Creating class-B: using a key symbol to become literate in educational discourse

ABSTRACT

This article addresses teacher training as a process of becoming literate in educational discourse. Through ethnographic research of a project for training science and math lecturers in educational practice, I follow how participants created a concept they called ‘Class-B’ to symbolise progressive educational discourse. Bringing the concept of key symbol and a New Literacy Studies approach to the analysis, I show how literacy in educational discourse is worked out and elaborated around the symbol of Class-B. The ethnography teaches us that key symbols can be keys to literacy, and perhaps be considered as a useful tool for teacher trainers.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy
• teacher training
• key symbol
• Palestine
• Israel

Acknowledgements

In my capacity as researcher of this project, I myself learned much about curriculum planning and science and math education. I would like to thank the participants and staff of the ICP project for this opportunity. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Adi Kuntsman for comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. STEM disciplines are widely recognised as of higher status than the soft social sciences and certainly than education (Young and Muller 2015). Indeed, after several presentations of educational research studies during one of the first seminars, one participant said,

You have changed our ideas about education … At first I felt that education is a waste of time; we already know the science.  … With us, people who don’t do well in science, go into education. So I thought it wasn’t worth anything.

2. As we will see in the ‘Can we make this in our schools in Palestine?’ section, the participants themselves engage with this discourse on the state of Palestinian education, even as they distanced themselves as educated Palestinians from it.

3. Names of lecturers and participants have been changed.

4. It is difficult to distinguish who individual speakers are on the tape. Their identities are offered when recorded in fieldnotes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies.