Distributive justice in the classroom: Teacher reasoning about student turn allocation decisions in whole-classroom discussions

We examine how primary school teachers reason about and justify the distribution of student talk turns during teacher-led whole-class discussions. Drawing on theories of distributive justice and dialogic pedagogy, we analyze how four sixth-grade teachers interpret and respond to student participation bids during academically productive dialogue activities. Using classroom video-stimulated interviews, we traced teachers' reasoning across four analytic phases that combined real-time classroom discussion footage with post-hoc reflection. Findings reveal a plurality of justice logics that teachers mobilize in situ, including need, equality, productivity, and reciprocity, often in tension with one another. Need-based justifications dominated across all phases, indicating that teachers frequently construed talk-turn allocation as a means of fostering inclusion and supporting students' emotional well-being, particularly for lower-achieving students. A central contribution of the study lies in identifying a divergence between teachers' articulated pedagogical ideals and their moment-to-moment classroom actions. While individual productivity featured prominently in teachers' general reflections, real-time decision-making more often relied on reactive, affective, or collective distributive logics shaped by the immediacy of classroom interaction. In addition, students themselves oriented toward principles of equality and reciprocity, at times challenging teachers' discretionary authority over access to participation. This exploratory study demonstrates the analytic value of applying a distributive justice framework—previously used in other educational domains—to the study of talk-turn allocation. By making visible the ethical and pedagogical dilemmas embedded in everyday participation decisions, the study extends research on dialogic pedagogy beyond interactional structure to teachers' reasoning about participation and access.