Discursive Construction of Academic Identities as Social Scientists

• In Event: Complementary Approaches to Understanding Discourse as a Unified Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Process

Abstract

The objective of this study is to present an approach to making visible the interdependent nature of social, linguistic and cognitive (interpretive) processes that define what counts as being a social scientist as well as “doing” social science in a linguistically, culturally and academically diverse classroom. To explore how members construct local, situated, and contextualized processes and practices for being social scientists, and to make visible the interdependent nature of social, linguistic and interpretive processes, I explore two angles of analysis: 1) the ways in which opportunities for learning to be social scientists were developed by the collective (the class, and sub-groups within the class), and 2) how a student with special needs learned to read, interpret, take up, communicate and apply the developing set of collective processes to become a social scientist. By selecting a special needs student as a tracer unit (Cole, cited in Green, 1983), I create an ethnographic telling case (Mitchell, 1984) of the interdependent nature of social, linguistic and cognitive (interpretive processes).
The theoretical perspective guiding this study views life in classrooms as constituted, and being constituted, through developing intertextual ( e.g., Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993) and intercontextual (Floriani, 1993) webs of meanings constructed by the teacher and students. From this perspective, the teacher (or other speaker) proposes a set of tasks and actions that constitute spoken, written and visual texts. The hearer(s)/students, through the ways in which they interpret, take up and acknowledge what was proposed, participate in the joint construction of classroom life (e.g., Lin, 1993; Green, Skukauskaite & Baker, 2010). As the discourse analysis across times and events will show, this process is dialogic, recursive, and interpretive, and involves interpretation of verbal and nonverbal cues and actions/activity in which meanings and identities are realized. By examining the developing texts, I develop evidence of how participants read, interpreted and responded to what was being proposed (Alton-Lee & Nuthall, 199x). Furthermore, in by examining ways in which the teacher speaks to the students, and students speak to and interact with the teacher and others, I explore intertextual links between past texts and actions and current and future ones.
Through analysis of the developing referential system across coordinated chains of activities, I make visible how Sergio, the tracer unit, constructed a series of academic identities as a bilingual speaker, a partner in writing, an knowledgeable other, an historian, among others. In this way, I demonstrate how social, linguistic and interpretive processes are signaled in a particular developing event, and how an over time analysis (across events) is necessary to see what has been interpreted and taken up for use in subsequent events or tasks. Through this analysis, I make visible the importance of Bakhtin’s (1986) argument that “Sooner or later what is heard and actively understood [emphasis added] will find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener. In most cases, genres of complex cultural communication are intended precisely for this kind of actively responsive understanding with delayed action” (p. 69).

Author

• Maria L. Castanheira, Federal University of Minas Gerais