Collective Action Dynamics in Classrooms

Daniel McFarland

A central process of schooling is the coordination of collective action in classrooms. Classrooms are social environments wherein actors coordinate interaction in a variety of ways over the course of a single class period (e.g. from lecture to recitation to group work to seat work). What social mechanisms lead classroom participants to adopt prescribed forms of coordinated action, to routinize their interactions, and to adapt quickly to new task demands? In short, what are the processes of coordination and structuration in classrooms (i.e. process by which enacted practices become stable, structural forms) and how do we study them directly? Direct empirical study of coordination and structuration is rather difficult and especially if you agree that it concerns shifting interpersonal relations. In order to research this process, I use a unique data set of over 700,000 streaming interactions that span 400 class periods and 160 different classroom settings. I use this data to create a variety of methods that enable me to get at the process of change and routinization, and to predict whether certain causal levers are more important than others. These methods are as follows: (1) a visualization tool that displays network dynamics as movies (Bender-deMoll and McFarland 2003; Moody, McFarland and Bender-deMoll 2003); (2) visual summaries and measurements of network change (Butts and Carley 2003); and (3) multi-level growth curve models used to identify mechanisms of change across many time points and observations (Snijders and Bosker 1999). The hope is that these research efforts will make situational dynamics more interpretable and easier to analyze for a wide array of work settings well beyond classroom settings.

About Daniel McFarland

Daniel A. McFarland received a BA in Philosophy and Sociology (1993) and then a PhD in sociology (1999) at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on social dynamics and organizational characteristics of schools and classrooms. Dan has studied how patterns of course-taking, extra-curricular affiliations and friendship networks affect mobility and status inequality within high schools. In addition, he has looked at how friendship loyalties and instructional methods guide students' decisions to either engage in the learning process or to rebel against it. Dan is currently conducting multiple projects: (1) actors' use of discursive tools to mobilize and rewire networks in classrooms; (2) hierarchy and value-formation through adolescent social networks; (3) socio-cultural analysis of adolescents' interpersonal relations inside and outside of class (including classroom discourse and interpersonal notes); (4) simulation models of students' educational and career decisions as they arise in varying types of school contexts; and (5) institutionalized processes of status-acquisition and socialization into different systems of representative government within schools (the variability of school election processes and student council bylaws).