Social Interactions in the Classroom: Thoughts and Perspectives

Introduction: Why Study Social Interactions in the Classroom? An Open Debate on International Research Experiences

Francesco Arcidiacono and Marcelo Giglio

This book stems from the observation that changes in school curricula in several countries that support the learning of new knowledge require innovative pedagogical activities. To conduct these activities, teachers and teacher educators need tools that enable them to better understand and act upon the socio-cognitive dynamics emerging from new activities (Giglio, Matthey & Melfi, 2014). Universities of teacher education face the challenge of preparing educational actors for new perspectives through pedagogical and policy measures that have been put in place at different times in most European countries (Arcidiacono & Baucal, 2020; Arcidiacono, Baucal, Pavlović Babić, Buđevac & Blagdanić, 2020; Arcidiacono & Veillette, 2022; European Commission, 2007; Kohler, Boissonnade, Padiglia, Meia & Arcidiacono, 2017; Wentzel, Felouzis, Akkari & Arcidiacono, 2021). One example of this is the harmonization of school structures in various cantons¹ in Switzerland, particularly in the French-speaking part of the country (cf. HarmoS: Intercantonal agreement on the harmonization of compulsory schooling). A Plan d’études romand (PER) was adopted on 27 May 2010 by the Intercantonal Conference of Public Education of French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino and gradually introduced from the start of the 2011–2012 school year for all teachers and subjects in the cantons concerned. The PER prescribes the knowledge and competences to be learned during the three cycles of compulsory schooling in the various subject areas and general education, as well as transversal capacities. The PER constitutes a reference enabling teaching professionals to situate their work within the framework of the student’s overall training project, to situate the place and role of school subjects in this overall project, to visualize learning objectives, to organize their teaching, and to have, for each cycle, fundamental expectations as an aid to the regulation of learning. However, several studies show the existence of a gap between teachers’ adherence to a curriculum and their actual practices (Cattonar et al., 2007; Giglio, Melfi & Matthey, 2012; Lenoir, 2006; Lenoir, Larose & Lessard, 2005; Tovote, Arcidiacono & Lahiani, 2022). Other investigations highlight the various discrepancies between teachers’ representations of the activities to be conducted and the reality of daily classroom work (Berman, Hultgren, Lee, Rivkin & Roderick, 1991; Giglio, Matthey & Melfi, 2014). What are these (sometimes hidden) ‘realities’ of the teaching profession? How can we equip teachers in their work and enable them to better analyze and understand the dynamics of social interactions that occur in the classroom? How to train teachers in professional ‘acting’ by mastering different socio-cognitive dynamics in new classroom activities?

From an international perspective, the aim of this book is to better understand, on the one hand, how students can learn to interact with the other, how they can interact with the other to learn and, on the other hand, how teachers organize different forms of interaction in discursive dynamics within their classes. In this sense, we have gathered here several scientific contributions from colleagues and researchers from different countries interested in social interactions within educational situations in the framework of compulsory education and higher education.

The project for this book was launched during a workshop we organized in June 2013 at the University of Teacher Education BEJUNE in Biel/Bienne (Switzerland) to discuss with several colleagues the following questions: How are social interactions experienced in the classroom in different school subjects? How do teachers interact with their students? How do students develop their knowledge through collaboration with others? What are the implications of past and current research for teaching and teacher education? The workshop gave us the opportunity to open a space for discussion on our different research and teaching experiences, and – more globally – to reflect on social interactions at school. Subsequently, the guests at the workshop agreed to work with us between 2013 and 2016 to contribute to the realization of the French volume Les interactions sociales en classe: réflexions et perspectives, published by Peter Lang (Giglio & Arcidiacono, 2017). The present book is a revised version of it and its English translation.

The present work emerges from the combination of scientific approaches of studying social interactions in the classroom and teaching/learning perspectives in school. In addition, a few contributions offer reflections on initial and continuing teacher education. These different levels are presented through a plurality of methodologies, theories, and perspectives around learning processes, psychosocial, and cultural dimensions of education and especially social interactions in the classroom.

Our goal is to enable a new understanding of teaching/learning dynamics in their context of production and realization. The relationship between psychology, education sciences, and learning models in the humanities and social sciences is to be seen as an interconnected process of individual and social development: the proposed approaches give an important place to semiotic mediations (in particular, language and discourse) and cultural artefacts (e.g., study materials, tools, conditions, and situations) that are involved in learning and teaching processes.

In this volume, the role of the participation of different social actors (in primis, teachers and students) is considered primarily from a socio-cultural perspective. Since most learning theories recognize the centrality of the role played by the learner’s active participation in an activity, the importance of cultural factors leads us to consider the organization of learning environments in terms of communities (Bruner, 1990; Lave & Wenger, 1991). They are learning communities made up of activities that include discourse and communities of learners linked by the knowledge at stake, by the tools used for learning procedures in an interpersonal communication network, and by their abilities to build relationships with others and their collaborative work practices (Heath & Nicholls, 1997). Adults and children, teachers and students do not develop in a social vacuum, but rather act in joint activities that confront them with different discourses, subjectivities, perspectives, and opinions. But how do they grow? Under what specific conditions and situations? How do they manage to coordinate themselves in the variety of daily activities at school?

Several aspects come into play in this book. First, as already anticipated, communication and discourse play a fundamental role in the classroom. Thought can take shape through conversations and exchanges. Children can gradually learn certain complex patterns of relationships and uses of different language resources to ‘live’ in the school context. Secondly, development can be seen in terms of the appropriation of a set of cultural practices in which teachers and students are constantly engaged to orient themselves and participate more or less actively. The examples illustrated in this book draw on the many resources available to participants, resources that are embedded in the social and cultural context in which classroom interactions take place. It is for these reasons that social interactions, also mediated by language, are at the heart of this volume and constitute a common basis for the studies and reflections proposed by the different contributors.