Abstract
As linguistic innovators, youth of all backgrounds play with social and linguistic boundaries, creating interactional spaces-within-spaces as a means of bridging multiple discursive worlds. This is especially true in schools, where ethnographic studies of classroom “side talk” (Lemke 1990), “third spaces” (Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson 1995), and language play (e.g., Rampton 2006), demonstrate that these spaces have an important socializing function, contributing to the ways that students weave together their many disciplinary and social identities. Further, as is demonstrated via the papers in this Special Issue, these spaces often mobilize overlapping identities in the negotiation of expertise, de-centering it from its usual locus and highlighting its situated emergence. In the Special Issue, empirical studies from grades K-12 examine how learners deploy particular registers in various formal and informal learning contexts, and what this language use indexes about their social roles in their local contexts. With empirical, ethnographic data coming from the United States and Italy, this Special Issue establishes a cohesive dialogue around learning spaces, academic discourses, language ideologies, and the ingenuity of young people navigating these constructs.
We borrow Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of heteroglossia to frame the various registers that youth adopt and deploy in interaction, including named languages, discipline-specific language, and other genres from both in and out of school, and to examine the continual interplay of these various modes of speaking in learners’ daily interactions. Though binary labels and identities (e.g., good/bad, standard/nonstandard, expert/novice, etc.) are often invoked in moment-to-moment discourse in learning contexts, students’ heteroglossic language use also crafts more complex and layered identities that involve racial(ized), gendered, and expertise-related dimensions perhaps drawing on familiar social identities in their positioning of one another vis-à-vis school subject knowledge, language proficiency, and other scholastic skills. Our consideration of formal and informal heteroglossic learning spaces involves understanding what is at stake in the mastery of particular modes (including those that index particular social types), and what this means for the way that competence and expertise emerge.
Mark Lewis’s article, the opening piece, draws on ethnographic research with students and teachers in a second grade bilingual classroom in Philadelphia to contextualize the development and naturalization of what is referred to as “academic language” and how it becomes available to and used by teachers and students. Andrea Leone-Pizzighella analyzes the classroom talk of 16-19-year old boys in a technical institute in central Italy and highlights the many ways that these “difficult” students perform academic expertise on their own terms, often for the benefit of each other. Turning instead to a different type of school persona, Sarah Braden’s work in a 9th grade physics class in a racially and linguistically diverse U.S. high school examines how students enact the “science nerd” trope in service of crafting local identities as science experts, and how this local identity comes to specify particular values for gender, race, and language background. Finally, the Special Issue comes to a close with a commentary piece written by Angela Reyes which examines how the papers in this collection exemplify three facets of the construction and maintenance of academic registers: contrast, personae, and voicing.
This Special Issue treats expertise as emergent, sometimes ephemeral, and contingent upon interactional factors, with the papers in this issue drawing on various linguistic anthropological approaches to examine how linguistic and other semiotic resources are deployed to construct complex identities in heteroglossic learning spaces where academic registers and school media commingle with youthful social registers and ways of knowing. By examining how school agents develop social identities related to disciplinary expertise in peer group interactions, this Special Issue reimagines how particular linguistic resources are invoked, recycled, and circulated in peer groups and institutions. Ultimately, this Special Issue aims to contribute to the linguistic anthropology of education and to the literature on language-in-education policies, as well as to make practical recommendations for researchers and practitioners working with K-12 students and teachers.
References:
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Revised ed. edition; M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 445–472.
Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking science: language, learning, and values. Norwood, N.J: Ablex Pub. Corp.
Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.