“It’s not them, it’s me”: competing discourses in one aspiring teacher’s talk

Abstract

In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin’s notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers’ struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students’ school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the authoritative and internally persuasive discourses one aspiring teacher brought with her and took from a 15-week long course on a predominantly White Midwestern public university campus. Ideas she encountered in the course and its required tutoring component challenged her thinking about how various facets of people’s lives (such as those we list above) and the contexts in which they live, work and are schooled, affect how they are perceived, what they know, and can do.

Keywords:

• authoritative and internally persuasive discourses
• life history
• critical thinking

Notes

1. Dialogism, while not discussed here, indicates the ways in which we produce meaning from the historical time, social context, particular topics under discussion, and the interlocutors present at any moment (Vice, 1997).

2. Mission Statement of the Elementary Education Program. To provide an intellectually challenging professional program that promotes social justice through multicultural education and critical reflection. This entails educating teacher leaders who: (1) are well educated in academic content and dedicated to continued learning; (2) recognize the powers, limits, and controversies of particular disciplines; (3) understand that identity shapes all thinking and action: their own, their students’ and that of all those connected to schooling; (4) know that institutions like schools have the potential to both perpetuate inequities and effect change in society; (5) work for social justice through research-based curricular planning and instructional practices that promote high academic achievement for all students, particularly those who have been historically underserved; (6) are responsive to their students’ needs by learning from their teaching, collaborating with other professionals, and changing their practices; (7) welcome, recruit and work as partners with families, caregivers and community members; and (8) contribute to and benefit from communities of professional practice.