Do you see the difference? Changing points of view in university classroom talk

This paper presents an investigation of university classroom talk, with a focus on teacher-student dialogue. The perspectival nature of interaction (Rommetveit, 1992) is taken as a key tenet of this investigation of action in university classrooms. Classrooms are conceptualized as collective spaces for sharing ideas and labouring in goal-directed activities in which utterances are grounded in a joint attentional frame, and where attention and cognitive activity are socially situated and shared in space and time (Tomasello, 2003). The purpose of the investigation which is the focus of this paper was to identify how students’ knowledge positions emerge and change and how they come to share (or not) the positions of their teacher. The data used in this study is a spoken corpus of academic English created from recordings of a range of subject discipline classrooms at a UK university. In order to examine how teachers and students entered into a collective struggle to make meaning and see from one another’s point of view, the approach to the analysis of the data was through a focus on stance-taking (Du Bois, 2007). I illustrate how interactants do not merely participate in knowledge transfer, but rather they engage with one another’s perspectives and evaluate those perspectives in relation to disciplinary knowledge. In particular, I draw on examples of teacher-student dialogue from an Architecture Crit. This activity, in which a student and tutor discuss a student’s design, is a somewhat unique and well-established feature of degree programmes in Architecture and reflects the embedded nature of this type of activity in the academic and professional culture of Architecture. Contrary to the gloss that the tutor is engaged in a complex and lengthy way of telling a student what to do, more precisely, she actively seeks to construct shared knowledge between herself and the student. She works to change the position of the student from one evaluation to another, which is more closely aligned to the tutor’s. The evaluation to which the tutor is working to align the student is signalled as the subjectivity of the discipline (which the tutor‘s position represents), which she embodies. The tutor evokes what it is that is valued in the discipline and constructs with the student how these values are, or are not, present in the student’s evaluation. It is not the giving and taking of knowledge or telling or not telling, the dialogue unfolds to create intersubjectivity. The tutor‘s embodiment of discipline knowledge is signalled by her stance expressions dispersed throughout the dialogue. In this case the tutor positions herself I in the task set for the student and speaks from that position as a successful representative of the culture and community of the discipline, the professional architect. This particular feature of teacher-student dialogue is further explored in other contexts in the corpus in which disciplines are attributed to a profession or vocation. The texts examined add further illustrations to the presence of stance-taking as the embodiment of the subjectivity of the discipline. Crucially, the importance of affording elaboration in these contexts is highlighted in order to make the space for the enactment of student stance in relation to the tutor embodiment of discipline knowledge.