View article

Our investigation focusses on a group of eleven lower-middle-class students from classrooms in which the teachers did most of the talking and students rarely asked any questions. We have examined whether spontaneous discussions among the students in a less structured setting would include questioning, and what kinds of questions they might ask. Our study is based within a historical dialectical materialist framework. We particularly wanted to find out whether, given a material context—an unusual variegated tree—the students would spontaneously ask questions about the tree, or whether they would need some sort of teacher’s guidance in order to do so. We were motivated to raise these research questions partly by worries that a culture of an unquestioning student passivity may exist and that such a culture may be an expedient way of maintaining social norms. Rather than testing out a teaching …