Tracing Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing Constructed in Classrooms

• In Event: Complementary Approaches to Understanding Discourse as a Unified Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Process

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is two-fold. My first goal is to make visible how analyses of written texts in the classroom provide an anchor for exploring the interdependent nature of social, linguistic, and cognitive and situated cultural processes through which these texts were talked into being (Dixon, Green & Brandts, 2005). My second goal is to propose a series of complementary angles (as in geometry) necessary to uncovering the relationship between individual and collective learning and development (Lima, 1997). At the center of this analysis is a view of texts (oral, written, and graphic) in classrooms as talked and acted into being, as inscribing a languaculture of the classroom, and as representing what is socially, linguistically, and academically significant.
By using a community essay written at the end of the school year as an anchor, I present the logic of inquiry that framed multiple layers of analyses necessary to examining to roots of the processes, practices, language and activity inscribed by Arturo and to construct a grounded understanding of Arturo’s claim that
These words are all part of the common Tower community language and if someone new were to come in, we would have to explain how we got them and what they mean. We also would tell them that we got this language by reports, information, investigations, and what we do and learn in our Tower community.
By tracing how, in and through the developing discourse of the classroom, the teacher and students constructed a local, situated and contextually grounded languaculture. As Agar (2007; 1995) argued, it is not possible to separate language from culture since language is imbued with culture and culture is constructed through language. By tracing the roots of the processes, practices, and key activities Arturo inscribed in this community essay, I uncover ways in which what members propose and construct at one point in time becomes a material resource for participation in developing events at subsequent points in time. By unfolding the different layers of analysis needed to develop warranted claims about the roots and routes for constructing and learning academic content, social practices, and sociolinguistic processes necessary to participate as an insider in this class. Additionally, as part of these analytic process, I make visible the logic-in-use (Kaplan, 1964) guiding these complementary analyses and how each contributed a particular angle that, when combined with other, led to a more comprehensive understanding of how members constructed common knowledge (or not), and how such knowledge was used in new ways across time and events. The approach to presenting this logic of inquiry makes visible how each new theory adds orienting, descriptive or explanatory power to the framework of the study. Through this process, I demonstrate why Agar (2006) argues that ethnography is a non-linear system, that requires abductive reasoning to guide a series of iterative and recursive processes in order to gain insights into insider (emic) knowledge and understandings of the situated, contextual and constructed nature of classroom life.

Author

• Judith L. Green, University of California - Santa Barbara