What counts as 'participation'?

Participation is colloquially understood to mean speaking, and many syllabi count "participation" toward students' grades, generally considered to be their willingness to contribute to class discussions. The push to get students to "participate" can also be found in teacher-preparation programs: edTPA, a teacher-certification assessment used by many states in the United States, requires that teachers utilize "activities, discussions, or other modes of participation that engage students" (Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity 2016: 52). However, the terms "participation" and "engage" are undefined, a common trend. In addition, students' conception of what "counts" as participation at any given moment in classroom interaction may be out of alignment with the teacher's interactional and/or pedagogical agenda. This misalignment can have serious consequences, including teachers' moral categorizations of "bad students," with differential interactional treatment leading to negative consequences for participation, engagement, and learning (see Hall 1998). This presentation presents a more complete picture of what doing-being-a-student looks like in classroom interaction, including consideration of not only students' verbal contributions in class but also their embodied actions. In order to do so, I propose a reconceptualization of participation as a hybrid phenomenon consisting of not only the interactional alignment of student actions but also their pedagogical alignment with the teacher's agenda. I also suggest a definition of engagement as students' close monitoring of the interaction, as evidenced by the precise temporal and sequential deployment of their multimodal resources. Finally, I hope to illustrate the limits of observable behaviors, highlighting what this means for our characterizations of student participation and engagement, for the analyst as well as the teacher, and the implications of these limitations for teacher education and evaluation, as well as for classroom discourse research more generally.