Understanding the Relational Dimensions of Classroom Modeling Conversations

ABSTRACT

As youth and teachers engage in modeling conversations, they are simultaneously negotiating how knowledge is generated and how people are accountable to each other in a community. Typically, design and analysis have privileged the epistemic focus, focusing on how to support young people to take up specific knowledge construction purposes and processes. The relational aspects of modeling conversations have received less attention. In this paper, we explore epistemic and relational work as intertwined during classroom modeling conversations. We examine the experience of three teachers who considered the relational dimensions of modeling conversations to be deeply connected with epistemic dimensions. We explore the tensions that they experienced in relation to students evaluating each other's ideas and student participation in whole‐class modeling conversations. We use framing as an analytic lens to understand the roles, goals, and actions that teachers sought and that students took up in these conversations. Finally, we show how as teachers tried out alternative strategies and structures for classroom conversations, these afforded different epistemic and relational opportunities for teachers and students.