Classroom mood and the dance of stance: The role of affective and epistemic stancetaking in the development of a classroom mood

Our paper offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of moods in academic settings. We begin by introducing the concept of classroom mood as a phenomena distributed across time and across people. Then we propose a method for studying classroom mood using the linguistic anthropological notion of stance. We demonstrate this method through an analysis of a year-long video ethnography of literacy teaching and learning in a first-grade classroom. In this analysis, we document how a collaborative-problem-solving mood, one form of emotional experience, emerges through stancetaking over time as a communicative, collaborative, and relational process. Our analysis describes how a teacher and her students coordinated affective and epistemic stances dialogically and opportunistically to build a collaborative problem-solving mood over time. This mood called forth (solicited) particular actions from students to participate competently in the learning activity, which included joint attention, effortful listening, and correct tool use (strategies/sound cards). Our analysis demonstrates how contextual moods influence engagement in learning.