Children Who Can Guess What Is in the Teacher’s Head: Understanding Engagement in Schooling from a Sociocultural Perspective

Teachers’ work is a crucial element in the complex education-health equation. In this chapter we consider the work that teachers do to establish positive affect in classrooms, guiding children to become confident and participating members of classroom learning communities, and thus creating the foundation for children’s learning at school. Maintaining positive affect is particularly important for teachers seeking to be inclusive of educationally marginalised students: those who are not yet tuned in to the underpinning purposes of schooling; or those least likely to put themselves in the spotlight to talk about their learning. Here we draw on an interactional and sociocultural perspective to discuss specific pedagogic strategies that teachers can use to establish and maintain positive affect, while keeping in sight the academic goals of classroom activity. We illustrate our discussion with extracts of classroom dialogue, recorded in two schools: one a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory; the other an urban South Australian school that caters for children from low-socio-economic backgrounds, many from immigrant and refugee families. We interrogate the patterns of classroom dialogue to show how teachers skillfully used interactive scaffolding strategies to develop students’ attention to academic learning from a foundation of positive affect. Rather than attributing school failure to deficits of the child or their environment, we argue that inclusion in academic activity is socially realised. Our data suggest that students’ capacity to focus and attend to learning is not so much a function of their individual abilities, but more a result of socially constructed meaning making which is fostered by expert teachers through moment-to-moment pedagogic choices.