Deciding who we are: a classroom agreement process that cultivates caring relations and dialogic value-orientations

Classroom communities are shared, value-laden, relational time-spaces. One way a classroom community makes explicit and cultivates its values and sought-after ways of interacting is through classroom rules or agreements. What they consist of, and how they are agreed upon, taken up and/or imposed communicates who and what is valued. While some classroom commuities co-author rules, they have typically focused on classroom management and student behaviors. In contrast, we examine the classroom talk of one second-grade classroom community’s process of co-authoring six classroom agreements that focus on valuing self, each other and their classroom. Our sociocultural discourse analysis of whole-class talk provides context for, and explicates ways, this co-­authored classroom agreement process set expectations and obliged commitment to honor these classroom agreements. Findings show ways this process cultivated caring relations and dialogic value-­orientations. This study is significant because it lays out not only the process of agreeing upon and making explicit what matters in a community, but also the values and practices such a process can cultivate.