Dialogic Status in Design Education: Authority and Peer Relations in Studio Class Conversations

In this article, I study role enactment and status relationships in university design studio classrooms. I analyze conversations that take place during discussions of student creative work, and I interpret them in the context of previous studies of learning, classroom discourse, and creativity. I found that professors and students jointly establish and maintain a complex and hybrid participation structure in which they enact dialogic status: they simultaneously perform both an authority relationship and a peer relationship. I analyzed the interactional mechanisms that dialogically perform these two status relationships, drawing on prior studies of role and status in conversation. I show that the dialogic blend of authority and peer relationships continuously and frequently varies throughout reviews of student work. Drawing on past studies of creativity in education, I argue that the joint enactment of dialogic status is an effective pedagogy for teaching and learning for creativity.