While everyday settings have been identified as rich contexts for learning, their collective interaction patterns and cultural practices rarely infiltrate New Zealand primary classrooms. This section reviews literature on the nature of learning and teaching in primary classrooms. Evident in this review is the emphasis on solo experiences that Rogoff (2001) likened to an assembly-line preparation designed in the industrial era of the early twentieth century to transmit information to the masses. Since the beginning of formal schooling in New Zealand over 150 years ago, classrooms have been deemed official places of learning where teachers have taken charge of learning and teaching decisions. Originally, the goals of education focused on reproducing information and learning the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. To achieve these goals, the classroom emulated factory efficiency where raw materials (students) were shaped by technicians (teachers) into products (learning). Sumpter and Lewis (1949) captured images of Miss Davidson’s School in Milton in 1858:
Like a queen, mounting with great dignity to her seat, she could see all that went on among her pupils. If one were misbehaving, her practice was to roll up her strap and throw it…at the culprit, whose part it then was to return it to the teacher, and receive his punishment. She kept also a stick with which she tapped on the head any child whose attention appeared to wander. (p. 85) Jackson (1990) argued that little has changed in classrooms: that they are still about delay, denial, interruption and social disconnection. Consequently, learning to live in
a classroom is about learning to live in a crowd, where the words and deeds of the weak (students) are judged by those who hold the power (teachers):
School is a place where tests are failed and passed, where amusing things happen, where new insights are stumbled upon, and skills acquired. But it is also a place in which people sit, and listen, and wait, and raise their hands, and pass out paper, and stand in line, and sharpen pencils. (p. 4)
Moll and Greenberg (1990) referred to the decontextualised nature of classrooms as creating zones of underdevelopment. It was in this way that a prominent New Zealand teacher Ashton-Warner (1980) wrote about her experiences of schooling:
It astounds me how little I remember of what went on in the actual classrooms. I could contain in a few chapters what I learnt in all those schools, whereas about what happened outside of them I could go on ad infinitum …my real school rooms were the country scapes, my desk the saddle of a bike or a horse and my teachers the wilful weathers. (p. 93)
Compared to the rich sites for learning in everyday settings, a narrower range of cultural resources is available in classrooms. Good and Brophy (2000) argued that teachers are the dominant actors in over 80% of classroom communication episodes, yet appear unaware of their dominance. Their findings are supported by Wells (2000) who noted a dearth of dialogue in classrooms; by Jackson (1990) who noted the excessive teacher control over discourse and pedagogical decisions; and by Brufee (1995), who noted that most classroom talk occurred through the teacher rather than through a two-way flow of ideas. Across schooling, teachers tell and students listen “in splendid isolation from each other” (Prawat, 1992a, p. 12).
In recent years, classroom-based research has focused on peer influences in learning, with evidence to suggest that these have a positive impact. For instance, the high degree of intersubjectivity required in sociodramatic play advanced understandings in young children (Stone & Christie, 1996). Adult-child conversation that reflected upon learning was also shown to enhance performance on road crossing skill compared to children who had not engaged in this mutual reflection (Cullen, 1998a). A study identifying the ways in which children made use of peer assistance in a new entrant classroom identified a rich peer life, which largely operated as an “underlife” separate from the official programme (St George & Cullen, 1999). Their work extends that of Nuthall and Alton-Lee (1993) who had earlier identified the peer culture or hidden world of classrooms. These writers also highlighted the
predominance of procedural issues in children’s talk, argued to be in response to the dominance of teacher talk about procedures such as paying attention and giving instructions. More recently, research has highlighted increases in individual and collective reasoning skills when children helped each other as authoritative informants (Alton-Lee et al., 2000), or when they use exploratory talk (Rojas- Drummod, Pérez, Vélez, Gómez & Mendoza, 2003).
The School Restructuring Study (SRS) in the United States aimed to strengthen intellectual engagement in classrooms by developing higher level thinking, deep understanding, sustained conversations and real-world connections (Newmann & Associates, 1996). Student achievement was enhanced in over 130 classrooms when these authentic pedagogies were observed. However, despite these reform initiatives, low levels of authentic pedagogies were observed with rote learning predominating. The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS) built on these SRS objectives. On the basis of 1,000 classroom observations in 24 case-study schools over three years, teaching practices were mapped against four dimensions of productive pedagogies (Lingard & Mills, 2002). These dimensions included intellectual quality, connectedness, supportiveness, and recognition of difference. In line with findings from the SRS, correlations were found between the presence of productive pedagogies and positive learning outcomes in case-study schools. Yet, as with the SRS, the QSRLS reforms largely failed to challenge children intellectually or to connect learning to their world.
Consistent with the SRS and QSRLS, Nuthall concluded that New Zealand classrooms were socially supportive, but intellectually undemanding places with a repeated record of failed reform efforts. He attributed this situation to the long-held belief that learning is a consequence of being in busy classrooms where “the practice of teaching remains a cultural ritual, largely uninformed by any body of established research-based knowledge” (Nuthall, 2002b, p. 44). He argued that holding on to the myth that teaching creates learning perpetuates traditional classroom rituals where teachers continue to produce rote-learners rather than connect with children’s minds. Nuthall (February, 2004) spoke of the need to expose these myths:
What teachers are doing is managing a busy active classroom of interested kids and at that point the assumption we all have is that of course the kid is
learning… All they see as a problem is classroom management. How to get those eyes looking bright and those hands going up and all that stuff that parents love to see when they come into a classroom…and everyone says “this is wonderful stuff!” But none of them know whether learning is taking place.
This section of the review highlighted the discontinuity between the nature of learning in everyday and classroom settings. Classroom practices have continued to reflect mainly transmission and cognitive constructivist theories of learning. These theories cast learning as a function of one-sided action, despite contemporary sociocultural views promoting learning as a social and cultural process in which participation is transformed. Reform efforts were noted to develop productive pedagogies, to use dialogue, and to engage collaboratively in real-world issues. The difficulty of sustaining these reforms was also observed. These findings serve to justify research, such as the present study, which aims to investigate the development of new classroom practices based on sociocultural theories of learning.
The strengths of the methodologies used in these classroom-based studies also inform the present research. For instance, the SRS and QSRLS combined contemporary theories of learning, research, professional development and reform efforts. These studies, conducted longitudinally and situated in the context of local classrooms, used a range of participant and dialogic methods to focus upon the social and cultural processes of learning.