Negotiating Pedagogical Tensions Through Resistive Acts

• In Event: 26.059 - Critical Sociocultural Studies of Classroom Discourse

Abstract

Purpose:
Using mediated discourse analysis (MDA) in two different studies, we document how students negotiate and resist ideological and pedagogical tensions in classroom settings. Our research attempts to identify alternative practices that create a more humane environment for youth and educational staff. Research questions include:
(1) What resistances emerge in the youths’ movements between and in relation to other more dominant and normative actions and discourses? To what extent are the resistances generative?
(2) What is socially and culturally mediated in these spaces? What identities are enacted in situated moments of tension and interaction?

Theoretical Framework:
The studies are situated at the intersections of critical sociocultural theory, discourse studies, and what one of the authors calls a theory towards resistive ambivalence (Pyscher & Lozenski, in press) that embodies a range of academic orientations including Bakhtinian analysis, standpoint theory, disabilities/poststructual theory, and resistance theory. Using a critical sociocultural framework (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), we attempt to better understand the intersections of actions, identities, practices, and discourses that youth utilize in educational spaces.

Methods, Data Sources, and Results
Both studies used mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris, 2011; Scollon, 2001) in an effort to offer analyses that highlight sociocultural interactions embodied in language and actions. Resistive moves of participants in both studies were seen in actions and talk, and MDA allowed us to examine the mediational means participants used to perform social actions of resistance beyond discourse analysis of talk alone.
This first study documents how youth who have endured childhood experiences of domestic violence navigate and interact in their urban public middle school. The second study examines how students in an affluent suburban high school resist critical literacies in a de-tracked sophomore English classroom. In both studies, data was collected through observations, artifact analysis, and interviews with key participants over one year. One participant’s actions from each study will be highlighted in this breakout group.
In both studies, students enact different resistive actions as a way through the experience rather than in full resistance in response to pedagogies experienced in class. In study one, Jen negotiates the poor pedagogies of a math teacher with resistive actions as to not resist to a point of behavioral “interventions,” something Jen experienced previously. In study two, Burke moved from a stance of total resistance to seeing the ways that critical literacies were aligned with his religious beliefs, though still saw critical work as being in service to him as a white male. As his stance toward critical literacy shifted, he enacted more subtle resistive actions as the year progressed.

Significance of Studies
Through mediated discourse analysis, both studies illuminate the ways youth resistance plays out in action and talk in classroom interactions and identify more humane teaching practices for staff and students. By closely examining participants’ actions and language in resistance to pedagogical tensions, these studies help us understand the ways students effectively negotiate classroom conflict and perform their identities in classroom interactions.

Authors

• Tracey Pyscher, Metropolitan State University

• Rachel Hatten, Edina High School