Abstract This paper describes an analysis of social practice taking place between teachers and students within the classroom in a Tanzanian Secondary School. The aim of this contemporary study is to describe and explain classroom interaction with respect to existing role patterns and frame factors. The studied material consists primarily of collected data from classroom observations, with concentration on one class in form one and five single teachers. In addition to the observation method the investigation is also based on complementary informant study where five students within the observed class were interviewed.  An analysis consisting of categorisation, description, and explanation of the different variables of verbal and written communication is expected to yield information about the social practice within the Tanzanian classroom. Such information will aid in addressing a potential connection between pattern of roles and certain frame factors.   The results of the observations imply that the teacher has the most active role; the teaching was almost entirely based on the use of direct, reproductive, teacher-centered methods leaving diminutive room for student moves.  A notably high frequency of questions of a reproductive form, where students merely had to emulate the teacher, was discovered. Even though students were rarely addressed with questions of an open form, observations and interviews reveal students’ eager to break free from their constrained roles. What occurred to be a fixed pattern of steered activities turned out to be highly dynamical process. Considering relevant frame factors, there are reasons to believe that the Tanzanian classroom interaction is about to shift from a monologic to a dialogic classroom discourse; making this a highly interesting matter to investigate.

No description available.

The principal contribution of the study is a conceptual account of classroom activities in school science, which incorporates both ethical and conventional science understandings within a single conceptual framework. In order to illustrate and explore the strengths and limitations of the conceptual framework developed, an exploratory case study involving 7 science classes was conducted at 2 schools. The 'classroom practices and understandings' conceptual framework presents a novel approach for understanding activities of students and teachers in the science classroom. According to this framework 'understanding' is a grasp of inferential connections as part of either practical or cognitive types of activity, whereas a 'practice' is a set of activities organized by understandings, rules and characteristic aims, emotions, and projects. On this basis the grounds for a given understanding are described in terms of a unifying structure for both ethical and science understandings. In both cases 'authority in understanding' refers to the specific sources of authority for a given understanding, which may include authoritative individuals in addition to more conventional grounds such as reasons or evidence. Finally, 'richness' of understanding refers to the quality of such connections to sources of authority in understanding, and is thus is a measure of the strength of understanding generally. Classroom lessons developed for the exploratory case study focused on ethical questions of sustainability. These were implemented in the science classroom at two research sites, with the researcher acting as guest teacher. One site focused on study of ecology in grade 11; the other site focused on study of genetics in grade 10. At both sites student interviews were conducted to supplement the findings of the classroom-teaching component. The findings support the integrity of the conceptual framework, while highlighting significant challenges for seeking to make explicit the sources of authority in science students' ethical understandings. Building from the conceptual framework and cases studies, a number of further directions for empirical and theoretical research are suggested.

Inclusive education practices call for the diverse and individual needs of all students to be met satisfactorily. The needs and experiences of artistically talented students in Australian visual art classrooms are currently unknown. This study addresses this gap in research through an inquiry into the experiences of artistically talented students and their teachers in visual art classrooms, by examining the accounts of a group of students and teachers at one high school in South East Queensland. This study is significant as it provides teachers, parents and others involved in the education of artistically talented students with additional means to plan and cater for the educational needs of artistically talented students. Teacher and student accounts of the visual art classroom in this study indicated that identification processes for artistically talented students are unclear and contradictory. Furthermore, teacher and student accounts of their experiences presented a wide variety of conceptions of the visual art classroom and point towards an individualised approach to learning for artistically talented students. This study also discovered a mismatch between assessment practices in the subject visual art and assessment of art in the ‘real world’. Specifically, this study proposes a renewal of programs for artistically talented students, and recommends a revision of current procedures for the identification of artistically talented students in visual art classrooms.

Thesis (M Ed) -- University of South Australia, 1993

The primary purposes of this research were to identify if and how a selected teacher and her class experience deep enjoyment as flow in the classroom, and if they do have that experience, to investigate the teaching and learning factors that facilitate that deep enjoyment. In particular this research had the following three aims: 1. to explore the conditions and activities that are identifiable in learner's perceptions of their deep enjoyment or flow in learning. 2. to identify the component characteristics of flow articulated in the learners' stories about their enjoyable learning experiences. 3. to identify and examine perceptions of deep enjoyment or flow in learning in teacher practice and student learning through a teacher's stories of her teaching experience and through classroom observations. The research involved a case study of a teacher in a state school Year 5/6 classroom, and seventeen of her students. Qualitative data were collected from interviews with the teacher, interviews with the students, and field observations recorded in the researcher's journal over a period of several months. These data, analysed by using the NUD*IST software, provide valuable insight into how the teacher and her students perceive their teaching and learning experiences. The children and their teacher do experience enjoyment, often the deep enjoyment of flow in their classroom. A classroom culture was identified that includes teaching characteristics, environmental, and instructional variables, which help facilitate deeply enjoyable flow in meaningful learning. This research concludes that the intellectual knowledge is available which will make flow facilitating classroom cultures achievable. Achieving such a classroom culture is possible when educators identify and value the enjoyment of flow, with its subsequent sense of learner control, confidence, success, well-being, energy and motivation to learn. To do this, educators need to identify and implement the teaching and learning strategies available that facilitate the experience, with the intention of ensuring recurrent learner success from the early years of school attendance. Such a change in the educational ethos would lead to successful, enjoyable and vibrant learning experiences for teacher and learner in the classroom.

In the last few decades, there has been growing attention to situated or distributed perspectives on learning and cognition. The purpose of this study was to examine science learning in classroom settings through the lens of distributed cognition. A particular focus of this study was on the public space of interaction that includes participants' interactions with each other and with artefacts in the environment. / Focusing on the event of student experiment design, two science lessons were videotaped in this study, in which a class of Grade-seven participants was asked to investigate the scientific theme of gravity by designing parachutes and pendulums. The video-stimulated post-lesson interviews with both teacher and student provided complementary data in order to understand their practice in these lessons. / The analysis of two science lessons reveals the different functions of language, gestures, and material objects and their relative significance in the process of student meaning making and knowledge construction. It shows that (1) the language of science is best understood as an artefact employed by the participants to achieve mutual understanding; (2) gestures and other forms of non-verbal acts build the connections between the conceptual and the physical worlds, and provided perceptual resources that foregrounded the salient aspects of their environment; and (3) material objects helped the students to understand each other by disambiguating references to objects, but (4) material objects constrained student sense-making. The analysis also demonstrated that (5) the learning activity was enacted through the participants' deployment of a range of artefacts, and (6) the manipulation of conceptual artefacts was interdependent of the manipulation of material objects. / Building on the theoretical framework of distributed cognition, this study was able to document the students' learning processes by investigating classroom interactions in great detail. The findings and techniques resulting from this study will help teachers and researchers to achieve a better understanding of science learning in classrooms and the role of artefacts in this learning and assist them to improve the learning environments.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: C.T.P. Diamond.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--George Mason University, 2008. / Vita: p. 466. Thesis director: Priscilla Norton. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 28, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 455-465). Also issued in print.

Dissertation (Ed.D.)--University of Toledo, 2008. / Typescript. "Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Education Doctorate Degree in Educational Administration and Supervision." Bibliography: leaves 156-169.