Creating Stances Toward Literacy and Being Together Through Transgressive Language in Literacy Instruction

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Transgressive Language Practices as Critical, Community-Building Tools in the K–12 Classroom

Abstract

Overview: An important part of what students and teachers “do” in literacy is take a stances towards literacy and stances towards their being and belonging together (Vausdevan, Schultz & Bateman, 2010). Yet little attention is paid to how students and teachers discursively enact stances through transgressive or what is normatively considered excessively childish language for early childhood instructional contexts (Souto-Manning, 2014a). This paper addresses this area by analyzing how a monolingual first grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, and her emergent bilingual students of color engaged in languaging playful, joyful stances towards literacy and stances of relatedness towards being together through the use of transgressive language in literacy instruction.

Theoretical Perspectives: I draw upon a theory of langauging that conceptualizes language as social action that people make on and toward each other (Beach & Bloome, 2019) to analyze the creation of stances in literacy events. Stances are created through every utterance in an interaction and there is never a time out from the social action of taking stances (DuBois & Karkkainen, 2012). Through stance taking, students and teachers align with others through affective states such as relatedness in learning as the expressive function of language is never separate from the cognitive function. It is important to note that when I use the term “relatedness” as a stance towards being together, I mean it not as an inner, individual but rather the collaborative, emotional-intellectual, performed nature of an instructional conversation (Jensen, 2014).

Methods: Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic study of literacy instruction, I analyzed events that contained transgressive language through discourse analysis (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto & Shuart-Faris, 2005). Data included observations, video recordings, field notes and student and teacher work products. Events that included transgressive language were selected as “telling cases” (Mitchell, 1984) to understand the social action that was enacted within them and were transcribed using line-by-line analysis.

Results: Through the teacher’s proposal of discussing taboo and somewhat “naughty” topics of poop and underwear in the read aloud conversation she enacted a playful stance towards literacy through the both content of the topic and linguistically through the exaggerated, playful stylizations of her language (Madsen, 2014). While taboo language in the classroom is frequently discussed in educational research through students’ proposals, this instructional event shows how a teacher’s proposal of such language (and students playful take-up of the transgressive language) led to literacy moments that enacted connectedness in learning. In these events, a stance towards literacy was collaboratively languaged not as alienation or an onerous task but rather as performed, collective play joy through students and teachers ways of talking and being together.

Significance: This paper highlights that transgressive language should not be regarded as merely fun or silly but rather as a key curricular resource to help teachers and students move away from the enaction of subtractive schooling and to move toward a kind of literacy that is simultaneously intellectually rich, emotionally exciting and creates a sense of belonging in learning together.

Author

• Faythe Beauchemin, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville