Within and Beyond the Text: Multiple Readings of a Second-Grade Conversation About Slavery

• In Event: Pedagogical and Methodological Approaches to Facilitating Critical Conversations With Elementary-Aged Children in Literacy-Rich Contexts

Abstract

The challenges of building critical conversations about race and racism in elementary classrooms are many, including colormute (Pollack, 2009) curricular materials, instruction constrained by high-stakes tests, and discourses of “developmental appropriateness” centering decoding over critical meaning-making. Here, I present a telling case (Mitchell, 1994) of critical conversation about race constructed amidst such constraints, sharing multiple readings of a conversation between a second-grade student and teacher that explores themes of slavery, racism, and humanity while discussing the student’s research project on Abraham Lincoln.

I use as a theoretical lens the languaging of classroom conversations about race and racism (Beach & Bloome, 2019; Brown et al., 2017). This framework directs attention to how understandings of race and racism are built within everyday classroom interaction, both shaping and being shaped by local and global realities. The data analyzed here were generated within an ethnographic study of critical literacy instruction within an accountability-constrained school. Ms. Lau, a second-grade teacher who identified as Chinese American, created opportunities for her students to engage in critical conversations about sociopolitical issues. Aiming to build mid-level theory (Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016) at the intersections of literacy and sociopolitical talk in elementary classrooms, I focus analysis on an interaction between Ms. Lau and Isaiah, a Latinx student, using five interrelated texts: (a) a biography of Abraham Lincoln; (b) Isaiah’s oral reading of that text; (c) Isaiah’s ensuing conversation with Ms. Lau; (d) Isaiah’s writing following the conversation; and (e) Ms. Lau’s video-guided reflection of their conversation. I engaged in line-by-line discourse analysis of each of the texts, focusing particularly on contextualization cues, turn-taking, thematic coherence, and intertextuality (Bloome et al., 2005).

I share three readings of this text set, guided by Brown and colleagues (2017) heuristic categories. A curricular reading directs attention to how the conversation was shaped by the Lincoln biography around which the conversation occurred and the mandated curricular unit in which it occurred. This reading illustrates how the biography discursively deemphasized the culpability of white slave owners, as well as how the unit’s focus on individual “heroes” (re)centered whiteness. A discursive reading examines the linguistic and proxemic (e.g., gaze; facial expression) cues Ms. Lau used to support Isaiah’s critical meaning-making, moving the conversation beyond the written text. Finally, a disruptive reading considers how Ms. Lau shifted conversation from a Lincoln-as-white-savior frame to one centering the experiences of enslaved people. This reading also considers the conversation’s silences, especially the absence of talk regarding Isaiah’s and Ms. Lau’s racial positionalities. These multiple readings highlight both the curricular constraints upon sociopolitical conversations and the improvisational spaces available for teachers to engage in such conversations. Through these readings, this paper also examines the mediating role of racial identity within conversations about racism, considering how this conversation between two non-Black people of color affirmed black-white binary constructions of race.

Author

• Laura A Taylor, Rhodes College