Performing Language Curriculum: Constructing Identities and Power Through Narratives in Classroom Discourses

• In Event: 75.042 - MTCC Roundtable Session 34
  In Roundtable Session: 75.042-10 - Hanging Onto Truths: Why Language Must Remain Key to the Study of Social Learning Processes

Abstract

Research in language education tends to view curriculum as an unproblematic resource for language development. This study uses a discourse analysis approach to critically examine how curriculum in one ESL classroom became a linguistic resource for the teacher and her students to perform and construct identities, and how their identity performances, entangled with power relations in the classroom, complicated the process of teaching and learning.

In this analysis, I adopt the theoretical lens of identity-as-performance, viewing identity as interactionally performed and constructed rather than as a stable label (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Ives & Juzwik, 2015). Building off critical curriculum studies, I conceptualize curriculum as pedagogized texts through which students “are constructed and constituted as they are invited, pedagogically, to interact with those [curriculum] texts” (Segall, 2004, p. 495).

Drawing on classroom interaction data from a critical ethnography conducted in one U.S. secondary school, I examine how Mrs. Brown, a middle-aged ESL teacher, and one of her students Tiger, a 15-year-old immigrant student from Taiwan, performed identities during one routinized language activity. Taking up interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) and critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011), I use Wortham’s (1994, 2006) concept of participant example as an analytical tool to examine the discursive structures (Bucholtz, 2011) of classroom interactions which enabled their identity performances. Wortham explains that in classroom interactions when teachers and students are used as illustrative examples for learning academic content, it forms a speech event of participant example in which the participant takes on two interactionally relevant identities—one as a participant in the classroom and one as a character in the example. The double participant roles can impact teaching and learning as they might reinforce or conflict with each other.

My analysis indicates both Mrs. Brown and Tiger appropriated classroom language practice for identity performance. For example, when teaching the word dominating, Mrs. Brown used herself as an example to explain its meaning, saying “I have a dominating personality but there are positives that come from that.” She subsequently shaped the classroom interactions to highlight the positive meanings of the word. In this speech event she had double participant roles: Mrs. Brown-the-Teacher-in-the-Classroom and Mrs. Brown-in-the-Example. She performed a teacher identity with power and control through constructing Mrs. Brown-in-the-Example a positive and dominating identity. Tiger also appropriated the language curriculum for identity performance. When practicing the word maintain with the sentence starter—“In order to maintain high grades, I should …,” he performed a cool, non-schoolish masculinity, saying “I should sleep every day so that I can relax and focus.” His masculinity performance, however, was incongruent with Mrs. Brown’s implicit goal of socializing her students to become “good learners,” resulting in her positioning him as not a serious learner, an identity which over time became solidified.

This analysis illustrates language curriculum was not just a learning resource but became a linguistic resource for the teacher and student to perform identities and construct power relations, and the process of teaching and learning language was consequentially intertwined with their identity performances.

Author

• Kongji Qin, New York University