What is learning in co-educational situations? Case study in didactics: a reading and writing session in the first school year.

Author(s):

Murielle Gerin(presenting / submitting)Monique Loquet

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 05 B, Cross-cultural Comparisons on Reading in Classrooms

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

13:30-15:00

Room:

K3.05

Chair:

Marte Blikstad-Balas

Contribution

The teaching and learning situation we analyze is a reading and writing session in the first school year in France. The students are six years old. In our excerpt, two students are working together: a boy and a girl. The fact that this is a mixed group is significant. Nevertheless, we differ from the studies (Mosconi (2015), Zaidman (1996), Jarlegan (2015), Faulstich-Wieland, Weber, Willems (2004), Budde (2006), Einarsson & Granström (2002), Sievers, (2006)) which attend to explain how primary school teaching practices are part of the process of a gender-based-division of knowledge. We also distinguish our research from the debate about co-educational/single-sex schooling (Younger and Warrington, 2002), (Smithers and Robinson, 2006), (Duru-Bellat, 2010). However, these studies inspire our work and we are asking the following question: how could co-education happened so that it becomes a tool to learn the knowledge at stake taken from the curriculum and at the same time a culture of gender equality?

The shift to co-education occurred in France in the 1970s. Mixed schools have been implemented because of economics issues. Equality between men and women, boys and girls has not been point as a perspective. Through the co-educational schooling system has been hardly ever discussed by the teachers. In many cases, boys and girls are seating next to each other in the classroom but do rarely have the opportunity to work together on an equality perspective. The questions we are raising are the following: what are the didactic conditions to enable a co-education that promotes a boy-girl’s coordinated action in a didactic situation? Is there a link between learning reading and writing in the first school year and learning a culture of gender equality?

Our research question is this: within a reading and writing situation, how interactions between a boy and a girl are adjusted to one another and articulated to interactions with the teacher, in order to enact a specific move toward the knowledge at stake that would be learning reading and writing and at the same time learning a culture of gender equality?

Based on the analysis of a lesson’s observation, our objective is to describe emerging didactic conditions which enable a boy-girl’s coordinated action within a learning situation.

Our theoretical framework would be Joint Action theory in Didactics (Sensevy, 2011; Gruson, Forest and Loquet, 2013) and specifically The Reticence-Expression Dialectics. Therefore, we will focus on the dialectics of telling-showing (expression) and being tacit-hiding (reticence) of the teacher. The Reticence-Expression Dialectics means that in order to enable a student’s action that would be comprehensive and autonomous, the teacher has to show and at the same time to hide some components of the piece of the knowledge at stake. In our excerpt we would attempt to show how The Reticence-Expression Dialectics of the teacher may enable a boy-girl’s coordinated action in a learning reading and writing situation.

Method

Our study is based on a filmed observation of a class. This film belongs to a French wide research on reading and writing in the first year of primary school in France. It has been conducted in 131 classes by the French Institute of Education (Ifé). The name of this study is “Lire et écrire au CP” (reading and writing in the first school year). Among this data we looked for a session with boy-girl’s interactions. Our goal was to describe the boy-girl’s interactions and find out the didactic conditions which might make these interactions happen. This has not been easy. Indeed, most of the time, interactions occurred between the teacher and the students, less among the students. The lesson we identified took place two years ago in the middle of November. At this time of the year in France, students generally start gradually to apply phonic knowledge and skills and to decode very simple words. Even if they ignore many phonemes and graphemes, they are progressively able to make correspondences between some graphemes and phonemes. They also begin to form lower-case letters by hand in a cursive script. In the situation we identified, the students have to build up and write a sentence. They have to do this in pairs. The group we observed is made up of a boy named Wahid and a girl named Mounia. Each pair becomes material to do its work. The material has to be shared by the members of the group. The sentence would be based on three words’ cards. Once the sentence would be created; the pair would write it on a sheet of paper. We would focus on a two minutes’ excerpt of the video that shows Mounia and Wahid writing the first word of the sentence “Ali”. The description of what one’s says and makes and of what we see on the video, would involve a very close observation of the filmed situation. The analysis of the extract would operate thanks to the JAtD’s Reticence-Expression Dialectics. We choose this excerpt because it shows how the teacher fosters a boy-girl’s coordinated action in the way he withholds information.

Expected Outcomes

A boy-girl’s coordinated action would be linked to a teacher-student joint action with a knowledge at stake. At speech turn 8., the boy notices that the girl made a mistake when she wrote the first word of the sentence (“Ali”). He tells the teacher about the error of the girl. Hearing this remark of the boy, Mounia adjusts her action to what Wahid said. Indeed, she stands up and goes to another place of the classroom in order to pick-up a rubber. When she comes back, she erases the word she wrote. At the same time the teacher’s reticence would occur. The teacher looks at the boy but does not say anything to what the boy said. Moreover, he does not say to Mounia that she made an error, what mistake she made, how she should have written “Ali” or that she has to stand up and hold a rubber. He gives the impression that he withholds information in order to make the student’s pair responsible for the correction of the error. Doing so he slowdowns the didactic time and enable adjustments between the boy and the girl. This reticence of the teacher would promote a boy-girl’s coordinated action as part of a teacher-student joint action. Learning reading and writing in a co-educational situation understood as a boy-girl’s coordinated action would mean: learning reading and writing and the same time learning a culture of equality.

References

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Author Information

Murielle Gerin (presenting / submitting)

Université Rennes 2, France

Monique Loquet