Communicating within the curriculum – issues of classroom interaction
Communicating within the curriculum – issues of classroom interaction
In using email to communicate between classrooms a strong infl uence seems to be the nature of internal classroom interactions. Despite many ideas for joint projects, the most successful communications are often pen-pal letters, ‘relay stories’ (in which one group begins a story, the next continues it, and so on), and communications with an ‘outside adult’, perhaps taking a mystery role of some kind. In each of these
The human interface 71 examples there is little in-built confl ict of purpose. Writing pen-pal letters leaves
students at both ends entirely free to write as they wish. The task becomes one of interesting the unknown partner (which is not an easy one, but the parameters of pen-pal letters are familiar and students know exactly what is expected). Similarly, continuing the writing of a story begun by someone else is relatively straightforward – there may be problems of unmatched interest, but with suffi cient ingenuity even an entirely unpalatable plot and characters can be subverted to a new purpose. Similarly, too, one outside adult is likely to be very responsive to students’ interests.
Other tasks prove much more problematic. The stated curricula of different schools do not match, making it hard to carry out joint work on the same curriculum content. Even at the simplest level a recurring problem is delay or straight failure to reply. I have written elsewhere (Somekh and Groundwater-Smith 1988) of my realisation that classrooms are not structured around the notion of communicating interactively with others. They are closed boxes from which information can be published or into which information can be drawn, but they are not able to interact spontaneously with other closed boxes. CMC between two classrooms is a complex business – in effect team teaching at a distance – and requires extensive and detailed planning between the teachers concerned.
I should like here to elaborate on this a little. Within a typical classroom the teacher will nominally control the curriculum and activities by selecting the topics for study, planning the activities, giving out the books and resources, setting the tasks and assessing the work done. However, in reality a great deal of negotiation goes on between the teacher and students as to the level of noise, the time spent on task, and even the nature of classroom tasks and activities. The work of Doyle (1979) and others has shown that students engage in an exchange of grades for compliance in which they negotiate the level of diffi culty of each task. Within this context, only the most careful planning of collaborative CMC can involve the students in both classes so that there is a real commonality of priorities for the teachers concerned. Even quite careful planning is likely to fall by the wayside if an uninvolved class doesn’t like the look of the communications when they arrive. No teacher can put a responsibility to other students and another teacher in a remote classroom before the interests of those for whom s/he has a specifi c responsibility. It will never be worth risking violation of the fragile balance of the negotiated curriculum.