Chapter 1
Making Meaning: Making People
When a mother interacts with her baby, she makes something meaningful out of what the baby “says.” The fact that there is not much to work with does not stop her from constructing a conversation. From “bemba” she imputes a social intention and responds, “You want milk?” She acts as if the baby’s noises are not random but are intentional discursive actions, and responds accordingly. Relationally she positions the baby as a sentient, social being – a conversation partner. In the process, mother and child jointly construct the baby’s linguistic and social development and lay the foundation for future interactions with others – how the baby expects to be treated and to interact (Rio and Alvarez 2002; Scollon 2001).
The same is true, in a way, in the classroom. The teacher has to make something of what children say and do. She makes sense for herself, and offers a meaning for her students. She imputes intentions and offers possible words, position, and identities. For example, suppose an independent book discussion group has deteriorated into chaos. The teacher decides to say something to the students. What does she say? Perhaps she says, “That group, get back or you’ll be staying in at lunch.” On the other hand, she might say, “When you are loud like that, it interferes with the other discussion groups and I feel frustrated.” On the other hand (yes, teachers have more than two hands), she might say, “This is not like you. What is the problem you have encountered? Okay, how can you solve it?” Each of these responses says something different about “what we are doing here,” “who we are,” how we relate to one another in this kind of activity,” and how to relate to the object of study. Each different response has the potential to alter the subsequent interactions in the class. The implications of these options are unpacked a bit in Table 1.1.
In other words, language has “content,” but it also bears information about the speaker and how he or she views the listener and their assumed relationship. Halliday (1994) call these the ideational and the interpersonal dimensions. There is always an implicit invitation to participate in a particular kind of activity or conversation. We cannot persistently ask questions of children without becoming one-who-asks-questions and placing children in a position of the one-who-answers-questions.
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Chapter 2: Noticing and Naming
Language is he essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge.
HALLIDAY 1993, P. 94
When people are being apprenticed into an activity of any sort, they have to figure out the key features of the activity and their significance. Babies go through a “Wazzis?” (What’s this?) stage when they discover that things have consistent names. (Of course they are also learning how to control of social interactions by asking questions – and learning the fun of doing so.) Noticing and naming is a central part of being a communication human being, but it also crucial to becoming capable in particular activities. Becoming a physician requires learning what signs to notice, what to name particular clusters of signs, how to distinguish one drug from another, and how different drugs relate to different patterns of signs. Becoming a teacher requires knowing how to tell when learning is going well and when it is not, what children’s invented-spelling indicates about what they know, what it means when a child does not participate productively, and so forth. As teachers we socialize children’s attention to the significant features of literacy and of learning in different domains.
This pattern recognition is very powerful. Once we start noticing certain things, it is difficult not to notice them again: the knowledge actually influences our perception systems (Harre and Gillet 1994). It turns out too, that there are different ways of naming the same thing. Different schools of healing notice different things and give symptoms different significance. Different schools of teaching do the same. Two teachers with different frameworks of teaching have different names for when a child does not spell conventionally. In some societies there are many words for mental events, in others few. In some communities it is common to talk about and identify feelings. Feelings, too, are socialized – we learn what they are, or rather, we acquire meaning for them. Our bodies respond to events, and in our interactions with others we learn what to make of those emotional responses – what to call them and what sense to make of them, and even whether or not they are something we should talk about. We also learn their relevance. With our assistance, children are expanding and leaning to control their own attention, and the attention system is in many ways a “gatekeeper of knowledge acquisition” (Gauvain 2001, p. 70). For this reason I particularly wan them to notice language and its significance.
Although noticing and naming things is a central part of apprenticeship we also learn things without naming them or even really being aware of them. Language is the perfect example. We acquire language, and by the time we arrive at school, we have remarkable facility with it. At the time, we are largely unaware of it. It is not the children have no awareness. They have been able to like and tell jokes for example, which means they know they can use language to consciously make something different from reality. However, many children graduate high school with little change in their level of awareness leaving them unprepared to manage the effects language has on them and others. This leaves them at the mercy of advertiser, politicians, authors, and so forth. It also leaves then unaware of the effects their discursive histories have had on them. Failure to understand these relationships means they cannot take up issues of social justice perpetuated through language. It is our responsibility to help children notice these things. We can’t notice everything, though, and teachers help mediate what is worth noticing and why. This responsibility is worth sharing. Who better to assist than the children themselves? The more they notice and bring to the class’s attention the better, and the less the teacher needs to wear the mantel of the one-who-says-what’s-important.
From here on in this book, I unpack examples of teachers’ talk, showing their effects on individual student and classroom communities. The examples of teacher talk appear as subheadings followed by an analysis of their significance.
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Chapter 3: Identity
At the same time that the children were using the stories to proclaim their identity as boys and “tough kids,” those stories were also, in a sense, claiming them. That is, the boys were adopting cultural storylines about how tough kids talk.
DYSON AND GENISHI 1994, P. 4
Discussing different authors in his class, Steven observes, “For the funny part, Jessie is really funny. He writes a lot about fantasy stuff…Ron’s a pretty good writer…and he’s a little better drawing and writing…Emily [in her mystery] gave details. She described the characters. It was a really good mystery because it had a point and it had something that the reader had to figure out” (Johnston, Bennett, and Cronin 2002b, p. 195). In the course of his comments Steven identifies himself and his peers as authors in the same breath and terms as he talks about the authors of the commercial books they read. His teacher has arranged classroom conversations in which he will develop his understanding of what authors do and further consolidate and elaborate his identity as an author. At the same time, because he further consolidates their identities as competent and varied authors. Children in our classroom are becoming literate. They are not simply learning the skills of literacy. They are developing personal and social identities – uniquenesses and affiliations that define the people they see themselves becoming.
When authors write novels, they create characters – people who say this sort of thing do that sort of thing, and relate to people and things in these sorts of ways. As we come to understand the richness and complexity of a character in a novel, we come to expect how he or she will likely behave when facing a new situation (though new situations can bring surprises). This is not just what authors do, it is what people do with themselves (Bruner 1994a, 1994b; Harre and Gillet 1994; Mishler 1999; Randall 1995). They narrate their lives, identifying themselves and the circumstances, acting and explaining events in ways they see as consistent with the person they take themselves to be.
Building an identity means coming to see in ourselves, the characteristics of particular categories (and roles) of people and developing a sense of what it feels like to be that sort of person and belong in certain social spaces. As children are involved in classroom interactions, they build and try on different identities – different protagonist. We hear something of this when they use the pronoun “I” in the storylines in which they employ themselves. As we shall see, they decide not only who they are in a given context, but also between agentive characters who are active and assume responsibility, and more passive characters who do not. They have to take up positions with respect to what they are studying, with respect to others in their social environment, and with respect to domains of practice. Teachers’ comments can offer them, and nudge them toward, productive identities.
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Chapter 4: Powerful Narratives
The comments in this chapter are all invitations to construct a retelling of an event from a agentive positions. Naturalizing such questions leads to the unspoken assertion that trying, struggling, noticing, and creating are normal, expected things to do. Underlying all of these conversations, of course, are relationships and evidence that support the narrative and make it trustworthy and persuasive. Students have to be convinced that our words are real and not empty, flattery and the evidence is in the details and in their manner of presentation.
Sometimes there is real risk in accepting agency. When a learner has built a narrative around his unsuccessful experiences in literacy that puts him in a passive role, there is no responsibility for failure. Accepting an agentive role can also be risky in the context of blaming conversations. This is a reason for building agency around successful events initially, and why arranging for events to be successful in the first place is fundamental. Nonetheless, the handling of potentially negative episodes is crucial, too, because they often have a pivotal role in narratives. First, negative episodes must be thought of as expected and useful. This is why “What problems did you encounter today?” is important to naturalize. But when a child tries something and does not succeed, we need to turn that event toward a narrative and identify that will be useful for the future. If children are not making errors, they are not putting themselves in learning situations.
It is common enough for children to produce writing drafts with no spelling errors because they do not want to risk what they think of as failure. We limit this possibility by overly valuing children’s exploration of new tactics and possibilities. For example, “Did anyone try any new or difficult words in their writing today?... Great! Tell us about it… That’s what William Steig does when he writes – uses interesting words. Did anyone else try anything new or different?” We can also help students reframe the sort of story a negative episode represents – how it might play a role in their identity as a learner, writer, reader, citizen: “Yes, you did have trouble with that, but I really like the way you are challenging yourself.” Drawing children’s attention to their successes and showing them how their decisions and strategic actions were responsible for them increases children’s perceptions of their ability and the effectiveness of their focused efforts (Pintrich and Blumenfeld 1985). Drawing their attention to their effort (“You worked really hard at that”) or their intellect (“You are so smart”) will not generate sufficiently useful narratives.
As teachers, then we try to maximize children’s feelings of agency. There are really three parts to this: the belief that the environment can be affected, the belief that one has what it takes to affect it, and the understanding that that is what literacy is about. An organized and predictable classroom helps a great deal with the first of these, as does arranging for children to be successful. However, we can effect both by ensuring that the narratives in which we immerse children emphasize the agentive nature of literacy, and their particular agentive roles. We know that this is effective because the most successful interventions for improving children’s feelings of agency in academic domains have included not just teaching effective strategies, but also using attribution retaining in which children are helped to tell agentive stories about their performances. These interventions have improved no only children’s sense of agency, but also their engagement in and motivation for subsequent academic activities (Foote 1999; Schunk and Cox 1986; Skinner, Zimmer-Gembeck, and Connell 1998).
It might already have occurred to you that children bring with them to school well-learned cultural narratives acquired in cooperatively retelling family stories from a very young age. These narratives hold models of the possible forms narratives can take, who is allowed to take which roles, and so forth (Pontecorvo and Stephoni 2001). Children have already learned some of the roles open and not open to girls, the feelings and actions that go along with those roles, and how certain behaviors should be understood, such as a by who reads or a girl who argues. They have learned these aspects of agency in subtle ways. For example, mothers tend to retell differently to daughters and son, particularly when it come to emotional events. An event reconstructed as invoking sadness for a daughter, such as having a toy stolen, is likely to be reconstructed to include anger for a son (Fivush 1994) – emotions with very different relationships to agency. In school, it is our job to help expand the possible agentive narrative lines available for children to pick up.
Boys and girls differ, too, in the stories they tell about success and failure. Boys learn to tell stories in which they claim agency for their academic successes but not their failures, whereas girls tend to tell stories with the opposite attributions. They experience success and failure through these powerful culturally derived narratives (Bruner 1994b). Our job is to change these narratives so that both boys and girls have a productive sense of the implications of the choices they make and the strategies they choose. We do this by foregrounding these in the agentive narratives through which we help them reconstruct the events.
