Capturing change through the lens of cogenerative dialogue: Engagement, interaction and measurements

Abstract

Introduction There are many cogenerative studies which have claimed that the process of engaging teacher and students in cogenerative dialogues have resulted in changes in the teaching and learning praxis (Roth, 2006; Tobin, 2014; lm & Martin, 2015). However it is unclear to what extent the effect of those changes implemented make a difference to students' engagement and learning in the classroom. Jn addition, studies have also claimed that cogenerative dialogues reduce power dominance among participants (Tobin & Roth, 2005). The discussion process requires the participants to be in equal footing in terms of power dominance. No one voice is more significant than the other. This translates to building closer rapport, trust, respect and relationship between the students and the teacher, (lm & Martin, 2015). However most of the studies mentioning reduction in power dominance were from the United States and the data collected from those studies was qual itati ve in nature. There is research potential in investigating the effect of cogenerative dialogues on student engagement and learning and the effects of cogenerative dialogues on power dominance in the Singaporean context. Significance of the study Student engagement and learning are potentially the key success factors in determining the effectiveness of the changes emerging from cogenerative dialogue discussions. Sharan (2008) categorised student engagement into three domains: (1) behavioural engagement, (2) cognitive engagement and (3) emotional engagement. Behavioural engagement focuses on the students and how on-task their actions are during lessons. Cognitive engagement targets the learning that occurs in the students. Emotional engagement relates to the student's personal connection to the subject matter and the teacher. Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004), posits that student engagement in the context of learning involved the interaction between behaviour, cognitive and emotions domains. I am keen to capture the behaviour and cognitive engagement of student participants through video recordings and capture the emotional engagement through recordings of heart rates. Video recordings will be used to capture students' facial expressions, gestures and gazes while oximeter recordings will be used to capture changes in heart rates. It is in my research interest to determine if the data captured from the oximeters corroborates with the data captured from the video recordings. The synchronisation of both data will result in event-triggered moments which will be documented as evidences of transformation in student's learning. I am also keen to capture the interplay of power dominance among cogenerative dialogue participants and how their emotional states changes as they interact. The data will allow me to capture evidences of possible transformation in the teacher-student relationship resulted from multiple cogenerative dialogue sessions.