The research topic of this paper is exploring different teachers ideals and how the constitute different conditions for students’ participating in class room talks. The theoretical framework is built up through different traditions. Firstly, teachers’ ideals are understood as creating certain teachers’ and students subject positions from a foucaudian perspective. Teachers’ and students’ ideals are also understood as something that creates its own shadow, in other words at the same time as the enable certain action and ways of participating in the classroom, they also hinders other ways of acting and participating. Secondly, schools communicative practices where classroom talks take place in are understood as institutional settings from a curriculum theoretical perspective where researchers as Lundgren and Englund are included. Thirdly, classroom talks and communication are understood as comprising interactional patterns, a perspective built up from the findings of classrooms researchers such as Dysthe, Nystrand, Cazden, Mehan as well as from the cultural and linguistic theorist Bakhtin.
A combination of ethnographical and text analytical approaches is used methodologically in the project. The ethnographic part of the study comprises of videotaped observations of classroom talks in order to study how a teaching practices practises and their imbedded interactional patterns generates certain communicative norms and ideals for teachers and students. The curriculum part of the study comprises of analyses of curriculum and syllabuses in order to understand how these institutional frames constitute conditions for participation in the classroom talks studied.
The findings of the research show four different teachers’ ideals connected to different ways of organising classroom talks, which in turn bring four different students’ ideals: 1) The Good Teacher as a moderator for a The Teaching Examination, 2) The Good Teacher as a moderator of a Text Oriented Talk, 3) The Good Teacher as a moderator of a Culturally Oriented Talk, and 4) The Good Teacher as a moderator of an Informal Book Talk.
In the paper a discussion is carried out how these teachers ideals not only creates students’ ideal, but also their shadows that enable certain ways of participating but at the same time hinders other ways of participating. These teachers’ and students’ ideals, generated from school practices, are also compared with ideals for teachers generated from pedagogical research, especially the Good Teacher as a deliberative Teacher and the Good Teacher as a Dialogic Teacher.
The question of how ideals, teachers and students, are generated in classroom practices and how the enable respectively hinders ways of participation has a clear relevance for Nordic and international educational research as the ideals found in this study could be understood as expressions of teaching traditions that are deeply rooted in all Nordic countries.
2009.