School Discourse Research Articles

The Effects of Family/Community and School Discourses on Children's and Adolescents' Interpretations of United States History

The Effects of Family/Community and School Discourses on Children's and Adolescents' Interpretations of United States History

Playful talk: the interspace between home and school discourse

The paper reminds readers of the importance of ‘playful talk’ in bridging home and school discourses. Through a number of excerpts of bilingual and monolingual children drawn from homes and classrooms over the past decade, it illustrates how school discourse may be taken home and transformed into ‘home talk’ through play. During this transformation, children take ownership of both the language and cultural practice of the classroom. Similarly, it shows the importance of providing the interspace for children to bring home talk into classrooms during socio‐dramatic play. The paper also illustrates the role of family members, particularly siblings and grandparents, in enabling young children to construct bridges between home and school during play activities. Finally, the paper stresses the importance of teachers in recognizing children's different linguistic and cultural resources in their classroom practices and provision.

Boundary Spanners as Bridges of Student and School Discourses in an Urban Science and Mathematics High School

A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of “boundary spanner” is such a tool. Boundary spanners are individuals, objects, media, and other experiences that link an organization to its environment. They serve critical communicative roles, such as bridges for bringing distinct discourses together, cultural guides to make discourses of the “other” more explicit, and change agents for potentially reshaping participants' discourses. This ethnographic study provides three examples of boundary spanners found in the context of an urban public high school of science, mathematics, and technology: boundary media, boundary objects, and boundary experiences. The analysis brings to the foreground students' and teachers' distinct discourses about “good student identity,”“good student work,” and “good summer experience” and demonstrates how boundary spanners shaped, were shaped by, and sometimes brought together participants' distinct discourses. An argument is made for boundary spanners' practical and theoretical utility: practically, as a tool for enhancing meaning‐making between diverse groups, and theoretically, as a heuristic tool for understanding the reproductive and transformative aspects of urban science education.

Discourse and difference

This article contends that students whose discourses differ from the dominant academic discourses of school may develop negative writer identities as a result of their language struggles in the academy. Using Critical Discourse analysis, the study explores the writer identities of two college writers in order to understand how embedded ideologies and power relations shape understanding of writer identity. The article goes on to suggest how the use of hybrid genres, acceptance of more multicultural discourses, and introduction of political discourse in the classroom can empower educators and students to overcome language policies that work against them in the academy.

Classrooms and the Design of Pedagogic Discourse: A Multimodal Approach

This paper offers a social semiotic analysis of the school classroom, in this case the subject English classroom, as a material instantiation of pedagogic discourse. The classroom is looked at as a multimodal sign: the semiotic ‘residue’ or ‘sediment’ of discursive practices over time. In particular it discusses how visual displays and spatial design in the English classroom can be thought of as signs of school English. From this perspective a teacher’s classroom can be understood as a sign of how she or he mediates ‘official’ government and school discourse. Drawing on three illustrative examples of English classrooms from three different schools, the paper argues that the variation between these classrooms can be understood in part as a consequence of the complex web of social relations that mediate and institutionally frame pedagogy.

Standardising Sexuality: Embodied Knowledge, “Achievement” and “Standards”

In this paper, we argue that education and the possibility of becoming educated are in tension with sexuality in schools and that, consequently, students tend either to suppress all kinds of knowledges—embodied and otherwise—that are neither welcome nor recognised within the formal contexts of schooling or debar themselves from success in terms of educational achievement. Students embody identities both as learners and as sexual subjects. Discourses of sexuality and education, therefore, come together in embodied ways. The difficulty for students arises from the discursive and semiotic construction of schools as being on the “rational”, “mind” side of the “mind–body” split, which typifies modernist, Enlightenment thinking. The paper examines specific ways in which four girls produce themselves in dialogue with, on the one hand, official (Governmental and school) discourses of “standards” and “achievement” and, on the other, particular powerful constructions of sexuality.

Discourses of Schooling in Contemporary Malaysia: Pedagogical Practices and Ethnic Politics

This paper examines the notion of schooling and draws on the experiences of Malaysian teenage schoolgirls in contemporary postcolonial Malaysia. Using a critical approach to understandings of schooling, the author unpacks the links between the macro, micro and the personal in examining these girls' negotiations with discourses of schooling. The intra and inter ethnic dynamics between the Malay, Chinese and Indian collectivities problematises the notion of schooling in contemporary Malaysia. The author examines the markers of the discourses of schooling as manifested in the narratives of these girls. These include the pedagogical practices of streaming and ranking, the politics of ethnic identification and the ‘Chineseness’ in the school ethos.

The discourse of classroom interaction in Kenyan primary schools

This paper addresses the role of classroom discourse in supporting children’s learning in Kenyan primary schools. The discourse strategies of 27 teachers teaching English, mathematics and science across the primary phase were intensively studied using discourse analysis and semi‐structured interviews. A survey questionnaire (n = 359) was also used to explore teacher perceptions of classroom discourse practices. The findings revealed the dominance of teacher‐led recitation in which rote and repetition dominated the classroom discourse with little attention being paid to securing pupil understanding. The wider implications of the findings for improving the quality of classroom discourse in Kenyan primary schools are considered together with the need for further research into how the wider social order is influencing discourse practices in Kenyan primary schools.

Preps and Punks: An Inquiry into Externally Imposed Factors that Contribute to the Social Categorization of Students

The division of students into social categories is a phenomenon that invites inquiry. Historically, students have tended to migrate towards one of two groups: the preps who embrace all aspects of school life and the punks who reject all aspects of school life. These two groups are reproductions of the social order. This paper inquires into three elements of the discourse of schooling that influence the categorization of students; normalization, the hidden curriculum and the social contract.

Bringing narrative psychology to school improvement for peace: Some implications for the role of the educational psychologist in social conflict

Staub remarked that psychology had important contributions to make to our understanding of how to create peaceful, harmonious and caring relationships between groups. This paper reports on the school improvement phase of an ongoing programme of practitioner research. It illuminates the potential for practitioner educational psychology to contribute towards building a culture of peace and to counter hegemonic school discourses which detract from the task of addressing inter-communal conflict. The work was underpinned by the argument that school-based efforts to overcome ethnopolitical conflict could be transformed through a perspective that gives a central role to the storied nature of human conduct; that is, through narrative psychology. This stance is a special case of the wider perspective called social constructionism, itself a movement which draws sustenance from and has links to a range of disciplines and intellectual traditions including Vygotskian theory and sociocultural perspectives on learning. Peace poems were elicited from children and young people and a sample of these were then discussed interpretatively by groups of experienced teachers and educators supported by practices from the organisational development approach called appreciative inquiry. Narrative thinking and methods were found to have great potential to help teachers generate alternative ‘richer descriptions’ of schooling for peace and consequently construct more inclusive and democratic social worlds. I argue that school improvement for peace requires the development of an alternative epistemology of professional practice based on a relational redrawing of psychological processes.

“That's So Gay!”: A Study of the Deployment of Signifiers of Sexual and Gender Identity in Secondary School Settings in Australia and the United States

While notions of “choice”, essentialism and sexual identity have become some-what passe in the academy, the controversy associated with these notions has not waned within secondary educational settings. Official curriculum and peda-gogy in Australia and the United States is still, I will demonstrate, very much constrained by this hackneyed debate. In the first part of this article my focus is primarily on tropes of choice. I ponder how such tropes are utilised, prohibited and circumvented within the confines of the school. This analysis is informed by interviews I conducted with people who work to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teachers and students in secondary school settings. Given the tenuous position of choice in official discourses of schooling, I go on to consider how the language young people use has the potential to disturb hetero and homo normalising practices. I do this by conceiving familiar and unfamiliar sexual and gender identity categories as catachreses. My focus is on the now ubiquitous term “that's so gay” where “gay” comes to signify all things uncool and nerdish. This strategy is provoked, in part, by my frustration with advocates for lesbian and gay identified youth who underscore the “victimhood” of these young people via an insistence that terms such as “that's so gay” be read as always, and, in every way, a homophobic slur. By conceiving “that's so gay” as catachresis it is possible to see how such terms can simultaneously sustain and disrupt the normalising practices that objectify schooling's subjects.

'Reading on the Line': An Analysis of Literacy Practices in ESL Classes in a South African Township School

The writer argues that there are significant gaps in the way in which academic literacy theory has been conceptualised in the South African context. Although there has been much research about the transition from school to university, school literacy has tended to be presented as self-evident and the implications of students studying in an additional language, English, have tended to be addressed in functional terms. This paper uses insights from a critical ethnographic study of English in an urban, black working-class secondary school to describe the instrumental literacy practices that characterise English classes at the school. The data suggest that students are deeply ambivalent about English. I argue that their seemingly contradictory language attitudes and classroom practices are intimately linked to their attempts to define appropriate roles and identities in relation to the unstable school and township environment, as well as their construction of their place in the world within and beyond the township environment. The data illustrate the need for academic literacy intervention to take into consideration students' language attitudes and motivation, as well the need for subject-specific knowledge of school discourse practices.

Securing international society: towards an English school discourse of security

English School approaches to international politics, which focus on the idea of an international society of states bound together by shared rules and norms, have not paid significant explicit attention to the study of security in international relations. This is curious given the centrality of security to the study of world politics and the recent resurgence of English School scholarship in general. This article attempts to redress this gap by locating and explicating an English School discourse of security. We argue here that there is indeed an English School discourse of security, although an important internal distinction exists here between pluralist and solidarist accounts, which focus on questions of order and justice in international society respectively. In making this argument, we also seek to explore the extent to which emerging solidarist accounts of security serve to redress the insecurity of security in international relations: the tendency of traditional security praxes to privilege the state in ways that renders individuals insecure.

“Anyone Can Be an Expert in Something”: Exploring the Complexity of Discourse Conflict and Alignment for Two Fifth Grade Students

Tntegrating funds of knowledge — the resources, processes, and strategies attached to family and community proficiencies — has widely been accepted as a worthwhile pedagogical intervention. In this article, we argue that two of the primary assumptions underlying such interventions have yet to be explored. First, because funds of knowledge are acquired rather than learned, children may not be readily able to locate and talk about such resources. Second, students often come to classrooms and schools with deeply embedded cultural models of what language, literacy, and learning in school are and should be. These cultural models are acquired through participation in the home, community, and school. In this article, we illustrate how some of the beliefs associated with funds of knowledge — narrow definitions of literacy, for example — run counter to the goals of integrating local resources into the academic curriculum. We studied the complexity of integrating funds of knowledge in a fifth-grade classroom of African-American students in a large Midwestern city. Situated within an action research framework, we collaboratively planned, collected, and analyzed data over a 10-week period. We learned that the network of spoken and written discourse practices that comprised the students' cultural knowledge either conflicted or aligned with the Discourse of the school. We share findings from the entire class and then focus on two in-depth case studies that demonstrate the complexity of alignment and conflict. This research sheds light on how elementary students develop problematic literate identities and offer suggestions to redirect such development.

The High Cost of Uncritical Teaching

Most teachers shy away from the discussion of controversial issues in the classroom. But, Mr. Winn fears, if students are not given the guidance and opportunity to engage in and discourse in school, they will not be capable of carrying out their responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society. WHY CAN'T my students think for themselves? Why are they so unprepared and so often intellectually lazy? Why do they expect me to do their for them? These are common complaints, voiced by those who teach both in our elementary and secondary schools and in our colleges and universities. But if the truth be known, relatively few teachers and professors are using the kinds of materials and the discussion strategies that would build in their students a mental set and a taste for thinking. Thus the typical classroom atmosphere and procedures dull the possibilities for creating the very qualities of mind that educators avow as their goal. Field studies in large samples of secondary schools have revealed that teachers use a very restricted range of pedagogical options, and these are mainly the ones that require looking up answers and recalling information. There is little emphasis on the evaluation of knowledge or the promotion of intellectual curiosity, with most of the time available for discussion dominated by teacher talk. Left as passive (and bored) spectators, with little chance to evaluate the information presented or to make judgments, students turn off intellectually and simply go through the motions necessary to complete the course. The same is true at the college level. For too long, American society and American education have adored the quiz whiz -- the one who can shoot back correct answers to factual questions as in a TV game show, as if that were indeed a true measure of wisdom. Even more disturbing is the societal pressure to conform and to shy away from because it is not polite or nice. Americans commonly confuse the adjective critical with negativism, conveniently missing the point that the opposite of is uncritical thinking, which is not at all! A diet of such uncritical can foster the kinds of technological and policy blunders that we see featured in the daily news: the Iraq gambit, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the ravaging of the world's natural resources, the financial scandals of Enron and Worldcom, and so on. Why spend years in school to learn to run with the herd and spout silly and commonplace thoughts? Such thinking is really better characterized as bull and is, perhaps, an easy way to pass the time. In critically, by contrast, we seek to penetrate to the core of an issue or problem. We go where our rational mind leads us, while we remain respectful of the intuitive and of the inspired hunch, as well as of those with differing opinions. Thinking critically includes the following: * an ability to raise important questions and explore alternatives; * a keen sense of what is missing or needed to solve a problem; * an ability to deal with complexity and to form hypotheses; * a sensitivity to the background of an issue; * a knack for separating important information from material that is peripheral or less relevant; * a healthy skepticism and a corresponding ability and willingness to test one's theories and explore one's feelings; * a willingness to challenge and be challenged; and * an ear for what others are saying and an ability to step into another person's shoes. Obviously, every person, educated or not, possesses some, if not most, of these capabilities. Different individuals employ them to varying degrees, often depending on time and circumstance. The list above is not exhaustive, of course, and we ought to be honest (with ourselves and others) in acknowledging when we are critically and when we are not. …

Examining National Identity through School Discourse

Examining National Identity through School Discourse

A Viable Project of Solidarism? The Neglected Contributions of John Vincent's Basic Rights Initiative

We analyse a part of Vincent's theory that has been neglected by the English School discourse: his idea of the right to subsistence, particularly the right to food, as the basis on which to build a cross-cultural human rights project across the societies of the world. Vincent insisted that starvation is the `resident emergency' of international society, and its elimination should be the minimum standard for the society of states to achieve legitimacy. We assess here the normative and practical viability of that enterprise as a project of solidarism in international society. Such assessment reveals that Vincent's work has made three contributions to English School thinking. In relation to the solidarist agenda, Vincent both widened the human rights agenda, and pushed the idea of developing a normative consensus around the basic right to food. More generally, his work forces the English School to think seriously about the relationship between international society and International Political Economy.

(RE)WRITING THE DISCOURSES OF SCHOOLING AND OF "LEARNING DISABILITIES": THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL LITERACY IN A STUDENT ACTION GROUP

This article offers an empirical example of the development of critical literacy and suggests ways to redefine reading/literacy curricula to foster this type of literacy. Drawn from a study of the experiences of learning disabled-labeled undergraduates at an Ivy League university, this piece clarifies the concept of critical literacy and its development through an examination of the evolving language practices of a student action group called HEAL (Helping to Educate about Alternative Learning). HEAL group members used their experiences as a basis for collectively critiquing the dominant discourses of schooling and of the learning disabilities field and for creating a more positive alternative discourse about learning diversity. The author traces the development of critical literacy in this group and suggests conditions to support the development of critical literacy in K-16 classrooms.

Interrupting Discourses Around Gender Through Collective Memory Work and Collaborative Curriculum Research in Middle School

Many schools in recent years have implemented curricular projects to 'deal with' homophobia and sexism as problems that affect adolescent students and make schools unsafe. The ways in which we, as teachers and researchers, confront such problems, however, depends upon how we view their power within schools. When viewed as discursive elements of a generally heteronormative school environment, gender and sexuality norms become more complicated and subtle, as they are a part of systems of language, actions, and expectations that can be difficult to problematize with students and teachers. Drawing on feminist post-structuralist theory related to normativity and discourse analysis, our research looks at two middle-school projects aimed at interrupting heteronormative thinking by including students in the process of analyzing and re-creating school discourse. In one project, a whole class looks at gender identity formation through analyzing collective memory works collaboratively with the teacher. In the second project, a smaller group of girls works to re-think ways that the science/math curriculum could be more responsive to girls, in the end also analyzing the work that comes out of the collaboration. Together, the projects raise important questions about the effectiveness of such curricular projects, the power of school language around 'adolescence', and the potential for addressing gender normativity on the level of discourse, especially in the face of such powerful ideas of gender/sexuality in the middle grades.

Language, Ethnicity and the Mediation of Allegations of Racism: Negotiating Diversity and Sameness in Multilingual School Discourses

This paper looks at the construction of two bilingual English as an additional language (EAL) teachers' positionings during a two-day student staged protest against a perceived racist incident in a London secondary school. It examines how these bilingual teachers' ethnicity and language resources in Turkish and English are employed by the school to (re)produce a discourse of diversity which attempts to level out difference. It looks at how the bilingual EAL teachers manage their multiple roles within this institutional discourse through the foregrounding and backgrounding of ethnicity, language, knowledge production, and 'self' in several school contexts throughout the two-day event and beyond. The data for this study come from two student-produced texts. The first of these texts accuses the school of racism while the second, by a different group of students, refutes the claims made in the earlier text. Analysis is extended beyond these texts to look at the interactions which happen around them within the school community. Through an ethnography of communication, the paper shows how the bilingual teachers mediate, negotiate and action identification positionings towards and away from the dominant discourse of institutional sameness. It finds that these bilingual teachers both collude with and challenge this discourse.