George Kamberelis

Other People's Voices: The Coarticulation of Texts and Subjectivities.

Abstract In this article we present an argument for construing the processes of text construction and the construction of subjectivity as mutually constitutive. We argue not only that these processes are coimplicated, but also that both are historical, intertextual, social, and political. To illustrate our argument we provide interpretive analyses of the essays of two fourth-grade children. These analyses foreground the extent to which the childrens texts are saturated with intertextual links, and they demonstrate some of the ways in which these intertextual links implicate and are implicated in particular social formations and political ideologies. We articulate some consequences that our arguments might have for exploring the meanings of intertextuality, voice, and childrens writing. We also suggest some implications of our work for enacting critical pedagogical practices in literacy classrooms.

Focus groups : from structured interviews to collective conversations

1. Focus Groups: A Brief and Incomplete History 2. Multiple, Interrelated Functions of Focus Group Work 3. Key Affordances of Focus Group Research 4. Fundamental Elements of Effective Focus Group Research Practice 5. Contemporary Dilemmas and Horizons of Focus Group Research 6. Epilogue

Mapping not tracing: qualitative educational research with political teeth

In this article, we deploy ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to argue for the importance of engaging in educational research practice designed to be productive (mapping) rather than representational (tracing). First, we introduce the significance of our approach for educational research practice. Second, we unpack key constructs from Deleuze and Guattari required for constructing our argument, and we outline the shape of mapping as productive or transformative research practice. Third, we share critical summaries of several studies that utilized mapping to engage in this kind of research practice. Finally, we discuss the nature, effects, and relevance of mapping as educational research practice.

Shifting Terrains: Mapping Education within a Global Landscape

In this article, the authors draw on critical social theory and educational theory and research to review and deconstruct educational discourses that have become common in this era of mass globalization. Key issues embedded within these discourses include addressing the educational needs of children from marginalized social and cultural groups, preparing students for the information-based jobs of the future, restructuring schools to fit with the reterritorialization of urban and suburban spaces, and gauging the effects of mass media on stereotypical notions of youths, schools, and schooling. The authors deploy Arjun Appadurais model of ever shifting and interrelated global flows to bring into relief how various aspects of globalization both enable and constrain different kinds of social, spatial, and economic mobility for todays youths. They conclude by suggesting new ways to understand the complex and paradoxical effects of globalization on education and schooling.

New capitalism, risk, and subjectification in an early childhood classroom

‘New capitalism’ has been characterized as an economic period in which insecurity, flux, and uncertainty exist in the workplace. Capitalism attempts to tame that uncertainty through risk taking. Taking risks has become what one must do with risk. Economic discourses of embracing risk — thoroughly grounded in the ideologies of neoliberalism — are widely distributed into many non-economic areas, including education. Risk taking is now understood as something everyone should valorize, a necessity for freedom and choice. Such discourses are appropriated and recontextualized into different domains, including the everyday interactions between young children and teachers. In this study the authors examine the discourse of a writing lesson taught by one early childhood teacher, focusing on how she used language to promote/produce her students as risk-takers. The authors argue that this teachers attempt to promote/produce risk-takers belied her commitment to neoliberal ideologies and new modes of capitalism. They also argue that her efforts were dampened by tensions that she also seemed to embody/live — tensions between old and new forms of capitalism, between modernist and postmodernist notions of agency, between safety and risk, and between freedom and control. The outcomes of her work thus seemed to embody tensions in how her students came to understand choice, risk, and freedom. It is no coincidence that free-market economies, which encourage personal risk taking, have outlived centrally planned ones, which do not. (The Economist, 1994) Steve: A person who takes risks — what kind of person do you think that person is? Jackie (age 10): A good person.

The play of risk, affect, and the enterprising self in a fourth-grade classroom

As a predominant discourse of the early twenty-first century, the new capitalism (and its companion cultural system, neoliberalism) privilege flexibility, risk, emotional intelligence, and the enterprising self. New capitalist discourses exert powerful and pervasive effects across all dimensions of human experience and activity from personal decision-making to family life to school to the workplace, and they encourage, even demand, that workers become individualized, self-actualized subjects. In this article, we discuss how new capitalist discourses affected talk and social interaction in one fourth-grade classroom. More specifically, we report on how the classroom teacher encouraged students to become more deeply aware of their affective investments in relation to themes in the books they read and to connect these investments to their everyday lives. We demonstrate further that this emphasis on affective investment involved high levels of risk for the students and positioned them as enterprising selves.

Ingestion, Elimination, Sex, and Song: Trickster as Premodern Avatar of Postmodern Research Practice

In this article, I argue that the mythological figure of the Trickster may be read as a premodern avatar of postmodern research practice or what Denzin and Lincoln called the sixth and seventh moments of qualitative inquiry. I begin by describing the key imperatives of the sixth and seventh moments. These imperatives include (a) a commitment to morally sound, praxis-oriented research; (b) strategic use of eclectic constellations of theories, methods, and research strategies; (c) production of dialogic, nonrepresentational texts; and (d) conduct of mindful inquiry resulting in sacred texts. In a modest attempt to write not only about but also in the sixth and seventh moments, I offer extensive descriptions and interpretations of the extant narratives of the Winnebago Trickster, Wakdjunkaga, making indirect or oblique connections to sixth and seventh moment imperatives along the way. I return to these connections in the end of the article and make them more explicit.

Re)reading Bakhtin as Poetic Grammarian and Strategic Pedagogue

The author is associate professor of literacy studies at the State University of New York at Albany. Bakhtin’s recently discovered work on dialogic pedagogy, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar,” is packed with brilliant insights related to learning and instruction upon which one might comment. Because Bakhtin’s arguments are abundantly clear, I have chosen not to reiterate them with close commentary but to use them as springboards for outlining a prolegomena of poetics/stylistics pedagogies based on a conservative interpretation of dialogism. I address each dimension of this prolegomena separately. First, I focus on Bakhtin’s insistence that we consider poetics/stylistics as essential to understanding and using grammar. Importantly, this theme is all but absent in most English language arts pedagogies including systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Second, I argue for the fundamental importance of making the delicate and complex form-function relations of language (e.g., grammatical constructions) explicit/transparent with/for students within instructional activities and through strategically organized social and semiotic mediation. In doing so, I reread Bakhtin’s dialogism through a lens less like the medieval carnival and more like Vygotsky’s (1978) social and semiotic mediation in the “zone of proximal development” or Tharp and Gallimore’s (1991) “assisted performance” within “instructional conversations.”

Generative Routinized Practices and the Production of Classroom Cultures and Identities.

In this article, I share results from a year-long qualitative study that focused on the emergent production of a classroom culture and the social identities most valued in that culture. I collected observational data, interview data and archival data throughout the school year in one self-contained fourth-grade classroom. Using a combination of analytic strategies drawn from grounded theory and critical discourse analysis, I constructed an account of key generative routinized practices/performances that contributed in powerful and pervasive ways to the emergent production of a classroom culture and the social identities encouraged/afforded within that culture. The practices were practising family, practising care, practising fourth-grade professionalism, practising literature–life connections and practising democracy. Accounting for and interpreting these practices in considerable detail allowed me to argue for how generative routinized practices can produce dynamic but durable classroom cultures that exert powerful effects on childrens developing social identities, their dispositions towards participation and their learning.

Markers of cognitive change during the transition to conventional literacy

In the present study I applied theoretical reasoning concerning transitional knowledge to a problem in literacy development. The impetus for the study was the idea that there are times in early literacy development when asynchronous relationships obtain between childrens knowledges and strategies about reading (comprehension modality) and their knowledges and strategies about writing (production modality). Integrating their reading and writing knowledges and strategies into more comprehensive and flexible literacy knowledges and strategies is problematic for children during these developmental periods. Yet such an integration is necessary for the acquisition of conventional literacy, which is defined here as being able to write and to read back stretches of extended discourse that are also readable to literate adults with some knowledge of invented spelling. Two asynchronous ormixed-level relationships between the sophistication of childrens narrative compositions and their readings of those compositions were hypothesized as indices of transitional knowledge or knowledge reorganization. These relationships consisted of writing behaviors and products that seemed much more sophisticated than childrens readings of them belied, and vice-versa. A longitudinal data set composed of 46 children each of whom composed six stories over a two-year period was examined using these indices to select children presumed to be in transition and then to analyze the developmental patterns exhibited by these children. Detecting children who are in transition from emergent to conventional literacy has critical implications for classroom research and instruction. These implications are discussed.