Teacher’s contingent dialogic scaffolding practices for students’ expressions of argumentative agency

Abstract

This qualitative multiple-case study explored how a biology teacher’s contingent dialogic scaffolding practices facilitated the students’ expressions of argumentative agency. Data such as classroom transcripts from audio and video recordings, interviews, and field notes were subjected to microlevel and macrolevel analyses using the constant comparison method. The micro-level analysis procedure was adapted from the Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA) which proposes that communication has a hierarchy and nested levels at the micro (communicative acts), meso (communicative events), and macro (Communicative situations) levels. This coding scheme was chosen as it allowed for the interpretative diagnosis of how dialogic the sequences of interactions are between the teacher and the students at the micro level and the intentions of the teachers’ dialogues at the macro level. All data transcripts were segmented, and initial coding utilized some codes in the classroom observation guides that merged with codes from literature to establish the final themes. Results show that her dialogic practice can be collectively characterized as flexible affirmations of the students’ ideas for collective consensus, and this was implemented in two different but related strategies: 1) reinforcing a mutually contingent dialogic exercise, and 2) revoicing to increase students‟ backing and enhance their discursive identity. The study provides information on the possibility of implementing classroom argumentation in any classroom, provided that the teachers can dialogically scaffold the class and lessen the immediate evaluative responses to students’ dialogues. The study, therefore, recommends that teacher educators increase pre-service teachers’ exposure to inquiry approaches to science education, such as argumentation, as an investment for the development of their dialogic scaffolding for classroom argumentation.