The study Room for learning was conducted in order to gain a deeper understanding of how students and teachers construct knowledge collaboratively while partaking in an intervention that was designed to help teachers create a knowledge building environment.
The analyses that were performed on the basis of this intervention not only reveal how the involvement, principles and didactic performance of the participating teachers develop over time, but they also shed light on the role of language in teacher-student and student-student interaction.
The primary concern of this ethnographic research is to contribute to the ongoing development of good education at exceptionally small primary schools in multilingual Fryslân.
During the intervention–which was installed in five primary schools– teachers and students have become acquainted with inquiry learning between 2008 and 2010. Six separate projects where carried out in this period, each of which lasted three weeks. Questionnaires, interviews, journals and observations were used to document the progress, which was also (partially) recorded on video.
Whereas teachers have primarily been involved in the organization of the learning environment in phase one, they focused more on the quality of the language used in the classrooms in phase two. This development ties in with innovations regarding both the organization of whole-class interaction as well as the way students engage in small group discussions. The nature of the interaction shifted towards a more dialogic structure; this helped the students and teachers expand their conversation repertoire and also enabled them to construct knowledge collaboratively in the end.
One of the major findings of this study is that native speakers of Frisian who engage in a discussion together frequently resort to Frisian –as opposed to Dutch– as a means to indicate the transition between various phases of the collaborative knowledge building process.