Negotiating Discourses of Curriculum and Time: Tensions of Humanizing and Dehumanizing Discourses in an Urban Elementary School

ABSTRACT

Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative study of literacy conferences in three urban elementary classrooms, I use microethnographic and critical approaches to discourse analysis to explore two sets of conflicting discourses mobilized by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions: curriculum as tailored versus standardized and as present oriented versus future oriented. To further explore how teachers and students interact amidst the tensions between these discourses, I present a close analysis of a writing conference in which a teacher-student pair prepare for the upcoming high-stakes writing test. This analysis makes visible challenges and possibilities of teachers and students co-constructing humanizing pedagogies while suggesting the need to attend to its temporal dimensions.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Laura A. Taylor

Laura A. Taylor is Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College. Her scholarship centers talk and interaction in education, considering how language serves as a key means through which teachers and students both (re)produce and transform oppressive social institutions and systems. Having previously taught at a public elementary school in Houston, Texas, Laura’s current research interests include teachers’ negotiation of neoliberalism in urban schools and the pedagogical possibilities of narrative.