where practice and theory intersect in the chemistry classroom: using cogenerative dialogue to...

Abstract This paper argues for an inclusive model of science education practice thatattempts to facilitate a relationship between ‘‘science and all’’ by paying particularattention to the development of the relationship between the teacher, students andscience. This model hinges on the implementation of cogenerative dialogues betweenstudents and teachers. Cogenerative dialogues are a form of structured discourse inwhich teachers and students engage in a collaborative effort to help identify andimplement positive changes in classroom teaching and learning practices. A primarygoal of this paper is to introduce a methodological and theoretical framework forconducting cogenerative dialogue that is accessible to classroom teachers and theirstudents. I propose that researchers must learn to disseminate their findings toteachers in ways that are practical, in that they provide teachers with informationneeded to make concrete connections between the research and their teaching, whilecontinuing to make available the theories that support their findings. Using anintegration research framework in conjunction with a temporality of learning model,I introduce a method of disseminating research findings that provides both classroomteachers and researchers with access to different forms of knowledge about cogen-erative dialogues in the same paper. In doing so, this article examines the relation-ships between teacher knowledge and researcher knowledge by exploring thepractical application of cogenerative dialogues for classrooms teachers and thetheoretical implications of using cogenerative dialogues for researchers.

Keywords Cogenerative dialogue Æ Teacher education Æ Science education ÆTemporality of learning and integrative research framework

This research was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation under GrantNo. REC-0107022. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in thispaper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National ScienceFoundation.

S. Martin (&)Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, Queens College, City Universityof New York, 65-30, Kissena Blvd, Flushing, NY 11367, USAe-mail: [email protected]

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Cult Scie Edu (2006) 1:693–720DOI 10.1007/s11422-006-9031-z

ORI GI N A L P A PE R

Where practice and theory intersect in the chemistryclassroom: using cogenerative dialogue to identifythe critical point in science education

Sonya Martin

Received: 2 August 2006 / Accepted: 2 August 2006 /Published online: 16 November 2006� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

In previous years, researchers and educators have grappled with issues ranging fromhow to engage in hands-on, inquiry-based teaching to developing culturally relevantcurricula. At the forefront of these discussions has been the drive to develop edu-cational policy that promotes ‘‘science for all’’ in an effort to develop scientificliteracy among all Americans (American Association for the Advancement of Sci-ence (AAAS), 1989; National Research Council (NRC), 1996). Angela CalabreseBarton (1998) explores the implications of this policy in her landmark paper ‘‘Re-framing ‘Science for All’ through the politics of poverty.’’ The following is an ex-cerpt from her paper:

The very idea of creating science for all is open and egalitarian, and it invites areflexive relationship between science and all. It invites an examination of howscience—and the teaching and learning of science—can be constructed inschools in ways that demand attention to the social, historical, political, andphysical contexts of the lives of teachers and students (p. 526).

Despite the reform rhetoric about ‘‘science for all,’’ the teaching of science hascontinued to cater to a small number of students who excel in it and choose to makescience a career while ignoring the needs of a larger student population who do notexcel in science and feel excluded from it. In this paper, I argue for an inclusivemodel of science education practice that attempts to facilitate a relationship between‘‘science and all’’ by paying particular attention to the development of the rela-tionship between the teacher and student, and their relationships to science. Thismodel hinges on the implementation of cogenerative dialogues between studentsand teachers. Cogenerative dialogues are a form of structured discourse in whichteachers and students engage in a collaborative effort to help identify and implementpositive changes in classroom teaching and learning practices.

Cogenerative dialogue (Roth, Tobin, & Zimmerman, 2002) offers teachers andstudents a pathway for sharing ‘‘current understandings to describe what has hap-pened, identify problems, articulate problems in terms of contradictions, and frameoptions that provide new and increased choices for enacting teaching and learning(p. 6).’’ Our current definition of what constitutes cogenerative dialogue has evolvedfrom the shared experiences of teachers, students and university researchers whoparticipated in a longitudinal ethnographic study focused on improving scienceteaching and learning in urban classrooms (Seiler & Elmesky, 2005).

As participants in this study, my students and I found that cogenerative dialogueenabled us to move towards this ideal of ‘‘science for all’’ by providing a method ofdiscourse and structured critical reflection from which we could explicitly define andnegotiate not only our goals for teaching and learning, but our individual and col-lective responsibility for meeting these goals. Herein, I introduce a methodologicaland theoretical framework for conducting cogenerative dialogue that is accessible toclassroom teachers and their students. These frameworks provide teachers andstudents with a tool to catalyze immediate change, enabling them to transform theway in which they position themselves in relation to one another and to science.

Making a case for structured reflection

It is my experience that teachers constantly reflect on their teaching. They makedecisions about their practices on both a conscious and unconscious level on a daily

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basis. They engage in conversations with their colleagues, parents and students abouttheir classrooms in an effort to provide students with greater opportunities to learn. Asa teacher, I find these conversations were sometimes therapeutic and cathartic innature because they provided me with an outlet for sharing my frustrations, concernsand even achievements. However, they often lacked the critical reflection and objectiveevaluation that is characteristic of cogenerative dialogue, making my ‘‘teacher talk’’unconstructive and ineffective in changing my teaching practices. Unlike cogenerativedialogue, when teachers just talk it does not invite input from the perspective of thestudent nor does it encourage change in one’s teaching, thus limiting a teacher’sreflective practice to a singular perspective of what occurs in her/his classroom.

At a time when policy makers criticize educational research for its distance fromthe classroom and its inability to effect change, it is less common to provide teachersand students with the means to engage in research on their own classroom practices.Cogenerative dialogue offers teachers and their students a methodological and the-oretical framework for engaging in meaningful research in their own classrooms.However, that classroom teachers and their students do not access the literaturedetailing these frameworks is problematic because the transformative potential ofcogenerative dialogue stems from the methodological and theoretical frameworksthat support them, and as a result, are necessary components of the process. Partic-ipating as a teacher/researcher in a study using cogenerative dialogues in my scienceclassroom, I learned that the transformative potential of this tool is limited by theextent to which teachers and their students can understand and apply the sociocul-tural and methodological theories from which cogenerative dialogue evolved.

Making the connection between research and teachers

When, as a classroom teacher, I first learned of this method of interacting with mystudents, I did not recognize the importance of the theoretical frameworks, whichare critical to cogenerative dialogue. It was not until I gained experience partici-pating in cogenerative dialogues with students, other teacher researchers, and uni-versity researchers that I was able to make the connections between the theories andthe practice. When teachers (and teacher educators) experience cogenerative dia-logue in the absence of theory, they wonder how cogenerative dialogue differs from‘‘just talking about stuff in the classroom.’’ Alternatively, had I been introduced tothe theory in the absence of experience, I may have been skeptical about how usefulor practical cogenerative dialogue would be in my classroom.

Today, there is a growing body of literature detailing the use of cogenerative dia-logues as a beneficial methodology for collaborative classroom research involvingboth teachers and their students. Unfortunately, as I have transitioned from a class-room teacher to a teacher educator, I find that many of the pre-service and in-serviceteachers with whom I work find a majority of educational literature to be inaccessibleto them. As a result, these teachers and their students do not benefit from the findingsof this and other research that have proven useful in developing positive relationshipsbetween students and science. Teachers offer many reasons why this is the case,including time constraints, unfamiliarity with how to access publications, feeling thatteachers are not the intended audience, and that the writing style and vocabulary usedare difficult to comprehend and alienate the teachers. These are all valid issues thatmay prevent teachers from accessing new information that could benefit their teaching

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practices. As a teacher educator, one of my goals is to make educational research moreaccessible to classroom teachers. In order to do so, I must first examine some of thechallenges that limit both teachers and researchers from making connections betweentheory and practice. Then I describe how implementing cogenerative dialogues canhelp teachers make these connections between theory and practice.

A framework for integrating theory and practice

The temporality of theoretical understanding

As a classroom teacher, I was unaware of not only the extent of the problems facingurban educators, but also the plethora of research being conducted to address theseissues. Although not informed about the latest research findings, I was aware of themany challenges I encountered everyday with my own students in my own classroom.In my teacher education courses, researchers introduced me to articles that I foundinformative and interesting, but I felt much of the research was irrelevant to orimpractical for my day-to-day teaching experiences. I found much of the literaturedisengaging because others wrote these articles about teachers rather than writing withthem or for them, making it difficult for me to make a connection between the theoriespresented in the research and my personal experiences as a classroom teacher.

I feel empowered in my transition from classroom teacher to teacher/researcher toteacher educator, as this evolution has gradually enabled me to recognize the rele-vance of research in improving education. Being exposed to the same theoreticalframeworks over time has played an essential role in my developmental under-standing of how theory can be used to inform and change teaching practices. Fromthese experiences, I have learned that the disconnect teachers feel between theoryand practice is very real. A great deal of research shows that students require re-peated exposure to the same information and experiences over time in order toconstruct meaning and to be able to integrate new knowledge into their currentunderstanding of the world. Teachers are no exception as they learn and make senseof the world much like their own students, requiring repeated exposure to ideas andexperiences over time. I believe this disconnect teachers experience when attemptingto implement theory into practice relates to the temporal nature of learning.

Temporality is described (Roth, 2006, p. 259) as the ‘‘central distinguishing fea-ture between praxis and any subsequent theory intended to describe and explainpractice(s).’’ Roth argues that theoretical understanding implies a temporal order,which inherently follows a practical understanding that already exists. Thus, hecontinues, ‘‘without practical understanding, there cannot be theoretical under-standing’’ (p. 254). When people encounter new ideas or theories about any phe-nomena, they must first develop a point of reference for relating these ideas to theirpersonal experience. Educational research often advocates that teachers introducenew or different teaching practices in their classrooms, based solely on a theoreticalconception of these practices. Teachers, like their students, need time to gainpractical experiences with new ideas over time. However, I argue that these expe-riences, while necessary for acquiring practical understanding, are not sufficient fordeveloping theoretical understanding. This is because developing theoreticalunderstanding requires time, during which experiences with something transform tobecome knowledge about something.

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As a result, integrating theory into practice is not only a process in time, but it is aprocess that takes place over time. Roth distinguishes these processes as phenom-enological time and chronological time, where phenomenological time relates to the‘‘experience of the moment’’ and chronological time refers to the ‘‘time associatedwith the objective experience,’’ from which a person can ‘‘reflect on the experiencein relation to the past and the future.’’ Thus, in order for a teacher to make a shift intheir teaching practices, they require both the experience of implementing changeand time to critically reflect on these changes. This reflective process enablesteachers to develop a theoretical appreciation for the changes they have enacted.This temporal model of learning suggests that the disconnect teachers experiencebetween theory and practice arises when they are asked to interpret theories in theabsence of both practical experience and the time needed to critically reflect on theimplementation of theory into their daily practice.

Connecting concretely to the abstract

However, if teachers are not accessing research literature to begin with, the diffi-culties they may experience trying to implement innovative practices in theirclassrooms as described in the literature is a moot point. Some of the disconnectteachers experience between theory and practice is due not only to the issuesassociated with the temporality of learning, but more generally, to the way in whichresearchers present their research in the literature. I believe this occurs because thepurpose of educational research is, by and large, to generate knowledge that can beapplied in a variety of different educational settings. If findings are to have anyimpact on the greater educational community, researchers must make inferencesbeyond the scope of their study. These generalities may be less useful for individualteachers than for other educational researchers, because classroom teachers andeducational researchers require different forms of knowledge to help them makedecisions informing their daily practices in the classroom or in conducting research.Therefore, I propose that researchers must learn to disseminate their findings toteachers in ways that are practical, in that they provide teachers with informationneeded to make concrete connections between the research and their teaching, whilecontinuing to make available the theories that support their findings.

Kadriye Ercikan and Wolff-Michael Roth (2006) suggest an integrative researchapproach to address these issues by conceptualizing research as being located alonga continuum, from which knowledge can be generated using lower-inference pro-cesses at one end of the continuum and higher-level inference processes on theopposing end. Using this sliding scale, teachers and educational researchers couldanalyze research findings at different levels along the same scale. Organizinginformation along the continuum would enable teachers to translate informationinto practical classroom applications while allowing educational researchers to ab-stract more theoretical understandings from the same phenomena. As a result, bothteachers and educational researchers would be able to benefit from the same re-search by appropriating different forms of knowledge about the same topic.

Mapping theoretical and practical understanding along a continuum

Using this integration research framework in conjunction with Roth’s (2006) tem-poral model of learning allows me to map my own biographical experiences from left


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to right along the same continuum. To do this, I offer biographical accounts writtenfrom differing perspectives as I transitioned from a classroom teacher implementingcogenerative dialogues in my tenth grade chemistry classroom to an educationalresearcher who, over time, developed a theoretical appreciation of how cogenerativedialogues can be used to inform change in the classroom. By locating my bio-graphical accounts across Ercikan and Roth’s sliding scale, I am able to connectthree different discourses and ways of knowing as characterized by contingent first-hand phenomenological vignettes (voice 1) and chronological reflections about myexperiences with cogenerative dialogues as both a classroom teacher (voice 2) andeducational researcher (voice 3). So even while these three voices are all generatedby one source, they offer different forms of knowledge about cogenerative dialoguewith respect to my transitional location along the continuum. As such, I provideopportunities for both teachers and researchers to access information about co-generative dialogues at different levels within the same paper.

In the following sections, I introduce a series of phenomenological accounts of myexperiences with cogenerative dialogue. These data collected through ethnographicresearch methods with my tenth grade chemistry class support the vignettes. Thevignettes express my lived experience with cogenerative dialogue, presented intandem with reflective metalogues written from both the perspective of a classroomteacher and an educational researcher. These metalogues are representative of mychronological reflections about these experiences over time.

Kenneth Tobin in response to a comment by Michael Roth (Roth & Tobin, 2004),describes metalogues as a way to ‘‘move from experience to theory about experi-ence’’ in an effort to explore different realms of applicability based on what has beenpreviously learned. My use of metalogue enables me to preserve my different voicesand share my experiences with cogenerative dialogue from the perspective of aclassroom teacher while simultaneously providing me with a forum for explainingthe theory supporting this model from the perspective of a teacher educator. Myintention for representing my experiences with cogenerative dialogue through dif-ferent voices should not be interpreted as a desire to compartmentalize these ways ofknowing. Rather, this method of writing allows me to overlap my changing per-spectives as my experience of doing cogenerative dialogue evolved, over time, intounderstanding how and why cogenerative dialogue should be done.

The vignettes appear as italicized text and provide a first person account of thecogenerative dialogues taken from field notes, journals, and video/audio recordingsdetailing these events. The metalogues written from the perspective of the classroomteacher appears as blocked quotes in response to the vignettes. I excerpted both thevignettes and the responses, in part, from my doctoral dissertation (Martin, 2005).I intend that these first two voices provide the details teachers and their studentswould need to begin implementing cogenerative dialogues in their classrooms. Thenarrative voice is representative of my perspective as an educational researcher andappears as standard text. This voice continues to be employed throughout tointroduce vignettes and to detail my evolving understandings of how to implementcogenerative dialogues to transform learning opportunities for all students. Inmapping my transition across this continuum, I provide classroom teachers andeducational researchers with access to different forms of knowledge about cogen-erative dialogues. This knowledge can be used to meet the individual decision-making needs of teachers and educational researchers. In doing so, this paperexamines the relationships between teacher knowledge and researcher knowledge

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by exploring the practical application of cogenerative dialogues for classroomsteachers and the theoretical implications of using cogenerative dialogues forresearchers.

In this paper, I integrate methodological and theoretical frameworks into thebody of the work. In addition, I define terms and concepts using everyday languageto make these frameworks accessible to both teachers and educational researcherswho may wish to use cogenerative dialogues in their own classrooms and/or research.In the following section, I detail the context of my initial introduction to cogener-ative dialogue as a tool for improving teaching and learning in urban scienceclassrooms.

Discovering ways to engage in classroom research

My students and I first learned to utilize cogenerative dialogue as participants in theDiscovering Urban Science (DUS) research group. Through this study, funded bythe National Science Foundation1, researchers introduced students and theirteachers to different theories and methodologies designed to support them as theyengaged in collaborative ethnographic research in their own classrooms. The largerDUS group included seven teachers, from five different urban schools, and a smallgroup of researchers from a local university. Each classroom teacher invited studentsfrom her/his classroom to form smaller research teams within the schools. Theseteams included a university researcher, a classroom teacher, and two or more studentresearchers. These small teams met 2–3 times a week within the school and thelarger DUS group met once a week for a seminar in which we discussed ethno-graphic research methodologies and theoretical frameworks in the context of ourindividual classroom research efforts. Researchers introduced DUS participants totheory while simultaneously asking us to implement these theories into practicethrough our individual classroom research projects.

A need for change

Teaching tenth grade chemistry at an urban magnet school, I had the opportunity towork with students who had numerous and varied talents. However, even at a schoolfor gifted students, nearly a quarter of my students failed or barely passed my sciencecourses each semester. When students do not have opportunities to interact withtheir teachers in other arenas (such as sports, school clubs, or in other subject areas),their behavior or academic performance in a subject area/classroom may be the mostdefining characteristic a teacher recognizes about them. This may leave both thestudent and teacher with unrealistic, monochromatic views of one another. This isnot necessarily problematic for the student who excels in class or who exhibits whatthe teacher considers ‘‘good behavior.’’ However, there are more subtle issues in theclassroom that can prove debilitating on levels that do not necessarily impact studentachievement or behavior. These issues, if left unresolved, can contribute to thedevelopment of negative interactions between students and teachers and even

1 NSF Grant No. REC-0107022.


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students and a specific subject matter. Over time, this negativity can influence howstudents feel about science and about themselves as learners of science.

While I had come to this realization long before becoming a teacher/researcher, itwas not until my experiences with DUS that I found a useful method for addressingsuch issues with my students. Supported by the larger DUS team, teachers identifiedissues that concerned them in their classrooms and then invited students to discussthese issues try and find ways to address them together. This was my starting pointfor engaging students in co-researching the classroom with me. This first vignette andaccompanying metalogues offer the reader with a snapshot of my evolving under-standings of how to initiate cogenerative dialogue with a student.

Getting started

My chemistry class is the only place I interact with Jamie. I have not taught her ineighth or ninth grade as I have some of her peers. And although I am an advisor forher grade, she is not in my section. Thus, I have no contact with Jamie outside of classfrom which to form my opinions of her. Based on my observations, I characterize heras a self-conscious, timid student who needs constant encouragement from me that shecan do well in science. Today I had the opportunity to see Jamie at basketball practiceafter school. On the court (far from the science classroom), I find Jamie to be aconfident, vivacious, and determined athlete. She is well respected by her peers and shehas emerged as a real leader—being voted team captain by her teammates. SeeingJamie in a different setting, it is hard for me to recognize her as the same person. Ihave decided to invite Jamie to come speak to me after practice about chemistry class.

Sonya: In asking Jamie to join me, I took the first step in establishing a co-generative dialogue. In this instance, I invited a student to speak with me aboutour experiences with one another in our chemistry class. At the beginning ofour meeting, I reminded Jamie that I was researching ways to improve myteaching and student learning and that in order to do so, I wanted to learn morefrom her about what it was like to be a student in my class. In addition, I toldher I wanted to share some of my concerns with her as a teacher.

Cogenerative dialogues involve two or more people coming together to talk about ashared event or experience (LaVan, 2004). By explicitly letting students know theirintention for talking to them outside of class, teachers apply two of the essentialelements of the methodological design that serves as a structural framework forengaging in cogenerative dialogue. The method adapted from Egon Guba andYvonne Lincoln’s (1989) authenticity criteria, requires that research be ontological,educative, catalytic, and tactical. Although these words may initially be unfamiliar toteachers and students, the basic concepts underlying these terms were easy for mystudents and me to understand. Ontological research refers to the fact that mystudents and I were not being researched but were, rather, doing research to learnabout one another’s perspectives. I adhered to this criterion by telling Jamie that Iwanted to learn from her how she felt about our classroom and learning chemistryand by sharing with her how I felt about my interactions with her and teachingchemistry. By sharing what we learned about one another with one another, we wereadhering to the educative criterion. By informing Jamie of my purpose for speakingwith her and by inviting her perspective and sharing mine, I adhered to the first twocriteria for ethical research. In future sections, I will explain what it means for

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research to be catalytic and tactical and how these criteria further inform themethodology of cogenerative dialogue. Today, these criteria are important charac-teristics of cogenerative dialogue and provide a structural framework for initiating adialogue around science with all.

In the previous vignette, I detailed my lived experience deciding to invite a stu-dent to speak with me about her performance in my classroom. The metalogue,written in the following semester as a reflection on this event, represents mydeveloping perspective as I transitioned from classroom teacher to teacher-re-searcher. The metalogue offers a more abstract, theory-based understanding of theneed for teachers and their students to engage in reflexive discourse in an effort toco-construct an inclusive learning environment. This development required practicalexperience initiating and engaging in dialogue with students as well as time tocritically reflect on these experiences. Using biographical experiences as a referenceenabled me to construct a theoretical appreciation for how to use these authenticitycriteria as a methodological framework for engaging in cogenerative dialogue.Representing this knowledge in three distinct voices allows both teachers andresearchers to trace this evolution while simultaneously providing practical knowl-edge about how to ‘‘get started’’ using cogenerative dialogues in tandem with the-oretical frameworks supporting their use for promoting inclusive science educationpractices.

Talking the talk

In this section, I describe my first experience implementing a cogenerative dialoguewith Jamie, who described herself as someone who has ‘‘never really felt good aboutscience.’’ I began by telling her how impressed I was by her performance on thebasketball court and wondered if she could tell me how she felt in chemistry classcompared to when she played ball. This introduction inspired the sports metaphorwe used during our cogenerative dialogue as we turned our attention to talkingabout how she learned chemistry.

Identifying issues

I first asked Jamie to compare how she feels about playing basketball and learningchemistry. Jamie confided that she feels more confident in basketball because sheknows how to act and what to expect; however, in chemistry class she feels uncertainabout my expectations because she does not understand my general ‘‘game plan.’’When I asked her how she feels this affects her ability to ‘‘play chemistry,’’ she offeredthat the discomfort she feels in class prevents her from asking or answering questions,even when she is certain she knows the correct answer. When I asked her why shethought this was true, she told me that she fears making mistakes in front of her peers.Finally, I asked Jamie how she has become so comfortable playing basketball. Jamieanswered, ‘‘practice.’’

Sonya: This vignette highlights the second step in cogenerative dialogue, iden-tifying issues or concerns held by students or teachers about occurrences in theclassroom. Jamie and I explicitly identified an issue that we both felt preventedJamie from performing as well in class as she did on the court. From our


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conversation, I learned that Jamie was unclear about my expectations for herlearning in class and that she was afraid to expose her perceived shortcomings toher peers by speaking up in class. I was aware that Jamie was uncomfortablewhen I called on her in class as I had on more than one occasion seen her wipingaway tears during quizzes and exams. Before my work with the DUS group, Icould not conceive of any means of addressing these problems other thanrefraining from calling on her or expressing my sympathy and concern for herwhen she was visibly distressed. I was in contact with Jamie for less than an houra day, and during that time, I also had to address the needs of 25 other students.However, as a participant in this study, I was urged by my DUS colleagues toaddress issues that do not necessarily fall under the realm of conventional stu-dent–teacher interactions. Although I was not sure what to expect from ourconversation, I wanted to let Jamie know I was thinking about how she felt and Iwas interested in working with her to make her feel more comfortable in class.

This vignette and accompanying metalogue highlight the importance of making surethat cogenerative dialogues be framed by the need for teachers and students to learnabout and share their perspectives with one another. Doing so ensures that con-versations adhere to the ontological and educative criteria, thereby promoting equityby establishing an alternative power dynamic in which teachers and students con-verse as equals. These reflections also illustrate the point that cogenerative dialoguesdo not offer teachers and students a ‘‘quick fix’’ for improving classroom interactionsand instruction. They do, however, provide teachers and students with a social spacefrom which they can share their perspective about what it is like to ‘‘be in thisclassroom.’’ As a result, they provide a window of opportunity for teachers andstudents to begin examining their individual relationships with one another and withscience. In the following vignette, I introduce the crucial element that distinguishescogenerative dialogue from just ‘‘talking with students.’’ Incidentally, this coincideswith the third criterion for engaging in cogenerative dialogue, that participants co-generate solutions that catalyze change.

Cogenerating solutions

Jamie and I brainstormed to find ways to make her feel more relaxed in class and tohelp her gain the confidence we both felt she exhibited on the basketball court. Wedecided that attending ‘‘chemistry practice’’ after school might help Jamie build herconfidence and her skills. Near the end of our discussion, Jamie told me she feels mostconfident in basketball practice when she knows the agenda for the day and shewanted to know if I could do this in chemistry class. I told her that as a student, I oftenfelt the same way. This seemed like a reasonable request that I could immediatelyimplement. To boost her confidence in class, Jamie and I arranged for me to call onher to answer questions only when she volunteered because she said she feels para-lyzed when I call on her without notice. In addition, we decided that by walkingaround the room more, it would be easier for her to ask me questions without drawingattention to herself in front of her peers.

Sonya: This vignette describes how Jamie and I identified issues and co-gener-ated some possible solutions for how to resolve these issues. Most importantly,we followed up the next day by enacting the suggested changes. Jamie volun-teered to answer one of the homework problems we had worked on together

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during our cogenerative dialogue. Holding up my part of the deal, I did not callon her to speak until she volunteered, even though I knew she had the ‘‘answers’’to all the problems we had completed the day before. In addition, I made aconcerted effort to not only walk around the classroom more, but I deliberatelystopped to speak to each table of students as I walked around in order to makemyself ‘‘available for questions’’ as Jamie had suggested. This was a very positiveexperience as it provided us with an example of how our ideas could be imme-diately implemented, resulting in tangible benefits for both of us.

Research that is catalytic moves beyond learning about and verbalizing problems totaking action to resolve these problems. My exchanges with Jamie might not seemsignificantly different than what many conscientious teachers attempt to do in theirclassrooms every day. Many teachers work to identify problems and then develop aplan for how to deal with these problems. However, these plans rarely includestudent input. So while what occurred in the classroom as a result of my and Jamie’sexchanges was not groundbreaking, the fact that a student introduced these ideasand a teacher implemented the actions suggested is powerful.

As a teacher, I often participated in conversations with students, parents, andadministrators that resulted in the development of contracts where we detailed whatstudents, parents, and teachers needed to do in order to improve student behavior orachievement. An example would be if a student chronically failed to turn inhomework. A common response would be for me to speak to the student and havethe student verbally agree that homework needs to be turned in. This was sometimesfollowed by an offer of after-school support to help the student meet this (suppos-edly) shared goal. Following this exchange, I would explain to the student that by notadhering to this plan, she/he may fail or be subjected to disciplinary actions.

The limitation of this type of ‘‘student support’’ model is that the teacher’s planfor failure intervention focuses more on detailing the consequences for breaking thecontract rather than examining the root of the problem. In addition, students andparents are generally spoken to rather than with, providing no means of communi-cating their reasons for not complying with school policies in the first place. Thisexample speaks to the final criteria, requiring that research be tactical, which meansstimulating action and empowering others. For research to be tactical, care should betaken to make sure that all participants have the space to make their viewpointsexpressed to others and be legitimately considered by others. Before being intro-duced to Guba and Lincoln’s authenticity criteria, I was not consciously aware ofhow one-sided my ‘‘conversations’’ with students (or their parents) were. Thismethod of working with students provided no alternative means for resolving issuesif and when a student failed to do what she/he had been told to do. It is here thatcogenerative dialogue differs most significantly from ‘‘teacher talk.’’ Co-generatingsolutions for change and taking individual responsibility to enact these changescompletes the first wave of implementation of cogenerative dialogue.

It is my belief that teachers and students can do what Jamie and I did in theabsence of theory. However, the extent to which teachers and students can suc-cessfully engage in conversations with one another to identify issues of concern,transform practices to address these concerns, sustain changes over time, and beresponsive when new issues arise as a result of change necessitates something morestructured than ‘‘just talking.’’ This is why the theory that informs this method ofdiscourse is so powerful. The methodology provides teachers and students with a


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legitimate means of structuring positive interactions with one another. By explicitlyattending to Guba and Lincoln’s authenticity criteria, teachers and students andeven researchers and teachers, can use these criteria as a guideline for interactingwith one another. Doing so provides an effective means of navigating the powerdynamics that may exist between them. These criteria provide a checks and balancesapproach to discourse that enables teachers and their students to co-construct theirlearning environment.

Walking the walk

The above vignette provides an example of changes made in our classroom teachingand learning practices that were recursively tied to a single conversation with onestudent. My positive experience with Jamie was salient in enabling me to see howcogenerative dialogue could allow me to make immediate changes in my classroombecause it provided me with a non-threatening example of how a relatively simplechange in my teaching practices increased the learning potential of one of my stu-dents. By recognizing that this change was a direct result of student input, thisexperience was influential in helping me see student contributions as valuable andvalid. That these changes seemed to result from such insignificant actions on my partconvinced me that cogenerative dialogues would be a productive way to improve theexperiences my students and I had in our classroom. However, I quickly learned thatby making small changes in my teaching practices, I introduced new issues thatwould have to be resolved. It seemed that, just like in chemistry under constantconditions, by increasing the amount of a reactants on one side of an equation, theequilibrium mixture changes, but the equilibrium constant, which is the ratio of theequilibrium concentrations [or really chemical activities] stays constant. However,external factors like temperature or pressure can actually change the equilibriumconstant, thereby establishing a new equilibrium. Therefore, as I introduced co-generative dialogue into my classroom, there was a new external parameter thatinfluenced the existing equilibrium in my classroom, but then modified it because ofthe new communication that occurred between my students and me.

In the following sections, I detail how my new arrangement with Jamie unbal-anced my interactions with the rest of the class. In addition, I share more of thetheory introduced to us as DUS participants, which provided my students and mewith some useful tools for re-examining our classroom and making the adjustmentsneeded to help establish a new equilibrium.

Implementing change

My arrangement with Jamie has encouraged her to assert herself both inside andoutside of class, making certain she has access to me as a resource for her learning in amanner that is most beneficial to her. Finding me a useful resource, Jamie has becamemore and more aggressive in seeking out my help—to a point where I sometimes feelhounded by her persistent need for attention. This is quickly becoming problematic. Iam already stressed by the demands of my job, which require I prepare four differentscience courses each day, so my time is a precious commodity. Other science teachershave begun to tease me in the afternoons by announcing, ‘‘Jamie has arrived for herprivate lesson.’’

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Sonya: Already spread thin, our co-constructed solution had left me feelingpanicked after the first month. Unsure whether future cogenerative dialogueswith my students would necessarily result in me being asked to fulfill animpossible role, I became concerned about the feasibility of being able tosustain such changes over time. Would cogenerative dialogues be necessarywith every individual student in my class? Would I need to make individualallowances for each child? Was this even possible? Even though my afterschool arrangement with Jamie was obviously improving her performance inclass, I was frustrated by the amount of time and energy it required of me ontop of my already impossible schedule. I was embarrassed by the frustration Ifelt because it made me feel selfish and unsupportive of a student who neededme. I always had a few students with whom to work during lunch and afterschool, but my relationship with Jamie was more than that. I felt that herknowledge of the purpose of the research (to improve my teaching and herlearning), coupled with our conversations, had invited a familiarity and senseof entitlement to my time with which I was not all together comfortable.

Teachers try new strategies all the time in an effort to engage their students andprovide students with resources to support their learning. Instituting these changesare easy, but maintaining change is hard, especially when unexpected obstaclesappear as a result. New obstacles can overwhelm a teacher in the midst of makingchanges to their classroom and, in my own experience, generally resulted in aban-doning all or parts of these new practices. Fortunately, the theoretical and meth-odological frameworks supporting cogenerative dialogue provide teachers with ameans of addressing such issues.

Sonya: Already tempted to ‘‘throw in the towel,’’ I decided to share my con-cerns with two other members of the DUS group, including the other teacherresearcher in my school, Linda Loman, and the university researcher for myclassroom, Sarah-Kate LaVan. I invited them to the science office one after-noon with the intent of discussing the difficulty I was having sustaining thechanges Jamie and I had agreed upon. During our discussion, Linda and Sarah-Kate reminded me of some of the theories we had been discussing in our largerDUS meetings. Specifically, it was our introduction to Michael Cole and YrjoEngestrom’s (1993) Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) that offeredme a new tool for re-thinking my arrangement with Jamie and gave me thecourage I needed to continue trying to effect change.

During my cogenerative dialogue with Sarah-Kate and Linda, I realized thatthe arrangement Jamie and I had cogenerated did not adhere to the tacticalcriteria in that our energy was mainly focused on providing Jamie with theresources she needed to meet her goals. This was not to say that I did not shareJamie’s goal, but our arrangement did not provide room for me to pursue mypersonal goals, such as fulfilling my other teaching responsibilities at schooland serving as a resource for all of my students. This was a growing concern forme as it was becoming increasingly clear that our cogenerated solutions af-fected not only Jamie, but also my interactions with the rest of the students inthe class. CHAT offered me a new way of thinking about these contradictionsby paying attention to factors in the larger community that influence how anindividual achieves her/his goals.


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The basic premise of this theory invites us to consider both the goal of theindividual and the resources that person has available to them to help them reachthis goal. In this instance, Jamie and I shared a common goal of helping hersucceed in chemistry class. Teachers and students may share goals, and at times,the goal of one may conflict with the goal of another. For example, prior to mycogenerative dialogue with Jamie, it was often my goal to have Jamie participatein class by calling on her with the expectation that she would respond. A primarygoal of Jamie’s was not to be embarrassed in front of her peers by incorrectlyanswering my questions. As a result, when I called on her, she generally refusedto answer or would reply, ‘‘I do not know.’’ Through our cogenerative dialogues,Jamie and I resolved this conflict by aligning our goals, but other problems arose.Sarah-Kate and Linda urged me to cogenerate new solutions for resolving thesecontradictions by meeting with Jamie again to specifically discuss these issues.

This experience made salient the necessity of employing the theoretical frameworks,including the authenticity criteria and CHAT, as a methodological framework forengaging in cogenerative dialogue. In the absence of these frameworks, teachers andindividual students are less likely to cogenerate solutions that are inclusive ofmultiple perspectives and goals and that provide space for re-negotiating change.This development required that I have both phenomenological and chronologicalexperiences with cogenerative dialogues. As a result of my practical experiencesengaging in cogenerative dialogue and my repeated exposure to and consideration ofthese theoretical frameworks over time, I began to see how theory could be used toinform practice. This growth is illustrated by the previous metalogue detailing myintentional application of CHAT and the authenticity criteria as theoretical lensesfor examining my interactions with Jamie.

In chemistry, the critical point of a pure substance is the pressure and temperatureat which two phases of matter, gas and liquid, become indistinguishable. When oneapproaches the critical point, by either raising the temperature or the pressure, thephysical properties of the gas and the liquid approach each other, so once at thecritical point there is only one physical property (such as density) rather than one forthe gas and one for the liquid. This vignette and the accompanying metaloguesrepresent a critical point for me with cogenerative dialogue—the point at whichtheory and practice intersected and I transitioned from a classroom teacher to ateacher-researcher. A second parallel relates to the phase changes of matter and mydevelopment as a researcher. For a solid to transform into a liquid or for liquid totransform into a gas, heat energy, must be added to the system. This phase transitionrequires time and a supply of energy until the phase change is complete. Using thismetaphor of phase transitions, I can see putting energy into the system of myteaching helped me reach my critical point of the merging of theory and practice.Intentionally applying a theoretical lens to evaluate my interactions with Jamieheralded my emergence as a teacher-researcher.

This increased recognition of the role theory plays in informing research posits mylocation at a different position along the integrated research continuum. Mydevelopment from classroom teacher to teacher/researcher is symbolically mirroredwithin this paper by the elimination of the first voice and the expansion of the voiceof the teacher-researcher. As such, these reflections become more theoretical innature. This demonstrates my growth and increased awareness as a researcher as Ibegan to recognize the need to integrate more theoretical and methodological

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frameworks into my daily praxis as a means of supporting the changes I wasattempting to implement. In the following section, I introduce video analysis as aparticularly powerful method of effecting and sustaining positive change in ourscience classroom.

Using video to support reflection

As participants in the larger ethnographic study, my students and I agreed to haveour class videotaped several times a week by Sarah-Kate, the university-based, co-researcher in our classroom. Acting as a participant–observer in our chemistry class,Sarah-Kate reported that she felt I spent a disproportionate amount of time withJamie during class. To verify this assertion, we analyzed video taken of our chemistryclass from both before and after Jamie and I began to implement our strategies forimproving her experiences in class. We observed from the tapes that prior to our firstcogenerative dialogue in early October, I rarely interacted with Jamie during class.Video analysis of a 50-min tape recorded on October 25, 2001, after our cogenerativedialogues and chemistry practice had begun, we observed a noticeable change inJamie’s practices as she repeatedly called me to her table to assist her during class.Analysis revealed that I spent nearly 17 minutes of the class period helping Jamie,meaning I was engaged in one-on-one teaching during one-third of the class period,effectively ignoring the needs of the 25 other students in the room! We also noticedthat while working with Jamie and her partner, several students raised and loweredtheir hands in anticipation of gaining my attention, but to no avail.

Seeing the bigger picture

Sonya: Up to this point, I had only imagined the videotapes as being useful forthe university researchers who were interested in identifying issues in urbanscience education across the different school sites. I had not considered howthis data resource could be useful for improving our classroom ‘‘in real time.’’Rather, I imagined that by analyzing the tapes and deciding how I could ‘‘dothings differently next year,’’ that it would benefit my future classes. It was notuntil Sarah-Kate shared with me her quantitative analysis of the changinginteraction patterns between Jamie and me that I recognized the potentialbenefits of video and video analysis for enabling teachers and students to makeimmediate changes in their classroom.

Sarah-Kate explained how to analyze video using meso- and micro-levelanalysis. Meso-level analyses require that the video first be viewed in real time(at the meso-level) to find segments of interest. Watching the video at normalspeed allowed her to determine the length of time I spent speaking to variousstudents, walking around the room, and especially the time I spent workingwith Jamie. After choosing a specific segment of interest, we used iMovie tocreate short Quick Time film clips. Viewing these segments in Quick Timeallowed us to slow and speed up the action in the clips. Controlling the speed ofthe tape enabled us to conduct micro-level analysis of classroom interactions.By slowing the tape down, we became aware of subtleties that were not easilyseen at the meso-level.


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For example, we noted that students raised and lowered their hands oftenwhile I was speaking with Jamie in class. I was unaware of these studentsduring class and only by slowly re-viewing the video clips could I see howfrustrated they were that I was ‘‘ignoring’’ them. Some students put theirpencils down, rolled their eyes in exasperation, and one student can even beseen tugging at her hair in frustration. Before viewing this video, I had no ideawhat was and was not occurring in the classroom! Sarah-Kate suggested I viewthese clips with Jamie so we could reconsider how our actions were affectingother students in the classroom.

As described by my students, being able to analyze audio/video recordings meansthe difference between ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘hearing/seeing’’ what happened in theclassroom. Engaging in conversations about a specific event makes discussions moremeaningful because students and teachers can point to a certain scenario in whichsomething has occurred. Rather than relying on memories of past events, analyses ofthese data sources provide another layer of complexity to the reflection process,further distinguishing cogenerative dialogue from ‘‘teacher talk.’’ Using audiotranscripts or video clips as a focal point for discussion during cogenerative dialoguewas an important development in our research. Viewing video allows participants todeconstruct events as they unfolded and encourages teachers and students to reflectupon why, as individuals, they acted as they did and how they might change theirpractices in the future. Specifically, analyses of these data resources provide studentsand teachers with a different perspective of the total classroom experience. Doing soprovides teachers and students with an avenue for determining how different indi-viduals experience the classroom and science. Exposing this reality is a necessaryfirst step in considering how these experiences could be re-structured to better meetthe needs of all individuals. My increased awareness, as a result of my experiences incogenerative dialogues, video analysis, and prolonged exposure to the theoreticaland methodological frameworks, enabled me to intentionally direct both myresearch and reform efforts in my classroom.

Re-structuring for change

Coupled with cogenerative dialogue, video analysis provides students and teachers withan invaluable tool for examining classroom practices, formulating questions to answer,and evaluating changes made in response to the video analysis. Informed by the videothat my arrangement with Jamie was disadvantaging other students in the classroom, Irecognized the need to engage in additional cogenerative dialogues with Jamie. In thefollowing reflection, I describe how a video clip served as a focal point for a discussionbetween Jamie and me. During this conversation, our explicit goal was to co-generatemore inclusive practices that would serve to benefit both Jamie and her peers.

Sonya: Based on the video analysis of our classroom interactions, Jamie and Iagreed that we needed to alter our practices to prevent other students frombeing unconsciously excluded. Jamie decided to write down her questions toask me after school during chemistry practice so she would not have to call onme so often during class. I decided to become more deliberate in structuringmy interactions with all student groups by consciously limiting the time I spentat each table before moving to the next group. Jamie pointed out that this

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would be difficult to do unless all the students knew my plan because, just likeJamie had, some student may unconsciously monopolize my time.

Thus, we decided it was important to explicitly state my intention for spendingonly a certain amount of time at each table as I rotated around the room. Wefelt that by that sharing the findings from the video with the class, we wouldraise student awareness about the importance of dividing my time equitablyamong each group. To do this, we decided that all students should beencouraged to write down their questions and hold them until I was able tomeet with their group or ask for assistance from members of a group withwhom I had already spoken. Jamie and I felt that by being explicit about howand why we were changing our individual teaching and learning practices, wecould expand opportunities for more students to interact with me.

This is where the transformative potential of cogenerative dialogues lies, in sharingthe responsibility for making and sustaining change with others. Teaching is oftendescribed as a very isolating profession, but by implementing cogenerative dialogueswith students, this does not have to be the case. When students are involved insuggesting and implementing new practices in the classroom, the teacher is no longersolely responsible for ensuring that change occurs. In addition, if these practices,once implemented are not sustainable or do not result in the intended goals, theteacher does not have to shoulder the responsibility for these failures alone.

This metalogue illustrates a significant development in our research as it becameclear that Jamie’s involvement in this cogenerative dialogue process with me wasresulting in a phase change for her as well, from student to student-researcher. Asstudents become more invested in making change in the classroom, they too begin tomove along the research continuum in terms of the knowledge they need to makeinformed decisions about how to access resources and use/appropriate thoseresources to meet their goals. Cogenerative dialogue provided Jamie with anopportunity to see where it is that she fits into the equation of ‘‘science and all.’’ Thisawareness equipped her with the knowledge she needed to make intentional deci-sions about her educational experience, thus providing her with a pathway fornegotiating her relationships with both science and me on her own terms.

From huddles to whole class: cogenerating change in real time

Thus far, I have only described how cogenerative dialogues expanded the learningopportunity of a single student in my classroom. In addition, these changes have allbeen negotiated outside of the classroom with the intention of implementing thesechanges within the classroom. In this section, I describe how we extended thetransformative potential of cogenerative dialogues by extending the circle ofinvolvement to include the entire class through cogenerative huddles and whole-class cogenerative dialogues. In the following metalogue, I describe how the use ofhuddles emerged as a new tool for transforming my interactions with all of mystudents during class.

Sonya: Pulling me aside in the hall just before entering the classroom, Sarah-Kate shared with me that she had just completed video analyses of severalweeks worth of tapes. These analyses allowed her to identify some repeating


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patterns/practices used by students during small group learning activities thatshe felt were very beneficial for student learning. Sarah-Kate indicated that thiswas an area of interest for her and wanted to know if we could use a portion ofthe class period to ask students to analyze their individual contributions totheir group to determine ways they could better support the learning of theirpeers.

Of critical importance to my development as a reflective teacher was my regularparticipation in these impromptu cogenerative huddles. Described as a mini co-generative dialogue by Ken Tobin (Tobin, Zurbano, Ford, & Carambo, 2003),‘‘huddles’’ are used by participants as a means of ‘‘touching base’’ with one another‘‘in the moment.’’ Huddles are often used by co-teachers, but can also be heldbetween a teacher and a student(s). Similar to regular cogenerative dialogues,huddles are used to ‘‘reach agreement on what to do next.’’ Huddles are relativelybrief, but are effective in helping students and teachers meet agreed upon goals byproviding a pause in the classroom to identify issues and resolve them quickly. Thefollowing provides an example of how this practice of engaging in huddles withSarah-Kate before and during class blossomed into a series of cogenerative huddlesbetween students, resulting in our first whole class cogenerative dialogue.

Sonya: After our huddle, Sarah-Kate and I started class by sharing with thestudents our findings from the video analysis and the ideas Jamie and I had co-generated regarding my increased movement around the class during smallgroup work. Students were particularly receptive to the idea that I move to newgroups at timed-intervals. Breaking into smaller groups, students cogeneratedsome ideas about how to make the most efficient use of our teacher-studentinteraction time. As I walked around, I stopped at each table and listened tothe ideas being cogenerated within each small group about this issue. Aftersome time, we reached a class consensus that timed-conferences would helpprovide each group with more equitable access to the teacher.

Next we began to strategize contingency plans for how to make these timed-conferences work. Some students suggested having specific questions readywhen I arrived at the tables. My previous teaching experiences had taught methat often times, students have the same questions in each group and I felt thatrepeatedly answering the same question was a waste of our time and resources.I offered that when many groups had the same question, it might be feasible forme to hold a whole class discussion around a single question. Meeting in smallgroups, we reached a consensus that if this occurred, I would signal all smallgroups to stop working and we would engage in a short whole group discussion.

As I continued to circulate around the room, visiting each small group, Ilearned that many students felt that if a concept were very complex, it would bebetter to relay the information to individual groups. After some more discus-sion, I agreed with the class and we integrated this student initiative into ourstrategy for engaging in small group timed-conferences. My experiences withJamie taught me that we should continue to revisit these strategies over time.My students and I decided we would continue to check in with one another tomake sure our cogenerated solutions were ‘‘working like we planned’’ and ifnot, we would ‘‘try new ways to fix it.’’

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Taking place several times a class period, huddles provided an opportunity for me toreflect on the events of the class in ‘‘real time,’’ which allowed me to make changesduring a single class period. Huddles allowed us to discuss classroom interactions ‘‘inthe moment’’ and collectively cogenerate plans for action. This could be as simple asnegotiating a change in an exam date or determining if students needed more timedeveloping their ideas about a specific concept. Before my participation in one-on-one cogenerative dialogues with Jamie, it had not occurred to me to request studentinput about anything I did in class. Taking those first small steps with her helped meto recognize that, given the opportunity, students have a lot of valuable insights toshare with their teachers. My experience with classroom huddles introduced me to aroom full of collaborators!

By extending the cogenerative dialogue circle to include the entire class (throughsmall huddles and whole class discussions) I found I was better able to meet thelearning needs of individual students. As I began to interact more with my students, Istarted to recognize the difference between planning for my teaching and planningfor student learning. To plan for student learning, I needed to be in touch with mystudents during my lesson. Huddles provide teachers with a way of ‘‘checking thepulse’’ or ‘‘determining the health’’ of the classroom in the moment. Rather thanalways being placed in the position of reacting to situations, in-class huddles provideteachers with the information they need to help them anticipate and resolve smallissues before they become larger problems. Engaging in classroom huddles withstudents provides a means of making immediate changes rather than waiting untilthe end of a lesson/unit/semester to gather feedback about how the learning expe-rience could have been improved.

This section provided clear examples of my progression from one-on-one cogen-erative dialogues with Jamie to quick, pre-class and in-class huddles, to whole classcogenerative dialogues. By discussing the same issues in different cogenerative dia-logue arrangements, teachers and students have multiple opportunities (phenome-nological experiences) to grapple with one issue over a period of time. Theseconversations equip them with a common language and a base of reference fromwhich to discuss issues over time. By constantly engaging in different, overlappingconversations about the same issue, students and teachers have a chance to developtheir understanding of a single idea as it spirals through these different conversations.This is where the real potential for sustainable change occurs: slowly, over time.

Listening to and being heard by others

One of the more significant findings from our DUS study indicates that teachers andstudents need practice to improve their communication skills with one another.Fortunately, cogenerative dialogue provides students and teachers with a socialspace for listening to and being heard by others. Teachers and students, and evenmore generally, adults and teenagers are not traditionally provided with many in-stances in which they learn to communicate their beliefs with one another in anopen, honest forum. Cogenerative dialogue provides a social space for bridging thegaps that traditionally exist between teachers and students, adults and teenagers.The following metalogue is excerpted from a cogenerative dialogue I had with astudent near the end of the school year in which we were talking about how our


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participation in this collaborative research effort to improve the ways in which weteach and learn chemistry had altered the roles we played in the classroom.

Sonya: I am finding that by talking to students regularly, I have more oppor-tunities to communicate my expectations for the responsibilities I think weeach bring to our roles as teacher and student in chemistry. I feel that bymaking clear my own expectations for our individual contributions and bylistening to students’ expectations, we are positioned more as equals in theteaching/learning equation. After asking one of my students to comment onthis, Chandra said, ‘‘I never really looked at both sides of the equation before. Ijust thought teacher = teaching, but now I also see student = learning. Puttingthem both together balances the equation because we both play an equal role.’’

As my students and I had more opportunities to interact in multiple cogenerativedialogues with one another, we developed a better sense of how to ‘‘talk to oneanother with respect.’’ Interacting with adults on a regular basis in this way, studentsdevelop new ways of speaking to adults and being heard by them. In the same way,teachers learn better how to listen to students and how to make themselves heard.This takes time and practice. The dispositions students gain by being with and talkingto adults enable teachers to see their students as capable of taking a more active rolein the classroom and in their own learning.

Communication across these borders is a critical component for the success ofcogenerative dialogues and in making science for all a reality. This was an essentialdevelopment in my own growth as a science educator. Before my experiences withstudents in cogenerative dialogues, I did not believe it necessary to take into accountthe beliefs, goals, and needs of individual students in order to teach science. Thisrecognition was a critical first step in my transition from someone who taught scienceto students to someone who supported students as they learned science. In the fol-lowing sections, I elaborate on how this shift in my pedagogical schema informed myteaching practices and how cogenerative dialogues helped me provide students whowere previously marginalized in science with opportunities to develop positiverelationships with both science and me.

Using cogenerating dialogues to bring students to science

Calabrese Barton (1998) states that a goal of ‘‘science for all’’ involves the ‘‘artic-ulation of values and beliefs about how and why scientific knowledge is created andvalidated as well as how the learning and doing of science influences those beliefsand values’’ (p. 539). To make science for all a possibility, you first have to establishwhat science for all looks like. This requires you have a conversation about sciencewith the ‘‘all’’ implied! Thus, discourse between teachers and their students are anecessary component in making ‘‘science for all’’ even a remote possibility. Co-generative dialogue provides students and teachers with not only the social space tocommunicate their beliefs about the purpose of science education, but also offers amethodology for setting and reaching individual and collective goals in scienceeducation. However, as I learned more about my students through cogenerativedialogue, my belief about what ‘‘science for all’’ meant was also challenged. Byasking my students to share with me their goals for their future, I found that very fewstudents imagined they would take chemistry in college or pursue a career that

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required science at all. I was surprised to learn that ‘‘simply passing the class’’ wasthe most common goal my students had for the year. By inviting students to discusswhat they felt was important to know and learn about chemistry, I opened myself upto some conversations with students for which I was not entirely prepared.

The following is the final metalogue I include from the perspective of the teacherresearcher. In this reflection, I detail my experience in a cogenerative dialogue with astudent and his parent. The student was failing my class. Although this was my firstcogenerative dialogue with a parent, Jaydon’s mother was familiar with the researchbeing done in our class and her son had explained to her the different types ofconversations I had been having with him and other students during class.

Sonya: Jaydon began the conversation by stating, ‘‘chemistry is the lowestpriority in my life.’’ He continued saying, ‘‘I want to make decent grades in allmy classes, but if I can just pass chemistry, I would be satisfied.’’ These weresobering comments to hear from any student. Jaydon was not interested inscience, nor was he motivated by grades. Before my experiences using co-generative dialogue and being informed by theories that encourage teachersand students to consider individual goals, these comments would have signaledan end to the discussion. Instead of giving up, I asked Jaydon and his mother ifthey would help me develop a plan of action that satisfied our differing goalsfor the term. In this way, we set out to co-generate a solution to our individualproblems that we could collectively implement and support.

Jaydon’s mother was concerned about his overall average for the year becauseshe was concerned that a low GPA (Grade Point Average) would preventJaydon’s chances to ‘‘get accepted to a good college.’’ Jaydon and I felt that hecould certainly do better than the F/D he currently had in class. Together, weagreed that a minimum of a C would be acceptable for chemistry as long as hekept his grades up in his other core courses. Next I shared my personal goals,asking that Jaydon increase his participation in small group activities and thatwe find ways to help him develop a better appreciation for chemistry. Jaydonand his mother both agreed these were acceptable goals. Finally, I asked thatJaydon set personal goals for himself to make his participation in class morefulfilling.

This conversation remains for me, one of the most positive conferences I have everhad with a parent about their child’s performance in my class. That Jaydon wasfailing my course and the conversation was still so positive is a testament to meth-odological and theoretical frameworks supporting cogenerative dialogues. Cogen-erative dialogue provides each participant with the right and responsibility to sharetheir beliefs and to assert their own goals. By setting aside my own belief of what itmeans to be successful in science, I was able to help Jaydon define his own goals forsucceeding in my class. In the following section, I present a video transcript in whichJaydon is reflecting upon his goals and the plans we collectively negotiated to makehis participation in chemistry not ‘‘feel like a waste of his time and energy.’’

Jaydon: People I look up to and the stuff I do in my life are never, ever affectedby chemistry. It is so hard for me to even comprehend how I am going to putthis into my life and how I am going to use it and how I am going to utilizethese tools. I try to get something out of everything I do, and it is really toughfor me to put this into the big picture, in the big scheme of things. And the only


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thing I can get out of this is doing something I don’t particularly enjoy doingand uh, just working hard at something I am not at all good at...and that’s that.That’s what I’m trying to bring from this class. I’m not trying to learn aboutmolecular formulas. I’m not trying to learn about Boyle’s Law. Like I guar-antee, I hate to say it, but I’ll probably forget it at the end of this year. I’m justtrying to, you know, learn how to work with people better and do things thatI’m not good at. And that should take me places....Ms. Martin and I had a conversation and I think both of us understand thatthis [chemistry knowledge] isn’t something I’m ever going to use but Iunderstand that it is something I have to get done. I never use that as anexcuse. I know, I just think you guys are doing this study on why kids learnchemistry the way they do and ... well if something interests me like English,I love English class. I love what we’re learning (pats hand over heart). I lovewhat we’re doing and I put an honest effort into that to actually to learn it(pats hand on head) to like remember it, to get something out of it. But I canhonestly say in Chemistry class, like I do in math class, like I do in computerclass, like I do in French class (laughing)—that says something aboutschool—that I’m just trying to do it to get by and to pass the next test. Youknow, to take things out of it outside of the actual (uses fingers to makequotation marks) curriculum structure. I am just trying to get stuff out of it asfar as me growing as a student.

This video was recorded near the end of the school year after several conversationsbetween Jaydon and me about our individual and collective responsibility formeeting the goals we set for his participation in chemistry class. I think it isimportant to include this transcript in this paper because it provides a realisticexample of how many students view science in relation to their lives. Jaydon is aperfect example of the type of student who generally failed my course in previousyears. I have had many opportunities to share Jaydon’s video vignette with varioushigh school science teachers and science educators, and I am always struck by theirinitial response. Widely acknowledging the fact that they too face the problem ofhelping students like Jaydon see the relevance of science to their lives, they aregenerally critical of Jaydon, his mother, and me for ‘‘encouraging’’ him to honestlyexpress his negative views about science. In reflecting on these experiences, I believethat many teachers react so strongly to this vignette because it is scary to imaginehaving this discussion with a classroom full of Jaydon’s who find it difficult to ‘‘evencomprehend how science affects their lives.’’

Before my participation in this research and with cogenerative dialogues, I toowould have doubted the value of engaging students in conversations such as this. Byinviting Jaydon to express his beliefs about science and to set his own goals forlearning, his mother and I demonstrated our willingness to allow him to take greaterresponsibility for his own learning. And this was exactly what he did. By the end ofthe school year, Jaydon and each one of his peers, had earned a grade of B+ orhigher in our chemistry class.

It was difficult for me to accept that chemistry was not a priority in the lives ofmost of my students. However, my acceptance of alternative goals played a crucialrole in fostering an environment in which students took seriously their individualresponsibility for their own learning. The conversations my students and I had aboutthe importance of science in our lives and the purpose of science education were

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more satisfying than their academic performance. These conversations wereimportant resources for my own ideological shifts about what ‘‘science for all’’ reallymeans. Re-structuring class to allow multiple goals to be met at once, my studentsand I found science for all could look differently for everyone. These experiencesenabled me to accept that while I need to make science accessible to all, science forall need not translate into thinking every student would go on to pursue a career inscience.

When asked to share with a group of pre-service science teachers what he felt wasthe most important goal teachers should strive for in her/his work with students,Mark (another student from our class) said, ‘‘bringing students to science instead ofbringing science to the students.’’ When asked to explain what he meant by this,Mark said that ‘‘teachers need to find out where their students are coming from andthen help them figure out where they want to end up. Once a goal has beenestablished, teachers and students can start to work together to reach that goal.’’This is exactly what cogenerative dialogue allows teachers and their students to do.Cogenerative dialogues provide students and teachers with a tool for negotiating‘‘science for each,’’ rather than ‘‘science for all.’’

Cogenerative dialogues for all

In the above work, I have attempted to convey what cogenerative dialogues are, andhow and why they are beneficial in improving the learning environment. Cogener-ative dialogues have been used in a variety of schools (including urban, suburban,public, and private) and have involved many different participants (includingteachers, co-teachers, student teachers, teaching supervisors, parents, administrators,and any number of students). The arrangements are as varied as the participants andcan consist of as few as two people or an entire class of people. These conversationshave taken place formally and informally in classrooms, offices, hallways, gymnasi-ums, and just about anywhere else people can find to sit and engage in a conversationabout the way they see the world.

After reading this paper, teachers and students may continue to have questionsabout the need to be part of a larger network of educational researchers, such asDUS, in order to successfully implement cogenerative dialogues. But our collectivefindings have shown that, when accessed, students provide teachers with a readysupport group for making and sustaining positive change in the classroom. Teachersand students may also wonder if they need to video or audio tape their classroominteractions in order for their conversations to be productive, but this is not neces-sary. To be sure, video analysis does add a layer of complexity to the reflectiveprocess, but it is not essential for beginning a discussion about the teaching andlearning occurring in your own classroom. Similarly, it is not necessary to involveother teachers, parents, or students in these discussions, but a fundamental finding ofour research is that being informed by multiple perspectives is essential for exam-ining and understanding any problem. Thus, while forming an alliance with otherteachers, parents, administrators, and students is a positive step toward transformingthe learning environment, it is not a necessary step. All a teacher needs in order toconduct cogenerative dialogues with their students is a lunch break and an openmind. In the following section, I provide some practical guidelines for how to set upcogenerative dialogues in any classroom.


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Who to invite?

It is recommended that teachers begin holding cogenerative dialogues by invitingonly one or two students at a time to participate as it may become overwhelmingwith more than two students present. Teachers may begin by choosing two studentswho are dissimilar from one another, such as one high-achieving student and astudent who struggles more in class. Doing so provides teachers with an opportunityto learn about a cross-section of student experiences in their classroom. In addition,it provides students with an opportunity to engage in conversations with peers whomthey may not normally interact. These conversations across achievement borders areimportant in that they allow students opportunities to recognize that individualstudent experiences with and in science (and school) differ from one to another. Thisrecognition helps individuals foster a sense of empathy and understanding for theirpeers that can result in increased collaborative interactions to better support sciencelearning.

How frequently should we meet?

An outcome of our collective DUS experiences is that cogenerative dialogues workbest when teachers and students meet frequently (1–2 times per week), using a mixof both small groups (1–4 students) and, after a time, whole class cogenerativedialogues. It is recommended that teachers meet one-on-one and in small groupsbefore using whole class cogenerative dialogues. This provides both the teacher andstudents with an opportunity to experience cogenerative dialogue in small groupsbefore extending to the whole class.

Today, it is common practice for teachers and students to engage in cogenerativedialogue on a weekly basis (or more frequently) and to deliberately re-visit issuesdiscussed in previous cogenerative dialogues with the explicit intent of re-evaluatingand, when necessary, re-negotiating the understandings they previously co-gener-ated. In addition, I recommend that teachers and students pay explicit attention tothe four authenticity criteria as they engage in cogenerative dialogue.

Over time, some general rules for structuring student and teacher discussion havealso evolved (LaVan, 2004). The evolution of these rules provides a powerfulexample of the recursive relationship between practice and theory as these ruleshave evolved, over time, from the experiences of students and teachers engaging incogenerative dialogues. We refer to these as Ace’s Rules, named after astudent-researcher from another high school in the DUS study. As a result of hisparticipation in this study, Ace emerged as a powerful advocate for increasedstudent involvement in classroom research.

Ace’s rules for conducting cogenerative dialogue

1. No one voice is privileged

By this, Ace means that both teachers and students have the right and responsibilityto listen to and be heard by others. This rule also speaks to our belief that cogen-erative dialogue should not be used as a space for students and teachers to listgrievances and demands of one another that must be implemented just because itwas suggested. Rather, this rule reminds participants that cogenerative dialogue is an

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exchange between individuals. All participants are asked to listen attentively, showrespect for one another, and strive to understand one another’s perspectives.

2. Everyone should have the space to speak, but speaking is voluntary

Participation in cogenerative dialogue is about more than being heard, it is alsoabout listening. Thus, we ask that participants respect the wishes of those who do notchoose to speak. However, we also ask participants to make space for those whowant to speak. As such, we ask that teachers and students attend not only to makingsure they individually get a chance to speak, but that they take care to ensure thatothers also get an opportunity to speak. To do this, we ask that participants beconscious of how long they speak and that they not interrupt others when they arespeaking. Participants may choose to develop a signal (like a hand sign) to indicatethat someone has been speaking for a long time or that someone else would like achance to speak. A signal is useful because it need not interrupt a speaker.

3. What is discussed in the group stays in the group unless permission is given by allparticipants to share the discussion with others

This rule plays a critical role in fostering trust between participants, which encour-ages teachers and students to honestly share their beliefs about the classroom andschool. By recognizing that learning is a social activity, attention must be paid to therelationships between students and teachers, students and their peers, and eventeachers and their colleagues and administrators. While engaging in conversationsabout teaching and learning, students and teachers may need to talk about theirexperiences with others in the larger school community. In doing so, participantsmust trust that what they share will not be shared with others. Teachers and studentsare cautioned that this rule does not give license to ‘‘gossip about other people ordown someone who is not present.’’ Participants are reminded by the overarchingauthenticity criteria that discussions should focus on sharing for the purpose of co-generating actions for positive change2.

These rules are useful in that they offer teachers and students a basic guideline forengaging in cogenerative dialogue. Coupled with the theoretical and methodologicalframeworks presented throughout this paper, cogenerative dialogue provide studentsand teachers a powerful tool for transforming the ways in which they interact with oneanother. Through this structured form of discourse, students and teachers are affordedopportunities for renegotiating and expanding their individual roles and responsi-bilities in the classroom, providing a pathway for making ‘‘science for all’’ a reality.

2 This rule is an important component of cogenerative dialogue in terms of developing a safe sharingspace, but recently, a teacher who was engaging in cogenerative dialogue with two middle schoolstudents was faced with a dilemma. Cogenerative dialogue often leads teachers and their students todiscussions that lay outside the realm of the classroom. In this instance, a student explained that herhome life experiences sometimes prevented her from completing her science homework. Specifically,the student cited issues of child abuse in the home. As court-mandated reporters, it is the legalresponsibility of all teachers to alert authorities to claims of child abuse. This revelation put thesanctity of cogenerative dialogue to the test. Fortunately, the teacher and his student were able touse cogenerative dialogue as a space for resolving this issue, enabling the teacher to take appropriateaction for the welfare of the child without jeopardizing the trust of his student.


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Determining the critical point of science education

Emerging from this study is a model of science teaching and learning that attemptsto facilitate a relationship between ‘‘science and all’’ by paying particular attentionto the development of the relationship between the teacher, the students, and sci-ence. Engaging students in discussions about science and science education is noteasy to do, especially when so much time must be spent preparing students forstandardized exams that are meant to hold teachers ‘‘accountable’’ for studentachievement. Faced with a barrage of local, state and national policies dictating theirevery action, teachers and students are left with few opportunities to communicateacross the many social borders separating them, such as, gender, race, class, and age.

Cogenerative dialogues can make a critical difference in how teachers and stu-dents alike experience and understand science by providing a method for bridgingthese borders between them. Our research has shown that forming alliances takestime and energy on behalf of all participants, but the sense of solidarity that canresult from building these social networks can help diminish the feelings of isolationand disempowerment that students and teachers experience in schools. Described asa ‘‘guerilla warfare tactic’’ by one of my current in-service teachers, cogenerativedialogue offers teachers and students a bottom-up approach to effecting change thatlies outside the authority of administrative control. This method of discourse andcritical analysis can be used to spark a grassroots reform effort in which teachers andtheir students come together for the sole purpose of making positive changes in theireveryday interactions and classroom experiences.

This is true of all classrooms, not just elementary and secondary science class-rooms. Teachers and students at all levels and in all subject areas need to takeresponsibility for improving their learning environments. One way to supportteachers and students in meeting this goal is to make educational research literatureaccessible to a wider audience. Making information accessible to teachers and stu-dents about how to engage in cogenerative dialogue to improve teaching andlearning in any classroom is a primary goal of this paper. Urging other educationalresearchers to recognize the need for disseminating their findings in ways that benefitboth teachers and researchers is a second goal. Currently teacher educators have twooptions for exposing their pre-service and in-service teachers to literature detailingnew research efforts, practitioner journals or research journals. Practitioner journalstend to offer articles that describe methods and detail activities without providingthe theoretical foundations for how or why these teaching methods or activitiesshould be employed. Research journals often provide information on the oppositeend of the continuum, providing rich theoretical insights in the absence of practicalapplications.

Advocating for accessibility should not imply a requirement to ‘‘water down’’theory, but rather the need to provide readers with opportunities to make connec-tions with the theoretical frameworks on differing levels. Another way that teachereducators can help classroom teachers make connections between the theories de-scribed in the literature and everyday praxis is by providing classroom practitionerswith practical experiences through modeling. By employing cogenerative dialoguesin their own university classrooms, teacher practitioners would have access to apractical experience with the methodological and theoretical frameworks describedin this paper. These biographical experiences would provide teacher practitioners

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with a basis from which they could construct a more theoretical appreciation for howto conduct cogenerative dialogues to effect change in their own classrooms. Theseoptions provide teacher educators with expanded opportunities for introducingclassroom teachers to important findings in educational research.

In doing so, they provide a pathway for modeling how to present different levelsof knowledge about the same topic along a research continuum as a means ofmaking ‘‘educational research for all’’ a possibility. Just as classroom teachers needto provide students with greater opportunities to develop a personal relationshipwith science, teacher educators need to provide their students with greater oppor-tunities to develop a personal relationship with educational research. Teachereducators must provide their students with phenomenological experiences thatpromote the articulation of values and beliefs about how and why people create andvalidate knowledge through educational research. By engaging in explicit conver-sations about these experiences and by focusing on how we generate knowledge andhow we can apply it within the classroom provides teachers with a pathway fordeveloping meaningful connections between theory and practice in their daily lives.Providing teachers with access to information and tools for how to integrate thisknowledge into their daily practice enables them to develop a reflexive relationshipwith research. Doing so allows teachers to take responsibility for their learning anddevelopment as reflective practitioners.

References

American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1989). Science for all Americans. NewYork: Oxford University Press. .

Calabrese Barton, A. (1998). Reframing ‘‘Science for All’’ through the politics of poverty. Educa-tional Policy, 12(5), 525–541.

Cole, M., & Engestrom, Y. (1993). A cultural–historical approach to distributed cognition. InG. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions (pp. 88–110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ercikan, K., & Roth, W.-M. (2006). What good is polarizing research into qualitative and quanti-tative? Educational Researcher, 35(5), 14–23.

Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1989). Fourth generation evaluation. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.LaVan, S. K. (2004). Cogenerating fluency in urban science classrooms. Unpublished doctoral

dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Martin, S. (2005). The social and cultural dimensions of successful teaching and learning of science in

an urban high school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Curtin University, Perth, Australia.National Research Council (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: National

Academy Press.Roth, W.-M. (2006). Learning science: A singular plural perspective. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.Roth, W.-M., Tobin, K., & Zimmermann, A. (2002). Coteaching/cogenerative dialoguing: Learning

environments research as classroom praxis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of theNational Association for Research in Science Teaching, New Orleans, LA, April 6–10, 2002.

Roth, W.-M., & Tobin, K. (2004). Cogenerative dialoguing and metaloguing: Reflexivity of processesand genres [35 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative SocialResearch [On-line Journal], 5(3), Art. 7. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3–04/04–3-7-e.htm (Accessed April 1, 2006).

Tobin, K., Zurbano, R., Ford, A., & Carambo, C. (2003). Learning to teach through coteaching andcogenerative dialogue. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 10, 51–73.

Seiler, G., & Elmesky, R. (2005). The who, what, where, and how of our ethnographic research. InK. Tobin, R. Elmesky, & G. Seiler (Eds.), Improving urban science education: New roles forteachers, students, and researchers (pp. 1–19). New York: Rowman & Littlefield.


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Sonya Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of Elementary and Early ChildhoodEducation at Queens College, City University of New York. Having completed a master’s degree inboth elementary education and secondary chemistry education at the University of Pennsylvania, shehas taught science at the elementary, middle and high school levels within the school district ofPhiladelphia. She received her Ph.D. from Curtin University of Technology in Australia. Currently,her research focuses the use of cogenerative dialogues and video analysis as tools for introducingboth in-service and pre-service teachers to an effective means for examining classroom teaching andlearning practices in an effort to catalyze change that benefits the learning environment for bothteachers and their students. In addition, she is researching her use of cogenerative dialogues andcoteaching with students in her university classes. She teaches graduate level courses focused ondeveloping science literacy in the elementary school and chemistry education at the secondary level.

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where practice and theory intersect in the chemistry classroom: using cogenerative dialogue to...

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