Analyzing discourse analysis: Teachers’ views of classroom discourse and student identity

Abstract

In the current context of urban schools, strict curricula and rigid teaching practices are often used in schools with high linguistic and cultural diversity. To understand how teachers can use more equitable teaching methods in classrooms, it is important to explore how teachers make sense of multifaceted student identities and how those identities play a role in making instructional decisions. Drawing on a discursive understanding of identity, this paper reports on a study that seeks to analyze two cases of teachers who employed discourse analysis with classroom transcripts in a community of practice and how this may lead to new understandings of student identity, particularly in multilingual contexts. As teachers appropriated the research practices of discourse analysis, they began to shift in the way they understood their students’ identities, from initially viewing them through institutional lenses to understanding the agentive positions that students took up in classroom discourse. This study yields implications for teacher development as well as furthering understanding about the relationship between language and identity in urban schools.