Discussion Leads: Team 1 Questions (Hull) – Matthew Franks and Nick Reddy

Remediation as Social Construct: Perspectives from an Analysis of Classroom Discourse

Author(s): Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, Marisa Castellano

Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Oct., 1991), pp. 299-329

 

1. “How is it that annoying conversational style can become a measure of intellectual ability?” (311).

In other words, how does a student’s deviation from expected behavior in the classroom affect the teacher’s evaluation and expectations of that student? June, the teacher in the article, suspected a student’s parents of writing her assignments for her.

Does the teacher teach to a lower level? Is education compromised?

2. IRE sequence (teacher initiates, a student replies, and the teacher evaluates)

Hull spent a lot of time explaining IRE. How important is the IRE sequence in a classroom setting? Is there a form of interaction more conducive to learning?

3. Roger Simon has written about “the contradictory character of the work of teaching” (246), illustrating that “what teachers choose to signify at any particular moment in time may present meanings which are ideologically inconsistent with meanings present at other times” (318).

I think this has to do with when/how a teacher tackles a certain subject or question and when they pass it by? In other words, when/how teachers should accept input/contribution to the conversation from students?

I’m not really sure what this is referring to. Perhaps an example may help?

4. The authors cite Jenny Cook-Gumpez’s “The Social Construction of Literacy” in saying that ‘…literacy learning consists of more than the acquisition of cognitive skills, it also involves the “social process of demonstrating knowledgeability” (301).

What “rules” about talking and speech do students need to know in order to convey their level of understanding in the classroom? Let’s make a list of everything we can come up with as a class and discuss our findings briefly.

5. How does a student’s cultural and educational background (use Maria as an example) impact how they talk in the classroom? (Maria, although a decent student, frequently interrupts June, even during IRE sequences and mini-lectures).

6. How has thinking about poor performing students changed over the centuries and decades? What paradigms are we working with in today’s educational world?

I believe that understanding the history of educational thinking about teaching remedial students is key to adequately progressing society forward. But what are we doing now that is different than what we used to do?

7. How can teachers avoid June’s line of thinking about Maria, specifically referring to June’s disregard of Maria’s journaling as an “extra institutional  literacy activity and negates the possibility that she could learn things about literacy from it”?