Roskelly, Breaking (into) the Circle: Group Work for Change in the English Classroom
Roskelly argues that when used correctly, groupwork in the classroom can provide opportunities for students to make meaning by “mak[ing] conscious and explicit the operations of the thinking mind” (37), and can help students negotiate race, gender, and other boundaries. One example of a successful group interaction Roskelly shares involves a student who believes racism doesn’t exist. After his group talks to another group, he says, “I guess I was thinking my experience in high school is pretty typical of everybody’s in the class. And that’s not true” (39).
Roskelly says that normally when groups “don’t work” in classes, it’s because the teacher doesn’t value group work. For groups to work, they must engage in real work, that is, work that is open-ended, has real consequences, and in which answers aren’t predetermined. Since most students don’t have experience working in productive groups, to work well, groups need to be given guidance by the teacher. Roskelly gives another example of a student who hadn’t worked in productive groups before who didn’t know “how he could help” the girls in his group, not considering that he could learn from them (78). In Roskelly’s classes, groups have permanent membership, engage in real work, write reflective journals together, and receive comments from Roskelly as a group.
Working within groups helps students problematize concepts and necessarily changes the authority-structure in a classroom. Roskelly asserts that “to participate fully, learners must add their own voices to the discourse, must challenge the discourse they hear by making it connect to themselves” (84), and groups provide this context. Roskelly emphasizes that the normal discourse of a classroom, where the teacher does most of the talking and occasionally asks questions, is challenged by groups.
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