"We're Saying the Same Thing": How English Teachers Negotiated Solidarity, Identity, and Ethics Through Talk and Interaction.

Abstract

This study explores discourse conflicts in schooling and society through an investigation of the ways that teachers and students negotiate literate identities, social solidarities, and ethical issues within the complexity of early 21st century secondary English classroom interaction. The site of the study, the Pinnacle Classroom Discourse Study Group (PCDSG), was the center of a collaborative action research effort during the 2007-2008 school year. Teachers and administrators at a hyperdiverse high school invested in closing the racial achievement gap invited the researcher to conduct a series of workshops on discourse analysis. Three case studies tell the stories of seven English Language Arts teachers as they learned how to analyze conflicts in their own and their colleagues’ classroom discourse. Multiple perspectives are represented, including that of selected teacher-participants, the researcher-facilitator, and the collective group. Discourse analytic methods taught in the PCDSG workshops and used for analyzing data included systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and interactional ethnography (IE). Relevant literature about conflict, ideological dilemmas, shared ethical positions, critical race theory, and whiteness in education further informed analysis and discussion. The results of the study revealed that the English teachers at Pinnacle High School negotiated solidarity with their students and colleagues through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse. Teachers drew upon linguistic repertoires derived from their identities, social subjectivities, and lived and intellectual ideologies in order to negotiate solidarities with their students and each other. They greatly valued “saying the same thing” in order to forestall conflict, or remained silent to preserve social solidarities. Although the larger goal of learning how to conduct discourse analysis on their own teacher talk remained elusive due to constraints of time, technology, and personnel, five of the seven teachers reported becoming more aware of their language use in the classroom. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide professional development materials for teachers interested in language and discourse studies, this research describes and analyzes how one group of teachers began to take up this kind of learning, and delineates some affordances and constraints of discourse analysis as method for teacher research.