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Abstract
Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we challenge the essentialized notion of adolescents and young people as perpetually driven to resist the authority of adults. At the same time, we disrupt linguistic conceptions of adolescent discourse, along with the discourse of youth at risk, by analyzing a transcript of classroom discourse that reflects an exchange between a highly regarded and well liked preservice teacher and his students. This representative transcript highlights the preservice teacher's ability to query, without a concomitant ability to listen, respond, and build a classroom dialogue with his students; what we call here a Socratic monologue. Second, we link the notions of dialogue and responsiveness to Bakhtin's concept of answerability, emphasizing the joint construction of classroom discourse as an ethically answerable relation between teacher and students.
He is currently doing research on new Asian pedagogies.
Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press.
Notes
He is currently doing research on new Asian pedagogies.
Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press.
Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press.
The terms draw from Marcuse's (Citation1972) discussion of the “affirmative character of culture” as part of a materialist analysis of ideology and discourse.
We acknowledge the overlapping of Halliday's (Citation1975, Citation1978) language metafunctions – ideational, interpersonal, and textual – and note that our use is interpretive. For example, aspects of the ideational metafunction are obtained through interpersonal relationships and, therefore, our discussion has the effect of narrowing these categories and highlighting certain aspects that are relevant for this article.
In many current discussions of young people there is a tendency to universalize “culture” as a constitutive force for explicating identity (for example, “youth culture,” “popular culture,” “Asian-American culture,” “white male culture,” “Queer culture”). The danger, of course, is a particular theoretical and practical species of essentialism affiliated with an identity politics that only enables insiders to speak (Foley, Levinson, & Hurtig, Citation2001).
Young people thus create other possibilities for semiotic realization and identify their position in contrast to dominant discourse practices and ideological positions. An important point here is that antilanguages are context specific and happen across communities and age groups. Instances of antilanguages will surface in response to social events and ideas, and they are fuelled by group membership and belonging, group identification, and resistance. The creative and new ways in which young people use language then are unlikely to exemplify a homogeneous adolescent antilanguage, but rather a range of subcultural and community-specific bids to constitute “community.”
“I actively live into [vzhivaiu] an individuality, and consequently do not, for a single moment, lose myself completely or lose my singular place outside that other individuality” (Bakhtin, Citation1993, p. 93).
All names have been changed to pseudonyms.
Aaron chose the placement at the alternative program over other placement options in the mainstream high school, and was quite happy working with the students. That said, there is nothing that could have prepared him for student teaching during an event of this nature.