that create and sustain educational accomplishments. Furthermore, it is suggested that individual and collective actions should be studied dialectically in subsequent research on leadership dynamics in schools.

Opportunities to talk science in a high school chemistry classroom

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of the discourse strategies employed by students and a chemistry teacher as they engaged in various activities in the classroom. More specifically, the paper examines how discourse supports or constrains opportunities to engage in experimentation and making sense of new experiences. Data, collected daily for four weeks in a high school chemistry classroom, included ethnographic fieldnotes, video-recordings, and interview transcripts. Discourse analysis was combined with other data to produce a rich description of the classroom. We show that various discourse strategies were employed by the teacher in order to maintain control of the discourse, which was consistent with both his and his students expectations and aims. The study argues that an understanding of the micro-discourse strategies that contribute to issues of control of talk and activities by the teacher in the classroom has important implications for learning science.

Jin Shin Jyutsu and Ameliorating Emotion, Enhancing Mindfulness, and Sustaining Productive Learning Environments

In a context of graduate education, we study intuitive uses of Jin Shin Jyutsu, a complementary theory of wellness that involves harmony and universal energy flow through the body. We adopt a multilogical approach to research in which we study events selected from videotapes of a doctoral class and two doctoral students critiquing presentations at a seminar. The research incorporates numerous sociocultural theories together with Jin Shin Jyutsu – adopting a standpoint that different theoretical perspectives illuminate experiences in ways that are synergistic, having the potential to reveal radically different research foci, associated research outcomes, and potential implications. What we learned is that those we studied continuously used touches, holds, and sequences of touches and holds (i.e., flows) that involved those parts of their body that were accessible to them. The prevalence of JSJ-like touches, holds, and flows are consistent with an assertion that emotions and well-being are controlled intuitively in an ongoing manner that harmonizes universal energy flow and contributes to maintaining good health. Our exploratory study sets the stage for further research involving interventions to ameliorate excess emotions and ensure that teacher and student roles do not adversely impact health.