Cultural Influences on Classroom Interaction

Dear Colleagues,

Understanding the classroom as a cultural and social landscape for the construction of knowledge for practice, this Special Issue explores the negotiation and mediation of lived experiences through talk as a central aspect of teaching and learning. Many decades ago, the learning theorist and sociolinguist Courtney Cazden (1988: 2) argued that ‘spoken language is the medium by which much teaching takes place and in which students demonstrate to teachers much of what they have learned’.  Spoken language therefore is of vital importance to teachers and learners. However, how spoken language is conceptualized or researched is not necessarily straightforward.

This Special Issue invites papers on the theme of “Cultural Influences on Classroom Interaction”, particularly papers that engage with the complex (though often hidden) enactment and experience of schooling, teaching and learning through interaction in a wide variety of classroom-based contexts and settings. Papers should focus clearly on the interrogation of interaction in ways that develop new and innovative theoretical and methodological possibilities for the pedagogy researcher.

Pedagogy encompasses teaching and learning, in addition to matters of curriculum, assessment, relationships and values; it encompasses what people perceive to be meaningful, important and relevant as they interact, engage and participate in activity. While the specific focus of individual papers may span a broad spectrum of central pedagogical themes and related areas, possible beginning questions could include:

• How can studies of classroom interaction shed light on pedagogy, and perhaps innovate and reform it?
• What do classroom interaction researchers focus on?
• Where and how do they look?
• What is visible and invisible from different angles?
• How can we explore what is usually hidden and hard to know in daily classroom interactions, and what could we learn about teaching and learning as a result?

Classroom interaction, like pedagogy itself, is about perspective-taking, and that perspective has implications for the research tools used. This Special Issue is about pedagogy in context, where context may span early childhood through university classroom settings, and may span aspects of space, embodiment and identity. Research methods and tools focused on classroom interaction may incorporate, for example, ethnographic, multimodal, videography, emancipatory, conversational and discourse analyses. While statistical analysis is not ruled out, it is likely that most papers will orient towards qualitative analyses.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Kathy Hall
Dr. Alicia Curtin
Dr. Niamh Dennehy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• classroom interaction
• pedagogy
• culture
• talk
• discourse
• assessment
• observation
• collaboration
• relationship
• mediation
• negotiation