What kind of student were you in school? The “quiet one?” The “know-it-all?” The “bad kid?”
Many people who devote themselves to education believe that all children are unique individuals, and hope that schooling helps each one realize his/her/their full potential. At the same time, the highly-structured nature of traditional schooling (what Freire (2000) called “banking education”) expects conformity to standards, and a key product of that type of schooling is a host of labels for those who don’t “fit” — “English Language Learner,” “Student with Interrupted Formal Education,” “At Risk.” These labels can endure long after a student leaves school, shaping their sense-of-self and identities long after they leave school.
Betsy Rymes’ book, Classroom Discourse Analysis, spells out a framework for analyzing classroom talk and discourse, in recognition of the ways that the language used by students and teachers can both heighten normative expectations for student identities and subjectivities in classrooms, and subvert them. While her book might be of interest to educational researchers, Rymes’ audience for this book is primarily teachers. She argues that if teachers pay special attention to how they and their students’ language use is shaped by (1) social context in and out of the classroom, (2) interactional contexts (e.g. how teachers pose questions, how they listen and facilitate dialogue), and (3) the ways they and their students exercise agency, they stand a better chance at understanding the totality of their students’ communicative repertoires, rather than making snap judgments about what “kind of” student someone is based on a superficial read of a student at one moment in time. Rymes argues that through this approach to analysis, teachers might promote learning, given that “classroom talk and interaction… give voice to a wide range of communication, augmenting the repertoires of everyone in the room. In this way, a classroom develops as a learning community not by eliminating elements from children’s repertoires but by developing overlap and building common ground” (Rymes, 2016, p. 20).
I’ve found Rymes’ framework to be a useful took for reflecting on classroom discourse in one of the middle school classrooms where I do my field work. In this site, there are a couple of boys who have been positioned at the margins of the classroom. A teacher’s first impulse might be to view all of those ways these students don’t fit the norm: They are older than your average 7th graders, have “low literacy,” are consistently sent to the principal’s office, are often present for just a few minutes of the class period, and use their phones or engage in side conversations. Rymes’ discourse analysis framework would encourage teachers to go beyond these momentary impressions to take a multi-level view — considering how various factors about the students (their ages, race, gender) might shape how their discourse practices (which include their speech, but also other ways they communicate — their clothing, they postures, etc) get interpreted by teachers and administrators at the school. Teachers might take a closer look at the kinds of questions they ask these students, the ways they expect them to engage, and provide more opportunities for student voice and agency. Once teachers complete this analysis, Rymes’ work advises teachers to focus on what they can control — their reactions and responses to students, how they “make the weather” in their classroom.
This is an empowering stance for a teacher. At the same time, there are a myriad of structural factors that contribute to why some students are / are positioned as disconnected from formal schooling, and discourse analysis can’t solve all of those issues. Taking a page from Freire’s book, it is my hope that if greater attention is paid to critical analysis of classroom discourse, teachers and students might be prompted to take action to shift the oppressive systems around them.
Your essay makes me wonder what the limits of discourse analysis are. What can it achieve and what is beyond its scope? Clearly, it can reveal hidden discourses, ways of thinking and the structure of social relations, and offer up ways to change these ways of thinking and thus shift power and self-positioning of disempowered groups. But shifting ways of thinking may not result in different practices. Can changing societal understanding of why some groups have most of the power and money and why some seem to be stuck at the bottom effect social change? If teachers understand better WHY some of their students display certain behaviors as structural rather than personal failings, would it change how they treat/police/assess/talk to/talk about these students? Is changing the discourse enough? Schools and teachers have struggled to be more inclusive and redefine the way non-mainstream children are treated and represented in schools. How would you analyze the changes that have taken place in the name of “diversity” in Spanish schools, in US schools?
Thanks for being more optimistic than me, I needed a little bit of that. I agree with you — this framework has the potential to be an empowering stance for teachers. I particularly like what you said about giving teachers the opportunity to work with what they can control. My post was more focused on what they cannot. I guess the frustrating aspect is trying to create a sense of responsibility among educators to do this kind of work when, like you said in your comment on my post, teachers have way too many things on their plate at once. Perhaps I’m being too cynical about teachers and education in general?