Teacher Learning: Acting Into the Imaginative Force of Language

• In Event: Attending to the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning

Abstract

What does a re-imagining of classroom talk as “acting into” relational possibilities (Shotter, 2010) mean for teacher learning that aims to disrupt, analyze, and transform historically structured systems of power? In this poster, we look closely at: moments in discussions when students create evocative (i.e., imaginative) language; how teachers attune to and are responsive to the bidding of such language; and what relational possibilities connecting teachers, students, disciplines, and social worlds are brought into being in such moments.

We build from Shotter’s (2010) critique of Cartesian logic, in which knowledge of the natural world makes humans “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes, 1968, p. 74). Critically, this logic adheres to our language, “unnoticed and unremittingly active in the background to everything we currently do and say, not only in our everyday activities but also our intellectual inquiries” (Shotter, 2010, p. 13), including those in our classrooms. It is at work in the ways teachers and students learn to talk with each other about disciplinary matters, which privileges language as a mode of representing an objective world rather than a mode of experiencing the world (Ochs, 2012). For example, in science education a grammar of nominalization is privileged over a grammar of animacy (Kimmerer, 2013). Not only does the Cartesian logic underlying the grammar of nominalization go unquestioned as the foundation for claims to truth but, because of its epistemic singularity, it actively excludes other ways of knowing, being, and acting. As botanist Kimmerer (2013, p.55) notes, “(A) bay is a noun only if water is dead…but the verb wiikwegamaa (in Ojibwe)—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live.” In classrooms, animacy is evaluated as anthropomorphic, therefore not scientific, and is excluded as disciplinary sense-making. In this and other ways, systems of power assert control in classroom talk through making themselves invisible and unspeakable (Foucault, 1979).

Data sources include video and transcripts of discussions in a) science and social studies in a 1st-2nd grade classroom, and b) a teacher-researcher seminar, which centered analysis of relationships among language, disciplines, and power. The classroom teacher was a participant in the seminar as part of a multiyear, collaborative project designed to cultivate interpretive power in disciplinary teaching (Authors, 2016b).

Our analysis asks: How does engagement with evocative language not only shift what teachers attend to as important in disciplinary sense-making but also liberate learning from the dominant forms of subject-object relations in disciplinary discourses? Our findings consider the ways in which the teacher and students: mutually attune to evocative language as it comes into being, contingently, in classroom talk; expand such language in ways that create openings into new disciplinary meanings and perspectives; and co-experience their language work as emergent sources of felt understanding alongside new geographies of relational possibilities.

We consider implications for teacher learning as “acting into” the imaginative force of language, an ongoing developing sensitivity to its heretofore unnoticed potential to analyze, disrupt, and transform the exclusions enforced by settled disciplinary discourses.
 

Authors

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Andrea Caroline Bien, Boston University

• Ann Rosebery, TERC

• Catherine O'Connor, Boston University

• Maria C Olivares, Boston University

• Rebecca Gadd, Boston Public Schools