Student participation in disciplinary discourses: when the teacher takes a step back, who takes a step forward?

This study compares the participation patterns of students across two classrooms, which were involved in a design-based experiment called PATHS. While both classes followed the same curriculum, which encouraged disciplinary engagement in the subjects of history and science, the pedagogical stances of the teachers led to some noticeable differences in the “participatory roles” that students took up during the course of instruction. However, despite differences in terms of the way students participated in discussions, this study finds that the stratification of students within each classroom in terms of the total amount of participation per student was the same across both rooms. The data point to pervasive patterns of student/student and student/teacher interaction, which confer status (and thus the right to speak) on particular kids.