First and Second Conversations: Remote Learning and Interpretive Boundaries

Abstract

This article examines the nature of student-to-student text discussion in a dialogically organized remote classroom. Conducted as teacher research, I investigated student talk in a PreK-1st grade biblical literature class. In the fall of 2020, I taught a biblical literature class to a fully remote PreK-1st grade cohort in a Jewish independent school on the East Coast. Four undergraduate research assistants from the SCRoLL education lab helped with ongoing data analysis. Through self-study of my teaching and classroom, I discovered the ways that the remote setting shaped intensive text discussion, facilitating students' comfort stepping into their own interpretive authority and moving past the classroom fixture of teacher as interpretive authority. In the remote classroom, the students comfortably moved between the first conversation, the meaning of the text, and the second conversation, competing conventions for determining the meaning of the text. I conclude with suggestions for how teachers interested in dialogically organized classrooms can carry the assets of the remote classroom forward.