Asserting and Subverting Authority Through Academic Language and Embodied Action in a Second-Grade Classroom

• In Event: 79.050 - MTCC Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: 79.050-2 - Pedagogies That Challenge Norms

Abstract

In an age of authoritarian regimes and youth-led social movements, questions of children's authority are of particular interest and importance to education researchers and educators. This paper addresses such questions through an ethnographic discourse analysis of video and audio recordings of classroom interactions in a California second-grade classroom. Guided by sociocultural linguistic understandings of language and interaction as well as by Bakhtin’s notion of authoritative discourse, this analysis shows that rather than inhering in a predetermined or predictable way in developmental stages or institutional statuses, authority is accomplished through shifting, complex, and contested interactional positionings that are enacted through and across a range of stances, styles, semiotic modes, and affects.

Author

• Meghan Corella, The University of British Columbia