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How Student Positioning Can Lead To Failure In Inquiry-Based Classrooms, Kelly Beatrice Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

In an effort to improve mathematics instruction, I studied how the positions students choose or are pressed to take on can lead to failure in an inquiry-based classroom. Positioning refers to the temporary roles that a student or a teacher can place each other in or take on in a given classroom environment. Since positions are constructed and maintained by language use, I drew from positioning theory and discourse theory for my theoretical framework. From analyzing transcripts of classroom episodes and interviews with the teacher and a student, I identified common positions that the teacher and the student took on. …