The discursive identities of three tenured teachers at Bloomfield High School in New Jersey will be explored. Bloomfield is a suburban community that boarders one major city, Newark, and several other suburbs, Montlclair, and Glen Ridge. The school is relatively large, with a population just under 2,000 for the past 5 years. Bloomfield High offers several tracks including level1(not college-bound students), college prep, honors, special education, and advanced placement science classes. I will conduct an ethnographic study of three tenured science teachers in the following subject areas: biology/anatomy and physiology, chemistry, and physics/physical science. The aim of this investigation is to examine whether or not students who were taught by tenured science teachers who either had very similar discursive identities to theirs or were extremely effective at communicating verbally and nonverbally in a manner that is familiar to them experience an easier transition to adopting the language and culture of science.
My aim has not changed. I am looking at three older, Caucasian gentlemen and leading them to examine how much scientific discourse is happening between them and their students. I am simultaneously providing them with reading material and discussion points that teach them about discourse identity and how it can play an important role in how much students talk during class and what becomes of the discursive exchanges. We are putting the classroom conversations under the microscope to see how much talk is happening, what kind of talk it is, and whether or not students seem to be responding positively to the exchanges. What has been interesting is how other environmental factors have come into the conversations. So, although my aim has not changed – I am still chiefly concerned with whether or not the exchange in dialogue is taking place in the classroom and how the teacher and student identities come into play – I am also acutely aware of the other pedagogical, cultural, and disciplinary issues that are also really influencing this whole dynamic.
This investigation will examine the cultural conflict between students’ identity and the discursive practices of science as well as conflict that may arise due to differences in the discursive identity of teachers and cultural identity of their students.
This is still very much true. There is still a struggle to help students deal with the abundance of unfamiliar terms (especially in the case of biological science) and ways of mathematical and analytical reasoning (especially in the case of physics) that are in direct opposition to many of the students way of thinking and doing. This conflict is still at the center of this investigation. Not to mention that the teachers continue to note that they feel like they are from a very different place and time in terms of their approach to learning. They are very much convinced that there has been a cultural shift and it has not been a positive shift.
Research Questions:
The current project is guided by five primary research questions:
1. How do tenured science teachers perceive the use of science- specific classroom discourse by their students? The focus groups are giving me great information about this. While observing the tapes of the focus group interviews and listening to the audio recordings of the classroom episodes, it will be interesting to see if the teacher’s beliefs seem to influence how they address the students. I wonder if I need to develop some sort of code for tying teacher statements about their students’ discourse to what happens in the classroom that seems to be related?
2. How do tenured science teachers recognize the use of science-specific classroom discourse as framing issues of access for students of traditionally underrepresented cultures? I think this is coming up as well in the focus groups. I think I focused more on whether we sort of pigeon-hole the students and then let that drive how we talk to them.
3. How do tenured science teachers identify differences between discursive practices of teachers and their students? I am getting plenty on this. Especially about the difference in the cultural aspect of family life and educational practices when they were high school students and how they have perceived the change in that culture that has taken place.
4. How do tenured science teachers perceive that a difference between their discursive practices and that of their students will affect students’ identities and their use of discourse in science classrooms? We have not really gotten to this. Actually, the teachers seem to believe that their experiences as young adults are helping them to connect with their students. Even though they believe themselves to have come up in a very different time and had a very different view and approach to their education when they were teens.
5. To what extent do tenured science teachers perceive the effect of their past educational experiences on their ability to facilitate discourse in their mathematics classrooms? We need to spend more time on this in the last two focus groups. But overall they think that their background has a huge impact on who they are as teachers and how they relate to their students. What we need to really zoom in on is how this affects their conversation.
This involves the following specific objectives:
1. To document evidence of the tenured teachers' perception of tension between academic and personal identity of minority students of science in a large suburban school public school. To explore how engaging in the cultural practices of science, including the discursive practices of science classrooms, can initiate cultural conflict for marginalized students. This involves conducting focus group interviews with tenured teachers of varied educational and cultural backgrounds and capturing their perceptions of tensions that arise during discourse in their science classes.
2. To explore and document tenured science teachers’ discursive identities and document their perceptions of their students’ cultural identities. This will be accomplished by conducting individual interviews.
3. To document the similarities or differences between the cultural practices and discourse identities of tenured science teachers and those of their students. This will entail the audiotaping of classes facilitated by the tenured science teachers. This will be followed by the generation of transcripts from those videotapes. A review of the transcripts will lead to the development of key theoretical domains that serve to effectively characterize the range of responses provided by teachers and students.
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