Interpreting the Rules: Language and Transformation in a Boys’ Comprehensive

ABSTRACT

This essay emerges from my position as a new trainee teacher, entering my first school, a school as unique and also as typical as any. What struck me was the complexity of the school's culture (and counter-cultures). Language was revealed as a site of resistance, a clash between staff and pupils at the point of instruction; a reluctance to read or write; an unanticipated response to text. This resistance was often shut down, yet it must at some level be meaningful. Indeed, it was often clearly communicated to me by the boys' complaints about having to read the texts prescribed to them, or indeed in the depth of the creative responses, particularly to visual images, that many of them displayed when given the opportunity to write in class. This suggests the need for a broader understanding of the way language is used, the different registers employed by pupils in interactions in the classroom; and, for me in my new role as teacher, the challenge of how to harness those moments which enable students to explore expression in ways they find meaningful.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• classroom
• register
• interaction
• meaning
• resistance
• heteroglossia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nisha Obano

Nisha Obano was, for many years before she became a teacher, Assistant Editor of Wasafiri, the magazine of international writing. In 2008 she completed her doctoral thesis exploring, from an ‘outsider’s’ perspective, the idea that subjectivity is constituted by belonging within, and possession of, language as an economy of meanings and values (‘Oikonomics’).