Page 79 - Getting of the fence

receive factual information’ (Christensen & Prout, 2012, p. 480).
According to Lodge (2005), a shared meaning of learning is established through engagement and dialogue because it ‘prompts reflection, critical investigation, analysis, interpretation and reorganization of knowledge’ (p. 135). The written reflective accounts, which created a legitimate and valued space (Cook-Sather, 2002) for the students to think about, to question, and to reconsider their interpretations of the underlying elements of the Comprehensive Approach,
together with the output of the unguided focus groups, created dialogical 3 processes of knowledge-production between the students and the research team.
The power of presenting the students with our interpretation of the output of their
focus group dialogue in the form of asking them to discuss the revised underlying
elements lies in the open acknowledgement, to them, of the legitimacy of their voice and showed an overt interdependence. The open question survey was to some extent also part of this dialogue since these answers fuelled the dialogue in the research team of which the output was presented in the following focus group.
Figure 3.1 above emphasises how the collaboration between the students and the research team was a joint process of knowledge-production leading to a better understanding of the underlying elements (Bergold & Thomas, 2012) and therefore of the model as a whole. The combination of the three different data elicitation methods created a certain stichomythic form, a rhythmic intensity of alternating turns in which both the students and the research team engaged in convergent and divergent inclusive forms of dialogue (Burbules, 1993). Each dialogical step was a constructive continuation of the previous one, questioning and discussing the output of the preceding step and thereby further developing the model through collective knowledge building.
In comparing the initial and adapted versions of the Comprehensive Approach (Table 3.3) it becomes clear that secondary school students can offer valuable insights in developing a model for teaching and learning through collaboration and co-construction. By eliciting the students’ voice regarding our initial model, the most important contribution was where they felt the underlying elements were incomplete or lacking altogether. Furthermore, as we have shown in Table 3.3, apart from the first Text approach element, ‘Literary terminology’, all the other elements underwent a change. There were six cases where we changed the description of the initial element and five instances where we merged either two or three elements into one. Whenever students indicated that the initial elements were ambiguous or confusing or when certain words were misplaced, we adjusted the elements
Connecting students and researchers
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