Classrooms, for me, are often little sparks of optimism that get lost in the despair and division that haunt many people today. While I resist discourses that treat education as the solution to all of our problems, I do believe that schools are essential to changing social dynamics and creating a more informed and empathetic society. Since many young people spend more time at school than at home, teachers play an important role not only in the process of learning content like literature and science, but are also crucial to the sentimental and moral education of young people, which I consider just as important (if not more important) than learning to add and subtract fractions.
The articles we’ve read this week engage in this role of teachers in a variety of ways through classroom discourse, using analytical tools of discourse analysis to reveal underlying process of distinction within the classroom. García-Sánchez’s (2016) piece is particularly telling in this regard. She shows the ways in which methods of inclusion and participation can, in fact, produce exactly the opposite effect, albeit unintentional (306). In the Spanish classroom she researches, she finds that Moroccan and Roma students are marked as the outsiders through a process of tokenization and hybridity erasure (293). Betsy Rymes (2016) explains how classroom discourses are sections of, and in part controlled by, larger social contexts and that critical reflection and individual agency are potential methods to tinker with the machinery of discourse (49). Rymes advocates for a repertoire approach to work towards denaturalizing the relationship between perceived identity categories and intellectual competence. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire provides us with ways to develop critical methodologies to work towards combatting these naturalized sociopolitical dynamics.
To be critical of these critical approaches, I am not particularly convinced that simply adopting a repertoire approach will challenge deeply engrained ideologies of race, gender, class, and their relationship to educational competence. This is one aspect of a process that requires a long, difficult, intentional, and sometimes painful process of reflection, reading, and discussion, which relies on two aspects of life that most teachers do not have: time and resources. While I agree with the intent of the article and believe in its potential to make educators more aware of how they can reproduce established and naturalized inequalities, I question its effectiveness because of its idealization of the reality of teachers’ lives and schedules. Like many attempts for education reform, the implementation becomes unfeasible due to complete lack of attention to the resources required for something like these approaches to work. Furthermore, it seems important to be wary of the power we place on language; as we’ve seen in Rosa & Flores’ (2017) work, language use is simply one aspect of a larger process of construction of social inequalities. Like education, language cannot be, and we shouldn’t think of it as, the solution to all of our problems; rather, we need to always keep in mind the historical and colonial constructions of the language use that reproduces marginalizing discourses.
You question a) whether it’s possible for teachers to engage in analyzing their own discourse practices due to lack of resources and b) the disproportionate importance placed on language by discourse analysts as the means for analyzing society/culture and potentially changing it. I think some discourse analysts would argue that language IS the way social structure is established and maintained and that powerful groups coerce and control others – not through physical coercion and violence, but through ideas (Foucault 1991). If we take a Foucauldian view, what other constructs are on par with discourse? Is there an alternative to changing society ideologically or changing it through violence and coercion?
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
Lots of thought-provoking ideas here. Our schools are underfunded and racially/economically segregated, teachers are striking across the country, they have no time to do anything but test prep, half of public school students are in poverty, and governments are divesting from public education. Colonized teacher mindsets are but one of the interlocking systems of oppression which make schooling the way it is. I think about Nelson Flores’ comments from his visit to the GC last week: even teachers who WANT to view their students languaging through asset-based lenses are constrained in so many ways from doing so.
That being said, I agree with Cece that the more tools out there that teachers have to do this kind of work, to have fuller and more holistic scripts in mind when they work with children — the more discourse we produce to shape the reality we want to see — the more we stand a chance at resisting those structures. To answer Cece’s questions, I think I have modest goals for what discourse analysis as a tool for reimagining a classroom can do. When teacher prep students in bilingual ed read about translanguaging, they feel like their language practices and those of their students are validated. They loosen up and welcome more of the whole child into their classrooms. Do they have all of the tools they need to truly implement this? No, but (and here, maybe I’m aligning myself with the foucauldian poststructuralist view) they have some agency, autonomy, and some new knowledge — don’t underestimate the power there!