I saw this image in my Facebook feed the other day. Kid President is great because he offers some positivity to my feed which has currently been about the death of David Bowie or Donald Trump. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, if what Kid President was saying is always true, especially in situations when we are engaging in critical conversations. What I mean is that my students often hesitate to talk about things that they perceive might be interpreted as unkind or impolite. I understand that the above quote is promoting verbal kindness - and I agree with that 100%. What I’m thinking about is how educators might help our students disagree, share perspectives, and actively listen to each other that promotes kindness while at the same time opens space for people to be uncomfortable - a process that often indicates learning. These are the kinds of questions that prompted a current project that I’m working on with Melissa Schieble. For the past five years, we have explored how discourse analysis can be used as a tool in teacher education. Our students record classroom interactions, transcribe short segments, and engage in reflection that asks them questions about how they position themselves as teachers, how they position students as readers and writers, and how they think identity markers (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual orientation) shaped how they teach. These are tough questions and over the years we have become better at modeling conversations through our own analysis, practicing analysis through example transcripts, and engaging in multiple small and large group discussions. Overall, we have found this tool to be extremely helpful for bridging theory and practice because it asks students to think about how they are enacting practices through daily interactions. This project has made us curious about how current teachers might use discourse analysis to foster critical conversations in their secondary ELA classrooms. By critical conversations, we mean classroom discussions that attempt to foster dialogue about sociopolitical issues, disrupt commonplace notions, invite multiple perspectives, and promote change within the local or national community. From work in our own classrooms, we understand how difficult it can be to foster discussions that engage students in rich dialogue. Specifically, we understand that fostering critical conversations entails both the content (what is being talked about) and the process (how people talk to each other). To explore this, Melissa and I plan to recruit teachers this semester for a project that asks them to audio record and transcribe three classroom interactions. We will also meet in small and large groups to discuss reflections and future goals and engage in a few interviews about the process. Stay tuned for more information about this topic. I’ll blog with an update after our first meeting.
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AuthorProfessor in English Education at UNC Greensboro Archives
June 2016
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