The seeds of time

The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural long-term trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events. Classroom talk plays an important role in mediating this long-term process, and in this article I argue that more attention should be given to the temporal dimension of classroom dialogue, both empirically and theoretically, if we are to appreciate how children gain an education from their classroom experience. I explore this topic using data from recent applied, interventional research in United Kingdom primary schools and examine how classroom talk is used to represent past shared experience, carry ideas forward from one occasion to another, approach future activities, and achieve learning outcomes. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and educational implications of making this kind of temporal analysis.

If you can look into the seeds of time

And say which grain will grow and which will not

Speak, then, to me …

(Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3) In this article, I examine how the passage of time is embodied in classroom talk and how this embodiment contributes to the process of teaching and learning. I begin by elaborating this topic, arguing for its significance, discussing relevant prior research, and considering some methodological and theoretical issues involved in studying it. I then present the first of several transcripts from a related series of events and use an analysis of the transcribed talk to begin to explore these issues and discuss what is involved in making a temporal analysis. Following the consideration of more examples of talk involving both teacher–student and student–student dialogue, I draw conclusions about the importance of the temporal dimension for analyzing the discursive process of 190teaching and learning and discuss the theoretical and methodological developments that will be required if this topic is to be pursued.

Most of my research has been carried out in primary/elementary schools. In such schools, a teacher and the members of a class normally stay together for the whole of a school year. Their classroom life is organized into lessons that may be as short as half an hour or as long as two hours; but any one lesson usually represents part of a series dealing with a topic or a set of related topics, taking place at quite regular intervals. Moreover, although the efforts of the learners (and the teacher) in each lesson may be focused on specific learning outcomes, there is a cumulative quality to the educational process. Particular tasks will be set in the context of an overarching curriculum, some topics will take more than one session to pursue, and the achievement of some kinds of skills and understanding may be prerequisites for more advanced work. The treatment of topics and development of skills may be planned by teachers as a staged process.

As Douglas Barnes (1992) observed, “Most learning does not happen suddenly: we do not one moment fail to understand something and the next moment grasp it entirely” (p. 123). It is widely accepted that becoming educated is not simply a matter of accumulating information; it involves the gradual induction of students into new perspectives on the world and the development of new problem-solving skills and new ways of using language for representing knowledge and making sense of experience. In British schools, at least, some of the most important assessment is designed to test students’ cumulative, integrated understanding of a subject and not just their recall of specific items from discrete lessons. From a student’s perspective, school work should ideally have a cohesive, cumulative quality in which specific activities and their goals can be seen to form part of a greater whole, as part of a purposeful educational journey.

The continuity of personnel and the linking of the content of lessons can be expected to provide some coherence to children’s experience of classroom education. However, for all students some discontinuity and incoherence will be inevitable, caused by such factors as absences of students from crucial lessons in a sequence; the use of inappropriate pedagogic strategies; students’ difficulties in keeping up with the pace of activities; and the effects of lack of concentration, boredom, and distractions of many kinds. Bereiter (1997) highlighted the problems that may be caused by teachers and students pursuing goals that are based on different implicit time frames. Alexander (2000), Crook (1999), and several other educational researchers have argued that coherent knowledge and purposeful understanding will not naturally emerge for students from their continuous immersion in classroom life: They have to be pursued actively as pedagogic goals, through the use of appropriate teaching strategies. Language is our prime tool for making collective sense of experience, and the extent to which students will perceive cohesion and coherence in their classroom work may be heavily dependent on how dialogue mediates that activity. Talk with a teacher, and with other students, is 191perhaps the most important means for ensuring that a student’s engagement in a series of activities contributes to his or her developing understanding of science, mathematics, or any other subject as a whole. In order to understand how classroom education succeeds and fails as a process for developing students’ knowledge and understanding, we therefore need to understand the temporal relationship between the organization of teaching and learning as a series of lessons and activities and how it is enacted through talk. To put it another way: As learning is a process that happens over time, and learning is mediated through dialogue, we need to study dialogue over time to understand how learning happens and why certain learning outcomes result. We may then see more clearly how the precious resource of the time that a teacher and a class spend together can be used to good effect in the pursuit of children’s education, or how it may be squandered.

The significance of the temporal dimension of discourse for the development of knowledge and understanding has been recognized by several researchers (e.g., Alexander, 2000, chapter 15; Cobb, 1999; Crook, 1999; Erickson, 1996; Issroff, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Nystrand, Wu, Gamorgan, Zeiser, & Long, 2003; Roth, 2001, 2005, 2006; Wells, 1999, chapter 3), but relatively few studies have expressly examined the relationship between time, talk, and learning in classroom life. One possible reason, as Littleton (1999) suggested, is that studying the dialogues of teaching and learning over an extended period of time poses serious methodological and theoretical challenges. As is apparent from one of the few studies of this topic (by Rasmussen, 2005, who analyzed the talk over some months in a Norwegian primary classroom), just gathering the relevant data requires the researcher’s substantial commitment of his or her own time for continual recording and observation – and then some theoretical and methodological innovation is needed for the subsequent analysis.

Methodologically, there is little guidance available for studying the temporal development of talk, and not just within educational research. On consulting several excellent and well-regarded methodological texts representing various approaches including sociolinguistics, discursive psychology, conversation analysis, and systemic functional linguistics (Christie, 2002; Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Gee, 1999; Potter & Wetherell, 1994; ten Have, 1999), I found no substantial treatment of this topic. However, I found some useful advice in publications by Gee and Green (1998) and Scott, Mortimer, and Aguiar (2006). Gee and Green described one of the functions of talk as “connection building,” whereby intertextual links are made by speakers in their joint meaning making. Following other researchers such as Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), they identified this as an important characteristic of classroom discourse and suggested that useful insights can be gained into how classroom talk functions by addressing such questions as the following:

What sorts of connections (intertextual ties) are proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and interactionally made to previous or future interactions 192(activity) and to texts, to other people, ideas, things, institutions and discourses outside the current interaction?

Which processes, practices and discourses do [speakers] draw on from previous events/situations to guide the actions in the current situation (e.g., text construction)?

(Gee & Green, 1998, p. 141) Scott et al. (2006), reporting a study of talk in school science lessons, offered the following advice:

To understand the purpose of a specific teaching activity in a sequence of lessons it is necessary to determine how this particular activity fits with the whole sequence…. [Our] analysis of the discourse of science lessons involves an iterative process of moving backwards and forwards through time, trying to make sense of the episodes as linked chains of interactions.

(p. 610) Also within an analysis of learning in science lessons, Roth (2006) offered the valuable insight that it is only by pursuing the trajectory of students’ learning over time that an analyst can begin to recognize the potential significance of the apparent repetition of certain actions (such as procedures in a practical scientific investigation) as part of the learning process. The same act repeated cannot be assumed to be “the same” act in repetition, because it builds historically on the earlier event. This insight applies as much, of course, to the consideration of verbal acts – and so problematizes the use of categories such as “types of questions” and other atemporal coding schemes for studying the educational functions of discourse. The question “What causes rusting?” would have very different meanings and functions if asked by a science teacher in an introductory whole-class discussion before any work on oxidation had been done by the class, at the end of a series of group-based experiments, or in a revision session just before a public examination.

At a different level of analysis, Christie (1999) showed how teachers use talk to manage the timing and sequencing of events in the classroom. My own earlier research described discursive strategies commonly used by teachers to refer to past events and so consolidate relevant experience being shared with their students. For example, they use recaps, or summaries of what they consider to be the most salient features of a past event for the current activity (Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Mercer, 1995). Recaps can be literal or reconstructive, the latter being where the teacher “rewrites history,” presenting a modified version of events that fits his or her current pedagogic concerns. Teachers also frequently use elicitations to activate students’ recall about past events (e.g., “Who can tell me what they found out about the moon in the last lesson?”). It is common, too, for them to mark past shared experiences as significant and relevant by using we statements 193(as in “Remember when we looked at the map of Italy?”). In those ways teachers invoke common knowledge and highlight the continuities of educational experience, trying to draw students into a shared, cumulative, and progressive understanding of the activities in which they are engaged. In his influential research on culture and pedagogy, Alexander (2000, 2004) suggested that one indicator that teacher–student talk deserves to be called dialogic is that the teacher uses talk to provide a cumulative, continuing, contextual frame to enable students’ involvement with the new knowledge they are encountering.