The Classroom’s a Stage: Performance as Resource for Critical Discourse Awareness

• In Event: Languages, Literacies, and Social Processes

Abstract

Recent socio cultural literacy research has highlighted how classroom discourse practices often determine how linguistically diverse students and teachers are positioned in the hierarchical structure of a classroom community. A major challenge for multicultural language educators, therefore, is to develop meta discourse awareness of how interactions in multilingual contexts can be conceptualized as complex negotiations of identities embedded in societal power processes as opposed to fixed binary constructs of legitimate and marginalized language. Aligned with the theme of AERA 214, this qualitative study investigates how the use of performance and post-performance discourse analysis in the context of a graduate language education program supported students in developing a multidimensional understanding of language, identity and power issues.

Author

• Ruth Harman, University of Georgia - Athens