Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/30981
Title: Children Who Can Guess What Is in the Teacher's Head: Understanding Engagement in Schooling from a Sociocultural Perspective
Contributor(s): Harper, Helen  (author)orcid ; Parkin, Bronwyn (author)
Publication Date: 2020
Early Online Version: 2020-05-23
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-3959-6_6
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/30981
Abstract: Teachers’ work is a crucial element in the complex education-health equation. In this chapter we consider the work that teachers do to establish positive affect in classrooms, guiding children to become confident and participating members of classroom learning communities, and thus creating the foundation for children’s learning at school. Maintaining positive affect is particularly important for teachers seeking to be inclusive of educationally marginalised students: those who are not yet tuned in to the underpinning purposes of schooling; or those least likely to put themselves in the spotlight to talk about their learning. Here we draw on an interactional and sociocultural perspective to discuss specific pedagogic strategies that teachers can use to establish and maintain positive affect, while keeping in sight the academic goals of classroom activity. We illustrate our discussion with extracts of classroom dialogue, recorded in two schools: one a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory; the other an urban South Australian school that caters for children from low-socio-economic backgrounds, many from immigrant and refugee families. We interrogate the patterns of classroom dialogue to show how teachers skillfully used interactive scaffolding strategies to develop students’ attention to academic learning from a foundation of positive affect. Rather than attributing school failure to deficits of the child or their environment, we argue that inclusion in academic activity is socially realised. Our data suggest that students’ capacity to focus and attend to learning is not so much a function of their individual abilities, but more a result of socially constructed meaning making which is fostered by expert teachers through moment-to-moment pedagogic choices.
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: Health and Education Interdependence: Thriving from Birth to Adulthood, p. 91-108
Publisher: Springer
Place of Publication: Singapore
ISBN: 9789811539596
9789811539619
9789811539589
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 390102 Curriculum and pedagogy theory and development
390304 Primary education
390412 Teacher and student wellbeing
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 160201 Equity and access to education
160302 Pedagogy
160103 Primary education
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
WorldCat record: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1249505915
Editor: Editor(s): Richard Midford, Georgie Nutton, Brendon Hyndman and Sven Silburn
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter
School of Education

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