Student Participation and Engagement

This first data-based chapter shows how the sequentiality and temporality of student actions can be used to characterize their participation and engagement in classroom interaction. Traditionally, researchers and teachers have focused on students’ verbal participation, and this chapter likewise focuses on students’ verbal contributions to demonstrate how participation and engagement might be disambiguated. A new term, studenting, is introduced here as well. This concept refers to student actions which may be characterized as a category-bound action of the role “student” undertaken at the “wrong” time or as a performance of participation. The analysis also shows how individual student actions may be visualized as a wave of student responses. Examples include choral responses, teacher-student interaction, and student-student interaction.