Epistemology and Teaching Styles 91arguably some double-voicing in which the satiric tone both mocks and subtly
invokes the stereotype.)
Through Socratic questioning (but also through departures from traditional
Socratic teaching such as mini-lectures and giving answers), teachers in modified
Socratic classrooms push students to perform all of the steps required for an ade-
quate legal reading as outlined in Chapter 4. Arguably, there is a slightly more at-
tenuated mirroring relationship here between authoritative classroom talk and a
canonical legal reading focused on authority. However, there is still a strong fam-
ily resemblance in both the structure and content of the message. As we see in Tran-
script 5.4, professors use negative uptake not only to press for technically correct
responses, but also to push students to adopt appropriately authoritative tones of
voice. During the substantial amount of class time spent in extended exchanges,
they prod students to decipher correctly the authoritative form and content of legal
discourse.
Shorter Law Class Conversations: Authority in Sheep’s Clothing
Finally, four of the classrooms of the study spent less time in the classic, extended
Socratic dialogues than was found in our modified Socratic classes, and less time
in lecture than in Class #7. Instead, these four, less conventional classrooms were
characterized by a higher proportion of the shorter, nonfocused professor-student
exchanges (Classes #2, #3, #6, and #8). Some of these classes also at times adopted
a more relaxed, conversational style of interaction. Of course, this is all relative;
there were still major differences between the structure of these classes and ordi-
nary everyday conversation. Turns at talk here were still closely controlled by the
professor, and unmediated exchanges among students were a relative rarity. None-
theless, there was far less focused Socratic dialogue in these classes than in the
modified Socratic classrooms (focused exchanges being those involving more ex-
tended dialogue with one student, whereas nonfocused exchanges entail only one
or two turns with a given student). Interestingly, three of these four classes were
taught by women professors (and, indeed, there are only three women professors
in the study).^8 In all but one of these four classrooms, the shift away from extended
dialogue was accompanied by a marked rise in the time spent on shorter exchanges,
with more students speaking for briefer periods of time (from 22% to 46%). In the
other school (Class #3), there are still more of the shorter, nonfocused student-
professor exchanges than in the modified Socratic classes (13% as compared with
5% and 6% of class time). However, this percentage is substantially lower than is
found in the three other short-exchange classes. Instead, there is more time spent
in lecturing (63% as compared with 29%, 33%, and 50% in the other short-
exchange classes). Thus, this class falls at the less interactive end of the continuum,
with some affinities to a lecture format, whereas the other three short-exchange
classes involve more overall discursive interaction between professors and students.^9
Despite these divergences in style, professors in all four of the short-exchange
classes teach the same canons of a standard legal reading that we have already iden-
tified in other classrooms. Once again, we have encountered numerous examples