Interactional order, moral order: Classroom interactions and the institutional production of identities

Abstract

Scholars examining the interplay of the global and local in literacy practice have relied on a variety of tools to understand the implications of larger-scaled histories in moment-by-moment classroom action. Drawing on data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, this article examines how the categorization of literacy practices by students and teachers during classroom-level interactions reveals different layered histories and contradictions of urban schooling. Following Heller’s linguistic anthropology of schooling (1995, 2007), I focus on how teachers and students construct what constitutes knowledge during classroom reading events and demonstrate how various interactions and literacy practices are linked to moral orders that can only be understood with regards to the transforming genealogy of urban Catholic schools.