Abstract

 [full article in English] 
 When teaching, many educators must respond to unruly and disruptive students. While most scholarship on student disruption focuses on classroom management strategies and tactics, few studies consider the nature of the disruption, its ideological significance and the social consequences that follows. Via ethnographic methods and microethnographic discourse analysis, this paper examines the complexity and contradictions of macro- and microstructures as they manifest during a student’s disruption of a classroom discussion of a novel in an 11th and 12th grade English Language Arts class in the United States. Using Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as a theoretical framework, this paper examines the pattern of disruption in the classroom that evoked multiple and contradictory ideologies and both maintained and subverted power structures in the context. Contrary to the belief that classroom disruptions are always challenges to power, they sometimes reinforced power relations on a broader cultural level. This paper urges that research and scholarship embrace complexity and contradiction as inherent in the interactions of people in schools and seeks to rethink how educators view and respond to classroom disruption. It concludes by advocating that embracing complexity and contradiction will better allow teachers and researchers to think through systems of education as a way to effectively and ethically intervene when these structures prove problematic.
Highlights
Most educators have faced the challenge of teaching amidst unruly and disruptive students
I use ethnographic methods and microethnographic discourse analysis to examine a student’s disruption of a classroom discussion as it occurs in an 11th and 12th grade English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, during literature instruction. This analysis seeks to understand the nature of classroom disruption and what it reveals about the ideologies surrounding the practice of teaching and learning literature in a particular classroom
Using an interaction between a teacher and students in an 11th and 12th grade English Language Arts classroom as a “telling case” (Mitchell 1984) for making theoretical inferences, this paper argues for a paradigm shift from one where researchers strive for a single, clear but flawed pattern to research that recognizes and embraces complexity and contradiction and the tensions they create within the microand macrostructures of the everyday life in schools
Summary
Most educators have faced the challenge of teaching amidst unruly and disruptive students. Students who disrupt the agenda and tenor of a classroom do not do so in a vacuum, nor does their behavior come from nowhere Instead, it is socially embedded, often a response to other people and the contexts they are in, and can be far more complex than “misbehaving” or challenging the teacher’s authority. It is socially embedded, often a response to other people and the contexts they are in, and can be far more complex than “misbehaving” or challenging the teacher’s authority To illustrate these points, I use ethnographic methods and microethnographic discourse analysis to examine a student’s disruption of a classroom discussion as it occurs in an 11th and 12th grade English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, during literature instruction. This analysis seeks to understand the nature of classroom disruption and what it reveals about the ideologies surrounding the practice of teaching and learning literature in a particular classroom
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