Talking and Teaching Through a Positional Lens: Recognizing what and who we privilege in our practice

Abstract

This article describes a year‐long professional development project that brought together a group of high school English teachers around multicultural literature they would be teaching to their students. The teachers all taught together in a culturally and economically diverse high school context in the USA. One objective of the project was to enable the teacher participants to explore their discourse patterns around the literature to discern their own subject positions with regard to one another and to the texts studied. In addition, the teachers together analyzed their own classroom discourse to determine how those subject positions carried over into their teaching, how they essentially taught who they were. Discussions of multicultural literature and teachers’ talk around that literature, accompanied by close interrogation of classroom practice, enabled the teachers to discern what (and who) they privileged in their teaching practice. These realizations led one of the two teachers highlighted to readily change her pedagogy and curriculum to better support the learning and empowerment of all students.

Notes

1. I recognize, of course, that due to the relational aspect of subject positions, one’s ability to ‘take up’ a particular position is dependent on certain social structures and hierarchies. Often society forces individuals to assume positions that perpetuate stereotyped notions of race, class, and sexual orientation in particular. Because the participants I highlight in this article are white and middle class, I recognize that their ability to take up certain positions is perhaps more possible than for others.

2. The name of the school and the names of participants are all pseudonyms.