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T[eacher] : “Three-quarters of the crayons in Mrs. R.’s box are broken. How many unbroken Crayons are there?”

S[tudent] : Sean offers to show his solution. “It would be four.” (He draws and talks on the chalkboard.)

T : “Why … ”

Then later in the conversation there will be confirmation of the answer by the teacher, or if wrong, denial.

This is the beginning of a typical pattern in teacher/student talk: teacher initiates, student responds, then teacher evaluates. This is called “IRE” in the teaching business. These are “display questions,” as if the teacher didn’t know the answer, and where the student is playing a game of guessing what is in the teacher’s head.²⁴⁶ “Hands up!” after the question, then one student answers at a time, a proxy for the others who must listen in silence if the conversation is not to become chaotic. Here, speech in its canonical turn-taking form is pivotal, though of course not without multimodal transpositions of bodies (“hands up!”), objects (crayons), and text (on the chalkboard).

At a time when education is turning towards e-learning, either blended into traditional in-person classrooms or purely at-a-distance, hybrid grammars are emerging in the speech-like text of discussion boards and activity streams. An “update” initiated by the teacher may evoke not just one response, but simultaneous “comments” from many students, if not all. Instead of one right answer, many variants of answer become visible. A productive diversity in the resulting dialogue replaces a discursive architecture oriented to sameness. Oral discourse had by dint of practical pedagogical necessity mostly been directed to one “correct” answer. The sentences and punctuation in online discussion boards show that these are grammatically somewhere between text and speech, and this may not be a bad thing on the route to “academic literacy.” The conversational pattern of IRE is still there, but the affordances have also been utterly transformed, and with this the dynamics of meaning and learning.²⁴⁷

Inspired by Cazden, we have in our research and development work built out a “social knowledge” app that we have called “Community,” and analyzed the subsequent shifts in classroom discourse.²⁴⁸ Our aim: to explore the affordances of new media for reflexive instead of transmission pedagogy.²⁴⁹ Spoken classroom discourse, as Cazden points out, involves certain kinds of closure, peculiar forms of inauthenticity, and digital media may in some respects open these out. These concerns have been one of her life projects as a linguist and a pedagogue, and ours too.

With Courtney, we talked our way across the vast expanses of Australian Aboriginal country. We saw schools where the community had written their world across the school walls in powerful paintings. We met teachers bridging the oral and the written in bilingual literacy.^§MS0.0a

As our four-wheel-drive rattled across the desert tracks, Courtney talked of the speech closures that had driven her life. Her husband, Norman, had been an ethnomusicologist at the University of Illinois while she was a masters student in the College of Education. Both had been members of the Communist Party of the United States.

Against McCarthyism, along with her fellow students and professors, Courtney fought long and hard in those Illinois years.²⁵⁰ Under investigation by the FBI at the behest of the House Un-American Activities Committee,²⁵¹ Norman Cazden,^§AS1.4.2a a promising young scholar, lost his job. It took him sixteen years to find another academic position.²⁵²

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²⁴⁵ Suzanne Eggins and Diana Slade, 1997, Analysing Casual Conversation, London: Cassell.

²⁴⁶ Courtney B. Cazden, 2001, Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, pp. 30, 46; Courtney B. Cazden, 2018, Communicative Competence, Classroom Interaction, and Educational Equity: The Selected Works of Courtney B. Cazden, New York: Routledge.

²⁴⁷ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2017, “Conceptualizing E-Learning,” pp. 1–45 in E-Learning Ecologies, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, New York: Routledge.

²⁴⁸ US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences: “The Assess-as-You-Go Writing Assistant” (R305A090394); “Assessing Complex Performance” (R305B110008); “u-Learn.net: An Anywhere/Anytime Formative Assessment and Learning Feedback Environment” (ED-IES-10-C-0018); “The Learning Element” (ED-IES-lO-C-0021); and “InfoWriter: A Student Feedback and Formative Assessment Environment” (ED-IES-13-C-0039). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “Scholar Literacy Courseware.” National Science Foundation: “Assessing ‘Complex Epistemic Performance’ in Online Learning Environments” (Award 1629161).

²⁴⁹ Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2016a, “New Media and Productive Diversity in Learning,” pp. 310–25 in Diversity in Der Lehrerinnenbildung, edited by S. Barsch and N. Glutsch, Münster: Waxmann; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2017, “Conceptualizing E-Learning,” pp. 1–45 in E-Learning Ecologies, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, New York: Routledge.

²⁵⁰ Walter Feinberg, 2019, Educational Thought at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1867 to 2017: A Philosophical History, unpublished manuscript, pp. 123–27.

²⁵¹ Victor Navasky, 1980, Naming Names, New York: Viking Press.

²⁵² Stephen Erdely, 1981, “Norman Cazden (1914–1980),” Ethnomusicology 25(3):493–96.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 101–104. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Courtney Cazden’s “Classroom Discourse” §AS1.4.1c