Abstract
This paper reports on ongoing ethnographic research from linguistically and culturally diverse middle schools in urban centers in Northern Italy. Via discourse analysis from classroom recordings and interviews, this paper examines how student categories and identities (including (dis)ability, language, gender, and race) converge and diverge over the course of the day as students move through different social and educational spaces, as well as over several months of the school year. This analysis focuses on one specific phenomenon—language policing by both teachers and students—and the role that it plays in creating groups and divisions around local/foreign and standard/nonstandard categories. Insofar as language (including the use—or attribution—of (dis)fluencies, accents, registers, named languages) link speakers to a constellation of identities which wax and wane from one communicative context to another, monitoring language policing provides a means of identifying allegiance and ostracism with regard to other students, the teaching staff, and potentially even the institution and the State (e.g., Phuong & Cioè-Peña 2022, Migliarini et al., 2021).
This analysis takes on greater significance in light of the impending division of middle school students into vocational, technical, or college-preparatory upper secondary school tracks, providing a jumping-off point for understanding the well-known issue of over-/under-representation of specific demographic categories in specific types of upper secondary schools in Italy (Borrini & De Sanctis 2017, Borrini 2021). Further, as the current research involves collaborative playback sessions (Rampton 1995), teacher workshops, and reflection sessions over the course of the academic year, this paper proposes possibilities for including pre- and in-service teachers in reflection about the impact of language policing on students’ trajectories (Wortham 2004), especially in light of gender, race, language background, (dis)ability, and social class.