Conflicting Discourses

Abstract

This article provides micro analysis of one representative incident from a larger qualitative study to examine how third-grade bilingual students and their teacher negotiated academic disciplinary and popular culture discourses in a social studies unit on Jamestown and Pocahontas. Informed by discourse and linguistic analyses, this study explores the competing dominant and nondominant discourses as they intersected and overlapped in the complex literacy practices in this classroom. Ms. Montclair’s instruction was shaped by the textbook’s approach to social studies and accountability pressures of testing and content coverage. Yet the students drew from everyday popular resources in their thinking, taking up nonacademic discourses to understand content. This research explores the following questions: (a) What are the predominant discourses evident in the official curricular text and teacher’s enactment of it? (b) What are the discourses evident in children’s everyday resources drawn on to make sense of the school text? (c) How do specific linguistic features make possible these discourses and perspectives? Findings demonstrate that students navigated across multiple discourses that were different but represented dominant culture. As discourses intersected in class, participants provided a level of critical analyses but did not deeply take up nondominant perspectives despite their own positioning from linguistically and culturally nondominant backgrounds. By showing the complexity of literate and discursive practice, this article contributes to understandings of how bilingual and English language learner students confront the demands of academic disciplinary language, draw on their own resources to make sense of content, and require explicit instruction on language and social justice.