Talking knowledge into being: Discursive and social practices in classrooms

Abstract

The history of the articles in this issue has two dimensions: the history of the articles themselves, and the history of research on the relationship of language and education grounding these articles. As guest editors, we feel that both histories are essential to understanding why this particular set of articles was selected and to locating these articles within a growing history of research on language and classrooms. The former is generally included in an introduction such as this one, the latter is often invisible, because reader knowledge of “the field” is often assumed. However, given the breadth of interest of readers of Linguistics and Education ,and the depth of research across the range of areas on the relationship of lin- guistics and education in the past three decades, we feel that both histories are needed to contextualize these articles and to illustrate the particular contributions of the studies represented by the articles in this special issue. The Local History and Organization of the Volume The local history of the articles is grounded in a program of research being conducted by the Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group. This community is composed of teachers, researchers, and students who are concerned with under- standing how everyday life in classrooms is constructed by members through their interactions, verbal and other, and how these constructions influence what students have opportunities to access, accomplish, and thus, “learn” in schools. The members of this community share a common background in writing process and language as social process. Four of the articles in this issue (Floriani, Heras, Lin, and Brilliant-Mills) are drawn from two classrooms (sixth and seventh grade), which, in turn, are part of a series of linked ethnographic studies in Grades 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12