The Teacher's Role in a Participation Structure of Collaborative Learning:

Organizing a Dialogical and Multilayered Conversation Floor in the Discussion of Social Studies

Abstract

  The purpose of this article is to examine how an elementary school teacher creates collaborative inquiry in his social studies lesson. This study is based on a field research conducted in a fourth grade class to investigate how the teacher forms participation and collaborative learning by students. In this study, the concept of “conversational floor” produced by Shultz, J., Florio, S. and Erickson, F. A was used to describe the teacher's strategies. Conversational floor means the rights and duties between speakers and listeners mediated by a topic.

  In this class, students introduce the topics into discussion by themselves and form the conversational floors. The floors are constructed fluid and multilayered. Mr. Fukuyama, the teacher in this class, constantly coordinates and repairs the interpersonal relationships among students.

  There are three kinds of strategies of organizing conversational floors. First, he mediates and forms the relationships among students as the speaker and/or the listener. They express their understandings about topics each other. Second, he prepares various ways of participation by organizing multilayered conversational floors and making networks among students. Third, he writes down the students' utterances on the blackboard and shows their configuration so that the students rethink the discussion and learn how to inquire collaborately. This strategy was used with the first and second strategies so that students would be able to exchange and reflect a variety of perspectives.

  The teacher designs the students' various experiences through organizing the conversational relationships as well as helps them to understand and construct their own knowledge.