Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

570 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Embedded within the remark about Stein having adequate control is the issue of how she was
able to maintain appropriate participation and shared responsibility for learning. Stein did not
always have quiet and well-ordered classrooms. In a one-year field experience she never gave up
on her students. Every day she was well prepared to an extent that was obvious to her students, a
sign that she was a teacher who cared for them. She got them actively involved, made strenuous
efforts to create social capital, and never backed down when students needed firm discipline.
Despite her slight build and cultural otherness (i.e., blond hair and white skin), Stein broke up
fights and quieted students when they were boisterous. These practices earned the respect of
students, who regarded Stein as very cool, caring, and anxious to better their education.
Amira was sensitive to the need for teachers to prevent students from disrupting the learning of
others. Consistently, she connected this to the level of planning, the consistency of effort in class,
and the demonstration of care for learning and welfare of students. Amira was concerned for the
well-being of not only the students, but also the teachers. For example, she wondered how her
mathematics teacher could stand the stress of teaching without more control of disruptive student
practices. In an excerpt of an interview with me, Amira made the following comments about her
mathematics class.
You don’t get nothin’ done in Ms. Smith’s class. Ms. Smith has no control. She has no strategy. She has
nothin’. I’m like how have you been a teacher for as long as you’ve been a teacher if you have no control,
no organization? She loses everything. I’m like I don’t understand how you’ve been a teacher for as long as
you’ve been. And I be like Ms. Smith, come here. And I tell her to watch what I’m watchin’. I be like don’t
say nothin’, just watch. This one turned around. This one talkin’. This one eatin’. This one playin’ with the
calculators. I’m like, what is this? This make no sense.
The above comments are salient because it is unusual, a contradiction, for students to explicitly
evaluate and provide a teacher with feedback on her teaching performance. They show how
Amira’s participation in cogenerative dialogues equipped her to speak with her teacher about the
quality of teaching and learning in the mathematics class. This seems especially important since
Amira enjoys mathematics yet was failing in the class. Adopting shared responsibility for the
teaching and learning in the class is consistent with our goals for cogenerative dialogues, in which
Amira participated in her science class. However, Smith had not participated in cogenerative
dialogues and may not have welcomed unsolicited feedback on her teaching. Hence Amira’s
comments to Smith may have been detrimental to subsequent interactions between them and the
teacher’s constructions of Amira as a mathematics learner. Educators should take care to protect
students who, having expanded their roles to support their own learning, could end up in hot
water with their teachers.
Students can experience identity problems if in one subject area they participate in collective
bargaining about the roles of teachers and students and in other subject areas they do not.
Similarly, teachers who have not participated in cogenerative dialogues can be threatened by the
changing roles of students and efforts on their part to assume more power in relation to what
happens in classrooms. Amira’s initiative in adopting the role of critic and teacher educator was
against the grain since the roles of students traditionally have been crafted as less powerful than
those of the teacher and usually it is regarded as disrespectful for students to advise a teacher on
how to improve her teaching. 3 If cogenerative dialogues are to reach their potential it will be important
for teachers and students within a community to accept the expanded roles that inevitably
unfold.
Although Amira is willing to assume responsibility for collective actions for agreed-upon
goals, it is important to acknowledge that her perspective is just one of many to be considered.
Amira knew what student practices should be eliminated and made suggestions on how to