Browsing by Subject "boundary crossing"

Modern views of learning emphasise the utilisation of students' pre-existing knowledge in teaching. Learning and information refinement occurs in social interaction, and for this reason school should also utilise more communal approaches to learning and teaching. Making use of students' existing knowledge is important also for student interest and engagement. The aim of this study is to find out how well teachers succeed in including student initiatives into teaching. The focal point is student-teacher interaction and how its quality is likely to affect student engagement. Earlier research has highlighted the importance of a good student-teacher social relationship, but on a level that provides no details of practicalities. A purpose of this study is to provide practical examples of different kinds of student-teacher interaction, and the interactions' effects on learning and engagement. This study is a qualitative analysis and the data is part of the data collected during the "Learning, Agency and Well-being" (2009-2014) project. The data of this study comprises of observational data collected from two upper secondary classes during 2010 and 2011. It consists of a total of 146 lessons that were concatenated into 52 episodes. From these episodes 109 interaction sequences that begun with a student initiative were included. In addition, 7 episode examples for selected for deeper scrutiny to form more detailed qualitative analyses and interpretations. Although teachers were fond of attempting to include student initiatives into teaching, only a few times was activity re-directed on the bases of the initiative. A good social relationship was found to be a significant factor for the creation of engagement fostering surroundings. Mutual trust and respect were found to be hallmarks of a good social relationship. Accepting students' somewhat on-task initiatives was found to be the best way of improving student engagement.