Abstract
AbstractThis study focuses on a recording from a week of third-grade classroom sessions. The recording was used to train new teachers in a certification program and provided data for a learning community that was studying classroom discourse. The third-grade teacher was described as being “outstanding” and “culturally responsive” by the university professor who had been using the recording to train teacher candidates. The teacher was indeed innovative in supporting cultural diversity and was responsive to all students throughout the week, except during a particular literacy lesson, the subject of this study. Critical discourse analysis revealed prioritizing White males, disrespecting a Mexican-American boy and neglecting females. The recording was later withdrawn from the certification program because it did not reflect exemplary teaching, yet its initial use points to an urgent educational problem: even experienced teachers exhibit microaggressions toward students of color and female students, and expert...
Highlights
This study focuses on a recording from a week of third-grade classroom sessions
Earlier research has shown that disrespectful behavior that remains unresolved poses a barrier for building healthy relationships; this study indicates a similar dynamic for teacherstudent relationships
Attention was drawn to a specific utterance delivered by Ms Smith because it was unusually loud and reprimanding toward Juan, line 22: I told you not to touch that card! Following Gee’s (2014) recommendation to look for how an utterance “connects or disconnects” to other utterances, or how it “makes one thing relevant or irrelevant to another,” or how it “privileges or disprivileges” different ways of knowing and believing, the verbal and nonverbal dynamics of line 22 were compared against Ms Smith’s other statements from the literacy lesson
Summary
The recording was used to train new teachers in a certification program and provided data for a learning community that was studying classroom discourse. Professor Jones had been using the recordings in a teacher certification program to model effective practices for teacher candidates, and she was doing ethnographic research in the third-grade classroom. Aside from being granted permission to use the recordings for the teacher certification program, Professor Jones had permission to use them for research purposes by the learning community. By the 11th week, our focus on the recordings narrowed to a particular literacy activity that appeared to be an anomaly in Ms Smith’s teaching approach We wondered why she yelled at one of the children, reprimanding him for touching a vocabulary card that was required for a group activity, yet she did not reprimand another boy who held the same card even after being repeatedly told to not do so. Still wondering about the dynamics and the unresolved questions about Ms Smith’s practice, and suspecting microaggression, I was granted permission to use the data on the condition that pseudonyms would be used to preserve privacy and prevent embarrassment
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