Dialogic Status in Design Education: Authority and Peer Relations in Studio Class Conversations

Critical Analysis

In a classroom, a professor has an opportunity to create a unique relationship between themselves and students, one that is less authoritative and more participatory. This is participatory pedagogy: a teaching and learning approach that attempts to place students and instructors on equal footing. While research indicates that this form of interaction is effective, it is challenging to implement, because a professor needs to maintain authority over the learning environment while deferring that authority in discourse. The operational innerworkings of the classroom require some sort of structure, and a course needs to be overtly aimed towards learning objectives. However, within these purposeful frames lies a great deal of room for participatory engagement.

Some clues to the successful implementation of participatory pedagogy emerge in the conversation and discourse between professors and students. Interactional mechanisms show up, such as changes in volume, speed, emphasis, hedging, length of speaking, number of speaking chances, and the negotiation of floor rights. The equitable distribution of these then indicates when authority is being expanded or diminished. The author of this text describes this as a dialogic frame, where the voices of students and professors combine in the context of a single utterance. This dialogic frame is often in tension.

This tension led the author to explore a research question: "how can the teacher and students jointly enact status relationships that enlist the students in participatory pedagogy while at the same time granting the teacher sufficient authority to guide the improvisational flow of the class?" While the question has broad implications across many forms of research, a design studio is typically constructivist, active, hands-on, and participatory, and so the author selected this as context for study. Existing research into creative teaching and learning has shown that professors are successful when they exhibit an openness to unexpected ideas, help students redefine problems, and encourage them to task risks. These are all qualities of a more participatory way of teaching and learning.

The author analyzed transcripts from six critiques in order to focus on interactions related to the negotiated dialogue. Critique may not be the most opportune time to see these interactions emerge, as it isn't a place where unexpected ideas and risk-taking show up; it's likely that the author selected this because it is a clearly delineated event with a beginning and an end, and so it is suitable for clear transcription and study. A better, albeit more logistically complex, place to study dialogue specifically related to those elements of design may be when design is actually occurring.

These transcripts used a Jeffersonian convention of descriptive transcribing, making understated or unstated moments clear.

Through the analysis, the author identified several key interactions at play. One is related to transition-relevant place (or TRP)—the unstated opportunity for one person to begin speaking when another is done. While students often avoided taking that opportunity, the author observed that some parts of critique evolved very naturally into equal moments of smooth and unstated transition. Another interaction observed was the constant negotiation of the authoritative and participatory spectrum, with professors purposefully showing participatory tendencies, but also engaging in moments with more authority.

These interactions take different forms. One is through "double-voicing"—where a professor engages in both authoritative and participatory interactions within a single comment. Another is through the provision of "floor rights," which sometimes occur naturally but are also sometimes selected (or assigned) purposefully.

The author finds that creative learning is fostered by guided, collaborative, emergent knowledge construction. This is an undercurrent and not overt, and it's familiar to students in art and design; they have likely experienced this form of dialogic framing frequently over the course of their education in creativity. Some students still resist this duality, though, as it increases their discomfort. Expectation states theory indicates that students predict an experience of authority, and without their active engagement in creating a dialogic blend, the pedagogical approach will be less successful.

One excerpt from the transcript shows a group of students discussing work with a seamlessness and ease that is not present in the other excerpts. It appears that the group has a very strong, trusting and familiar relationship with the professor, but it's unclear how that trust emerged, and the author does not explore why this selection is so different than the other examples provided. It's likely that students have also established a participatory pedagogy between one-another (perhaps in private and outside of the classroom), and this would be useful to examine as well.

The overall finding from this research is that "professors and students jointly enacted a social space where authority and peer relationships were blended and status relationships were dialogic." The author began by questioning how a teacher and students can jointly enact teaching and learning, while still acknowledging that the teacher needs authority to actually run the class. The paper does not answer that question, but instead offers that a "hybrid combination of status and role performance" occurs during a creative class experience, and that "participatory pedagogy is realized through the enactment and continual negotiation of dialogic status." One way to extract approaches towards that joint enactment may be to study and compare novice teachers with expert teachers, or "novice students"—students new to critique—with those who are more established and experienced.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Identifies both participatory pedagogy as a frame, and dialogic framing as a lens, for considering classroom interaction dynamics
• Shows the value of a detailed transcription review that moves beyond simply analyzing discourse and includes analysis of behavior dynamics in language
• Indicates the challenge instructors have towards "running a room" with both an authoritative and participatory demeanor at once
• Offers an opportunity for extending the research into the actions of the other "players", such as students to one-another
• Raises more questions about the challenges of teaching creativity in a space that is intended for one-way knowledge transfer