| Description |
Over the last half-century the majority of scholarship regarding student participation in the university classroom has been explored using the positivist approaches of the social sciences. Furthermore, instructional communication scholarship that theorizes classroom and student experiences uses participation as a vehicle by which to explore other areas of interest (e.g., technology; conflict; conversation themes). Although valuable in their own right, these behaviorist methodologies to theorizing student participation have limited utility because they fail to highlight the emic experiences that characterize the dynamics of classroom participation. As a result, participation is often looked through, but rarely looked at. The goal of this project is to focus on participation in order to understand more about it as a phenomenon; that is, I am interested in how students define, experience, and talk about participation in the university classroom. This thesis was designed to explore student narratives about their classroom experiences with participation. This project has the potential to contribute insight to literatures in communication and instruction because it invites firsthand accounts from current university students about what being a student in today's classroom is like. Further, by focusing on participation, this study seeks to illuminate this often taken for granted and amorphous communicative practice. Finally, observations from this study can inform practice because it sheds light on how participation is experienced, can be enhanced, and how assessment of participation can be made more relevant. |
