(Re)Framing Deficit as Possibility: Discourse as Resource for Making Visible What Diverse Students Can Do

• In Event: From Deficit Discourse to Educational Resource: Using Discourse Analysis to Make Visible Difference and Diversity as Valued Resources

Abstract

How can education research make visible the complex work of students and teachers as they co-construct everyday life in classrooms where a language of deficit (e.g., Ladson-Billings, 1994; Comber, 2000) defines that work and what is – or is not– accomplished? In the face of standardized and other measures of what constitutes “success” or “failure,” how can researchers (e.g., teachers, university) see, understand, make visible, learn from, and act on what racially, linguistically, ethnically, and/or academically diverse students, can do, rather than what they cannot do (Author, 2006; Córdova & Matthiesen, 2010)? How can we reframe perceived deficits as well as language of deficit? This study, part of a larger ethnographic study of a fifth grade bilingual classroom (Author, 2003), drew on analyses of a particular cycle of activity (Green & Wallat, 1981) in history/social science (Island History Project) to address these issues. Author was both teacher as researcher in this classroom and later researcher more distanced from the classroom (e.g., Author, 1999; 2003; 2006). The study draws on Interactional Ethnography (e.g., Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2001; Dixon & Green, 2005), an approach grounded in anthropological theories of culture, discourse-in-use (e.g., Gumperz, 1986) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992) of spoken and written texts of a social group. Hill-Bonnet et al. (in press) argue that this approach provides conceptually grounded ways of exploring how opportunities for learning, inter-related social and academic identities, and literate practices are discursively constructed through developing events of everyday life in classrooms (e.g., Bloome, et al., 2005; Castanheira, et al, 2007). This study presents as telling case (Mitchell, 1984) one event during the IHP (two-month cycle), in which students represented small groups to report results of brainstorming sessions to the larger group. This event represented (re)formulation of a situated practice of public reporting as the work of historians. Analyses of teacher/student(s) discourse-in-use at multiple levels of scale (e.g., event mapping, message units) revealed that teacher discursive choices served as a kind of metadiscourse (Author, 2003) about practice ([re]formulating social, literate, and inquiry-based practices as work of historians), making present material resources on which students could draw to take up opportunities to report findings as historians. Teacher discursive interventions decreased across initial presentations as students, including linguistically diverse students and school-defined special needs students, both within and over time (Bakhtin, 1986), independently took up these reporting practices as members of a group of historians. This telling case showed not only how particular kinds of opportunities for learning were discursively constructed and served as material resources for the group, but also revealed how critical discourse analysis from an Interactional Ethnographic perspective made visible social and academic work linguistically, ethnically, socio-economically, and academically diverse students and their teacher were accomplishing in this event. This study has implications for how opportunities for learning are discursively constructed and afforded diverse students, and for what is possible when critical discourse analysis and an Interactional Ethnographic logic of inquiry is viewed as resource for researchers (e.g., teachers, university) in (re)framing deficit as possibility.

Author

• Beth V. Yeager, California State University - East Bay