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The Classroom Setting The research analyzed classroom discussions within the context of the Saint Mary's Collegiate Seminar Program; a four-semester undergraduate general education requirement based loosely upon the Great Books tradition of St Johns College. The seminars are relatively unstructured discussions where participants explore the ideas and values evoked by a carefully selected primary text. The pedagogical intent of the approach is to foster productive habits of intellectual inquiry and exchange that will serve students in diverse future learning environments. The discussions are normally facilitated by a leader but are ultimately shaped by the unpredictable moves of their participants and do not adhere to any preordained content-driven objectives.
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Not-Knowing In an earlier investigation of student reflections on their seminar classes (see link below), the theme of not-knowing emerged as a key factor in the maintenance of a truly collaborative intellectual community within the classroom. In order for a shared inquiry to proceed productively, the participants must be able to regularly acknowledge their lack of understanding, offer partial understandings, and collectively digest the resulting discourse. Not-knowing is characterized by a groups ability to defer meaning, tolerate ambiguity, hold divergent perspectives, and postpone closure. In order to develop, it requires a relatively non-judgmental classroom atmosphere, but not an uncritical one.
2002 Reflection Project
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"The only means of strengthening ones intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing - to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
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How is Not-Knowing enacted within actual classroom discourse?
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Theoretical Starting Points - A constructivist perspective - effective learning occurs when students are challenged to construct their own understandings
- Within the seminar, student knowledge is co-constructed within ongoing discourse
- Lev Vygotsky's conceptualisation of cognitive development - initial understanding happens within a social context and thought is an internalised conversation, a displaced social process.
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Analytic Approach The primary focus was on not-knowing as a group capacity co-constructed within classroom discourse. In order to develop a richer description of this process, detailed digital audio recordings and transcriptions of selected seminar discussions were collected and studied using the method of discourse analysis (Wood & Kroger, 2000). Discourse analysis is a microanalytic approach to understanding participants own meanings within small segments of conversation. Its objective is not to uncover universal laws or manufacture broad generalizations, but to understand language use in its functional specificity. One hour-long seminar discussion on Garcia-Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was transcribed and analyzed using this method. The session was not chosen for its high quality or as a best practice but as an illustration of collaborative inquiry typical of this pedagogy.
Annotated Transcript
This document illustrates the discourse analysis of a 1-minute segment of class discussion. It should be viewed in Word to preserve the two-column format.
Audio Clip
This is the actual audio recording of the segment transcribed above. It is a 1 MB MP3 file.
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Key Findings At the most explicit level, the students used discourse markers to communicate the provisional and open-ended nature of their contributions. These markers commonly included tag questions (e.g. y'know? isn't it? does that make any sense?), qualifiers (e.g. maybe, almost like, kinda like) and prefaces (e.g. I just thought, I was wondering if). A first glance, these markers may seem to reflect a disturbing lack of confidence their own opinions, however, they can also be viewed as pragmatic devices - performing a social function rather than reflecting an internal reality. Their pragmatic intent is to communicate that an utterance is open to modification, transformation and qualification by the group. On a more subtle level, not-knowing is embedded within the discourse structure itself. Through a surprising variety of linguistic forms, students communicated that they do not expect definitive answers to their questions or immediate evaluations to their contributions. Their speech regularly indicated that they were seeking other ideas to lie on the table beside their own in an open-ended field of inquiry. These discourse dynamics imply an underlying epistemology of knowledge as co-constructed and negotiable rather than discrete and given. Discussion segments characterized by not-knowing had non-linear topic patterns and complex exchange structures; the group frequently veered off topic and then returned in a cyclic pattern. These learning environments required participants to negotiate multiple threads simultaneously and make connections across wide spans of interaction. The associated cognitive demands may encourage more elaborate processing of information as students hold, review and reconstitute ideas for lengthy periods of time. This may be one explanation for the traditional (but inconsistently validated) claim that discussion makes for better retention and understanding of course material. Discussions devoid of not-knowing may not foster the same educational benefits. Hopefully, this research is one step towards building a more articulated model of seminar processes and their relationship to student learning. Rather than making strong generalizations, it attempts to create a model of seminar that draws attention to relevant variables and underlying learning dynamics.
Bibliography
A few key references with annotation.
Final Report
A more detailed description of the results of this study.
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