The Discursive and Embodied Construction of Preservice Teacher Identities Across Timescales

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Integrating Analyses of Interaction, Texts, Ideologies, and Embodied Ways of Knowing

Abstract

Purpose
Most micro-analytic research in language and literacy studies focuses on utterances and gesture, excluding other semiotic modes and larger body movements. Moreover, it has largely centered on isolated or short-term data sets (Lemke, 2000; Wortham, 2006), making it difficult to speak to the construction of identities over time. This paper reports microanalyses of utterances and larger body movements to examine how one pre-service teacher performed teacher identities across a two-year time span.

Theoretical Framework
We understand identities as dialogically co-constructed (Bakhtin, 1981) in the particulars of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984). Bakhtin argued that interactants bring multiple “voices” to bear in a dialogic relationship as ideologies and identities are constructed and negotiated across space and time. Our view of discourse includes an array of semiotic modes (Blommaert, 2005).

Data Sources and Analyses
Data were drawn from a two-year study exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Research activities included a literacy methods course for pre-service teachers redesigned around multilingualism and multiliteracies; two study groups on literacy for linguistically diverse learners and multimodality and literacy instruction, respectively; and classroom observations. “Camille,” the focal participant, was a white middle class woman who entered her teacher preparation program as a non-traditional student. Data sources include video-recorded observations from Camille’s literacy methods course, two minimally structured interviews, audio-recordings of study group meetings, and two video-recorded observations during Camille’s student teaching.
Analyses began with constant-comparative thematic coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) of the larger data set to identify events across the two-years for subsequent microanalysis (i.e., moments that were multiply coded, suggesting tension with respect to ideologies of language, literacy, and teaching). Focusing on these events, we conducted microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2005) and analyses of body movements across the classroom space (Radinsky et al., 2012) where relevant (e.g., video data).

Conclusions
Findings illustrate how Camille discursively and physically positioned herself as she negotiated competing ideologies and demands in her teacher preparation. For example, in a lesson on possessive pronouns, Camille invited students to bring manuals from their favorite video games to class, signaling the value of multimodal and popular culture texts. However, she used these manuals to support a highly didactic instructional approach, demonstrating how pronouns and contractions are used in these texts. As students playfully took on identities of specific videogame characters within the lesson, Camille stepped in to redirect interactions to focus on possessive pronouns. In this one example, and throughout the two-year data set, Camille performed multiple teacher identities within and across the space/times of her teacher preparation (e.g., a traditional “expert teacher” (Britzman, 2003) identity, and a teacher responsive to students’ personal and popular culture experiences).

Significance
Our analyses are significant in their examination of both utterances and body movements to understand social agents’ discursive positioning, and in their dual focus in terms of timescales (Lemke, 2000), including micro-analyses within the particulars of practices and texts, and positioning across a broader two-year timescale to understand teacher identity performances.
(490 words)

Authors

• Lara J. Handsfield, Illinois State University

• Thomas P. Crumpler, Illinois State University