Elizabeth Wyshe Hirst

Diverse Voices, Dialogue and Intercultural Learning in a Second Language Classroom

In this chapter we adopt a sociocultural theoretical framework to theorize classroom learning as the process of appropriating various sociocultural voices, and competence as the capacity to adopt voices that are culturally privileged, that is, those voices that have audibility and status within specific cultural contexts. Voice provides a methodological tool that is sensitive to the polyphonic nature of classroom talk. With this tool we examine how participants negotiated and re-mediated identities through their deployment of cultural and linguistic resources. Key episodes of classroom talk are analyzed to illustrate the nuances of participants’ ventriloquation of diverse voices and shifting strategic identities, reflecting changing local, national and global material conditions. The site of our investigation is a second language classroom in a primary (elementary) school setting in Northern Australia, where we have recorded the diverse voices that students and the teacher take up during their ideological becoming. In this second language (Indonesian) classroom students adopt subtle ways of ventriloquating as they re-voice teacher utterances. For example, there are numerous episodes where students parodied the teacher to create a sense of distance between themselves and the teacher — rejecting the identity of “Indonesian speaker” even as they mastered a rudimentary vocabulary. The teacher either ignored or did not recognize the implied insults in the students’ parodying of his voice, so such episodes often degenerated into playground burlesque where the students were able to make fun of the teacher as if he were a low-status peer, rather than an authoritative adult. We argue that these classroom episodes of mimicry, parody and burlesque must be interpreted in relation to broader conflicts beyond the school boundary regarding cultural diversity and national identity.

Keeping them in line: choreographing classroom spaces

This paper provides teachers with an opportunity for thinking about the kinds of ‘people’ constructed in their classes, the kinds of ‘dances’ choreographed and the ways space is organised for learning. We argue that this is essential for teachers to think about if they are to enact socially just professional practices. In this study, we explore the ways in which students learn to be particular kinds of people. We understand this as happening through their participation in communities of practice. Becoming a member of a community of practice, of a classroom and of a school is a process of developing a particular identity, modes of behaviour and ways of knowing. It is through these ‘normalising’ practices that power is constituted, boundaries constructed and certain ‘kinds of people’ are recognised, represented and constituted, whilst others are not. All individuals are implicated in these processes and active in the construction of their own as well as others’ identities. This paper locates this discussion using social relations of gender and ethnicity, and considers how diversity and difference are actively constituted and play out in one primary school classroom. How students participate in the spatial practices and the construction of pedagogical spaces, what identities are available to them in these spaces and which they take up, is explored. The metaphor of dance is used to analyse these spaces, a metaphor which helps us to understand the complexity of classroom relationships and the way macro‐social practices are both reflected and reconstituted in classroom practices. We argue that the ways teachers think about how they place students, space students and construct students are crucial for student and teacher learning.