One-Way Transactions: Teacher-to-Students"Normal" teaching presupposes this vector to be highly significant in presenting content and procedural guidelines to students so they will be able in turn to do the work and be evaluated on it. Such is the view characterized as the "banking model" of education expounded by Paolo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In transactional teaching, one-way transactions assume more of a support role; they set the learning process in motion, but do not represent what it is.
Conveying specific procedures related to learning tasks, or the on-line environment supporting those tasks, is one type of teacher involvement that occurs frequently; another is concept articulation--also known as basic presentational teaching. And general management of class discussion, paralleling the kind of on-line conference moderation commonly called "weaving," is another essentially one-way transaction that can set learning in motion.
The segments from on-line transcripts that follow demonstrate such one-way transactions as they occurred.
Conveying Specific Procedures
For example--In our January 30 conference in ENG 103, we worked on both understanding the assigned task and using the conferencing software to support that task. The assignment was based on Elbow and Belanoff's Workshop 6, "An Interview about Writing." Part of the task here was understanding what kind of interview the project aimed at. Once the students had a basic grasp of the assignment concept, they needed reminding about the steps they would have to go through. In order to discuss examples, another task was to learn how to use Netscape Chat as conferencing software, which allows users to send and view Web pages via Netscape Navigator during the discussion in NSChat. The sample here was the first of many such episodes of on-line technology coaching.
"Weaving" and Concept Articulation
On February 20, we were conferencing at the start of the persuasion project, based on Elbow and Belanoff's Workshop 8. The discussion focused on a reading of the essay "The Great Person-Hole Cover Debate" by Lindsy Van Gelder (Elbow and Belanoff 226); this text introduced the concept that established English gender forms are unfair to women in the way they assume that the normative or "default" gender is masculine. Discussion began in a lively, even chaotic manner--and I occasionally had to weave threads together if there was to be any chance for students to pick up on several important concepts included in persuasion. Throughout the conference I attempted to unify various comments within the boundaries of the subject, turning them into instances of concept articulation.
In some conferences, I prepared beforehand to lay out concepts by setting up a data file with short passages that could be pasted right into the real-time discussion at the appropriate moment. One example is from our March 20 conference on argumentation, where I set out concepts of argument evaluation.