Question Asking and the Common Good: A Hermeneutic Investigation of Student Questioning in Moral Configurations of Classroom Practice

Abstract

This qualitative study (based on a hermeneutic moral-realist interpretive frame (Yanchar & Slife, 2017)) explored question asking as it unfolded in the everyday practice of being a student in a graduate course on design thinking (with an emphasis on design in education). Findings are presented as four key tensions that occurred within the complex classroom setting under investigation: “theory and overlapping practices,” “convergence and divergence,” “participation and reticence,” and “give and take.” Overall, these thematized tensions point to a dynamic interplay between student agency and the common good of the class. These findings have significant implications for understanding student questioning experiences and the study of classroom interactions.

A Teacher Questioning Activity: The Use of Oral Open-ended Questions in Mathematics Classroom

“…Students should be encouraged participate more in asking questions to the teacher to create balance in the learning process (Gong and Yanchar, 2019).…”

Phenomenology as a subversive practice.

“…One example of this strategy was offered in a study of graduate student question-asking in the classroom, conducted by a doctoral student and myself Yanchar & Gong, 2020). Mainstream psychological and educational research in this area is overwhelmingly cognitive, logocentric, and quantitative in nature, typically producing thin descriptions of representational structures, computational procedures, and taxonomies (for more details, see Gong, 2018). Our goal was to look at this phenomenon differently, that is, in a way that illuminated (in some measure) what has been obscured in traditional studies based on information processing and related assumptions.…”

Concern and control in human agency

“…But qualitative approaches designed to explore the meaning of human experience and phenomena, such as forms of hermeneutic (Fleming et al, 2003; Packer & Addison, 1989; Stigliano, 1989; Yanchar & Slife, 2017) and phenomenological (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003; Wertz, 2005) inquiry, would seem to offer suitable methodological resources in this regard. For example, one recent hermeneutic study of student question asking in a graduate course suggested that concern and control were often connected with how, or whether, students asked questions in class (Gong & Yanchar, 2019). While the explicit topic of this study was student question asking as a kind of moral–educational practice, and the term “control” was not explicitly mentioned, the relevance of control became clear as some participants tended to dominate class time through their questions while others felt a kind of duty to avoid such domination or sought a balance between exerting too much and too little control over class discussion.…”

“…Moreover, how some students tended to control discussions—often in indirect, subtle, or even tacit ways—was connected with what mattered in regard to their professional and personal aspirations; and what mattered was often complex and multifaceted, leading to complex class interactions. In these ways, this study (Gong & Yanchar, 2019) offered a novel account of student control via question asking in the classroom.…”