Democratizing Classroom Discourse: The Challenge for Online Writing Environments

Abstract

This article is intended to highlight peer response discourse trends and to initiate a dialogue about the ways in which educators, and designers of educational environments, can play a central role in creating more democratic discourse in classrooms. We report on a research and development project involving education experts, computer engineers, assessment specialists and, most importantly, the teachers and students who inform our work. We share findings about the general discourse patterns of students from six eighth-grade classes as they use the peer feedback component of our developing online writing environment. We also examine multiple responses from one teacher's classroom. We argue that new online environments offer great potential for reimaging classroom discourse (e.g. less teacher-directed and more horizontally distributed). However, our research in this developing environment indicates that students in very different contexts respond to each other in somewhat ‘typical’ ways (e.g. they rarely elicit and offer few change strategies). Furthermore, teachers' initiating texts (e.g. assignments and rubrics) influence student discourse, often in unintentional ways that restrict student voices. Finally, we discuss implications of our work and offer a number of key recommendations for educators and designers working to promote more horizontal (peer-to-peer) discourse.