Elisabeth Tenglet

Verbal participation in the classroom is generally considered to contribute to positive student engagement and learning outcomes. Students are often required to demonstrate their learning in class by, for example, raising their hands and answering questions. However, there are students who remain quiet in the classroom, and are not responsive to invitations to participate. As quietness and low levels of verbal participation in class are often perceived and positioned as problematic in many educational systems and settings, more needs to be understood about the notion of students’ verbal participation and the implications for supporting all students’ learning journeys through school. The study sought to explore how students’ verbal participation was constructed and positioned in the narratives of parent-teacher conferences. A Swedish corpus of audio recordings and transcriptions of parent-teacher conferences with 24 students in years 5 and 6 (approximate student ages 10–12) across five schools was utilised as the basis for the investigation. Through an interactionally-oriented narrative approach, a collection of stories about verbal participation was identified. These stories were analysed using the concept of narrative positioning. Three stories from the collection were selected to demonstrate, in greater depth, aspects of how students’ verbal participation was constructed and how discourses unfolded. The analysis demonstrated diversity in terms of how discourses were employed and how students were positioned in the narratives about verbal participation. Prevalent discourses drew on notions of learning, affect and assessment and were identified as pedagogical, psychological and performative discourses. The study highlights how verbal participation tends to be constructed as an individual undertaking, with the implication being that students are assigned individual responsibility for this. As students are usually encouraged to make the most of their verbal participation in class, the study gives rise to important and complex questions in terms of challenging assumptions about how best to support student learning, particularly in the case of students who remain quiet in the classroom.

In this article, the assessment practice known as the “grade conference” is analysed using an interactionally oriented narrative approach. The aim is to explore the grade conference and what it entails for students when executed in their fourth year of compulsory school, as part of a trial of an educational reform where students receive grades from year four instead of year six. Two cases illustrate the way that students are positioned and ascribed different paths and prospects in and through stories located within the grade conference. Findings show that students are ascribed individual responsibilities and their positions as students are largely evaluated by individual characteristics in these stories. It is concluded that the grade conference is a practice that may influence the students’ views of their potential in school, as the narratives about their paths and prospects discursively make different routes more or less viable.