Students' Participation as Co-authoring of School Institutional Practices

Abstract

The school, in occidental culture over the last 150 or 200 years, has been the main social institution that is in charge of educating new generations. Institutional practices are those that define the legitimate knowledge in the school, what learning is, and also the right ways of, the proper moments for and the people to be involved in knowledge construction; in other words the rights and obligations of the participants, as well as the adequate ways to construct this cultural process of instruction. These practices are usually constituted by the teachers as the legitimate academic authorities of the school as an institution. The notion of participation used in this article ‘stresses the inherently social, collective and distributed quality of any act of speaking’ (Duranti, 1997, p. 21). Authorship is understood as a collective responsibility for the shape and content of messages that shifts from individual speakers to particular types of participants’ frameworks. In this form, messages are collaboratively constructed and interpreted (Duranti, 1997, p. 314). This distributed responsibility of discourse production addresses the concept of co-authorship (Duranti & Brenneis, 1986) as a widespread phenomenon. The main purpose of this paper is to study students’ discursive participation in the co-authoring of institutional practices within science classes in the context in primary classrooms in Mexico City. This means paying attention to children’s initiatives in the constitution and legitimization of social practices in order to perform academic tasks. These forms of participation show the contribution of students in defining and negotiating their identity in classroom relationships.