Co-Constructing Writing Contexts in Classrooms

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to delineate a specific perspective to tracing children’s developing understandings of genre writing; this is described as a socially-situated, intertextual process that is mediated by interaction. The discussion focuses on two writing conferences in two 5^th grade Greek classrooms (characterized by a working-class and a middle-class student population, respectively), and attends to the discourse strategies used by participants, teachers and students, for the construction of the thematic and interactional structure of these units. The analysis provides evidence on the discourse processes through which children of different sociocultural groups gain access to literacy learning and considers how the learning contexts created through talk within each writing conference may in fact, limit or facilitate children’s access to learning opportunities. To attain this aim, I proceed as follows: Rather than analyzing conference discourse through a pre-established set of descriptive categories, attention is directed to the way by which the teacher and the children navigate through discourse patterns and varying perspectives to reflect upon narrative texts and construct a “shared” pool of the criteria that make a school narrative text effective (according to communicative standards co-constructed within each classroom community). The questions I raise are the following: How does the teacher cooperate with the children and how do all participants manage to coordinate their varying resources and construct a “shared” perspective toward meaning making? Is this construction possible in all cases and on what factors does it depend? The conferences under investigation point to two distinct styles of knowledge construction, i.e., scaffolded versus collaborative learning. While, on the theoretical front, these two styles seem to be differentiated in rather clear-cut terms, the data reveal a more complicated picture. This chapter illustrates how scaffolding attempts made by the teacher are taken up (or rejected) by the students (and vice versa) and how, through these processes, the teacher and (some of) the students, as active participants in these classroom contexts, negotiate their divergent understandings of the nature and functions of writing.