Children's Democratic Experiences in a Collective Writing Process – Analysing Classroom Interaction in Terms of Deliberation
Abstract
The aim of this study is twofold; firstly, it aims to explore the interactional conditions in terms of democratic qualities constituted in collective writing in a primary school classroom, and secondly, it aims to try out if a set of deliberative criteria is fruitful as analytical tools when studying natural classroom interaction – natural in the sense that the researcher have not consciously intervened in its design. The study has an ethnographic approach where classroom’s observations were conducted during a collective writing process involving six nine-year-old children and their teacher. In all, two lessons, divided into 3 hours, have been observed, videotaped, and transcribed. The teacher had planned for a quite strict interactional or didactical order during this collective writing, where the children should response one at a time. However, the children responded in a different manner through starting a vivid dialogue by negotiating both form and content of the story. The analysis shows some deliberative qualities in the classroom interaction while other qualities where not yet developed. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the set of deliberative criteria was useful both in visualizing existing deliberative qualities in the interaction as well as potentials for developing such qualities.
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Keywords:
collective writing, classroom interaction, deliberative communication, ethnography
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Copyright (c) 2017 Eva Hultin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.