Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice 9781788920094

Citation preview

Learning English at School

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM Series Editors: Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, USA and Wayne E. Wright, Purdue University, USA Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is an international, multidisciplinary series publishing research on the philosophy, politics, policy, provision and practice of language planning, Indigenous and minority language education, multilingualism, multiculturalism, biliteracy, bilingualism and bilingual education. The series aims to mirror current debates and discussions. New proposals for single-authored, multiple-authored or edited books in the series are warmly welcomed, in any of the following categories or others authors may propose: overview or introductory texts; course readers or general reference texts; focus books on particular multilingual education program types; school-based case studies; national case studies; collected cases with a clear programmatic or conceptual theme; and professional education manuals. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

BILINGUAL EDUCATION & BILINGUALISM: 112

Learning English at School Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice 2nd Edition

Kelleen Toohey

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/TOOHEY0087 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Toohey, Kelleen - author. Title: Learning English at School: identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice/Kelleen Toohey. Description: 2nd edition. | Bristol; Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, [2018] |Series: Bilingual Education & Bilingualism: 112 Identifiers: LCCN 2018001655| ISBN 9781788920070 (pbk : alk. paper) |ISBN 9781788920087 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788920117 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. |English language—Study and teaching—Social aspects. | Language and education—United States. | Education, Bilingual—United States. Classification: LCC PE1128.A2 T63 2018 | DDC 428/.007—dc21 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001655 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-008-7 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-007-0 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2018 Kelleen Toohey. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Edwards Brothers Malloy, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgements for the Second Edition

ix

Introduction Learning English at School in 2000 and Now Chapter Summary

1 4 5

1

8

2

Framing Story: Theory, Setting and Methodology Language, Learners and Learning in Early Second Language Acquisition Research The Sociocultural/Discursive Turn Language, learning and learners in sociocultural theory Communities of practice Second language learning from a sociocultural perspective Summary Research Questions The Research Site Methodology New Materialism and Language Learning Non-dualism, Relational Ontologies and Non-essentialism ‘Intra-action’, ‘Agential Cuts’, Desire and ‘Affect’ Intra-action Agency and agential cuts Desire and affect Understanding Language Research from a New Materialism Perspective ‘Writing Up’ Representations or Stories Conclusion

v

8 12 12 17 18 19 20 21 22 25 26 29 29 32 33 34 38 41 43

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3

Kindergarten Stories Life in Kindergarten The Children’s Stories Randy Surjeet Martin Julie Harvey Amy Coda

4

Constructing School Identities: Kindergarten Being a Child/Becoming a Student Aspects of School Identity Academic competence or learning potential Physical presentation/competence Behavioural competence Social competence Language proficiency Assigning Identities: ESLness Discussion Conclusion

87 88 89 90 95 98 99 101 103 105 111

5

‘Break Them Up, Take Them Away’: Practices in the Grade 1 Classroom Sitting at Your Own Desk Using Your Own Things Using Your Own Words and Ideas Discussion

114 117 123 126 129

6

Discursive Practices in Grade 2: Language Arts Lessons Language Arts Lessons Recitation Sequences Background Recitation sequences and the focal children Teacher-mandated Partner and Small Group Conversations Background Teacher-mandated peer conversations and the focal children Student-managed Conversations Background Student-managed conversations and the focal children

45 45 48 48 56 64 69 75 80 84

137 139 140 140 142 147 147 147 154 154 155

Contents

Discussion Recitation sequences Teacher-mandated peer conversations Peer-managed conversations Conclusion 7

Appropriating Voices and Telling Stories Identity, Resource Distribution and Discourse Practices Access to Voice Facilitating Access The Politics of Representation Documentation Future Second Language Acquisition Research Afterword

References Author Index Subject Index

vii

159 159 160 163 164 166 168 169 172 174 180 181 182 186 200 204

Acknowledgements for the Second Edition

All three campuses of my university are located on unceded Coast Salish Territory – the traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm) and Kwikwetlem First Nations. Unceded means that the land the university and the cities are located on was never bought, sold or negotiated. While the immigrant children I write about are newcomers to this place, it is important to remember that the colonial settlers and their descendants are also newcomers to a land that was sustainably stewarded by First Nations for millennia. My first First Nation teachers were Plains Cree and, while trying to learn the language, I was interested in the grammatical and lexical distinctions in Cree between animate and inanimate nouns, and the difficulty for settler learners of Cree to understand the thinking behind these distinctions: e.g. some berries are animate and others are inanimate and some stones are animate and others are inanimate. I am not knowledgeable enough to say that Cree (or First Nations or Indigenous) understandings of the world are aligned with some of the post-humanist, new materialist positions discussed in this book, but the complexity of the cosmology/ontologies/epistemologies of the original inhabitants of this and other places, and the ways they understand the relations of the world differently from customary settler ways, must be acknowledged and investigated by others who understand these matters better than I do. Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2016) argued that, while (mostly) male Western European academics are credited with ‘discovering’ the interconnections among humans, the environment, water, climate, animals and so on, these had been matters of discussion in various Indigenous groups for a very long time. Acknowledging the diverse Indigenous peoples’ understandings of how the world works, as well as the injustices visited on them, is necessary in a world that needs new visions and ethics in order to move on from present discord and catastrophes. The research reported in the fi rst edition of this book was the result of three years’ observation of a group of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds attending a Canadian school in the late 1990s. I am grateful to the children and their parents for allowing me to be an observer ix

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Learning English at School

of their classroom activities. I am also grateful to the teachers involved, for their hospitality and for the efforts they made to amplify my understandings of life in schools. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for fi nancial support for this project. I continue to be grateful to John Holt, whose expert editing not only much improved the fi rst edition of this book, but also taught me a great deal about writing. Finally, I thank my colleagues Suzanne de Castell and Roumiana Ilieva who made generous and helpful comments on drafts of the second edition. The stories I told in the fi rst edition of this book have continued to provide me with food for thought since 2000. I revisited the stories with a group of teachers and graduate students (Teachers’ Action Research Group – TARG) who had agreed to have conversations about teaching second language learners in school, and who started that conversation by reading Learning English at School (LEaS) Those teachers and students wrote a book chapter detailing their reactions to LEaS and together we wrote a book about their research with their students in their schools (Denos et al., 2009). I cannot thank the members of this group enough for their many kindnesses, their stimulating conversations and the efforts we made together to amplify our understandings of life in schools. I especially wish to recognise Susie Sojan Sandhu, gifted, kind and caring teacher and colleague, and a graceful and passionate advocate for families and education. Thanks for this edition of Learning English at School are also due to colleagues at Simon Fraser University: Suzanne Smythe, Cher Hill, Margaret MacDonald, Diane Dagenais and Nathalie Sinclair. Together we read new materialist literature, becoming excited about its potential ‘lines of fl ight’ for our work, wrote about our own and one another’s research, and had wonderful times together (Smythe et al., 2017). I have been privileged to be a member of this group and dedicate this edition to them and to TARG, with a slightly different title: Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice, to reflect the addition of theory-practice perspectives of new materialities. Chapter 2 draws upon three chapters in Smythe et al. (2017). Parts of the kindergarten stories and analysis (Chapters 3 and 4) were previously published in 1996 in the Canadian Modern Language Review 52, 549– 576. A version of Chapter 5 was published in 1998 in TESOL Quarterly 32, 61–84.

Introduction

Language and culture are [not] scripts to be acquired as much as they are conversations in which people can participate. The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture. McDermott, 1993: 295

This quote opened the Introduction to the first edition of Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (LEaS), an ethnography in which I reported my observations of a group of initially six, and finally four, children in whose homes Polish, Punjabi or Chinese was spoken. I observed these children in their classrooms, from the beginning of their kindergarten year (when most of the children were five years old) to the end of Grade 2 (when most were seven years old). While a common understanding of language learning at the time was that learners needed to acquire cultural and linguistic scripts (as McDermott put it above), I wished to examine what the experience of learning English at school was like for children who spoke other languages in their homes, through the lenses of then-emerging sociocultural theories and empirical research, to see if there were additional ways to understand these matters. Much of the second/additional/foreign language education research literature I read before writing the 2000 book saw linguistic and cultural systems (scripts) as individually acquired; this work was centrally concerned with such questions as who was learning/acquiring what and how much.1 Psychology, linguistics, and later the hybrid field, psycholinguistics, maintained that language learning was an ‘interface between learners’ mental processes and the grammatical system of the target language’ (Breen, 2001: 173). Language learning from this perspective was individual acquisition of language structures. This strain of second language acquisition (SLA) research continues today and researchers continue to be interested in individual learners’ cognitive and psychological processes and their consequences for acquisition of distinct language systems. This view dominated linguistics and language education research throughout the fi nal years of the 20th century, and Long (1997: 319) observed: ‘social 1

2

Learning English at School

and affective factors … [in this research were seen as] important but relatively minor in impact … in both naturalistic and classroom settings.’ Like ‘autonomous’ models of literacy learning (Street, 1984), SLA was (and is still, in much research) seen as involving discoverable, possibly universal, processes that are affected mostly by individual personality and cognitive differences. In the late 1960s, another hybrid, sociolinguistics, came to some attention in linguistics and language education scholarship. This field was (and is) concerned with language use rather than language as a pre-given system, with how language is used in various milieus, and with how social life is accomplished through language (Hymes, 1972, 1974). Sociolinguistic documentation of various communities’ ‘ways with words’ (Heath, 1983) became of great interest to language and literacy researchers and educators in the hope that school alignment with minoritised communities’ language use patterns might result in greater school achievement for children from these communities (Au & Jordan, 1981; Cazden et al., 1972, 1985; Philips, 1983, and many others). These scholars revealed how ‘abilities and opportunities [to speak and understand other languages] are woven into everyday patterns of social practice in locally specific ways’ (Hamilton, 2016: 3). 2 Some sociolinguistically inspired second language education research drew from sociology (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) and poststructuralist feminist research (e.g. Weedon, 1997) and strove to examine how the notions of identity and power were implicated in language learning (Norton, 1995, 2000, 2014). 3 Other scholars drew on the field of cultural psychology and examined how that perspective helped us understand language learning (Lantolf, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Pavlenko & Piller, 2001; Swain, 2000; Thorne, 2000, and many others). Cultural psychology or sociocultural theories (Cole, 1996, 1998; Wertsch, 1991, 1998) brought together insights from anthropology and psychology in conceptions of persons as constructed by their sociocultural relations and activities. From this perspective, investigation of how people engaged in the social and cultural practices of their communities could reveal how their identities were constructed, what they learned and how social power ‘circulated’ (Foucault, 1972, 1979) in those communities. Motivated by this scholarship, I examined how identity making happened when my subjects were in kindergarten, how social relations developed among the subjects in Grade 1 and how discourse practices in Grade 2 had effects on the children’s language learning possibilities. I have, with colleagues, recently become captivated by a group of perspectives, variously termed posthumanism, new materialism, the New Ontologies or materiality theories (Smythe et al., 2017). These perspectives have been taken up in many fields and consider how material humans, material symbolic systems and the material world are bound together inextricably (entangled) and act together. Drawing on the work of philosophers Whitehead (1929/1978) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005),

Introduction 3

new materialism theorists argue that poststructural concepts of the individual identities of persons, constructed in discourse, see the material world as ‘merely the inert scenery against which the humanist adventures of culture are played out’ (MacLure, 2013: 659). New materialism decentres the human and looks for material entanglements of things, discourses and humans. My interest in this group of theories has motivated the slight change in the subtitle of this edition: Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice, as I have come to understand the social and the material as bound up together and mutually entailing. Like the poststructuralists, new materialism scholars move away from static and essentialistic traits of ‘identity’ as explanatory constructs. However, new materialists argue for the recognition of entanglements or assemblages of human and non-human entities in phenomena. In my 2000 study I argued that a sociocultural view of language learning, in which identity making, discourse and institutional practices were identified and analysed, allowed us to see language learners’ experiences differently from how we might see these matters with a psycholinguistic focus. Relying on poststructuralist and sociocultural notions of identity and discourse, I examined how school identity-making practices, social relations and classroom discourse practices were important in how children were identified and how they subsequently had variable opportunities to participate in specific classroom conversations. In this second edition, I present the socioculturally based theories and analyses that motivated the first edition and add more recent references to that body of work. However, I also wish to argue that going beyond persons in their cultural contexts and classroom discourse practices, in order to examine the material that ‘matters’ in language learning, is a fruitful direction for our field. Because my ethics approvals for the original study required that data be destroyed five years after study completion, and I did not collect those data with a new materialist approach in mind, the ‘agential cuts’ (see further in Chapter 2) I made at that time did not take materiality into account in ways I might now wish to explore. Not having used posthuman/new materiality perspectives when I initially wrote LEaS, I now see ways in which I conducted the research and constructed descriptions and analyses which could have more deeply investigated the materiality of the children, their classrooms, their learning tools, my presence as a researcher, what the video camera showed and did not show, and so on. Attention to such matters would have resulted in quite different ‘representations’ of what was going on in those classrooms. Empirical analyses using new materialism’s concepts and insights to investigate second language learning are just recently emerging (see, for example, Fleming et  al., 2017) and while I cannot produce wholly new analyses of these classrooms and the children, in shadowed boxes throughout this new edition I suggest how new materialist researchers might consider matters in addition to the human interactions in their research sites.

4

Learning English at School

However, the socioculturally based stories from the fi rst edition have their own logic, and they have been helpful to others in the past. Deleuze (1994), whose work has inspired many new materiality scholars, reminded us that scholarship doesn’t advance because we wholly reject what has come before, and that scholars should adopt attitudes of ‘and, and, and’. For these reasons, in this second edition, I re-present the stories and my sociocultural analyses, but I also discuss, where relevant, how a new materialism perspective might document and analyse these events somewhat differently, and how such a view might lead language education in new and challenging directions. In those sections of chapters in which I present new materialist interpretations in shadowed boxes, I discuss additional possible ways of understanding what was going on. After presenting the sociocultural view that animated the first edition in Chapter 1, in this second edition I include a new chapter (Chapter 2) which explains in more detail the new materialism theoretical perspectives on which I now draw, and what changes these perspectives might necessitate or encourage in research methodology and reporting. Learning English at School in 2000 and Now

The fi rst edition of LEaS focused on a common set of circumstances in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the late 1990s: young children from minority language backgrounds attending English medium schools and having to learn English in order to succeed in these schools. Since the 1990s, continuing and increasing geopolitical confl icts, environmental catastrophes, the increasing integration of international economies, of communication, and of information infrastructures, have all been major factors in the physical and virtual movements of people across national boundaries and, as some observers have argued, in the increasing inequalities in income, political autonomy and natural and cultural resource distribution throughout the world. While these conditions are not new, we have seen increasingly in the 2000s the movement of migrants and refuge seekers speaking many local languages that do not carry cultural capital in the regions in which they seek new lives. These migrant and refugee individuals and families seldom come with the cultural or monetary capital to be part of what McDermott called ‘the conversations’ in their new homes, and they are seen to need to master languages of wider communication (specifically, in many cases, English) as a prerequisite to participation. Schools and other educational institutions are often important arenas for migrants’ and refugees’ attempts to become part of their new communities, and we recently see more second language education studies concerned with wider issues of globalisation, income inequalities, and so on (e.g. Blommaert, 2013; Loring & Ramanathan, 2016; Ramanathan, 2013; Wodak, 2013).

Introduction 5

However, in the psycholinguistic research literature of the late 1990s not much attention was given to power, inequalities, or their effects on language learning. Nor did the textbooks of language teaching methods and approaches available at that time for such classrooms much take these sociopolitical perspectives into account (e.g. Faltis, 1993; Genesee, 1994; Gibbons, 1993; Rigg & Allen, 1989).4 I believed when I wrote the first edition of LEaS that emerging sociocultural views of language learning might enhance our understandings of the experiences of children learning English in Englishmedium schools, and might link these to wider societal inequities. I think that the descriptions and analyses found in the first edition of LEaS continue to be relevant today in many places where English language learners (ELLs) are increasingly taught in regular classrooms, with diminishing specialist support. At the 2014 International Association of Applied Linguistics meeting, while researcher Michele de Courcy alone was able to report rather good news on this front from Australia, researchers Linda Harklau (USA), Yvonne Foley (Scotland), Angelpreet Singh and I (Canada), observed that in many ways support for ELLs in schools was being cut back or dropped entirely, and that teacher education institutions in these three countries were responding by reducing courses and programmes for English language teacher education. This was the case at the same time as Samson and Collins (2012: 2) reported: ‘the reality is that most, if not all teachers have or can expect to have ELL students in their classroom and therefore must be prepared to best support these children.’ Chapter Summary

In Chapter 1, I briefly survey some examples of child SLA research from the 1970s and 1980s, and their conceptions of learners and the processes of SLA. I then survey the work of several poststructural, sociocultural and critical theorists, emphasising the implications for studying both identity formation and language learning at school. Finally, I introduce the research questions, the setting of the research and the methodology. In Chapter 2, I introduce a selection of new materialism literature and explain some of the concepts on which I draw in discussing the children’s language learning in the chapters to come. I describe non-dualism, relational ontologies, non-essentialism, intra-action, agency, affect, language from a materialist perspective, new materialist research strategies, and the issue of representation. In Chapter 3, I describe the kindergarten classroom and introduce each of the six focal children, describing events over the course of that kindergarten year. I also present information gathered in teacher and parent interviews about each child. I use these descriptions in Chapter 4 to analyse how school practices constructed school identities for the children. I show how each child came to have a school identity that was consequential and that also seemed relatively fi xed and unitary. As well as finding out what

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kinds of identities seemed available to each child, I consider what the range of identities reveals about the classroom as a community (in McDermott’s terms quoted at the beginning of this chapter, ‘what conversations are around to be had’). Throughout, I also make observations about how new materialism might offer analyses that are sometimes different and sometimes simply more extensive than the sociocultural theory I used initially to analyse the kindergarten stories. I also discuss how the concept of identity is made problematic in new materialism. In Chapter 5, I examine physical, material and intellectual resources and practices in the Grade 1 classroom, arguing that together they shaped access to the vital classroom resource of conversations with peers and with the teacher. I argue that the variable distribution of resources in classrooms, like school identity practices, is neither natural nor inevitable, but has profound effects on learning and learning opportunities. In this chapter, materialism perspectives are particularly relevant and are also woven throughout the chapter in shaded boxes. Chapter 6 follows the children to Grade 2; in this chapter I examine discourse practices that, I argue, regulated children’s access to possibilities for participation in their communities. I examine how discourse practices in children’s language arts lessons were organised, and extend the earlier analysis of how classroom practices establish social relations which determine access to classroom resources and ultimately to learning. Again, woven through the chapter, I include discussion of how discourse might be conceptualised from a new materialist perspective, and how this perspective might enhance analyses of classroom language learning. In Chapter 7, I discuss theoretical, methodological and pedagogical ideas and dilemmas that emerged through the initial course of the research, and how I think about those issues now. I discuss how a new materialist perspective might enhance our understandings of what goes on when children are learning second languages at school, and what differences this perspective might make to how we conduct research. I discuss how schools and teachers might support children of minority language backgrounds in their struggle to appropriate English in school classrooms. As mathematics educators and new materialism theorists de Freitas and Sinclair (2014) have argued, attention to matter may increase our understandings of what happens and what could happen in classrooms, with various assemblages of children, adults and the other materials involved in institutionalised schooling. Notes (1) Concern with who is learning what, how much and how quickly has continued to be an over-arching motivation for much educational research, policy and practice over the past 20 years.

Introduction 7

(2) Mary Hamilton was writing about literacy and ‘reading and writing the printed word’, but her comments have equal validity in discussing language learning. (3) Elizabeth de Freitas and Matthew Curinga (2015: 248) similarly note that contemporary approaches to identity in language education ‘emphasize the fragmentation, multiplicity and partiality of identity, less fi xed and more contingent, less permanent and more tactical, less essentialist and more performative’. (4) More recent publications of second language teaching research and methodology for young learners do take sociocultural perspectives into account (García & Frede, 2010; Howes et al., 2011; Murphy, 2011; Philips et al., 2008).

1 Framing Story: Theory, Setting and Methodology

When language is systematically unavailable to some, it is important that we not limit our explanations to the traits of the persons involved; it is equally essential that we take into account the interactional circumstances that position the people in the world with a differential access to the common tongue. McDermott, 1993: 283

Educational researchers have commonly used the traits of learners to explain schooling outcomes and, as I observed in the Introduction, second language learning research has often taken learners’ characteristics or traits as a central concern. McDermott argued that such a view is limited and that observers also need to pay attention to learners’ positions and social relations (their ‘interactional circumstances’). This chapter begins with a survey of past and more current psycholinguistically-oriented second language education research and goes on to describe socioculturally-oriented work before 2000 (when Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (LEaS) was first published) and since 2000. This is a brief review of both psycholinguistic and sociocultural research and focuses on a few representative studies, summarising how this research has traditionally and more contemporarily conceptualised language, learners and the processes of language learning. As such, this is a rather ‘broadstrokes’ history, and not reflective of nuances in particular scholars’ work. With respect to socioculturally-oriented work, I consider how language, learners and language learning have been, and are, conceptualised. I used a sociocultural perspective to develop the theoretical framework and methodology for the 2000 report of my study. In Chapter 2, I discuss how new materialist theory might augment psychological and sociological ways to think about language learning and teaching. Language, Learners and Learning in Early Second Language Acquisition Research

The study of second language acquisition (SLA) developed rapidly in the 1970s1 and 1980s and continues today. Early research drew upon 8

Framing Story: Theory, Setting and Methodology

9

structuralist theories of language, often cited as originating with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), who urged attention to the linguistic knowledge that allowed speakers/hearers to use and understand language’s stable patterns and structures. From this perspective, actual instances of language usage were unpredictable and could be affected by memory lapses, fatigue, slips, errors, and so on, and thus were not seen as revealing of ‘deep structure’ patterns and therefore were of little interest in the scientific study of language. For structural linguists, languages were discrete, differentiated and rule-governed systems that were best represented through linguistic analysis. Structural linguistic analysis was seen as helpful in language education: ‘pedagogic grammars’ sequenced language rules in ways research had proven to be most accessible; learners’ errors could be seen as evidence of incomplete or faulty acquisition of language’s rules and could give educators guidance about what structures learners still needed to learn (Richards, 1974; Rutherford, 1980; Schachter & Celce-Murcia, 1977). Learners in early SLA research were conceptualised as individuals with individual psychological characteristics and learning styles. 2 Sampson (1989: 919) noted that from this perspective: ‘Individuals are assumed to have personal ownership of the identities they possess, including all of their attributes … as well as the outcomes of whatever achievements their particular abilities and motivations bring to them’. McNamee (1996) observed that most psychological researchers who accepted this notion of individual identities were concerned with fi nding (through careful and controlled observation) the basic structure or essence of individual identities. Learners’ characteristics (age, intelligence, aptitude, motivation, learning styles, and so on) and their effects on internalisation of linguistic ‘input’ were the subject of several SLA studies (Bialystok, 1978; Skehan, 1991; Spada & Lightbown, 1993). An early and influential study entitled The Good Language Learner (Naiman et al., 1978), building on earlier ideas of Rubin (1975), examined both the cognitive processes of language acquisition and how learner characteristics had effects on these processes. Naiman et al. (1978: 3) were interested in language learners’ mental strategies (‘perceiving, analyzing, classifying, relating, storing, receiving and constructing a language output’), as well as the relationships among the personalities, learning styles, motivations, and other (what were considered to be) individually owned characteristics of individual learners and their successful (or not) acquisition of second languages. In a study of child second language learners, Wong Fillmore (1979: 221) looked for ‘the combination of interests, inclinations, skills, temperament, needs and motivations’ that distinguished good from poor second language learners, fi nding that individual motivation to identify with people who speak English was responsible for the differential rates of acquisition by the children in her study. Strong (1983: 255), in a later study

10

Learning English at School

of kindergarten English language learners (ELLs), found support for ‘a relationship between aspects of sociability or outgoingness and natural communicative language skills’. 3 Saville-Troike (1988) investigated relations between child ELLs’ level of cognitive development, their social orientation and learning style and the quantity and quality of their private speech. All this work saw cognitive development, social orientation and learning style as internal aspects of individuals. However, little of this research considered how social relations among learners, as well as among learners and those who judge their performances, might affect their assessments of cognition, social adjustment and learning styles. In addition to consideration of what individual learners bring to second language learning, early SLA research investigated second language learning processes. Dulay et al. (1982: 276) described the cognitive processes of language acquisition as those ‘by which language learners gradually organise the language they hear, according to the rules they construct to understand and generate sentences’. Davis (1995: 428) argued that this psychological or mentalist model was ‘designed to get at language learners’ mental strategies in acquiring an L2’. A great deal of research on both child and adult SLA used data from learner productions and selfreflections to induce generalisations about learners’ cognitive processes of organisation, rule construction and sentence generation (Dulay & Burt, 1974; Hakuta, 1974; Huang & Hatch, 1978). Through a focus initially on the systematicity of learner errors (Corder, 1967; Ravem, 1968; Richards, 1974; Selinker, 1972) and later on the systematicity of learner productions as a whole (Hatch, 1978; Schachter, 1988; Schachter & Celce-Murcia, 1977), SLA researchers investigated the processes by which adults and children internalised linguistic rules. With the discovery of a regular order in the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by some second language learners, researchers hypothesised universal processes of language acquisition. Research on learner productions and the plotting of emergent grammars led to attempts to understand both how internalisation of linguistic knowledge occurred and how knowledge of these processes might be of practical, pedagogical benefit (Ellis, 1994; LarsenFreeman & Long, 1991). As in psychology, much language learning and teaching research of this type was experimental and, for example, might look for co-relations between measures of learners’ motivations or their learning styles or their personalities, and their success in learning discrete aspects of target language structures. More linguistically-oriented work in the 1970s and 1980s, guided by concepts of structural linguistics, examined corpora of language-learner speech to determine, for example, if there was an invariant order of morpheme acquisition by learners of particular languages, or if grammatical, lexical or semantic errors could reveal systematic but flawed rule construction by learners. In the late 1990s, when the research for LEaS was under way, these were the dominant

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theoretical frames underlying SLA research. Since then, SLA research has changed considerably. Educational psychologists Kirschner and Martin (2010: 4) argued that a prevailing view in much psychological scholarship in the 1970s–1990s was that persons are ‘deeply interior, reflective and ruminating … the infamous Cartesian self dwelling in splendid isolation from the world and others’. This view prevailed, they argued, despite a great deal of previous scholarship which had posited more relational views of how persons came to be, because of psychology’s efforts to attain scientific credibility and to establish ‘objectivist theories of knowledge … operational defi nitions and quantified measurement’ (Kirschner & Martin, 2010: 4). They pointed out, however, that since the 1970s, psychologists became increasingly interested in conceptions of persons as constructed by their sociocultural relations and activities, and in seeing such views as potentially more helpful in addressing many of the psychological, sociological and political problems of contemporary societies. What many have termed the ‘social turn’ (Block, 2003) has had important effects on more current studies of SLA. In philosophy as well as in psychology, ethnomethodology, sociology, literary theory, poststructuralism and Marxist studies, in the mid-1990s, theorists were increasingly interested in sociality and subjectivity as rooted in language or discourse. In a review of 40 years of SLA research, Ortega (2013: 3–4) noted that the field now enjoys ‘a remarkable epistemological diversity’ as it shifted to go beyond the ‘quantitative, cognitive, positivist epistemologies dominant in SLA until the mid-1990s’ and beyond a preoccupation with idealised language structures (and idealised native speakers), to a focus on how learners actually use language and make meaning. Hall et al. (2006: 226) described this usage view of language as ‘dynamic constellations of linguistic resources, the shapes and meaning of which emerge from continual interaction between internal, domain-general cognitive constraints on the one hand and one’s pragmatic pursuits in his or her everyday worlds on the other, that is, through language use’. Members of the Douglas Fir Group (2016: 19), who proposed a ‘transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world’, also saw language as a resource and, inclusive of their diverse research commitments and interests, saw ‘language use and learning as emergent, dynamic, unpredictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated’. For them: A new SLA must be imagined, one that can investigate the learning and teaching of additional languages across private and public, material and digital social contexts in a multilingual world. We propose that it begin with the social-local worlds of L2 learners and then pose the full range of relevant questions – from the neurobiological and cognitive micro levels to the macro levels of the sociocultural, educational, ideological, and socioemotional. (Douglas Fir Group, 2016: 20)

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The transdisciplinary stance these authors advocate moves SLA research from exclusively psycholinguistic theories of second language learning to broader concerns with social interactions, social learning and learners’ contexts. This stance has been informed by developments in sociocultural theory and research and I move now to a description of these. Readers interested in recent and more fulsome discussions of recent SLA research might consult Spada and Lightbown (2013), the 2017 Special Issue of Language Learning (Currents in Language Learning series: Experimental, Computational and Corpus-based Approaches to Language Learning) and Loewen and Sato (2017). The Sociocultural/Discursive Turn

As communication scholar Angus (1998: n.p.) saw it, the sociocultural/ discursive turn in the social sciences was founded on ‘the notion that social reality is constructed in and through language and that, consequently, the proper activity of philosophy and the human sciences is the investigation of language use in various settings as well as its wider theoretical implications’. From this perspective, critical investigation (or de-construction) of how people used language/discourse in social settings could reveal how knowledge was constructed and how knowledge and language could be instruments of power. Language structure was thus tied to language use, and was seen as a kind of doing or making and, in any event, as social activity. British linguist Austin (1962) examined speech acts that were aimed at action, that made things happen (like the words: ‘I now open this new shopping mall’). While Austin was of the view that performative speech was a specific class of speech act, the notion of performativity was later generalised to all language use, as scholars recognised that all utterances were doing something in social worlds (Butler, 1997). The nature of these social worlds thus came to be seen as important in determining what certain words could mean/do, and sociocultural theorists drew on work that foregrounded social context. The following explains how language, learners and learning were conceptualised in socioculturally-oriented work, and then how these concepts have been taken up in second language education research. Language, learning and learners in sociocultural theory

In the 1980s and 1990s, many psychologists interested in sociocultural theory (SCT) began to read the work of two early–mid 20th century scholars from the Soviet Union: literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin and psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky (Cole, 1996, 1998; Wertsch, 1991, 1998). Unlike structural linguists, Bakhtin (1981) believed in the importance of studying language use (utterances) situated in specific sociocultural contexts. With regard to context, he argued that understanding language use required attention not only to speakers’ and listeners’ contemporary and

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historical social positionings, but also to their past, present and future linguistic contexts. For him, language was situated in a ‘chain of speech communication’ of past, present and future utterances and discourses on the same and related topics. Thus, for him, utterances were ‘dialogically’ linked to one another. Sociocultural psychologist Wertsch (1991) considered dialogicality – voices coming into contact – to be the most basic theoretical construct in Bakhtin’s work. For Bakhtin, utterances were joint productions: speakers constructed their utterances on the basis of their interaction with listeners, in both actual and assumed communities. Interlocutors’ social positions mattered, as did previous and future speakers’ and hearers’ positions; hence, ‘fi nding a place’ in the chain of speech communication was neither easy nor simple. Bakhtin spoke of the struggle for ownership of language, the need for speakers to wrest language from other people’s mouths and intentions: Words are, initially, the other’s words, and at foremost, the mother’s words. Gradually, these ‘alien words’ change, dialogically, to become one’s ‘own alien words’ until they are transformed into ‘one’s own words’. (Bakhtin, 1984: 385, cited in Smolka et al., 1995: 18, their translation of Bakhtin) The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!) but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s concrete contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin, 1981: 293–294)

For Bakhtin, individuals never create utterances on their own, either out of their individual psychological reality or through application of the rules of a syntactic system. Rather, he saw speakers ‘trying on’ other people’s utterances, taking them from other people’s mouths, appropriating these utterances and gradually (but not without conflict) directing these utterances to serve their needs and relay their meanings. We come to know our native language – its lexical composition and grammatical structure – not from dictionaries and grammars but from concrete utterances which we hear and which we ourselves reproduce in live speech communication with people around us. We assimilate forms of language only in forms of utterances … [They] enter our experience and consciousness together. (Bakhtin, 1986: 78)

Persons use their ‘voices’, when they enter the communicative chain, as they initially appropriate others’ utterances and then bend these utterances to their own intentions. Dialogicality for Bakhtin is how speakers

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get past ventriloquation (using other people’s language) in order to enter the communicative chain, for in fi nding words to answer another speaker’s utterance, a person fi nds and expresses voice. How learners enter the communicative chain, or how they learn to use language, was also a central concern of Bakhtin’s contemporary, L.S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky (1978) emphasised the social construction of learning, with regard not only to participants in instructional events, but also to what counts as necessary or desirable learning. Recognising that psychologists traditionally examined individual development and functioning, Vygotsky and his colleagues aimed to establish a psychology congruent with Marxist ideas about the importance of social relations (cf. Measures et al., 1997; Rosa & Montero, 1994). For these theorists, the social world was constitutive of humans (as well as constituted by humans), and was not just a surrounding context for them. This basic idea of the reflexivity of individuals and their social worlds made Vygotsky’s work different from much Western psychology which, as we have already seen, tended to see individual development as independent of social relations (Wertsch, 1991). Vygotsky’s observation that children’s mental processes (learning) are constructed through relationships with others (often adults) provided a basis for his interest in the social formation of individuals. He observed and called attention to mental processes in children evident in relationships with others (as in joint problem solving with more skilled partners) that were not evident when the children were alone. He theorised the phenomenon of a child functioning ‘as though he were a head taller than himself’ in social interaction as a child’s potential area of growth, a child’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 102). Sociocultural psychologist Rogoff and her colleagues claimed that this hypothesis could be understood as more skilled partners ‘bring[ing] the intellectual tools of society within the reach of children’ (Rogoff et al., 1993: 232) and thus facilitating activity leading to growth. Vygotsky saw intellectual tools as mediations between humans and the world, seeing human beings as mediating their interactions with one another through the use of culturally and historically formed psychological and material artefacts. For him, participation in social activities was importantly mediated with language.4 As well, he saw material mediations or tools as parallel in many ways to ‘psychological tools’, like natural languages, counting systems, mnemonic devices, writing, signs, and so on (Wertsch, 1991). Vygotsky used the notion of the zone of proximal development to focus attention on the sociality of learning and on children’s potentials and future growth. Educational literature throughout the 1990s increasingly invoked the notion of the zone of proximal development as a theoretical support for recommended instructional practices, especially the provision of supportive ‘scaffolding’ for students (through collaboration with peers, for example).

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This wider cultural and historical focus on sociality did not figure much in second language instructional methodology literature when LEaS was fi rst written; as I have already observed, such literature rather abstractly discussed the social conditions and origins of learning, but thereafter commonly focused on assessing and describing individual internalisation of the second language. Sociality was dismissed, so to speak, as a background to individual internalisation. Rogoff and her colleagues (1993: 234) suggested that internalisation might be better thought of as appropriation, so as to emphasise that learners, already participants in activities, learn to manage them, rather than ‘engaging in a two-stage process of first, social lessons, and then individual internalisation to put these lessons inside their heads’. A SCT perspective would see second language learning, then, as a process of appropriating the second language in specific situations and learning to manage the activities – participate in the conversations, perhaps, in McDermott’s (1993) terms – of a particular context. This view began to gain ground and sociocultural analyses of language learning became numerous in the late 1990s and 2000s (Atkinson, 2002; Johnson, 2006; Lantolf, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; Swain et al., 2010, and many others). As well, sociocultural conceptualisations of learners became more numerous at this time. Theorists from a variety of disciplines throughout the 1990s objected to a conceptualisation of both individuals and groups as having essences independent of the social relations within which they act. Many feminist theorists, for example, criticised hypotheses about essential distinctions between women and men, preferring to see gender not as internal traits of persons but as performances conducted under specific relations of power (Bryson & de Castell, 1997; de Beauvoir, 1993). Essentialising, they argued, denied the multiplicity of human experiences and aspirations and promoted ‘repressively stereotypic norms of gender appropriateness’ (Bryson & de Castell, 1997: 98). Feminist scholar Gal (1991: 176) argued that, rather than a set of stable characteristics or essences, gender is ‘a system of culturally constructed relations of power, produced and reproduced in interaction between and among men and women’. For Gal, conceptualisations of women and men as members of groups with stable or essential characteristics did not do justice to how local, unstable power relations shaped performances of gender. Cultural theorists also critiqued the practice of ascribing more or less stable constellations of characteristics, both positive and negative, to groups and individuals defi ned on the basis of culture. Hall (1990: 225), for example, argued for a notion of cultural identity as situated in ‘time, history and culture’: Cultural identity is not a fi xed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark … Not an essence but a positioning. (Hall, 1990: 226)

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Hall’s argument that identity is not an essence, but a positioning, brings into focus the social construction of that positioning, the politics of position. From this perspective, identity is unstable, constructed in particular local discursive interactions and entails relationships of power. French philosopher Foucault (1979) observed that the practices of categorising individuals and attaching them to their identities were enacted in particular institutions (like prisons and schools) in Western Europe, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries. Individuals, in his view, were constructed by the practices of the institutions with which they were engaged. He further argued that individuals categorised as too far from a norm underwent sanctions to ‘normalise’ them (Foucault, 1979). In the 1990s, some language education researchers were critical of the ways in which SLA research conceptualised learners as having no particular social locations or histories, and a collection of papers by various authors in a special topic issue of TESOL Quarterly (Norton, 1997a) applied then-current feminist, cultural and poststructural theories to the study of second language learners and learning. For these authors, much SLA research characterised learners in ways that did not take dynamism over time and place into account. Similarly, these authors saw previous SLA research as unable to account satisfactorily for power relations in learning events. More recently, Darvin and Norton (2015: 37) have pointed out: ‘[The socio-discursive] lens challenges educational agents to reflect on the material conditions that allow learning to take place, and how learners, inscribed by race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and sexual orientation are accorded or refused the right to speak’. Darvin and Norton (2015) have described the remarkable amount of scholarship in language education that has been focused on learner and teacher identity and that has examined the unequal distribution of various forms of capital, and how those inequalities have impact on language learners and teachers. This scholarship locates humans as central both as recipients of unequal distribution of material resources and/or unequal learning/teaching ‘conditions’, and as variously situated agents who attempt to affect material resource distribution and/or conditions. There were and are many second language learning studies that take this socially situated view (e.g. Appel & Lantolf, 1994; Bourne, 1992; Gutiérrez & Larson, 1994; Hawkins, 2005; Johnson, 2006, 2009; Kanno & Applebaum, 1995; Knouzi et al., 2011; Lantolf, 2000c, 2006; Lantolf & Poehner, 2011; Poehner & Lantolf, 2005; Vasquez et al., 1994; Willett, 1995, and many others). I review some of their specific contributions to my study in various places later in this book. Some of these researchers have consulted scholarship in psychology that investigated aspects of the sociocultural contexts in which children and adults learn and function (e.g. Cole, 1996, 1998; Rogoff et al., 1996; Wertsch, 1991, 1998). The contributions of linguists, sociolinguists and anthropologists have also provided important background (e.g. Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Goodwin, 1990; Ochs, 1988; Streeck et al., 2011). Many of

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these scholars saw the work of Vygotsky, Bakhtin and their contemporaries as foundational to the development of SCT. As well, many of these Soviet scholars’ ideas were reflected in the work of American anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), who provided a concept that many found helpful – communities of practice – to explain how the social practices of sociocultural contexts are constitutive of the learning that occurs in them. Together, the work of these theorists provided means for me to examine the social practices of second language learning in my research site. Communities of practice

Lave and Wenger proposed what became a very influential concept: communities of practice. The emphasis on individual minds and individual learning found in much psychological work was challenged by their discussion, summarised by linguist William Hanks (1991): Learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework, not in an individual mind … It is the community, or at least those participating in the learning context, who ‘learn’ under this defi nition. Learning is, as it were, distributed among coparticipants, not a one-person act. (Hanks, 1991, in Lave & Wenger, 1991: 15) Rather than asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, they ask what kind of social engagements provide the proper context for learning to take place. (Hanks, 1991, in Lave & Wenger, 1991: 14)

Lave and Wenger provided examples of how learning in a variety of contexts is centrally a matter of social practice. While Vygotsky’s attention to context focused on human macro-societal practices and groupings as well as (usually) dyads engaged in explicitly instructional processes, Lave and Wenger’s focus was on what they called ‘communities of practice’: relationships among groups of people engaged in specific, local, historically constructed, changing practices, of which only some might be intentionally instructional. For them: A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 98)

Membership in these communities shifts and newcomers participate (in ‘attenuated ways’) with old-timers in the performance of community practices. Lave and Wenger suggested the notion of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ to describe the engagement in community practices of all participants who have varied degrees of familiarity with the practices of the community. Lave and Wenger’s volume was one among an increasing number of publications in the 1990s in which psychologists, anthropologists,

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philosophers and educators proposed what they variously termed situated cognition or sociocultural, socio-historical or cultural-historical theory, all of which sought ‘to better reflect the fundamentally social nature of learning and cognition’ (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997: 1). For these theorists, moving focus from the isolated thinking individual, to collectives, settings and activities permitted analysis of relations within settings and examination of the learning that inevitably accompanies social practice. Communities might provide more or less desirable, powerful or equitable positions for participants within them, but – through the practices in which participants engage – all participants learn. What they might learn is shaped by the kinds of positions they might occupy. Some might even learn something like ‘assume a minimal role in this activity’. Lave and Wenger (1991: 98) noted that the ‘social structure of the community of practice, its power relations and its conditions for legitimacy defi ne possibilities for learning (i.e. for legitimate peripheral participation)’. This perspective, which emphasised the importance of the social in human action, was recognised by some as only a partial solution to developing a comprehensive view of cognition. Collins (1993) argued that the social theory underlying some sociocultural work leant toward a social determinism that, Kirshner and Whitson (1997: 7) argued, ‘undervalues the productive possibilities of everyday confl icts and contradictions’. Forman et al. (1993: 6) pointed out that an emphasis on the sociocultural contexts of human beings should not obscure from view ‘real people who develop a variety of interpersonal relationships with one another in the course of their shared activity in a given institutional context’. These authors were all concerned that understandings of learning and action should seriously take into account not only social practices but also individual performance and understandings of those practices. Another critique by Hughes et al. (2007) provided multiple perspectives on how the concept of communities of practice is primarily oriented toward the social, despite its mention of tools and activities. The new materiality perspectives (to be described in Chapter 2) take up the ways in which tools and activities are centrally involved in social (human) interactions. Second language learning from a sociocultural perspective

From a Vygotskian perspective, a second language could be seen as one among many mediating means people use to participate in social activities. Investigation of second language learning, then, would include investigation of how variously located newcomers use these mediational means in their particular contexts. How social activities are organised in any particular location will affect how newcomers come to appropriate the use of these tools. Second language learning research that draws on Vygotskian views has proliferated throughout the past 20 or so years, and

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interested readers might wish to consult Lantolf (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2006), Lantolf and Poehner (2011) and Thorne and Tasker (2011). As well, Bakhtin’s observations about the sociality of speech and language and the development of voice and dialogicality have been taken up in some second language education research (Ball & Freeman, 2004; Hall et al., 2005; Maguire, 2005; Maguire & Graves, 2001). Rather than seeing second language learners as gradually internalising and applying the rules of a variety of systems (syntactic, phonological, semantic, pragmatic, and so on) of a standard language, Bakhtin’s work encouraged a perception of beginners in a language doing the complicated linguistic, social and psychological work of constructing ‘voices’ within specific communities, taking ‘words from another’s mouth’ and, at the same time, constructing a point of view, a ‘speaking subject’s perspective, conceptual horizon, intention and world view’ (Wertsch, 1991: 51). Many scholars of second language education have utilised the community of practice perspective (Flowerdew, 2000; Kanno & Norton, 2003; Morita, 2004; Norton, 2001; Toohey, 1996, 1998, and many others). Norton (2001) introduced the notion of ‘imagined communities’ to the second language learning field, conceptualising language learners as aspiring to belong to such communities during the period of their language learning. A sociocultural perspective on second language learning holds that learners struggle to appropriate others’ voices and to ‘bend’ these to their own purposes, and that learners’ and their interlocutors’ past, present and future social positioning, and their membership in various communities, crucially affect how they manage that appropriation. If, by participating in language or coming to voice, learners fi nd answering words for others’ words, attention to those others and to the learners’ social contexts is critically important. My study responded to these issues. Summary

Bakhtin’s (1981) focus on language usage in social contexts (and not on language as a system independent of its users) encouraged analysis of how learners come to (struggle to) construct voices that convey their meanings. Learners’ social positions and contexts matter profoundly in these processes. To conceptualise learners in new ways for the research reported in the fi rst edition of LEaS, I drew on feminist, cultural and poststructural theorists’ positions on identity as socially constructed, contradictory, dynamic and entailing power. I considered Foucault’s notion that the practices of institutions with which they are affiliated or by which they are regulated, construct rankings for individuals. With respect to learning, I found Vygotsky’s ideas persuasive, as well as those of other contemporary advocates of similar sociocultural, socio-historical or cultural-historical theories, scholars who argued that relations and practices among members of communities constitute those members’ learning.

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Learning English at School

From this perspective, the researcher sees learners’ identities, as well as their learning, constructed in the practices of the communities in which they are situated. The theory also recognises that some participants have more access to and more experience in the use of various of the community’s mediating means (e.g. language) than others, and that some participants are more and some less advantageously positioned in their community. A classroom being a kind of community, one can examine its practices not only in terms of how they identify learners and how the learners take up and are assigned identities, but also in terms of how differential access to the classroom language arises. For children learning a second language, part of constructing voices for themselves is coming to be seen as particular sorts of ‘selves’ in their school community, that is, coming to have identities as schoolchildren. My study began by examining how children of minority language background in a particular classroom came to inhabit (temporarily and in contradictory ways) particular identities in their classrooms. I understood those identities as having effects: they might determine or at least influence what these children could do and say and in what kinds of conversations they were permitted to engage. Research Questions

The questions that originally guided this project included this general question: (1) How do the focal minority language background children engage with each other and their teachers over the course of their primary schooling? and these more specific questions: (2) How do identity practices affect the access of the focal children to classroom conversations and thus to possibilities for appropriating voice? (3) How do physical, material and intellectual resource distribution practices affect the access of the focal children to classroom conversations and thus to possibilities for appropriating voice? (4) How do discourse practices affect the access of the focal children to classroom conversations and thus to possibilities for appropriating voice? These latter questions revolve around aspects of classroom practice and I address each separately in three successive classrooms – the kindergarten, the Grade 1 classroom and the Grade 2 classroom, respectively. In  this second edition, I also read my observations and interpretations through literature on new materiality and, where relevant and possible, I  analyse what this theory might add to our means of conceptualising language learning. Before proceeding to these questions, however, I close

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this chapter with a description of the research site and the methodology I employed. The Research Site

The suburban city in which Suburban School5 sits had a population in 1999 of about 300,000, and was and is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada with a population of over 450,000 in 2011. There is great diversity in its residents’ socio-economic circumstances and micro-geographic environments. Although it has had a local reputation as being physically unattractive and crime ridden, and its citizens are sometimes depicted as uneducated and working class, in fact the suburb contains many middleclass neighbourhoods, as well as wealthy neighbourhoods of large expensive houses on sizeable acreage. In other parts of the suburb, the urban sprawl that gives the city its reputation is evident, with wide, busy streets lined with strip malls and large areas of low-rental housing. In 1999, about 25% of the population of Suburban City as a whole spoke languages other than or in addition to English, and they had greatly diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In 2016, more than 45% of the city residents spoke languages other than English, with the same wide diversity as in 1999. Punjabi Sikhs were and are the only ethnic group to have a ‘quarter’ (although many other Punjabi-origin immigrants live throughout the city), with a temple, homes, retail stores, restaurants and other service and commercial centres clustered within a roughly six-block radius. Members of other ethnic-linguistic groups live individually and in small clusters all over the city. Suburban School sits in an area of the city regarded as among the less attractive, adjacent to a busy four-lane arterial access for a major highway. A large shopping mall is located about a kilometre away from the school. Adjacent to the school’s playgrounds are a rent-controlled townhouse complex, a secondary school’s playing fields and streets of small, mostly well-kept lower middle- and working-class single-family residences. The 1996 and 2011 census information on family income and education levels placed this neighbourhood as working class. Census information lists English, Punjabi, Chinese, Polish, Vietnamese and Tagalog as languages spoken by residents in the school catchment area. People considered the area around the school fairly dangerous at night because of several incidents of youth, gang and sexual violence; like many parents, parents of children in the school were generally concerned about child safety issues. Parental concerns about the safety of minority children might have increased with the beating murder of an elderly Sikh man not far from Suburban School during the time of my research. The accused killers had links to a white supremacist group. Safety concerns might also have been increased by a newspaper report that an organiser from the Aryan

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Resistance Movement, another white supremacist organisation, claimed to have student members in Suburban City schools. Suburban School, an elementary public school (kindergarten to Grade 7) was built more than 50 years ago and, in 1999, was visibly rundown. Enrolment over the three years of the research was almost 400 children, but decreased somewhat over the course of those years: the principal believed that some catchment area parents had become concerned about the building’s age and had enrolled their children elsewhere. Many classrooms were uncomfortably hot in the summer and all were dusty. Much of the equipment was old and worn, although there was a computer laboratory with new, expensive computers. As many as seven classes were held in portables. Heating in the buildings was unpredictable. Specialists like the learning assistance teachers, English as a second language (ESL) teachers, and counsellors had small instructional areas in poor condition. Suburban School’s district has struggled in times of reduced government funds and generally growing enrolments to respond adequately to the need for repair and renewal of schools. Many of the approximately 30 teachers at Suburban School had been there for several years. They believed this was a good school in which to work and that the children and their parents appreciated their efforts. When interviewed for teaching positions at Suburban School, all were asked about their willingness to work with children who speak English as a second language. School district records indicated in 1999 that almost 50% of the children at the school came from homes where languages other than English were spoken. Methodology

I was a participant observer for three years at this school. After gaining approval from all agencies concerned, I met fi rst with the principal, and later with the kindergarten teacher, Mrs Clark, and fi nally with her class. Consent forms, sent home with the children, were returned, indicating parents’ permission for me to observe, audiotape and sometimes videotape their children. Among the 19 children in this kindergarten, Mrs Clark identified 11 as native speakers of English and eight as English as second language (ESL)6 learners. These minority language background children came from homes where Laotian, Punjabi, Polish and Chinese were used. I selected the six focal children after about three visits. I selected the two children in the class (a boy and a girl) whose home language was Punjabi, two children (a boy and a girl) whose home language was Polish, and two (a boy and a girl) whose home language was Chinese.7 Which Chinese language(s) these children spoke was not obvious from their registration information, Mrs Clark was not sure, and the children did not respond to questions about this. I selected the children I did because a boy and a girl

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from each of these language backgrounds were enrolled (eliminating the single boy who spoke Laotian in the class). However, my first observations as well as the fi rst interviews with the focal children’s parents made it clear that even these six ‘ESL learners’ had a wide variety of pre-school fi rst language and English experience. Knowing that such diversity authentically typified the school’s (and the district’s) classrooms, I decided to work with this sample of children in observing their experiences learning and using English for the next three years. Because I made no attempt to compare individual competence over time, the fact that the children started from such different baselines was not a problem. I deliberately did not assess the children’s English proficiency at the beginning of the research or at the end. I had, and have, specific concerns about language proficiency testing (Toohey, 2008), and wished instead to try to understand how the children were using and learning English as they engaged in classroom (and sometimes playground) activities. In the kindergarten classroom, I observed once a week in the classroom for a morning and for a whole day once a month. In the Grade 1 classroom, I observed for a morning once a week. When the children were enrolled in Grade 2, I observed once a week during their 1.5-hour language arts class. During this Grade 2 year, graduate student researchers Sarah Yip and Elaine Day joined me in conducting observations. Sarah and Elaine observed sometimes on the same day as I did, sometimes on other days. Throughout the research, I kept fieldnotes and frequently audiotaped classroom interactions. Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education’s highly experienced videographer, Linda Hof, videotaped the classrooms at least once a month throughout the three years of the study, for a total of almost 80 hours of videotape. Student researchers Sarah and Elaine were joined by Lisa Day in transcribing the video-recordings. Sarah, Elaine and two other research assistants – Thoko Muthwa-Kuehn and Allyson Julé-Lemke – and I reviewed videotapes as I completed drafts of chapters, and we all looked for examples that confirmed or contradicted the observations we made of classroom practices and events (Toohey et al., 2000). I interviewed all the parents (in English) at the beginning of the study. Bilingual research assistants (Kunwal Aurora, Karen Dhaliwal-Rai, Dr Bozena Karwowska, Sarah Yip and Lanny Young) subsequently interviewed the parents twice each year in their home languages. They also interviewed the children in their homes at the same time to document the children’s use of their home languages. I interviewed each teacher formally three times during each of the three years of the research. We also discussed matters of interest informally as they came up, during class times, recess, lunch hours, and so on. Research assistants transcribed the tape-recorded teacher interviews.

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The research assistants and I transcribed both the audio- and videotape recordings. I randomly checked transcripts for accuracy, and checked transcripts that were to be published. In the case of the interviews with parents and children in their home languages, the bilingual research assistants who conducted the interviews made English summaries of them. I began the analysis of my observations collected in the study with respect to the practices by which children came to construct and be assigned identities as schoolchildren. Chapter 3 begins that exploration, as I introduce the children and give examples of their interactions in their kindergarten which contributed, I believe, to how they were seen by others there. But first, I explain the concepts from the new materialism literature that I apply in subsequent chapters to the observations I made in the classrooms. Chapter 2 describes the theory-practice coordinates of this perspective. Notes (1) Ortega (2013: 17) dated the beginning of the field of SLA with Selinker’s (1972) ‘fielddefi ning publication’, in which he discussed how learners create successive ‘interlanguages’ on their way to acquiring a target language. (2) Canadian philosopher Taylor (1989, 1994) traced the origin of this idea of individuals having specific attributes, abilities and motivations to Western European thought and practices in the 17th and 18th centuries. The assumption of individuals having unique, fi xed and coherent ‘essences’ in congruence with which they learn, think and act has been, Taylor argued, authoritative in Western religions, economics and politics; individuals’ social locations were seen as relatively superficial aspects of their personhood, not necessarily even affecting core characteristics. (3) A focus on [the politics of] social and cultural construction makes the ‘naturalness’ of social arrangements and constructs problematic. From this perspective, a concept like ‘natural communicative language skills’ (Strong, 1983), for example, would be investigated with a view to discovering what kinds of communication skills are seen as ‘natural’; Who do they appear ‘natural’ for (and importantly, who are they seemingly not ‘natural’ for)? Who makes decisions about the rank of ‘skills’? Who benefits from the selection of some competencies rather than others for ranking, and so on. (4) Wertsch (1991) makes the point that Vygotsky’s emphasis on the use of language may have been because of the particular sociocultural characteristics of his own community, as later studies (e.g. Rogoff et al., 1993) have shown less reliance on verbal means in non-European communities. (5) I have assigned the school, city, teachers and children fictitious names to protect their anonymity. Attempts have been made in the case of the children to represent the ethnic identification of their given names. (6) The language in use at the time of the research in this school district was ‘ESL’. (7) It subsequently became clear that one of the Chinese children (Amy) came from a Cantonese-speaking home, and Teochew was used in the home of the other child (Harvey).

2 New Materialism and Language Learning

The way we think about matter and the images we use to do so have far-reaching implications for the way we think about ourselves as human as well as for the way we treat nature and other embodied selves Coole, 2010: 112

Sociocultural psychologist Wertsch lamented in 1991 that psychology and the other human sciences seemed unable to do anything consequential about the myriad inequalities and conflicts facing contemporary societies. Actor-network theorist Latour (2004: 225) was of the same opinion about the social sciences and humanities in general, and wondered if the critical de-constructionism of contemporary scholarship in general had a part to play in the current situation of ‘Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars and wars against terrorism. … Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction?’ Like Latour, Wertsch and many others, philosopher Braidotti (2013) urged attention to income and educational inequalities, gender violence, racism, environmental violence and other threats to life, and proposed that scholars need to think in ways that acknowledge the links among these problems, and also need to examine these problems in ways that acknowledge the importance of not only human life and flourishing. The persistent calls for inter- or transdisciplinary and engaged research by many scholars recognise the entangled and material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species and the natural environment (Frodeman et al., 2017). The growing scholarship that recognises these linkages refers to such a perspective as posthumanism, feminist materialism, process philosophy, relational ontologies or new materialism. I use the latter term in this book. Feminist political theorists Coole and Frost (2010: 8) observed that a ‘trait of the new materialism is its antipathy to oppositional ways of thinking’, and that its prevailing ‘ethos … is more positive and constructive than critical or negative’. While sociocultural theory (SCT) provided the theoretical framework for the fi rst edition of Learning English at School (LEaS), and while I think that analysis is still valid and helpful, I am 25

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persuaded that new materialist scholarship offers additional concepts with which to think in new and expansive ways about contemporary issues, including education, and second language education in particular. In this chapter, I review some of new materialism’s concepts: (1) non-dualism, relational ontologies and non-essentialism; (2) intra-action, agential realism, desiring and affect; (3) language from a new materialist perspective; and (4) new materialist ways of research (including research apparatuses) and (5) representation, pointing out how each of these concepts differs from or builds upon sociocultural perspectives. Throughout these conceptual explanations, I discuss how the insights of new materialism may be helpful in language education research. Non-dualism, Relational Ontologies and Non-essentialism

New materialism, feminist materialism, posthumanism and process philosophy index a set of perspectives drawn upon in contemporary scholarship across a number of fields: anthropology, education, feminist studies, geography, philosophy, physics, sociology, and science and technology studies. Emphases and interpretations are various, but one commonality might be summarised as a rejection of traditional Western European philosophical dualisms and hierarchies (human/non-human, thinking/feeling, male/female, mind/body, native speaker/non-native speaker, and so on). Dualism has a long history in Western European thought, with Plato understanding form and matter as distinct, Descartes arguing that mind and body are separate and Christian philosophers separating soul from body, heaven from earth, men from women, and so on. Other religious, cultural and philosophical traditions do not make the same dualistic assumptions found in the Western European tradition. For example, North American Standing Rock Sioux scholar, Deloria wrote: American Indians, understanding that the universe consisted of living entities, were interested in learning how other forms of life behaved, for they saw that every entity had a personality and could exercise a measure of free will and choice. … Because the universe is alive, there is choice for all things and the future is indeterminate. (Deloria, 1999: 50–53)

Métis scholar Todd (2016: 5) pointed out that this view has been written and talked about in Indigenous scholarship for some time, and briefly described the writing of Inuk author Qitsualik (1998) about the Western Arctic (Canada) concept of Sila: ‘the breathe [sic] that circulates into and out of every living thing’. As noted in the Introduction to this book, Todd argued that understanding that humans, the environment, water, climate, animals, and so on are in relation with one another was characteristic of the thinking of various Indigenous groups. Todd suggested that progress in new materialism (or postmodern ontologies) will mean that we

New Materialism and Language Learning 27

recognise ‘fi rst and foremost, [we are] citizens embedded in dynamic legal orders and systems of relations that require us to work constantly and thoughtfully across the myriad systems of thinking, acting and governance within which we fi nd ourselves enmeshed’ (Todd, 2016: 16).1 Todd argued that this ignoring of Indigenous scholarship is a result of enduring colonialism within the academy, and she cited the work of Sundberg (2013: 35), who argued that the ‘nature/culture split’, which new materialists critique as a universally shared duality, is actually ‘localized to specific knowledge traditions [Western European]’, and it has not been the way these matters are seen by many Indigenous thinkers. For readers who have too seldom read or drawn on the knowledge traditions of Indigenous scholars, Todd helpfully provided extensive citations of such work, and suggested that decolonisation efforts will include citations of other than ‘a Great Thinker who is on the public speaking circuit these days’ (Todd, 2016: 19). As well as asserting that human things (minds, bodies) are not separate but entangled 2 with one another, new materialist scholars take the distinction between humans and non-humans to be an important dualism to contest; as anthropologist Ingold (2013: 31) put it, a new materialist perspective ‘returns persons to where they belong, with the continuum of organic life’. Education scholars Davies and Gannon (2009: 132) similarly wrote: ‘human, animal, earth and other matter – all exist, and exist in networks of relationality, dependence and influence’. Everything existing in relation with other things is, for Westerners, a novel way of thinking about being or existence or reality, and this perspective is also sometimes known as the ‘ontological turn’ (Heywood, 2012; Holbraad, 2012). Materialist accounts invite us to refrain from positing a priori ontological boundaries between material things, such as people, tools, furniture, and so on. Rather, things are becoming in relation with other things, a view often referred to as a relational ontology. While SCT, like the new materialisms, also rejects binaries like self/ society and individual/culture (Kirschner & Martin, 2010), SCT retains primary focus on human interactions, with the non-human seen as context and/or mediations for human activity. An SCT perspective investigates how human persons are situated (and often, how they agentially situate themselves) in positions in social/historical/cultural collectives, and how humans use mediations, sometimes physical but also what Vygotsky called ‘psychological tools’ like language, mathematics, and so on, to accomplish their objectives. New materialism, by contrast, argues that an anthropocentric focus on what humans do, to/with one another, on what their intentions are or on what is done to them ignores important aspects of how the world operates, pointing out that material things also perform: ‘They act, together with other things and forces, to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010: 7).

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Related to the rejection of dualisms, and in common with SCT, new materialist accounts argue that fi xed, determinable and essential qualities cannot be attributed to human persons. Going beyond SCT, however, new materialists argue that fi xed and essential qualities cannot be attributed to (for example) the animate or the inanimate, or to human persons or non-human things; rather, the claim is that material people, animals, objects, nature, discourses, and so on, proceed (and are becoming together) in relation to and with one another. As Chepximiya Siyam (Janice George), hereditary chief of the Squamish nation in West Vancouver (Canada), put it in a discussion about woven Salish blankets worn in ceremonies, ‘You should think about blankets as merged objects. They are alive because they exist in the spirit world. They are the animal. They are part of the hunter; they are part of the weaver; they are part of the wearer’ (Tepper et al., 2017: 1). This entanglement view differs from SCT which forefronts humans, and sees tools (material and psychological) as mediations in human activity. Barad (2007: 93) argued: ‘In new materialism, the boundaries of any of the objects or subjects of studies are not taken for granted’. However, she also observed that ‘the material discursive boundary making practices that produce objects and subjects and other differences out of and in terms of a changing relationality’ should be of great interest and, like French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005), she asked: what do these boundary-making practices produce? Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005: 306) explained relational ontology in their proposal for thinking of humans and non-humans as joined in ‘assemblages’ (the English translation of their term agencement) in which mutual entailment and influence are ubiquitous. The concept of assemblage of diverse things has been influential in new materiality studies in education. Literacy scholars Ehret et al. (2016), for example, examined assemblages of bodies-materials-place in a school in which young people were making digital videos of books they had read. The authors examined how boundaries between media-based and book-based ideas for videomaking were constructed in assemblages that included the spaces in which the students worked, and how these ideas became differently valued with movement (e.g. from a classroom to a playground). In particular, they were interested in how one or the other of these ideas was excluded or most readily taken up in the two sites. Similarly, Smythe et  al. (2014) examined how, in two institutional sites (a public school classroom and a community organisation), video-making required substantial material ‘work-arounds’ to make video production possible. Small classrooms, many bodies, iPads and their applications, funding agencies and extension cords were entangled in various ways, and the video-making that occurred in these sites required the creation of new assemblages (the work-arounds). Educational researchers Bhatt and de Roock (2013: 6) used the term ‘sociomaterial assemblage’ to describe classroom events and to describe a

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method that is able, as they put it, ‘to attend to the ecology of practices (and their contestations, impasses, breakthroughs, etc.) in a digital literacy event to see how sociomaterial relations are assembled and their realities (such as class work, assignments) are done’. Rejection of dualism, hierarchical systems of value, and essentialism are found in the work of many feminist scholars and, as we have already seen, in SCT. What new materialism adds is its emphasis on the relational entangled nature of animate and inanimate entities that are always in states of becoming. New materialism sees people, discourses, practices and things continually in relation, under construction and changing together, becoming different from what they were before. This is a perspective that, by defi nition, cannot deliver universality or fi nality about how assemblages might behave, but it may be able to deal productively with the complexity of events in education. To return to the issue of scholarship helping us resolve the crucial problems of the contemporary world, this view stresses the potentiality of relationships among humans, discourses and the material world and argues that, while universal solutions to problems are impossible, the evanescence, unpredictability and actions of specific assemblages offer hope for partial, situated, provisional and differential outcomes (or at least, change).

‘Intra-action’, ‘Agential Cuts’, Desire and ‘Affect’ Intra-action

For new materialists, human bodies, discourses, environments, technologies, and so on are continuously changing, learning and adapting in intra-action (Barad, 2011) with one another. Barad’s term intra-action contrasts with (or builds from) the idea of interaction. She argued that, if two things are in interaction, then they are separate entities with individual characteristics, but if they are what they are in relation to one another, they intra-act and come into being (on their way to becoming something else) through their entanglement. She illustrated this view of intra-action considering early 20th century physics experiments investigating the nature of light. With one particular apparatus of enquiry, light is a wave; with another, it is a particle. Barad explained that this apparent contradiction is not only because of our instrumentation; rather, she argued that light does not become ‘a thing’ until it is measured, and the instrument of measurement (as well as the measurer) is entangled with the phenomenon. In quantum physics, phenomena that trouble our sense of what things are have been recognised at the subatomic level. Barad (2007) and others have argued that our habit of seeing things as having fi xed inherent natures misrepresents reality. Indeed, Atwood and López (2014: 1147) argued that new materialism entails questioning the

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‘very nature of reality itself’. With entanglements of phenomena, observers and apparatuses, intra-actions are fundamentally indeterminate. The concept of intra-action urges attention to relations among mutually entailed, relationally identified things and, as Barad put it in conversation with Kleinmann: [T]he notion of ‘intra-action’ queers the familiar sense of causality (where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect), and more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism (the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities, as well as times and places). […] [I]ndividuals do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intraaction. (Kleinmann, 2012: 77)

Educational researchers interested in thinking about intra-action in phenomena at more macroscopic levels than the subatomic, such as classrooms, might examine how physical locations, the objects available (furniture, books, human bodies, paper, computers, water, snowmobiles, and so on), discourses on the nature of ‘knowledge’ and learning (materialised in books, curriculum documents, staff room conversations, and so on), and political, educational and economic policies are assembled and entangled, and how they ‘intra-act’ with one another; further, observers would query how they are changing together and how they might or could change together. Indeed, Barad wrote about the ethical responsibility of intellectuals to recognise and document socio-material linkages and intraactions and, further, to participate in those intra-actions. She noted, ‘particular possibilities exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering’ (Barad, 2003: 827). Such a perspective moves away from static, transcendent traits of ‘identity’ to a concern for change, reciprocal relations and difference, and underscores ‘the intrinsic indeterminacy and mobility at the heart of any process of becoming’ (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014: 34). Educators in early childhood education (ECE) have taken up some of the implications of the concept of intra-action (e.g. Dahlberg et al., 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Olsson, 2009; Smythe et  al., 2017). ECE centres, instituted in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia by educator Loris Malaguzzi after WWII, have provided inspiration for ECE practices in many places. Malaguzzi believed that learning was a result of children’s activities and the resources available to them, and strove to fi nd ways to determine children’s interests and growing understandings in order to provide them with the activities and resources they needed to continue learning. Like American philosopher Dewey (1916), Reggio Emilia-inspired teachers believe that children learn through encountering ‘problems’ (inconsistencies, illogicalities, non-comprehension, an inability to do something, and so on), and experimenting with possible solutions, leading to other problems or learning opportunities. These educators believed that

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documenting children’s activities in particular ways could make their learning and their interest in specific problems evident. Swedish ECE researcher Olsson (2009) wrote about a pre-school classroom with fourand five-year-old children whose teachers, after a Valentine’s Day exposition on the heart, noticed the children’s interest, and provided them with stethoscopes, paper and pens. Having the stethoscopes permitted the children to hear their own heartbeats and to experiment with listening to their hearts before and after physical exertion, and the paper and pens permitted them to show in various ways those rhythms in drawings. After a great deal of discussion among the children and the teachers, it became apparent that the children were most interested in how rhythms could be illustrated on paper. Olsson described the children’s teachers documenting the children’s learning, and searching for ways to provide opportunities for them to extend their experimentation and learning activity. In Reggio Emilia-influenced ECE, teachers document children’s learning through photography, fieldnotes, and video- and/or audiotaping. This ‘pedagogical documentation’ provided teachers with (of course, incomplete) records of what children had done, but contained clues, Malaguzzi and many others believed, to the learning in which children are engaged. Olsson (2012: 89) observed that in her experience with children it became apparent that they enjoy ‘intense, undomesticated and vital experimentation rather than looking for any kind of permanent and stable knowledge’. She described ‘empirical interventions’ in classes of preschoolers in which the teachers and researchers attempted to listen deeply to children’s understandings (and to document what they saw, heard, felt, and so on) and to be ‘on the lookout for some sort of track to follow with the children’. Contrasts between undomesticated experimentation and permanent stable knowledge were theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) as ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space, with striated referring to habitual, permanent and conventional knowledge. One might think of cities, for example, as striated spaces, spaces that force our bodies (and our cars, and so on) to move in certain limited directions and follow paths planned by and used by others. Smooth spaces are exemplified by deserts or the sea, and allow bodies to move in in any direction, to take off in ‘lines of flight’ that involve imagination and creative action. Swedish ECE researcher Lenz Taguchi (2010: 105) considered what an ‘intra-active pedagogy’ might look like, and described two four-year-old boys ‘taking a ride with their pens on paper’ as they were presented with the problem of describing their way home from pre-school. The same task was presented to five-year-olds who, having a great deal of experience and skill in making drawings of what they were thinking, produced drawings that looked somewhat like conventional maps. Lenz Taguchi described these productions as ‘obedient and habitual’ and, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2005) words, as ‘striated’ productions. The four-year-olds initially had difficulty verbally

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explaining their way home, but one of them told a complicated story about getting into his house to retrieve swords. When the boys made drawings, they incorporated fanciful elements, laughed and talked intensively, making sounds, and ‘seemed to respond in a less pre-coded way’ than the five-year-olds. These boys ‘did not submit to the striations in this pedagogical space … set[ting] … off into their imaginations as a line of flight from truthful representations of the requested way home from pre-school’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 106). She argued ‘what we can see [in this intraaction between the four-year-olds] is creative and inventive intra-activity taking place, where joy, imagination and matter matters in processes of doing and thinking’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 108, her italics). Notice the ‘cut’ Lenz Taguchi made in her story of map-making: children separated by age. The cut, of course, might have been made differently and different stories and arguments might have resulted. Lenz Taguchi also made the point that both striated and smooth spaces were conducive to learning and that striated places in particular provided safety and predictability for learners. Agency and agential cuts

Much educational work has considered the construct of human agency in examining how subjects negotiate their interactions, act intentionally and effect change. Barad (2007: 33) saw agency somewhat differently: she argued that in intra-action ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ (italics in original) is apparent. For her, agency is distributed. Sociologist of science and technology and acknowledged originator of actor-network theory, Latour (1991) maintained the importance of treating human and non-human ‘actants’ as having agency, formulating this notion as a principle of ‘generalized symmetry’. Others have argued that it makes no sense to speak of non-animate things as initiating action, claiming that agency is not located in people or other entities, but is ‘afforded through connections between the assembled beings’ (Miller, 2016: 205). For Miller and many other new materialist scholars, agency arises in the relation of diverse materials, whose boundaries are indeterminate. Barad (2007) offered the concept of ‘agential cuts’ as a way to signal that in research (and life) we make boundaries between objects and activities, but that ‘cuts’ could always be made in other ways. 3 Having made particular cuts, we then design instruments or methodologies to act as apparatuses for enquiry about these objects or activities, and such enquiry can lead to discoveries about real things; however, had the cuts been made in other ways, different, perhaps even contradictory, discoveries can be made that are also real. In education, we are accustomed to examining teacher agency, learner agency and the agency of curriculum planners; poststructural and sociocultural second language education research has commonly seen human

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learning, agency and action as of fundamental interest (e.g. Norton, 2000, 2014). Such work focuses on how humans use discourse (language and other cultural systems) to act intentionally and to effect change. Humans using language or discourse would be seen by many new materialists as perhaps part of the forces involved in phenomena, but they would expand the argument to claim that ‘agency is co-constituted in the intra-activity of bodies-materials-environments’ (Ehret et al., 2016: 352). In an examination of a video-making project in a school setting, my colleagues and I described how two girls and a musical theme, and an iPad and the girls’ fi ngers intra-acted agentially to form an organisational matrix for the video they produced (Toohey et al., 2015). Desire and affect

Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) challenged the psychoanalytic notion of desire as the individual response to lack, in an attempt to conceptualise desire as distributed, circulating, and productive or destructive (or both). Like Foucault’s power relations, desire is not rational or coherent but, rather, an ‘ontological drive to become’ (Braidotti, 2013: 134). Olsson (2009: 2) provided a vivid example of the concept of ‘desiring’. She described watching her niece attempting to learn how to walk and compared that with her own attempts to learn to surf. Noting that ‘nobody has to tell a child how to start walking, they do it anyway’, she argued that children seem eager to experiment with movement, to extend their bodily abilities, for many different purposes, in many different ways, on many kinds of surfaces. To learn surfing, adults usually need instruction, much of it provided on land, but those land lessons are often not very helpful in water, where ‘you are left with experimenting and nothing else … you need to become one with the water’ to actually surf. She discussed the joy that accompanies increasing your body’s capacity to move: ‘you have joined other forces and together with these your body is capable of doing more’ (Olsson, 2009: 3). Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) offered the concept ‘assemblages of desire’ to reference how desire is a force happening among and in between assemblages, and is always experienced in the body. New materialism scholars have investigated the involvement of human bodies in various ways. Some have been interested in assemblages of neuroscience and education (e.g. Lenz Taguchi & Aronsson, 2017; Youdell, 2017). Philosopher Massumi (2002) has brought to our attention the concept of affect, a matter of ‘autonomic responses that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cognition and to be rooted in the body’ (Ley, 2011: 443). Massumi rejected the conflation of affect with emotion, preferring to see affect as independent of meaning or intention and, as some of the research he cited showed, affect occurs before emotion comes to awareness. Davies (2014: 18–19) saw affect as ‘a quality of a collective rather than an individual’, a kind of desiring felt in bodies, a ‘flow’

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originating with the children she observed, that engaged her ‘materially, conceptually, and ethically’. Dahlberg and Moss (2005: xxiii) stated: ‘When the logic of affect is activated it gives rise to collective experimenting, intensity and unpredictability. It functions like a sort of contagion that people get involved in, or rather “hooked on”’. I point out examples of activations of affect in the chapters to come. Language is of concern in much new materialist literature but it is a primary concern for second language educators and researchers. The legacy of structural linguistics has been to see language as a system and as housed (more or less accurately and completely) in individual minds. Qualitative researcher MacLure (2013) argued that seeing language usage as a material phenomenon is quite a radical departure from the tenets of structural linguistics, as well as from many other perspectives on language, including SCT. How is language conceptualised from a new materialist perspective? Understanding Language Utterances do not come from inside an already-constituted subject. Language, already collective, social and impersonal, pre-exists us and my voice comes from elsewhere: ‘the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice’. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005: 93) We need to find ways of researching ‘the materiality of language itself – the fact that language is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the body; affecting other bodies, yet of course, always leaving the body, becoming immaterial, ideational, representational, a striated, collective, cultural and symbolic resource. (MacLure, 2013: 663–664)

Grammars and dictionaries have certainly influenced our understanding of languages, as MacLure (2013: 664) put it, as ‘striated, collective, cultural and symbolic resource[s]’. Grammars and dictionaries are socially consequential representations of language usage which dictate ‘correct’ speech, signing,4 writing and understanding in particular circumstances. Sociolinguists and sociocultural observers (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) have pointed out how particularities of language use (and, for Bourdieu, bodily habitus) indexed status, power and privilege. Language users who conformed with or deviated from socially acceptable norms (represented in grammars or dictionaries), commanded different social value. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2005) discussion of voice resonates with Bakhtin’s (1981) notion that we appropriate words from others, who might be talking, writing and/or signing. 5 Similarly, Becker (1988: 185) explained: ‘All languaging is … taking old language … and … pushing it into new contexts’ (cited in García & Li, 2014: 8). This is an active view – we take words, not from grammars or dictionaries, but from other

New Materialism and Language Learning 35

people’s mouths as both we and they are becoming and engaging in the lives of our and their communities. This understanding of language is different from structuralist understandings of languages as discrete, differentiated and rule-governed systems, stable patterns, structures and meanings independent of contexts. As already discussed, structural linguistic analysis was seen as helpful in language education: ‘pedagogic grammars’ sequenced language rules in ways psycholinguistic research had proven to be most accessible, and learners’ errors could be seen as evidence of incomplete or faulty acquisition of language’s rules and could give educators guidance about what structures learners still needed to acquire. For new materialists, the linguistic concept of ‘language’ is an agential cut which abstracts language (and its users) from events, ignoring its becoming and its entanglement with the becomings of its human and nonhuman companions. As MacLure points out, language is certainly material, involved as it is with human bodies, but it is also immaterial, ideational, representational and a collective resource. Using the ‘logic of AND’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005), how are we to understand the materiality and the immateriality of language? Applied linguists García and Li (2014) considered the notion of languaging initially proposed by Varela (1979), and argued: Language is not a simple system of structures that is independent of human actions with others. The term languaging is needed to refer to the simultaneous process of continuous becomings of ourselves and of our language practices, as we interact and make meaning in the world. (García & Li, 2014: 8)6

Similarly, applied linguist Pennycook (2010: 2) argued, ‘The notion of language as a system is challenged in favour of a view of language as doing’ … ‘as a material part of social and cultural life’. The verb form ‘languaging’ suggests that speakers (and listeners, writers and readers, signers, and so on) are, in effect, appropriating utterances in assemblages of the human and non-human, all of whom are intra-acting and becoming and making meaning. Applied linguists Cenoz and Gorter (2015) gathered together the work of contributors who reject the Sausurrean view that languages are separate systems with impermeable boundaries, and the assumption that language learners develop parallel and separate competencies in the languages of their repertoires. Rather, investigations of multilinguals’ actual language practices show them using diverse language repertoires in dynamic and complex intra-actions. From this perspective, users, aware of previous instances of languaging, improvise and act and learn to use language in dialogue with other people and things, a view that takes us a long way from understanding language as a static (or at least a slowly changing) system or structure that learners must acquire.

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Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) offered the concept of ‘assemblages of desire’ to reference how desire is a force happening among and in between assemblages, and is always experienced in the body. Like learning to walk or to surf, language learning may be a matter of desiring, experimenting and intra-acting in various settings so as to ‘join other forces and together with these [you are] capable of doing more’ (Olsson, 2009: 3). We may want to add the concept ‘language desiring’ to our repertoires as we examine intra-active events, rather than seeing language as a pre-given stable system that has boundaries and an ontology apart from its users or its use.7 The currently common identification of ‘translanguaging’ (García & Li, 2014) practices refers to the human creative use of diverse semiotic signs (from, what might have been termed previously as, multiple languages), which is a little different from the new materialist view of languaging as an assemblage of what speakers, signers, listeners, readers and writers do in particular places with their vocal musculature, air, their hands, their mouths, their arms and faces, their tapping of electronic keys, the memories of their own and others’ previous languaging (all of which are ‘stored’ in human bodies), and so on. For new materialists, as MacLure (2013: 659–660) put it, ‘discourse and matter are mutually implicated in the unfolding emergence of the world’. Educators de Freitas and Curinga (2015: 250) argued for the recognition that ‘communication entails physically altering the environment’ through, for example, the production and reception (by walls, by eardrums) of sound waves (or light waves as in deaf communication or any non-sound communication). Like many other observers (e.g. Birdwhistell, 1970; Streeck et al., 2011), de Freitas and Curinga (2015: 250) cautioned that if analyses of social interaction focus merely on the semantic and semiotic representations in utterances, and do not take into account the many material factors that ‘operate outside or alongside language’, they overlook bodily, sonic and visual accompaniments of communication. For them, language is an assemblage of multiple features – human bodies and vocal musculature, intensity – ‘the tone, the rhythm, the variation of emphasis, the loudness, the changes of pitch, the mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps and elisions, and the never absent play of musicality of utterance that makes human song possible’ (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015: 257). The human song (which we might call languaging) is thus seen as part of an assemblage or a semiotic chain that bring together not only words, but also gesture, material bodies, amplitude, and so on. Languaging may be understood as a song, but deaf communication research reminds us that it is also a dance. Linguistic anthropologist Kusters (2017) described how people with ‘sensorial asymmetries’ (hearing and deaf persons) use gestures, signs, writing, mouthing, lip-reading and other modalities to communicate with one another. In the cases Kusters and her colleagues examined, the nature of languaging as multimodal doing and as assembling diverse semiotic resources to meet unique conditions was

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particularly clear. They showed how gesturing, for example, was created on the spot, in the midst of activity, when deaf persons purchased goods from hearing persons, and they described the varied multimodalities that interlocutors relied on to get their business accomplished. Seeing languaging as an activity involving vocal musculature, bodies, memories stored in identifiable parts of brains, and so on, research in second or additional language education will require thinking of language learning and use not only as individual accomplishments, and not only as social practices, but also as ongoing phenomena entangled with material elements in the world, including human bodies, discourses, and myriad other environmental ‘things’. Research on languaging that takes all these diverse matters into account will necessarily look differently from how structural linguistics has conceptualised language use. Conceptualising language, learners and learning as assembled phenomena, rather than as distinct and individual (with fi xed individual characteristics), has not characterised much language and literacy education literature to date (exceptions include, in addition to those already cited: Pennycook, 2016, 2018; Toohey & Dagenais, 2015; Toohey et al., 2015). This might not be surprising given the centrality of learners and teachers in language education research and, according to philosopher Braidotti (2013), in the humanities more generally. Rather, as already discussed, language education research has often been preoccupied with discovering universals: teaching practices that do and don’t ‘work’, ideal orders in which to teach elements of a language’s grammatical structures, personality traits of successful and unsuccessful learners, the best social relations for language learning, and so on. A new materialist view would hold that discovering universals can only be done by reducing phenomena to static, dead and determinable things. How might we begin to think of language, learners and learning in material, dynamic, intra-acting, indeterminate and immaterial ways? And what implications might this view have for teaching languaging (or following their language desiring) to youngsters or newcomers, and for researching that teaching and learning? With the conviction that grammars or dictionaries are essentialistic and static, we will require something more than, or different from, grammatical, phonological and semantic descriptions to help us understand language learning and teaching. If newcomers to a language need to participate in activities with others, they need to understand that the ‘very words’ they use are only part of what occurs in activities with others, that unexpected things can and will happen with language in action assemblages and that they are creating as well as using language in their activities. Rather than basing language pedagogy on grammatical descriptions of languages, de Freitas and Curinga (2015) proposed that language education and research should concern itself with what linguists have referred to as the ‘pragmatic’ features of a language. Others (Morgan, 1997; Pennycook, 2016) have suggested alternative ways of organising language

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education and research. Morgan, for example, showed how intonation, rarely a topic of much emphasis in English language courses, was crucially important in communicating intended meanings in an English language class for adults. We have seen in this chapter researchers and teachers trying in several different ways to observe and document students’ learning, and to provide opportunities for them to extend their experimentation and learning activity. Being on the lookout for a track to follow with our students, so that they can engage in what Olsson (2012: 89) described as ‘intense, undomesticated and vital experimentation rather than looking for any kind of permanent and stable knowledge’, may be a way forward for those of us who teach language to our students. Too often in the past and currently, education has been conceptualised as constraining or domesticating student experimentation so that students come to pre-given ‘truths’ or to already-canonical representations of what must be learned (like dictionaries or grammars). New materialism challenges us to go beyond these concepts and activities, to experiment in languaging with our students in many different intra-actions with words and things, and to come therefore to understand how words and things can be assembled and can intra-act to produce outcomes that have no fi nality. Understanding language learning as ‘language desiring’, wanting to ‘join with other forces to do more’ (Olsson, 2012), may not most usefully be seen as a preoccupation only of the young or the adult language learner. Rather, as teachers and researchers, it may be productive to think about what ‘more’ we wish to do with our teaching and research. This is a matter of experimenting with forms of communication that portray what we are learning, or wondering about – the ‘problems’ that motivate our learning. In the next section, I consider what ‘research desiring’ might look like. Research from a New Materialism Perspective

SCT and poststructuralism rejected the notion that a researcher, metaphorically speaking, can remove herself from the world to observe, so as to provide unbiased, dispassionate, objective representations of events in that world. Rather, these theorists saw researchers as situated in personal histories, gender identifications, multiple other identities and interests, and further recognised that the researcher’s view is selective, partial and interested. New materialists expand our understandings of the ‘situatedness’ of research by calling attention as well to the apparatuses we use to understand phenomena. Barad (2007) gave the example of light being understood as a particle or a wave, depending on the material apparatus employed to investigate it, and cited Danish physicist Niels Bohr as thus demonstrating the ‘essential indeterminacy of the world’. For Barad, as for others interested in new materialism, the apparatus and the human researcher and the phenomena are entangled or assembled together, and

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the ‘apparatus must be understood as part of what is being described’ (Barad, 2007: 118). The apparatuses with which qualitative researchers are entangled include audio and visual recording equipment, fieldnote books, their eyes (enhanced or not by lenses of various sorts), their ears (which again may be entangled with enhancement devices), their bodily attentiveness to affective intensities, and their memories of various theoretical positions, other empirical research, and many other preoccupations. I came to the research reported in LEaS as a university academic who had had graduate training from educational anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists and applied linguists, and I was familiar with the traditional anthropological practice of doing fieldwork through participant observation and then removing oneself from that field to ‘write up the data’ of observations in an ethnography. Anthropologist Ingold (2014: 387) argued that the practice of participant observation is a way to ‘learn from the world’: [Participant observation is] absolutely not a technique of data collection. Quite to the contrary, it is enshrined in an ontological commitment that renders the very idea of data collection unthinkable. … To convert what we owe to the world into ‘data’ that we have extracted from it is to expunge knowing from being. It is to stipulate that knowledge is to be reconstructed on the outside, as an edifice built up ‘after the fact’ rather as inhering in skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings. (Ingold, 2013: 5)

Seeing what we learn while participating in another community as ‘data’ was for Ingold an unfortunate result of the social sciences’ desire to become respectable (like the ‘hard sciences’), even though, as we have seen with respect to physics, some had been cognizant of how observers and their apparatuses are entangled in the phenomena about which they enquire, since early in the 20th century (Barad, 2007). For Ingold, participant observation, using ‘skills of perception and capacities of judgment that develop in the course of direct, practical and sensuous engagements with our surroundings’ (Ingold, 2013: 5), was not data collecting. Rather, he saw participant observation as ‘join[ing] in correspondence with those with whom we learn or among whom we study’ and ‘coupl[ing] the forward movement of one’s own perception and action with the movements of others’ – an activity he called corresponding, in which we respond to what we observe with ‘interventions, questions and responses of our own’ (Ingold, 2014: 389). He wrote: To observe is not to objectify; it is to attend to persons and things, to learn from them, and to follow in precept and practice. Indeed, there can be no observation without participation – that is, without an intimate coupling, in perception and action, of observer and observed. (Ingold, 2014: 387–388)

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For Ingold, ‘we do not first observe, and then go onto describe, a world that has already been made – that has already settled into fi nal forms of which we can give a full and objective account. Rather, we join with things in the very processes of their formation and dissolution’ (Ingold, 2013: 2). An approach to people, discourses, other species and things that sees them as in continual and reciprocal change would not seek to create full and objective accounts, but rather try to document moments in time at the same time as participating in shaping those moments. Like the pedagogical documentation described by the ECE researchers earlier, the participant observer creates artefacts that are intended to stimulate further discussion, experimentation and problem solving or, better, complexifying problems. I did the research reported in the fi rst edition of LEaS with the understanding I had then that ‘proper’ participant observation was more observation than participation. With the aim of representing these children’s experiences in their classrooms as accurately and as fully as possible, I made every effort to capture in fieldnotes and recordings as much as I could in my weekly observations. Indeed, I noticed that if I participated by talking to an individual child or group of children, I sometimes missed opportunities to record something interesting happening in another part of the classroom. Especially when conducting fieldwork in the kindergarten, I tried to be as comprehensive as possible, and to observe each of the focal children for equal amounts of time every session. When entering fieldwork, I knew that I would never be able to record everything that happened, but I hoped to be able to observe each child’s activities deeply. What came into focus for me in the classrooms was not simply a matter of giving each child equal time (using the apparatus of my watch). It also became apparent to me when I ‘left the field’ to ‘write up’ my observations, that out of those hours and hours of video- and audiotapes and binders full of fieldnotes, certain classroom episodes were more compelling to me than others. MacLure (2013: 660) refers to these episodes (or ‘data’) as glowing. As she put it: In a materialist ontology, data cannot be seen as inert and indifferent mass waiting to be in/formed and calibrated by our analytic acumen or our coding systems. We are no longer autonomous agents, choosing and disposing. Rather, we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us. This can be seen, or rather felt, on occasions when one becomes especially ‘interested’ in a piece of data – such as a sarcastic comment in an interview, or a perplexing incident, or an observed event that makes you feel kind of peculiar. Or some point in the pedestrian process of ‘writing up’ a piece of research where something not-yet-articulated seems to take off and take over, effecting a kind of quantum leap that moves the writing/writer to somewhere unpredictable. On those occasions, agency feels distributed and undecidable, as if we have chosen something that has chosen us. (MacLure, 2013: 660)

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I take up again this issue of how researchers select the stories they tell in Chapter 7. ‘Writing Up’ Representations or Stories

ECE researcher MacDonald (Smythe et al., 2017), working with young children in a daycare centre, described how the collaborative researcherteacher-child investigation of the bio-reactor in their building led to multiple ‘representations’ of what the participants were learning, including drawings and dramas (children), and fieldnotes, videotapes and still photos (teacher and researcher), creating new knowledge through so doing. Neither the children’s representations of the bio-reactor and its organisms nor the teacher-researcher representations of children’s activities were taken to be ‘true’ representations of what the bio-reactor’s organisms ‘really did’ or ‘what really happened’. As MacDonald put it: If we think instead of the products of our research (our and the students’ representations) to be part of an assemblage of our knowing (holding power in the moment of that coming together) and in the moments of being shared out at a conference or holding meaning for others as it is interpreted in a journal for example, we can shake off the ‘fi xedness’ of representation. … Instead, representation may be seen as a useful part of the continual (ongoing) learning journey or a way to reach a higher level of understanding (for the students as they consolidate their knowledge in an exam, report or work of art); and for the researcher as she communicates her current understandings in an essay, article, book or book chapter. (Smythe et al., 2017: 84–85)

How are participant observers to report what they have learned to others? While the application of anthropological techniques in educational research had to struggle to be seen as legitimate (and the struggle continues in ‘audit culture’ sites), much educational research has subsequently relied on ethnography (literally, ‘writing about the people’) as a way to communicate with others about observations. Ethnography has had a great deal of critique over the years, including the charge that ethnographies are sometimes written so as to represent ‘the people’ or ‘the situation’: that is, they freeze events that happened in the past and on the basis of analyses of descriptions of these events, make generalisations about what those people are like, what they do and what they think. Gatt and Ingold (2013: 147), on the other hand, saw ethnographies ideally as  ‘generous, open-ended, comparative yet critical inquiry into the conditions and potential of human life’. Ingold wrote about ethnographies as stories, stories that bring to our attention possibilities, without explicitly advocating any one course of action. For Ingold (2013: 110), the ‘telling of stories is an education of attention. Through [stories], things are pointed out to novices, so that they can discover for themselves

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what  meanings their stories might hold in the situations of their current practice’. Many of us who work with novice and practising teachers have long noticed that it is the stories they and we tell, and those in course readings, that are remembered and referred back to. Sometimes, in my experience, professors wish teachers could ‘get out of’ their stories, and express their learning in ‘theoretical’ terms (another cut). Telling stories with interpretation has not often been recognised as a methodology in educational research, and when writing the fi rst edition of LEaS sometimes I worried about the comprehensiveness of my ethnographic methods, and if they met the standards of credible research. As I revisit my research stories now in this second edition, and after engaging in longterm relationships with teachers doing research in their own classrooms, I am more confident that telling stories is what some educational research should be like, to ‘educate the attention’ of novices and even some more experienced researchers and practitioners. I want to tell my research stories in ways that interest researchers-teachers in approaching their own sites as complex assemblages of material people, devices and discourses, and to enter those sites with questions about learning situations – with specific children, and themselves, at specific times, in specific sites, with specific equipment – in effect, for them to engage with ideas about, in Barad’s (2007: 827) words, how ‘to intervene in the world’s becoming’. I also wish to investigate how new materialist perspectives on language, learners and learning might offer expansive ways to understand those phenomena. What do these ideas mean for applied linguistics research? I think we might usefully consider the research/practice technique that some scholars in Reggio Emilia-inspired ECE advocate: pedagogical documentation (Edwards et al., 1998; Lenz Taguchi, 2010) as ways to collect ‘data’ that researchers and teachers can use together not only to approach understandings, but also to intervene in educational settings. Rather than claiming that our documentations or ethnographic stories tell us the ‘truth’ about what ‘really happened’, we might usefully think of ethnographies as particular, situated accounts of events that should encourage further thinking and experimentation. Davies (2014: 28) sees documentations as ‘opening up creative movement toward the not-yet-known, and interrupting the quotidian practices through which life-as-usual is maintained’, and Braidotti (2013: 166) saw worthwhile research as escaping ‘the mode of linearity or the confi nes of the printed page, but mov[ing] outwards, out of bounds in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts’. This is the hopefulness of new materialism, that which might allow us to understand differently, perhaps, the myriad problems facing the world today, which I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, and which might allow us to act differently, to intervene in the world’s becoming in ways that allow the flourishing of all.

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Ingold (2014: 384) saw anthropological enquiry as requiring ‘longterm and open-ended commitment, generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context’; for him, anthropology ‘is to join with people in their speculations about what life might or could be like, in ways nevertheless grounded in a profound understanding of what life is like in particular times and places’. Conclusion

How can new materialist educational researchers tell others about their observations in ways that do not purport to ‘represent’ or to prescribe ‘best practices’ or describe ‘worst practices?’ LEaS is full of transcripts and my interpretations of those transcripts, as well as some contextualising information. Even though I did not set out to record the many agents involved in the intra-actions I observed, because I relied on sociocultural theoretical foundations, I did sometimes discuss where events happened, and/or what socio-material assemblages (I was not then familiar with the term) accompanied children’s or teachers’ or parents’ conversations with one another. The questions with which I entered this project, as stated in Chapter 1, were not concerned with assessing how individual children were ‘acquiring’ English – ‘who is learning what and how much’, in McDermott’s (1993: 295) pithy phrase – as a psycholinguistic researcher might. Rather, drawing from sociolinguistic and sociocultural research, my questions concerned identity, social relations and classroom practices, and how they influenced the focal children’s access to voice (in English) in their classrooms. Had I gone into this research with a background in new materialist theory and practice, my questions (and the agential cuts I made) would have been different. In addition to asking how identity, social relations and classroom discourse practices affected second language learners’ development of English ‘voices’, I would wish to observe how the classroom’s human bodies and their embodied memories, the architecture of their classroom and its furniture and toys and the curriculum and the designation ‘ESL’, and so on, intra-acted with the English being continually languaged there. Bakhtin (1986: 169) observed that he ‘heard voices in everything, and dialogic relations among them’, and presumably, for him, ‘everything’ included the material aspects of bodies, things and discourses. Telling stories about how specific assemblages of material children and their material surroundings and tools encouraged particular becomings of those children, their tools and their language practices might have been of assistance to a researcher/teacher ‘on the lookout for some sort of track to follow with the children’ (Olsson, 2012: 89) in their ‘experiments’ with language in their classrooms. While SCT recognises the overlapping of ‘identities’, ‘social relations’ and ‘classroom practices’, and the mediations that non-human objects

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provide between people and the world, a new materialist perspective would start by affirming that humans and non-humans (things, places, time, and so on) intra-act with one another and are continually in states of becoming. Throughout the next four chapters, in shaded boxes, I provide suggestions about how I might have framed my research in light of these new theories, and how the ‘data’ I collected might be seen in new ways. Notes (1) I acknowledge that this aim requires much more consideration than it has received here, and that respectful engagement with these ‘myriad systems’ is a long-term project for me and others who recognise its necessity. (2) The term entanglement comes from quantum physics, where entanglement at the subatomic level is well documented (Barad, 2007). (3) Instead of doing research on boys and girls in school, for example, we might make distinctions between children who live in cities and those who live in rural areas, between wealthy children and poor children, between children in whose homes computers are found and those whose homes do not have computers. (4) Sign languages can be national or local/regional. National sign languages have regional variations, and there are dictionaries for many sign languages and, to a much lesser extent, grammars. Most research on sign language is situated within theoretical linguistics, although some of the sign language literature has an appreciation for the temporally variable and situationally constructed nature of signing (personal communication, Kusters, 2017). (5) Climate change scholar Angela Last (2013: 63) pointed out that Bakhtin’s notion that we relate to the world through a ‘process of co-creativity’ (dialogue) with the Other has been interpreted by some as including co-creating with more than other humans. Indeed, as Last (2013: 63) pointed out, Bakhtin (1986: 169) stated, ‘I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them’. (6) Applied linguist Swain also used the term in 1985, to refer to ‘the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language’ (Swain, 1985: 98). (7) Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016: 15) discussed ‘literacy desiring’ to ‘describe the rhizomatic and intra-active processes of children-creating-with-material-and-oneanother, not always in intentional ways, with materials, modes, time, space, language and bodies’.

3 Kindergarten Stories

Making their way from place to place in the company of others more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices learn to connect the events and experiences of their own lives, to the lives of their predecessors, recursively picking up these past lives in the process of spinning out their own. Ingold, 2011: 161

In this chapter, I describe the kindergarten and each of the six focal children involved in this research. I tell complex stories about the focal children’s kindergarten experiences – sometimes contradictory stories, because the stories came from multiple sources (parent and teacher interviews and my own classroom observations) and because the particular circumstances of observation differed. I observed these children over the course of their kindergarten year and this, at least minimally, historical information provided shifting views of who they were and what they did. And fi nally, although the kindergarten stories principally focused on who the children came to be seen as at school (and not on their out-of-school experiences), this detailed look provides a sense of how complex classrooms are. The perspectives of differently situated observers led to sometimes-different, sometimescongruent ‘takes’ on each child. However, there are complexities and contradictions within the accounts of single observers and I have tried to include as much information as possible on each child, making the source of the information clear. Unless otherwise stated, all the classroom interactional material reported here comes from my observations recorded in fieldnotes and audio- and videotapes; the information on families and the children’s maintenance of their families’ languages comes from my and research assistants’ interviews. In shaded boxes, I present perspectives from new materialist theory.

Life in Kindergarten

The kindergarten classroom, on the west side of the school on the ground floor, faced the playground and, beyond that, a busy street. The classroom itself, bright and large, was usually colourfully decorated with the students’ art projects and materials pertaining to the classroom themes. The classroom had many well-equipped ‘centres’: book centre, housekeeping centre, puppet theatre, puzzle centre, computer centre, 45

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block centre, sand table, water table, painting easels, listening centre, and so on. The deterioration evident in other parts of the school was not so apparent here: stocked with many of the teacher’s personal belongings (a puppet theatre, books, toys, and so on, many of which belonged to her own children), the room was inviting, clean and comfortable, although often very hot in the afternoons. Nineteen children were enrolled at the beginning of the study year; two children left the class over the course of the year and three children joined it. Mrs Clark, the kindergarten teacher, had taught kindergarten at Suburban School for two years and had taught for 14 years in total. A speaker of English, she had no specific academic preparation for teaching English as a second language (ESL)1 learners, as the children were designated at the time. However, she read professional development literature about second language learning and she attended workshops occasionally. She planned in cooperation with Mrs Smith, who taught another kindergarten class across the hall. Both teachers used and taught the same materials, songs and activities, and their classroom routines were very similar. During the kindergarten morning, Mrs Clark and her students engaged in: opening circle, ‘work’, free activity time, snack, looking at books and closing circle. After closing circle, the 11 children who were ‘not ESL’ were dismissed and went home. The eight remaining children (the minority language background children, whose parents had agreed to an afternoon Language Development class) ate the lunches they had brought from home, supervised by a teacher’s aide, and then played outside for about 15 minutes. Then the children and Mrs Clark would reassemble in the classroom for the afternoon Language Development class, which included children from both Mrs Clark’s and Mrs Smith’s kindergartens. The morning routine described above varied somewhat when the children received instruction from other teachers (music, library time) or when Mrs Clark took them to the school gymnasium for physical education. As well, after a school break in April, the children had recess midmorning with the other children in the school and went outside to the playground for 15 minutes. Otherwise, the structure of the time they spent together was consistent over the year. The routine in the afternoon Language Development class was similar to that of the morning. The themes Mrs Clark introduced in the afternoon were different from the morning themes, as were the craft activities (‘work’). Mrs Clark judged that she spent more time in the afternoons repeating vocabulary items and focusing on vocabulary development. While conducting this research, I did not make extensive observations about the material objects in the kindergarten – the furniture, the scissors, felt crayons, and so on – which today I might have made. Influenced by SCT, I was primarily interested in the social relations

Kindergarten Stories 47

that constituted who these children were at school (as opposed to who they might be at home) and who they might be when playing with classmates or answering teacher questions, and so forth. While Vygotsky and sociocultural theorist Wertsch, for example, stressed the importance of mediating means, it seems to me that more emphasis is put in SCT on cognitive tools than on material objects. However, as I recall, in the kindergarten classroom the required craft materials for the children’s ‘work’ were stored in plastic bins placed on top of a low bookshelf near the centre of the room, and were thus easily accessible to all the children. The room was furnished with four low tables and more than enough chairs for the group. When children left the carpet to do their work, they self-selected a table, resulting in varied combinations of children day to day. One or another child would bring a bin of materials to a table and the table group of children would collectively use these supplies. Work usually consisted of colouring in a photocopied drawing, using scissors to cut out drawings and gluing cut-outs onto paper, making a drawing about the day’s theme, writing some alphabet letters, and so on.

Overall, life in this kindergarten seemed particularly smooth and enjoyable. Most of the children often appeared happy and comfortable there, and much classroom practice seemed explicitly designed to encourage harmony. In interactions involving the teacher, voices were never raised, smiles were frequent and an atmosphere of friendliness and peacefulness prevailed. Mrs Clark reminded the children of transgressions of classroom rules quietly and respectfully. As the children listened to stories that Mrs Clark read to them while they were sitting on the carpet in the centre-right side of the room, many of them leaned on one another and stroked each other’s hair and clothing. They enthusiastically sang and recited the songs and chants taught to them. Children gave one another and Mrs Clark gifts; they were clearly touched and pleased by the Valentine cards they received from one another. When two children moved away and left the class, Mrs Clark and the children talked about missing them. Affiliations with one another were strong and explicitly articulated. In all, this classroom group felt like a community, with all the positive connotations of the word. The kindergarten class contained 11 children (six boys and five girls) who (I thought) did not use languages other than English. Over the course of the year, although not directly focusing observation on them, I came to know something of their lives in the kindergarten as well. I observed the focal children in large and small group settings, and their interlocutors were sometimes other focal children, but often not. Consequently, the children as a whole (except for one student whose parents refused permission for videotaping) were observed, videotaped and audiorecorded.

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I was a uniquely positioned participant in the community of this kindergarten. I had access not only to my observations of the children and the classroom and my own interpretations of those observations, but also to some of the teacher’s and parents’ stories and interpretations. The following selections address the question of what kind of person each child was taken to be and/or became in the context of the kindergarten class. As I mentioned earlier, contradictions between differently situated observers’ observations and interpretations, as well as within any one observer’s observations and interpretations, should not surprise the reader. More general comments about what kinds of identities appear to be available to children, and what effects having one or another sort of identity might have on access to classroom ‘conversations’ are taken up in detail in Chapter 4. Now, let us meet the children.

The Children’s Stories Randy

Randy was the oldest child in a Punjabi-speaking family and lived with his father, mother, sister, paternal grandparents, aunt, uncle and adult cousin. Both of his parents worked outside their home at full-time jobs. Before they entered school, Randy and his sister were cared for by their grandfather, who spoke to them in Punjabi. Randy attended an English-medium pre-school programme for 2.5 years. His mother told me she felt that he had not made many friends there, except for another Punjabi-speaking child. Randy’s mother reported that the family spoke Punjabi at all times in their home. She thought Randy’s Punjabi was good, but by November of his kindergarten year she felt that he was learning English well too. In November of Randy’s kindergarten year, I interviewed his mother (with the school district’s Punjabi-speaking home-school worker interpreting) for the first time. We spoke about her perceptions of her son. She thought that he was very shy (in her words, ‘just like his father’) but that he was happy to be going to kindergarten and seemed to be adjusting well to school. She also thought that he was learning a good deal there. Research assistant Karin Dhaliwal-Rai, who conducted many of the Punjabi home interviews, reported after her first meeting with Randy in January of his kindergarten year that he pronounced Punjabi well and he appeared comfortable and fluent speaking it. She noticed some English words in Randy’s Punjabi speech, mostly for vocabulary items from school and child popular culture domains. His parents also reported to Karin that they had noticed more English words in his Punjabi speech since he had started kindergarten. They also reported that Randy replied in Punjabi to older cousins who addressed him in English; they thought that he practised speaking English with his younger sister but not with other family members.

Kindergarten Stories 49

This excerpt from Karin’s English interpretation of their conversation concerns Randy’s reactions to what he was learning at school: Excerpt 3.1

Whenever he learns a song, he comes home and tells her [his mother] about it and repeats it over and over again, and also the other lessons too, he will come home and share it with her. Whenever he is in the car, he sings all the songs he has learned at school. When they are travelling in the car, he prefers to have English music on compared to Punjabi music.

Randy’s mother also spoke of her perception of her son’s desire to do well in school. Karin interpreted his mother’s words: Excerpt 3.2

He wants to learn really fast what’s going on. So, when he doesn’t do something on task, he kind of feels upset about it. Like for instance when he colours and it goes outside the line he will be upset at himself, oh gosh why is this happening, why aren’t I learning. So, it’s kind of hard on him. Sometimes he will get this sad look on his face and he will say why didn’t I get it and sometimes he’ll get upset. He will just sit in one little spot and he will do it again, he will start his work again.

Noting that she and her husband hoped Randy would get a good education and a good job, Randy’s mother mentioned that his father ‘sometimes encourages him to speak more English, like, I will get you this [a treat] if you try to speak more’. Randy was initially silent upon his entry to kindergarten; when questioned by Mrs Clark or other adults, he rarely answered. Nor did Randy appear to seek out interaction with other children: the activities in which he chose to engage at school until about the end of November (puzzles and colouring pictures) did not require other children’s participation. Even when children played beside him, he did not verbally interact with them. I never heard Randy speak in Punjabi to any of the Punjabi-speaking children. Nevertheless, when fieldwork began, Randy appeared attentive to the English stories Mrs Clark read and apparently enjoyed the repetitive songs and chants of ‘circle’ time. Mrs Clark was worried about Randy in early November. Although she was pleased with his near-perfect attendance record, she found his continued silence in the classroom a concern and she told me on 15 November that she planned to refer him for assessment to the school district’s psychological services. 2 However, later in November, Randy’s participation in some aspects of kindergarten appeared to increase. His mother had mentioned Randy’s repetition of school songs at home. Seating himself almost always right next to Mrs Clark at circle time, a practice he continued throughout the year, in November he smiled and looked increasingly comfortable during choral songs and speech. It appeared to me that the songs and chants of

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the circle ‘seduced’ Randy into speaking. Beginning with some tension around his lips, then minimal and fi nally full participation, Randy moved to become a participant in the ‘choir’ of the circle. This participation did not, of course, mean that Randy took on the position of soloist right away; his solo verbal performances in front of the large group remained minimal until later in the year. Mrs Clark often ‘scaffolded’ Randy’s verbal participation in classroom activities. 3 At the end of November, she approached Randy as he was colouring in a picture of the ‘three bears’.4 Excerpt 3.3

Mrs Clark: Who’s this? Randy: (quietly) Papa Mrs Clark: What does papa bear say? Randy looks at Mrs Clark. Mrs Clark: Who:’s (rising intonation – over to you) Randy: Who’s (pause 4 seconds) been Mrs Clark: sitting in my chair?

Mrs Clark commonly collaborated with Randy in the completion of a turn at the circle as well, in much the same way. After one of these collaborations, after completion of the ‘task’, she would praise him warmly. In December, I observed a child sitting next to Randy, as well as the teacher, scaffolding his participation: Excerpt 3.4

Group doing a counting game with cards. Each card has a large number on it as well as a smaller one. Randy’s card says 17, 12 Lisa: Who has 17? Randy looks at his card. Earl: (whispering) I have 17. Randy: I have 17. Mrs Clark: Who::: has (rising intonation) Randy: 20 Mrs Clark: 12.

In January, the children played this game again using cards with alphabet letters. At the end of the month, when Randy’s turn came, he said with no hesitation: ‘I have T, who has L?’ Even near the end of the year, his teacher still often scaffolded Randy’s contributions: Excerpt 3.5

Mrs Clark: Anything to share, Randy? Randy shakes his head. Let me see your smile, Randy. When you said good morning to me, I saw a tooth gone. When did that fall out? Randy: When I was sleeping.

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Mrs Clark: Last night? Randy nods. Oh wow. Did you fi nd it on your pillow? Randy shakes his head. You didn’t swallow it? Where was it this morning? (Pause 7 seconds) Did you swallow it? I thought I saw a new smile. So, you did have something to share with us. She smiles.

Randy’s mother’s description of his habits of persistence with tasks was evident in a November observation. On that occasion, Randy spent about 30 minutes working on an alphabet puzzle. He got A–F attached and then began a long, partly random, partly rational strategy for completing the puzzle, which I described in fieldnotes: Excerpt 3.6

Randy getting the alphabet puzzle, gets A–F done right away. Tries J, knows it’s not right, tries W, P, R, I, U. His hand is on G, but he doesn’t pick it up. Tries P again. Attaches O to P. Tries S on F. Tries X. Tries G, it works, goes immediately to H, then I. Tries to attach O and P. Tries Y, R. Then goes back, points to A and sings (sotto voce), A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. Stops. Goes to puzzle box and studies it to see what comes after I. (It’s hard to see.) Gets J. I (KT) point out the wall alphabet to him, I say: Will that help? No answer. He gets K and L, then stops. Sings from beginning again. Gets as far as Q. (Several more trial and error and singing attempts until he finishes – takes about 10 minutes from beginning.) Mrs Clark comes up: Did you do all that, Randy? Can you say it to me? Nice and loud. He does, but I can’t hear it (she does).

Randy’s efforts to solve this puzzle and his reliance on the tools of the box and the song to aid in this problem illustrated a repeated pattern of persisting with school-defi ned tasks, managing his actions privately and quietly. Beginning in late November and continuing throughout the year, Randy increased his verbal contributions in the kindergarten. Mrs Clark reported to me in the middle of November that Randy had said quietly to her, ‘I can’t glue it’ – the fi rst sentence-long utterance she had heard from him since beginning school. Near the end of November I heard Randy, in play with Harvey, say, ‘It’s over in the trees’. This was the fi rst time I had heard him say anything in kindergarten. Increasingly, when called upon in circle time, Randy would respond to the teacher’s questions with oneword answers (e.g. to questions like, ‘What colour is it? What shape is this?’). In early January, Randy volunteered an answer to a teacher prompt: in the context of writing a class poem about winter, in which Mrs Clark had provided several examples of the sort ‘Winter is snow; winter

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is not swim suits’, Randy volunteered ‘Winter is boots; winter is not a pumpkin’. Randy was slower to interact with the other children than with Mrs Clark; he began to interact with Harvey and Martin (other focal children) in late January. Much of this conversation occurred in play with some dinosaur models, in which many of the boys were interested. Typically, such interactions included handling the models, bashing models into other models, vocalisations of crashing noises and utterances like ‘He’s killing your guy; You’re dead’, and so on. Randy actively participated in this interaction and showed real pleasure in it. He continued to play with the dinosaur models into April, by which time the other boys had apparently lost interest in them. During this time, Randy continued his action and talk with the dinosaurs very quietly and mostly by himself. Randy’s verbal engagement, or languaging, with other children in his classroom started during play with the plastic dinosaurs. The assemblage of Randy’s and his classmates’ hands on the models, their bashing actions and their vocalisations of crashing noises, meant Randy was able to play with his classmates. The models and the languaging the children produced during these play episodes served similarly to Mrs Clark’s scaffolding of Randy’s verbal participation: Randy was able to language along with the others. His trajectory of learning also points out how much ‘things’ are involved in speech events. Streeck et  al. (2011: 3) illustrated, in a vivid transcript of a conversation between an archaeologist and a student at a dig, how the many material factors that ‘operate outside or alongside language’ are absolutely requisite to successful communication. For them, language use is thus seen as part of an assemblage, which Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005: 7) described as being ‘like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive’. Randy’s participation in the dinosaur play reminded me about how ‘things’ are almost always involved in communication with young language learners, and Streek et al.’s work illustrated how this is not only true for the young. Kell (2015) also focused attention on how objects and languaging are entangled. At the end of January, Randy brought some hockey trading cards to show at ‘sharing time’, the first time he had brought anything to show. His verbal contribution on this occasion was: ‘I got them at the store – hockey cards.’ Mrs Clark extended his turn by asking him if he watched hockey and if he had favourites among his cards. Randy responded to these initiations non-verbally. In April, Randy participated in a very common interactional pattern in the classroom in which he had not participated previously. As the children coloured pictures, they often chatted among

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themselves about what they were colouring, what colours they were using or topics unrelated to the present activity. On18 April, the following conversation took place: Excerpt 3.7

Randy and Abe and Morgan colouring pictures. Morgan calls out, ‘No King, no king, la la la la la la [a phrase from the movie The Lion King] Randy: (smiles broadly, then darts away) I need yellow! (looking at picture on puzzle of Simba, checking colour?) Abe: (looking at Morgan’s picture) Oh yuck. Morgan: That’s supposed to be yuck. Randy: (to Morgan) You need the brown. Morgan: Yeah. Randy: I like red. Abe: I like red. Morgan: You both like red. I hate red. Randy: I like white. Abe: Me too. Morgan: Me too.

Randy’s active involvement and initiative in this conversation, simple as it was, did not resemble his previous participation in the classroom. Here, he told someone else what he needed, expressed a preference, had his statements listened to, and he agreed and disagreed with other students. From this time to the end of the school year, Randy increasingly participated more and more actively in classroom conversations like this and others. He initiated conversations with other children, displayed his knowledge (30 May: Randy (to me): ‘I know how to spell dog. D-O-G!’), and participated in imaginative play. Increasingly, Randy began to direct communicative efforts toward Earl, one of the more powerful-appearing boys in the kindergarten. Possibly because Randy began the year so silently, his increasing participation in classroom activities seemed to surprise his teacher somewhat. Several times when Randy answered a question correctly, or performed well, Mrs Clark’s positive response indicated (to my ears, anyway) some element of surprise. For example, during a videotaped encounter in February, when Mrs Clark asked the children individually to select the fi rst, the third, and so on from a series of hearts displayed in a pocket chart, Randy volunteered to select the seventh. Excerpt 3.8

Randy goes to chart and quickly removes the seventh heart. Mrs Clark: Wow. He didn’t even count. How did you know that was the seventh? She smiles at Randy. Randy says nothing. Did you count them?

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Randy says nothing. No? You just knew that was where 7 would be? Randy nods almost imperceptibly. Good for you.

During an interview in February, Mrs Clark echoed her assessment of Randy’s ‘surprising’ abilities in comparison to Anglophone students. Excerpt 3.9

I look at kids like Melanie [an Anglophone student] and she looks very good, but then I assess her and compare her with kids like Randy and she’s way behind. If these white English-speaking parents knew this they’d be some upset. You look at the scholarship winners in this school district and they’re all kids who used to be ESL.

This statement included the interesting notion that one’s identity as ‘ESL’ could shift – one could, in a sense, graduate from being an ‘ESL kid’ to being a scholarship winner. Randy’s mother’s November report of his disinterest in Punjabi was echoed in a conversation I had with a group of children, including Randy, at the end of April. A child at another table said something in Polish. Morgan (who joined the kindergarten in January and whose family used Polish at home) began the conversation. Excerpt 3.10

Morgan: KT:

(to me) Do you know how to talk that language? No, I only know how to talk English, I’m not as smart as you. I don’t know how to talk Polish or Punjabi or Chinese like you kids. Randy: Earl speaks Chinese. KT: And you know Punjabi. Randy: No. KT: Did you forget? Randy nods.

As stated earlier, in January Karin Dhaliwal-Rai interviewed Randy and his parents in their home. Although Karin judged that he spoke fluent Punjabi and that his pronunciation was very good (his parents concurred), Karin interpreted Randy’s mother’s remarks: Excerpt 3.11

Randy does not like to watch Punjabi/Hindi movies on video. Randy said that his teacher told him only to watch cartoons and English movies but no Indian movies. Randy also tells them (his parents) that they have not learned English because they watch Indian movies. He will leave the room if they watch them.

In addition, Karin reported that Randy said that he did not like Punjabi and discouraged his parents from participating in Punjabi events. Mrs

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Clark told me that she had initially counselled the children not to speak their fi rst languages in school and to watch English television; however, after reading some literature on teaching ESL, in November she had contradicted this directive and told them that they were free to speak their first languages in school and that those languages were important. 5 Randy came into kindergarten as a quiet boy who persisted at school tasks. He did not miss any days of school throughout the year. Initially, at least his teacher and perhaps his parents saw his silence as potentially problematic. However, Randy’s silence in school ‘broke’ at a most auspicious time. He was not assessed as requiring learning assistance or counselling and he became increasingly able to participate in conversations with classmates of his choice. His classroom presented him with resources he liked: the songs, the chants and the dinosaurs. His teacher evaluated his persistence positively. The verbal scaffolds other children and his teacher gave him successfully held his place. Mrs Clark frequently praised him. At the end of the year, Mrs Clark wrote on his report card: ‘I am pleased with Randy’s increasing confidence this year.’ His report card also reflected her perception that Randy’s growing competence in literacy would do much to ensure his success in school. At the same time, Randy’s proficiency in Punjabi was not a part of his definition as a ‘successful schoolboy’.

Stories that teachers tell about their students often follow narrative arcs which portray students coming to them one way, and after a year in their (the teacher’s) classroom, the students are represented as changed, and often in more positive ways. It is perhaps part of the teacher’s responsibility to change children, to enhance their learning, and thus to perceive students’ identities as somewhat malleable. Sometimes, however, teachers perceive that children are not changed for the better over the course of their attendance in their classrooms, and in such cases it is often assumed that the child’s inherent cognitive, behavioural or other deficiencies, or their home/linguistic/cultural background, despite the teacher’s best efforts, are responsible for the lack of (positive) change. By contrast, educational researcher Bronwyn Davies (2014: 34) wrote, ‘the subject is not so much an entity as an intra-active becoming’. She explains the line through ‘subject’ as signalling ‘that while the concept of the subject is one we cannot do without, it is locked in a series of binaries, and hierarchies within those binaries, that need to be pulled undone. The individual subject is not singular or plural, not self or other, not fixed or mobile, but all of these’ (Davies, 2014: 44). In this way, she draws attention to the emergence and relational qualities of identity such that subjects are always becoming, in relation with other subjects, and that becoming, thus, cannot be seen as an individual accomplishment or responsibility. I return to the concept of identity in Chapter 4.

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Surjeet

Surjeet was the oldest of three children in her Punjabi-speaking family. Her grandparents, who had been teachers (and her grandfather a school administrator as well) in India, also lived with her family; in addition, an aunt and two older cousins lived in the ground-floor apartment of the family’s house. Before entering school, Surjeet had been cared for either by one of her parents, by her aunt or by her grandparents, while her parents worked outside the home. All these adults could speak both Punjabi and English. Her mother reported that the adults in Surjeet’s home communicated in Punjabi, that the adults spoke to the children in a mixture of Punjabi and English, but that the children usually conversed in English among themselves and usually answered adults in English.6 In November 1994, Surjeet’s mother said she felt that Surjeet understood Punjabi reasonably well but couldn’t really speak it (‘A few words she speaks, but she cannot make a sentence’) and was primarily an English speaker. Her mother reported to me that Surjeet was a late talker (she had not started to speak until age three) and that she wondered whether Surjeet’s language development might have been delayed because Surjeet was shy (a characteristic adult relatives attributed to Surjeet several times), or because she played so much with older children (her cousins) who might have spoken for her. On another occasion, Surjeet’s grandfather told Karin Dhaliwal-Rai that after she became fluent in English, he would teach Surjeet Punjabi. I never observed Surjeet speaking Punjabi or playing with children who were speaking Punjabi at school.7 Karin Dhaliwal-Rai interviewed Surjeet in her home in January and June of her kindergarten year, in an attempt to assess her Punjabi proficiency. On both occasions, she found it difficult to engage Surjeet in extended conversation. Karin concluded that Surjeet understood Punjabi fairly well for a Canadian child her age, but spoke it only rudimentarily. She could repeat a prayer said by the family every day, after a good deal of scaffolding from her mother, and was able to understand questions put to her in Punjabi. When Karin addressed her in Punjabi, she usually answered in English; if pressed, she would use a few Punjabi words in a primarily English sentence. Karin summarised her observations about Surjeet’s Punjabi use: Excerpt 3.12

Surjeet does not get read to in Punjabi and is not encouraged to read or write in Punjabi, as she is in English, but she is still getting other forms of exposure to Punjabi in her life. One form is through audio-cassettes of Bhangra, Punjabi dance music. There was one Bhangra tape in her home that was a favourite of all the children, including Surjeet. Surjeet’s grandmother said when these tapes are played, the kids enjoy dancing around to the music. … The other form of Punjabi that is in Surjeet’s life takes the form of media, ‘RimJim’, the 24-hour Hindi/Punjabi radio. It seems

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‘RimJim’ is always on in this household. The radio daily presents Punjabi songs, on the air open talk shows, Sikh prayers and the news in Punjabi.

Mrs Clark stated in October that she thought Surjeet was really shy and withdrawn and that she played by herself most of the time. She mentioned that Surjeet had had no pre-school programme and had had a difficult time separating from her mother in the fi rst week of school. She wondered whether Surjeet had some kind of a learning problem, but was unsure: Excerpt 3.13

When I consider where she was – she couldn’t even recognise her name in the beginning and now she’s writing it without a model. She’s coming, and yet in other respects she’s so low, like in counting one to ten, she really doesn’t get it. So, we’ll have to see.

Mrs Clark’s uncertainty about Surjeet’s academic abilities persisted throughout the year, but she ceased to worry about Surjeet’s social isolation, because later in October, Surjeet and Donna (an Anglophone girl) began to play together, and Surjeet also participated actively in conversations with other children. Her close association with Donna lasted until about April, after which time the two girls played together only occasionally. Indeed, after that association became less strong, Surjeet did not play with any one child in particular. Although she did play with a variety of other children, as the year was coming to an end she spent more time in the classroom alone. Although several members of her family (and initially, her teacher) reported that Surjeet was shy and she certainly displayed shy behaviour on some occasions,8 Surjeet from the beginning of the research talked and interacted with many other children. However, although she was sometimes attentive to the songs, rhymes and chants of the circle, she rarely participated in ‘solo’ turns (answering teacher questions, volunteering information, and so on). Surjeet paid strikingly little attention to the stories Mrs Clark read to the children, and sometimes even to the directions Mrs Clark gave for the completion of tasks. Almost every day, Mrs Clark read a story to the children as they sat on the carpet, and as she began, the circle the children had been in collapsed, as the children moved closer to her so they could see the book’s pictures. At such times, if Surjeet had initially been close to Mrs Clark in the circle, in the rearrangement another child moving in would take Surjeet’s place, or she would place herself at the outside edges of the circle. There she would very obviously occupy herself with matters other than the story: she would look around the classroom, stroke another child, fi nger her bracelet and/or move from place to place on the floor. During kindergarten, I never saw Surjeet attend except very briefly to a story read aloud. When the other children responded emotionally to

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events in the stories, with groans or laughs, for example, she would come to attention, look at her classmates, and sometimes her expressions would mirror theirs. At such times, she appeared to attend not to the story, but rather to her classmates. Mrs Clark also noticed that Surjeet did not appear engaged whenever the children viewed a videotape. Surjeet’s behaviour during a videotape presentation near the end of the year led me to wonder whether her inattention was selective or general. The videotape, an episode of the American television programme ‘Reading Rainbow’, started with an adult reading a storybook (with accompanying illustrations) about a whale. During the story reading, Surjeet moved to seven different locations, looked around, whispered to other children and looked at the ceiling. Near the end of the programme, the video showed several children giving their reviews of the book. For this part of the video, Surjeet sat still, gazed toward the television screen and looked attentive. Surjeet often appeared almost hyper-attentive to other children and sometimes to Mrs Clark; in such cases, her comprehension and expertise appeared quite keen. The videotaped records show Surjeet’s intent gaze toward children who were speaking during circle time as well as her obvious attention to other children at the tables during work time. Her rapt attention to other children sometimes seemed counterproductive to her completion of the set tasks. On several occasions, Surjeet began one of the craft projects and then became apparently confused as she noticed other children doing these projects in a variety of ways. Concerned about doing things correctly, she seemed to fi nd this diversity confusing and she would revise what she was doing on the basis of her observations of others. Doing things correctly appeared to be a primary concern of Surjeet’s. She often gave directions to other children (and once to me).9 These directions commonly took the form of reminding other children of a classroom rule or a ventriloquation of a teacher directive (e.g. Surjeet (to Mitch): You need to cut it out!; Surjeet (to Martin): Put away your backpack!). Although she gave many directions, it would be inaccurate to portray Surjeet as a powerful child whose directions the others always heeded. On the contrary, many children commonly ignored her directives. For example: Excerpt 3.14

Amy and Cathy at sand table. Surjeet comes up. Surjeet: You can’t have water! Cathy: Who cares? They ignore Surjeet.

I surmised that the other girls defined Surjeet’s directive as irrelevant either because they didn’t have water anyway or because they dismissed her right to tell them what to do. On the other hand, Surjeet could sometimes

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command the attention of two classmates, Martin and Harvey (in examples to be discussed later), when she issued directives to them. Sometimes they resisted her directives, but they did apparently listen to them. Other children often ignored or resisted Surjeet’s attempts to initiate or participate in conversations. However, their responses varied. Sometimes Surjeet actively participated in conversations with other children, especially during the first half of the year. An example is this interaction in January with Melanie: Excerpt 3.15

Surjeet and Melanie are at the water table. Surjeet: This is a flower thing. Melanie: This is soap. Girls cooperating in filling things. Thank you, Surjeet. How do you make bubbles? Surjeet: You press it hard. Melanie: Put some more in here, Surjeet. That’s enough. You water the garden while I get some nice good stuff. Surjeet: More? Melanie: A little more in there. Surjeet: A little more? (offers water) Melanie: No. Surjeet: You’re not playing? Melanie: Yes. Surjeet: (notices her sleeves are wet). Oh-oh. My mom will hit me. (not distressed, part of the companionship.) Girls stop and dry their hands.

Such friendly, imaginative and relatively cooperative10 play was sometimes evident in interactions Surjeet engaged in in the playhouse – a centre to which she tried often for access. The classroom rule was that only four children were allowed in the playhouse (other centres had different quotas); although Surjeet often wanted to get in there, she didn’t always manage it, because other children might complete their craft project faster than her, install themselves and invite others there before Surjeet was free. As the year wore on, Surjeet more frequently made conversational contributions that appeared internally contradictory or which other children did not take up. Consider this conversation in April: Excerpt 3.16

Donna, Surjeet and Melanie colouring pictures of Easter eggs and ducks and rabbits. Donna: That’s not supposed to be pink. (to Surjeet regarding her duck, which she has coloured pink) Surjeet: Meagan, Mitch is using the sparkles. Randy too. Melanie, go tell Mrs Clark. Melanie: Ryan was too. I’m shocked.

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Learning English at School

Donna: I’m too. Surjeet: My dog lives in my house, he bites me, no he doesn’t bite me. Amy: (to Surjeet re her pink Easter egg) This a yours? Amy picks it up. Surjeet is upset. Surjeet: Leave it. Amy: OK. (she puts it down) Donna: I have three or four (Easter eggs) from Katy’s party. (gestures to picture) Surjeet: Me too. I have 10 hundred. I can’t go to people’s birthday parties.

Although conversations accompanying colouring were commonly somewhat free-wheeling, rarely coherent or cohesive, the other children neither heeded Surjeet’s direction to go tell Mrs Clark11 nor took up her contradictory contribution about her dog. Although some of them began the year using phrases like ‘10 hundred’, by this time most of the children were using plausible-sounding numbers in their contributions and enforcing others’ use of such numbers. They sometimes mocked younger children who persisted in using number constructions they did not recognise as ‘right’. Hence I suspect they noted Surjeet’s use of the improbable number, even though they did not remark on it in subsequent conversation. In February, while Surjeet was gluing pieces of paper to two toilet paper rolls, Nina approached her: Excerpt 3.17

Nina: What are you making? Surjeet: A phone. (she looks up at Nina) Nina: What kind of phone? What kind of phone? (Pause 5 seconds) Surjeet: It’s not a phone. Nina: Then why do you need that red paper? Surjeet: (glances at red paper) It’s not, it’s a pur: (eyes widen) I don’t need it! I only need /dIs/ (gestures to white paper beside her) Nina: Then why did you get that red paper? Surjeet: I didn’t do it. Randy got it. Nina: I don’t believe you. Surjeet: I saw **** Nina: I didn’t even just see Randy on this table. Surjeet: I sitted here! (eyes widen and she gestures to chair beside her) Nina: Well, he’s (Randy’s) on that table. (gestures to the table where Randy is sitting) Surjeet: **** Nina: I know everything Surjeet: No you don’t. Nina: Yes I do. Surjeet: No you don’t. Nina: (singing) I know everything. I know everything. Julie approaches.

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Julie: (to Surjeet) What are you making? Nina: Julie, Julie, what did the cat do? Julie: I don’t know. I don’t know. She walks away. Nina also leaves.

In this conversation, Nina continued to query Surjeet about the red paper, saying she did not believe Surjeet. Surjeet asserted initially that she was making a phone and then contradicted that assertion.12 The interaction ended with Nina telling Surjeet that she (Nina) ‘knows everything’ and usurping Surjeet’s turn in the conversation after Julie asked Surjeet a question. This attempt to position Surjeet as not knowing everything (which Surjeet resisted mildly), as not believed and as not allowed a conversational place, became a relatively common practice in the classroom. Surjeet’s sometimes non-cohesive conversational contributions seemed part of this process – she did not seem able to fi nd a place for herself easily within conversations. However, in some conversations Surjeet’s utterances did seem tied onto others, for example, this conversation in June: Excerpt 3.18

Children are writing the alphabet and drawing pictures at the table. Surjeet: I’m not scribbling like Harvey. Look, I’m not scribbling like Harvey. Mitch: Harvey always scribbles. Every time I sit beside him. Surjeet: Yeah. Harvey comes over. They watch him. Surjeet: See he’s scribbling. Mitch: No he’s not. Surjeet: I have a friend outside who scribbles like Harvey. Mrs Clark comes over. See, I’m not scribbling like Harvey. Mrs Clark: Harvey doesn’t scribble any more. He’s learned how to do it right. The conversation continues as children colour. Surjeet continues to discuss scribbling.

This conversation continued for some while, during which time Surjeet accused Harvey of being a ‘copycatter’ for using the chart on the wall to get his alphabet right and Surjeet told me that ‘I didn’t look at that [the chart], I just knowed it! I’m not scribbling!’ Surjeet here participated in the positioning of Harvey as incompetent and attempted to distance herself from such incompetence. Again, we see Surjeet’s concern with doing things correctly. In fact, Surjeet did do a lot correctly in her classroom and her efforts in this regard were considerable. Much of this expertise centred around literacy activities. In February, she delivered all her Valentine cards,

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which involved matching the names she had written on the envelopes of her cards to the names the children had put on the outside of mailboxes they had constructed. This was more difficult than it sounds, because the formation of the names addressed by the senders often differed considerably from the formation of the names on the mailboxes of the receivers. Surjeet interrupted her own deliveries several times to point out mailboxes other children were looking for. After she fi nished her own deliveries she offered to help Donna, who was obviously having trouble with the task. In the midst of helping Donna, with several children milling about the mailboxes, Surjeet also gave assistance to other children. Her assistance looked very efficient and accurate. The videotape that shows Surjeet doing this matching also shows Randy engaged in the same exercise. Randy glanced briefly at the names on his cards, tried somewhat half-heartedly to fi nd matches, and then put the cards in the mailboxes one by one starting on the left, without regard for the names on the envelopes or the names on the mailboxes. The contrast with Surjeet was striking. Earlier in the year I observed Surjeet with two other children playing a Concentration game with alphabet letters on cards. Surjeet handily won the game. She then continued to play with other children, winning each time. In March, as she examined a chart with children’s names on it, Surjeet remarked to Mrs Clark: ‘Abe’s got a small name!’ She also approached Mrs Clark on another occasion in March, pointing to the label on Mrs Clark’s desk: ‘I can read this! “Mrs Clark’s desk!”’ Her numeracy abilities also apparently developed over the course of the year. As Mrs Clark had noted, Surjeet did not participate in the choral chanting of numbers in the circle at the beginning of the year. However, videotapes taken in May sometimes show her leading the group in choral counting. In addition, her paintings were detailed and colourful. But her expertise in these activities did not seem part of ‘what everybody knew’ about her.

Pedagogical documentation may have stimulated different views of Surjeet. Davies (2014: 36) argued that sometimes conceiving of identities as individual and owned can encourage ‘sticking points … the production of already existing knowledge’. She pointed out conceiving of subjects as intra-active becoming is a struggle, ‘a shift away from will, intentionality and repetition … requir[ing] constant work against the seduction of the lines of descent that require no effort, that confi rm who one is and how the world works’ (Davies, 2014: 36). Advocates of pedagogical documentation have often written about the difficulties of thinking differently, of expecting contradiction and of refusing to rely on childhood developmental theories or other already given knowledge to fi nd new truths, new insights and new reactions.

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Near the end of the year, Surjeet was sitting on a chair at a table in the library and Julie came up to her, saying, ‘I have to sit somewhere’. Julie then bent her knees and put her hips down on the side of Surjeet’s chair, forcing Surjeet out. Surjeet did not protest about this, and she moved to another chair in the library. Earlier in the year, I had seen similar incidents: Excerpt 3.19

Surjeet sitting in Mrs Clark’s chair in the circle. Oscar approaches. Oscar: I want to sit there. Surjeet: I was sitting here fi rst. Melanie approaches. Melanie: Surjeet, leave. Surjeet leaves and Oscar sits down. Surjeet goes to plasticine table.

On several occasions, children took materials that Surjeet was using out of her hands or she gave up materials when other children demanded them. In addition, on many occasions, Surjeet stood at the entrance to the ‘housekeeping centre’, a centre she appeared to really like, but stayed outside, watching other children play. Apparently, she had a hard time finding a secure, central, active and desirable place for herself in this community. It would be incorrect to say that she didn’t have a place or that she was marginal to the action; rather, she was there, but her place, her position, could be threatened or taken, and she could be disbelieved and/or ignored. At the end of the year, Mrs Clark believed that Surjeet was still quite handicapped by incomplete knowledge of English. She recommended to the next year’s teacher that Surjeet get extra instruction in ESL. Mrs Clark was also concerned that Surjeet might have a learning disability and that she should be tested in Grade 1 for possible remedial placement. Davies (2014) described several events in a pre-school in which two boys were angry with one another, events that affected and distressed her (and, she speculated, other children as well). As she described the intra-actions among the two boys and their playmates, she came to see their anger as arising when their ‘social embeddedness is jeopardised and the hope and longing to be part of a community is threatened’ (Søndergaard, 2012: 5). Davies came to see the anger the boys displayed as no one child’s fault, but as something produced and shared among all the playmates, an affect that ‘generally lies under or beyond conscious thought and is lodged in the affective flows between subjects and their encounters with each other’ (Davies, 2014: 50). Through further observation and through discussion with the pre-school teachers, this ‘problem’ or provocation to thought stimulated closer listening to the children and experimentation with

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ways to assure all that their longing to be part of the community would be accommodated. Some of the events I observed in the kindergarten seemed to threaten Surjeet’s social inclusion and I now wonder if closer listening and observing might have led to experimentation with ways to increase her and her playmates’ feelings of inclusion. Martin

Martin was born in Germany to Polish-speaking parents who had left Poland and immigrated to Canada when Martin was a year and a half old. As infants, he and his younger brother had attended part-time an Englishmedium daycare centre for some time while their parents were engaged in educational upgrading in Canada; after this, one or other of their parents cared for them. Martin’s family had no other extended family members in Canada, but they were friendly with other Polish-speaking families who lived in their townhouse complex. By the time Martin began kindergarten, his parents had noticed him ‘mixing words’ of Polish and English: ‘[He] can say a sentence half Polish, half English. Especially colours, animals, numbers, [he] says it in English.’ Dr Bozena Karwowska, the Polish– English bilingual research assistant in this project, assessed Martin’s Polish skills in February and June of his kindergarten year. In February, she found Martin’s Polish skills quite good: Excerpt 3.20

He has no problems with understanding and speaking Polish. In general, he does not mix Polish and English words. He declines nouns and adjectives. His declension of nouns is fairly good. His Polish vocabulary is quite good. In general my impression was that Martin’s language is not much lower than the level that is expected from Polish children of his age.

On his entry to kindergarten, Mrs Clark saw Martin as an active and potentially somewhat difficult student; in October she reported that she had found him ‘quite a handful’ at the beginning of the school year and had been in touch with his parents about his behaviour. His father said in an interview I conducted in November: Excerpt 3.21

At the beginning the teacher was complaining because he was, there are other Polish children and he knows them and the teacher said they were trying, they didn’t listen to her, they were just – Martin tried to turn others’ attention to himself so he did all kinds of different things, sticking the tongue out and not listening to the teacher, doing all different things. But now the teacher said you have to stay in contact, I will inform you

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how he is doing, because he has to listen to me because I want to teach him something. If he won’t listen to me he won’t learn and so we explained it to him a thousand times. I think there is no more problem.

Because fieldwork began in October, I did not see Martin engaging in the behaviours that had initially precipitated Mrs Clark’s communication with his parents. By the time I began to observe, Mrs Clark believed, as did his father, that Martin had ‘calmed down’ and that his behaviour was acceptable. Nevertheless, Martin’s behaviour was consistently an issue throughout the year, particularly for the other students. I was struck by numerous instances in which Martin was directed by other children. They told him where to sit, how to complete his work, that he was doing something wrong, and so on. Both Anglophone and bilingual children gave him directives. In some cases, these directives were offered in a friendly and collusive manner, as when Earl told him in a whisper one day in June when Martin joined the circle with an object for sharing that ‘It’s girls’ day’, and Martin quickly put his toy away in his backpack. At other times, children ‘tattled’ on Martin to the teacher (e.g. Mark: ‘Mrs Clark, Martin’s lying down!’), or gave Martin directives in ways that did not appear so collaborative, like Wesley’s in June: Excerpt 3.22

Martin has come and shown Wesley an animal. Wesley: Martin, put that back! It’s not playtime for you. Martin puts it on the track. But you’re not allowed to put it on the track. It’s NOT PLAYTIME FOR YOU. [loud and slow] KT: Why? Wesley: Because he hasn’t showed his work [to Mrs Clark].

Wesley often told Martin what to do. On one occasion, while I was observing the children at the table and Martin had left to get some materials, Wesley whispered to me, ‘I have to tell you something but it’s a secret. Martin talks rude.’ When I asked him what he meant, he said he couldn’t say, but he repeated his ‘secret’ to Julie and Cathy. Surjeet also provided Martin with many directives. On an occasion in November: Excerpt 3.23

Surjeet: Martin:

Don’t, Martin, sit on my chair! [dramatically] You’re doing it wrong! Oh-oh, you need to write your name! But I write my name.

On this occasion, Martin contradicted Surjeet’s assumption that he had not written his name on his paper. Such countering of others’ commands

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was not particularly usual for Martin. More typically he acquiesced, as in this encounter: Excerpt 3.24

Harvey and Martin playing with Brio [wooden trains]. Tim comes over. Harvey: Tim. Get out. Get out. Harvey and Martin trying to balance bridge. Hey, Martin, don’t do it. I’m trying to figure this out. Martin stops and watches Harvey.

On another occasion, Martin was playing with some other children in the blocks area, and they built a high tower with blocks. Several children outside the area became distressed about this, and Wesley, in particular, admonished Martin loudly and began to take blocks off the tower. Martin was himself upset with Wesley’s reprimand and with the dismantling of the tower; he appealed to Mrs Clark. Mrs Clark restated the classroom rule (no bricks higher than your head) and told Martin: ‘Measure to your head, Martin, these friends are helping you.’ Martin usually complied with other students’ directives but he sometimes resisted (as in his protest to Surjeet noted above). His resistance to others’ directives, including the teacher’s or other adults’ occurred particularly with directives to stop or change activity when he was engaged in colouring, drawing, cutting things out or making something. Like Randy, Martin was persistent, but his persistence was evaluated differently from Randy’s. It sometimes caused difficulties for him: on several occasions, Mrs Clark or his classmates reminded Martin when he did not make transitions to new activities when so directed. The Reggio Emilia approach to working with young children encourages them to explore their environments, which they call the ‘third teacher’ (coming after the two teachers in each classroom). They also emphasise children’s expression of what they are learning or thinking about. Malaguzzi (1998: 77) maintained that: ‘The more teachers are convinced that intellectual and expressive activities have both multiplying and unifying possibilities, the more creativity favors friendly exchanges with imagination and fantasy.’ He advocated that teachers pay close attention to ‘the hundred languages of children’, including drawing, dancing, speech, movement, painting, and so on. In my experience, not every teacher is attentive to the more-than-linguistic languages of children. Martin’s persistence with drawing, making, colouring and cutting out might have been very interesting to document, and to provide clues to his understandings and desires for learning. How his art work meshed with his expression in words would also have been an interesting line to follow.

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Martin also somewhat resisted classroom directives about using his first language. At the beginning of the year, the only Polish speakers in the kindergarten were Martin and Julie; in January, Morgan, a Polishspeaking boy, joined the class. Early in the year, Martin spoke quite a bit of Polish to Julie and to two Polish-speaking boys in the afternoon Language Development class, although his parents reported that he had told them that Mrs Clark had said, ‘No Polish in school, only English’. Although the rule changed and Mrs Clark stated that the children could use their fi rst languages, like many of the children Martin spoke Polish less and less over the course of the year or spoke it more surreptitiously. In some cases, the children themselves enforced the initial first language ban. In March, Abe (in whose home Kurdish was used), an Anglophone girl (Julie) and Martin were playing in the puppet centre. Martin had on a duck sock puppet and said something in Polish. Abe replied, ‘That’s not talking!’ Martin then switched to English. Martin spoke Polish with Julie and with a frequent playmate, John, in the afternoon class. Children from other language backgrounds would sometimes join these Polish-speaking dyads, and Polish speakers would then switch to English. In the following interaction, Martin switched to English to reprimand Harvey, but he resumed speaking Polish before Harvey left the area: Excerpt 3.25

Martin and John speaking Polish in blocks area. Harvey comes in – wiggling their tower. Martin: (notices and yells) ‘Hey! Stop that, you are wrecking it!’ Martin resumes speaking Polish to John. Harvey watches and then leaves.

Martin was active in the kind of ‘side talk’, accompanying the completing of crafts, in which most of the Anglophone children engaged. He also engaged in imaginative play with other children with blocks, the trains, the puppets and the dinosaurs. In many of these interactions the other children seemed to value his presence and the interactions were comfortable and peaceful. In the following conversation, while completing a craft centred on the song ‘I Know an Old Woman who Swallowed a Fly’, Martin did not notice the shaming attempt by Morgan and another two boys: Excerpt 3.26

Martin: Amy: Julie: Martin: Amy:

If somebody swallowed a fly, that would feel gross. You know what? My dad said that Chinese people eat frogs. You know, my dad eat snake. That would hurt a stomach. Some of the dads and mom eat the snake. Some of the dads kill the snake and cut it and then give it to the children. If you eat frogs, their stomachs will go (gestures up and down) I don’t eat snake, I just eat sandwich.

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Morgan and two other boys come over to the table, gesture to Martin’s picture and make some vocalisations like ‘Oh-oh, he’s doing this wrong’. Martin doesn’t apparently notice. They leave. Julie: Oh-oh. Morgan just said shut up. Martin: He’s in very deep trouble if he just said shut up. ‘Aw, shut up!’ (as if quoting)

Martin’s confident ‘He’s in very deep trouble …’ seemed to be the remark of someone who, for once, did not fear that he himself was in deep trouble. Another apparently enjoyable conversation was this: Excerpt 3.27

Randy, Ryan and Martin playing with dinosaurs. Making lots of sibilant noises – Martin knocks down all of Randy’s dinosaurs. Randy: Hey! (not irritated, more amused) All of them bamming into each other’s dinosaurs. Gleeful smiles. Ryan: (pretend concern) You can’t hurt the baby. You gotta protect the egg. We’re all buddies on this side. Martin: And here’s! He’s going out in the deep water. He’s going on his head. Martin and Ryan are ganging up on Randy’s dinosaurs. Ryan: Bullseye! Martin: Bullseye!

After the interaction above, Mrs Clark gently scolded Martin for not stopping his play when she directed all the children to stop and clean up in preparation for recess. She defined Martin’s persistence as misbehaviour. Martin’s contributions, especially in the circle but also sometimes in conversations with peers, often included attempts to communicate fairly sophisticated meanings, despite his beginner’s English syntax. In a conversation with an Anglophone girl in March, Martin was aggrieved because he had only one cupcake holder and the girl had more: Excerpt 3.28

Martin:

You got some lots. It’s not to behave some lots. I need some – you got lots of.

The girl did not give up any of her cupcake holders as a result of Martin’s reproach, to which she did not respond in any discernible way. Martin made many other attempts to express complicated meanings. Sometimes his interlocutors could easily comprehend his contributions; sometimes they could not. In February, at circle time, Mrs Clark was surprised by how rapidly a girl answered a question: Excerpt 3.29

Mrs Clark: How did you figure that out so quickly? Did you guess? Natalie: No. Martin: Maybe she thought!

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In January, when the children had put on a variety of hats indicating diff erent occupations, and then had individually to think up phrases appropriate to that occupation, Martin suggested to the child wearing a crown to say, ‘Do what I says!’ To a child wearing a party hat, Martin suggested, ‘Let’s do party!’ His contributions on this occasion surprised Mrs Clark, who thought them quite advanced ‘for Martin’. In February, Mrs Clark was explaining to the children that when printing an upper case ‘E’, the ‘perfectly correct way to make it’ was to make the top and the bottom ‘about the same size’. Martin interjected, with great interest, gesturing with his fi ngers, ‘But, not like this big one, and this one same size’ – meaning, I think, that the middle horizontal line should be shorter than the other two. Mrs Clark was anxious to move on to another activity, and it was not clear whether or not she understood Martin’s contribution. She only minimally acknowledged it and then began giving the children instructions for the next activity.

Martin’s occasional verbalisations that did not follow the striations of English grammar, but could be interpreted as making sense, were, I think, evidence of his desiring to think, to express, to experiment with English and to contribute to the intellectual life of the classroom. By the end of the school year, Mrs Clark was convinced that Martin was a fairly bright student who would probably require some adultmonitored structure in order to work to his potential. Mrs Clark did not regard his English language abilities as an impediment to his learning and she did not recommend testing for specialised ESL support in Grade 1. In her view, Martin was prepared for Grade 1 but his behaviour and ‘flightiness’ were a still-relevant potential concern. Julie

Julie and her younger sister were born in Canada to Polish-speaking parents. Cousins, aunts and uncles lived nearby. Julie’s mother had cared for her children, speaking Polish, since their birth. Julie had used English a little while playing with English-speaking children in the townhouse complex where she lived before starting school. She had also attended one year of an English-medium pre-school programme. Her mother thought that Julie started pre-school speaking Polish appropriately for her age but knowing only ‘a few words [of English], not much’. By the time she began kindergarten, her mother noted that Julie spoke much more English and that she insisted on speaking English with her

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younger sister. Julie’s mother told me in November that Julie was starting to speak quite a bit of English with neighbourhood children. She had noticed that Julie was forgetting some Polish vocabulary and that her pronunciation of Polish, especially difficult sounds, was beginning to sound like an English speaker’s. Dr Karwowska assessed Julie’s Polish skills in February and in June. She noted in February that Julie used English words while speaking Polish. Dr Karwowska interpreted this use of English as Julie’s ‘losing’ Polish vocabulary, especially in the school domain. Dr Karwowska also documented productive syntactic restrictions in Julie’s Polish as well as receptive difficulties caused by syntactic distinctions in Polish not made in English. After the June meeting, Dr Karwowska thought overall that Julie’s Polish proficiency was limited and that ‘she is losing Polish in a steady way’. Many of my notes, and the audio- and videotapes, show that Julie was relatively quiet in her classroom and that she spent a good deal of her time watching other children, listening to them and watching her teacher. At the same time, I was impressed by the extent to which Julie socialised with others in her classroom. She appeared to have a series of preferred playmates throughout the year, but she interacted with many other children as well. Her preferred playmates in her morning kindergarten at the beginning of the year were Alice, an Anglophone girl, and Oscar, a boy whose family spoke Laotian. Alice moved away from the school in December and Oscar also moved away in April. However, by about January, Julie had also become particularly friendly with Amy (one of the focal children) and Melanie, in whose home English was used. All year, in the afternoon class, Julie interacted preferentially with Agatha, her cousin. With Alice, Oscar, Amy and Melanie, Julie spoke English, but with Agatha she initially almost always spoke Polish, with a great deal of translanguaging between English and Polish. Later in the school year, she and Agatha spoke more and more English with one another. Julie’s interactions with her playmates varied, and Julie and Alice’s interactions frequently appeared somewhat competitive. Oscar often took a protective stance toward Julie. In November, I observed Julie and Oscar playing a Concentration game when Alice approached them and asked to play, which they allowed. Alice won the game and Julie exaggeratedly hung her head, communicating distress. Oscar appeared worried about her, stroked her back, said several comforting things and asked Alice if Julie ‘could go first’ as the next set of cards were laid down. At the end of November, Alice and Julie were playing at the sand table together. I could not record their conversation, but my fieldnotes say: ‘Alice is being very bossy toward Julie, but Julie’s taking it.’ In early December, the two had the following conversation:

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Excerpt 3.30

As they are doing a Christmas craft – gluing triangles to each other and then decorating the ‘trees’ with sparkles and crayons. Alice: (to Julie) You’re copying me! Julie: No. (Pause 5 seconds) Where’d you get that? (referring to some sparkly paper Alice has. Laughs.) Alice: I can’t tell you. Julie: Nice! (showing me [KT] some shiny paper she has) (laughs) I did it the wrong way! Alice: Don’t copy! Julie: I’m just gonna … (runs away to get more paper. Returns) See! (laughs) Alice: It’s not funny, Julie! Julie: Let’s see. Guess where I’m gonna stick it. I’m making this for my mom. She was sick. She was having a big cough. Surjeet: (comes to sit beside A and J. Speech does not appear connected with anything that has gone on so far) And my sister said, ‘LEAVE ME ALONE!’ (yelling) Alice: Be quiet (pause 3 seconds) that’s a big (pause 4 seconds) Oscar comes over and whispers to Julie. Hey, Julie, remember no secrets in this school? What did he tell you? Julie: He said /bey uw:::: læ læ/13 Alice: It’s gonna hurt my feelings. Julie: Okay, I’ll go ask him. (she moves to Oscar – whispering) Can I please tell her? She’s my best friend. Alice: I know what he said. Julie: Should I tell her? (to Oscar) Alice: I won’t tell no one. (to Oscar) Oscar nods. Julie: (as if quoting, this is the secret) He’s my friend and he likes me and he likes you. Alice: (whispering to Oscar) I’m making something for Santa. Surjeet: I heard that. Alice: What did I say? Surjeet: You’re making something for Santa. Alice: No I’m not. Surjeet: You’re lying. Alice: No I’m not. (Pause 10 seconds) Julie: Tell me what you said. Alice then whispers her secret to Julie and Surjeet walks away.

Julie maintained ‘face’ in this conversation, despite Alice’s initial desultory attempts to threaten it.14 First Julie denied she was copying Alice (copying

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was a practice of some ambiguity to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4). Next, Julie announced that she had ‘made a mistake’; she laughed and ignored Alice’s rebuttal that the mistake was ‘not funny’. Oscar’s whispering to her then put Julie in a more powerful position than Alice (as someone in the know). Alice asked to be let in on the secret. Julie very quickly acceded, while maintaining Oscar’s right to decide whether or not she could let Alice in on the information. Julie did not acquiesce to Alice’s initial attempts in this conversation to shame her, and Oscar’s intervention allowed her to speak from a more powerful position than Alice for a turn or two. I did not notice whether Oscar had observed the girls’ interaction before he moved in with his secret, so I do not know whether he intervened intentionally, to ‘protect’ Julie. However, he very effectively helped her resist the subordination Alice was trying to set up. Although Julie was not subordinated, Alice’s attempt to subordinate Surjeet was presumably more successful. Julie’s interactions with Melanie appeared much less fraught with difficulties than those with Alice. The following conversation took place in mid-November: Excerpt 3.31

Melanie and Julie playing with farm animals, moving them around, making fences around them. Talking about big and small cows. Melanie: See I can tell where they are. Julie: No the cows has to be here. Here’s grass and there’s grass too. This cow doesn’t want to stay up. (complaining) Melanie: We’ve got some people coming to feed [the horses. Julie: [Here’s a horsey. And the big horse. (plays with the big horse) (in someone else’s voice) ‘Remember I have to get on the horse.’ Melanie: Do you? Julie: This horse doesn’t want to stand! (irritated, her own voice) Melanie: Some do, some don’t. Julie: This is their horse – here’s one cow. Melanie: You tell me which dog you want to use? Julie: No. I like this one. Melanie: How about we use two? Julie: I like this horse. Melanie: Me too, I’ll put dog the fence Julie: **** I have to go to the washroom.

This play with Melanie appeared relaxed and enjoyable. Julie entered into storying play (‘Remember I have to get on the horse’) at one point and the two negotiated how they would handle both liking the same horse. Speaking with someone else’s voice occurred in some of the children’s storying play, especially in the housekeeping centre, but some children never engaged in it. In numerous examples, Julie was able to deflect criticism and/or maintain a desirable position within her classroom. Once in November when

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children were cutting out pictures of ‘foods bears like to eat’, she initiated a subordinating sequence about Harvey: Excerpt 3.32

Julie: Does Harvey eat garbage? Children laugh. Alice: Does Harvey eat a roof? Julie: Does Harvey eat a roof? Earl: (putting scissors in mouth) Does Harvey do this? Children laugh uproariously.

Later I recorded: Excerpt 3.33

Wesley: Julie’s a fish! Julie: And you’re a bear! Wesley: Gr: ow: l:: Julie smiles.

Here, Julie deflected Wesley’s potentially subordinating game with her. On many other occasions, Julie was able to resist or deflect others’ attempts to dominate her. For example: Excerpt 3.34

Julie goes to computer. Tries to figure out where to turn it on. Ryan notices and comes over and does it for her. She looks at the screen and does nothing. Oscar comes over and points to the alphabet across the top. Alice comes over and grabs Oscar’s hand off the screen. Alice: Can I play next? Julie: No. Julie singing A-B-C song and kind of randomly pressing keys. Oscar is trying to show her non-verbally what to do. Oscar: My turn, Julie. (tries to wiggle onto the chair.) Julie: Wait. He gets off the chair. She clicks on another ‘game’. Julie: (pointing at an icon, to me) Is this a /h∂rz/? Oscar: A horse! It’s not a /h∂rz/! KT: Oh, a horse. No I don’t think so. Julie: It IS a /h∂rz/. Harvey joins the group of kids around her. Also Ryan who pushes some keys. Ryan starts a new game. Julie is still on the chair. Julie: Don’t push. Harvey: Julie, it’s my turn. Ryan: Harvey, go wipe your nose. Julie looks at me (KT) and grimaces. Harvey goes away, she leaves.

Julie was able to maintain her position, even though she was neither very expert at nor very interested in the computer over which the children

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disputed. She also contradicted one of my statements and continued her play without pause. The afternoon kindergarten included not only Julie’s cousin Agatha but also several other Polish-speaking youngsters. Agatha spoke Polish well, but was also an experienced English speaker because of her preschool attendance at an English-speaking daycare centre. In the afternoons, and in the playground, Julie played with Agatha a great deal. The girls increasingly played in English as the year wore on (speaking almost exclusively in English by about April, despite their teacher’s lifting of the fi rst language ban). Although Agatha was not enrolled in Julie’s morning kindergarten, Julie’s having this powerful part-time ally, with whom she had strong and long-standing ties outside the classroom, may have been important in how others (including her teacher) came to see her in school. Julie often attempted to involve adults in conversation and mostly succeeded. More than any of the other children, she would try to engage me in brief conversations, asking to look at my field notebook, asking to write her name in it, and so on. She also made friendly overtures to the teacher aide who supervised the children while they ate their lunches and played outside at noon. When ‘Mrs B’ entered the classroom at lunch, Julie would run to her, mock-wailing in a high-pitched voice indicating, I think, extreme pleasure, ‘Oh, Mrs B!’ and hug her. Julie switched affiliations to a new aide after Mrs B moved to a new school; her behaviour with the new teacher aide was very similar. Both women accepted Julie’s initiations with what looked like pleasure and Mrs B told me that she found Julie a ‘sweet little girl’. More than any of the other children, Julie asked others for help when she was unsure of a vocabulary item. Typical was this interaction in January: Excerpt 3.35

Ryan: Julie: Ryan:

Look at that wiggly, swiggley, miggley worm. What’s a worm? It’s something that crawls in the grass! (surprised)

This interaction, in which Ryan provided a defi nition for her, showed Julie as seemingly unafraid that her display of ‘not-knowing’ would be a problem for her. As in her laughing proclamation in Excerpt 3.30, ‘I did it the wrong way’, Julie did not seem unduly concerned about her occasional lack of English vocabulary or expertise. To an extent not noticed with respect to the other focal children, Julie often discussed her fi rst language with other adults and children in her classroom and displayed her competence in Polish to others. Martin, in her morning class, initiated several Polish conversations with her. She also spoke Polish with Agatha and some other Polish-speaking children in her

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afternoon class. One morning in February, Julie tried to teach Cathy (an Anglophone girl) and Oscar some Polish: Excerpt 3.36

Julie goes to chart with pictures and English labels written by the pictures. Cathy and Oscar are eating their snacks at the adjacent table. Julie points to a picture of a bird. This in Polish means ptak. Julie: Cathy: (points to a frog) What does this say? Um::::. (referring to a different picture) Jajeczko. [diminutive of egg] Julie: Cathy points to bear. Misiu (mispronunciation of Polish misio) Julie: Cathy: What? Julie: Misiu. Cathy: Misiu. (pointing to a picture of a Christmas tree). Hoyinka. Julie: Cathy: (to Oscar) Do you know how to count in Polish? Cathy and Oscar start talking about something else. Julie continues to look at the chart, saying: ‘I know what this means …’.

On other occasions as well, Julie explicitly discussed her and other children’s knowledge of Polish. She appeared proud of knowing Polish and more than any of the others, she acknowledged her affiliation to her first language and considered that others might be possibly interested in it as well. At the end of the year, Mrs Clark assessed Julie as having made good progress in linguistic as well as academic skills. She was confident that Julie would have a successful year in Grade 1 and probably would not require any further special assistance with English. Harvey

Harvey was the oldest of three boys in a Chinese family. I initially thought (as did Mrs Clark) that Harvey spoke Chinese at home. He was enrolled in the afternoon Language Development class on the basis of that supposition. However, later interviews with his mother made it evident that English was Harvey’s fi rst and only language (Toohey, 1996). Harvey’s mother reported that she and her husband, native speakers of Teochew (a Singaporean dialect of Chinese), had decided that they would speak to their children only in English so as to ease their way in Canadian schools. In separate interviews at the beginning of the school year, Harvey’s mother told both Mrs Clark and me that Harvey ‘was a very bright boy’ and that she was glad he was in school because she felt he needed more stimulation than she could provide at home. She cited the elaborate Lego™ constructions he had been making, his attention to stories and his efforts to read as evidence of his cleverness. Harvey’s mother’s

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English phonology was similar to his; Mrs Clark’s suggesting later in the year that Harvey’s English pronunciation might have caused him problems at school surprised both his mother and his father. Harvey’s interlocutors often did not understand his utterances, particularly when he took ‘long turns’, and he appeared very frustrated by this.15 Their not understanding him seemed related to their positioning of him in the classroom. A typical example: Excerpt 3.37

Harvey with a small group of other pupils. Harvey initially unhappy because one of the children moved the crayons at the table on which he is working and he is unable to reach them. In the context of a relatively long utterance which neither the children (I think) nor I understand, Harvey says: /swεtš/ [meaning, I think, ‘stretch’.] Edward: (laughing, mocking) Trash??? Harvey: (twice) I didn’t say trash, I said /swεtš/ (angry and frustrated). The children laugh and move the crayons farther away from him. Unable to sustain my observer stance, I say – I think Harvey wants to reach the crayons. Harvey, can you say ‘Can you pass the crayons, please?’ He does, they do and then he leaves. Edward: I don’t like Harvey.

Harvey had many disputes with other children over resources; also other children frequently refused him access to play with them. Often, the other children appeared to ignore his verbal initiations. Once, for example, Harvey carried around a Bingo game and wanted playmates: he approached two other boys in the class (one Anglophone, one Chinese-speaking): Excerpt 3.38

Harvey: Earl:

Bingo, guys! (enthusiastic) Ah, stupid Bingo.

He asked another boy who did not respond and it was unclear whether the boy had not heard him, had not understood him or had just chosen not to respond. A few minutes later, Harvey said to me: ‘Mrs Toohey, nobody’s playing with me Bingo. Nobody ever plays with me.’ Indeed, he spent a great deal of time playing alone. Harvey often coughed, sneezed and had a runny nose. In addition, he was somewhat less physically adept than many of the other children. On several occasions, other children angrily reprimanded him for touching them, if he had inadvertently leaned on another child in the circle or bumped into them in a line-up. I observed children wrinkling their noses in disgust after the teacher told Harvey to wipe his nose. Other children often told Harvey to move further away when he sat down beside them in

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the circle. Excerpt 3.39 (cited earlier) illustrates a ‘shaming’ of Harvey, an episode initiated by Julie: Excerpt 3.39

Julie: Does Harvey eat garbage? Children laugh. Alice: Does Harvey eat a roof? Julie: Does Harvey eat a roof? Earl: (putting scissors in mouth) Does Harvey do this? Children laugh uproariously.

Harvey’s social exclusion from his kindergarten classmates was distressing to me, but I was aware of and to some extent shared, the affect of considering him as polluting. I wish that I had tried to think with his teacher about his exclusion and about the runny nose and about how some of the unpleasantness he experienced might have been mitigated. Considering himself an expert with the wooden trains, Harvey at the beginning of the year quite loudly directed others about play with them. Harvey frequently argued with other boys about the use of the trains and it often appeared that the other boys resisted Harvey’s commands. Frequently, disputes also arose when Harvey took classroom materials (glue, scissors, and so on) from other children. At times, Harvey became very frustrated with his classmates and expressed his irritation loudly. Often, as he made to snatch something, he would declare, ‘You have to share!’ Harvey frequently sought interactions with the teacher and other classroom adults at the beginning of the school year. He reported when he felt he had been unfairly treated by other children and he initiated conversations with both the teacher and myself on occasions when he had apparently been unable to engage children in interaction. He frequently bid for the teacher’s attention during circle time in order to relate long, often somewhat incomprehensible (to her) stories. Despite his frequent exclusion from activities with other children, he actively participated in teacherled activities: he often answered teacher questions in the circle, usually participated actively in choral work and indicated enthusiastic interest in the stories read to the group. Despite the skills that Harvey’s mother had pointed out, Harvey began the school year apparently unfamiliar with pencil and paper. Initially he also had difficulty writing his name, colouring and using scissors and glue. By the end of the year, he would fi nish the daily assigned crafts quickly and was frequently reminded both by other students and by the teacher to put his name on his work, to tidy his materials and to return equipment to its storage. Mrs Clark told me several times that she was less convinced of Harvey’s intellectual gifts than his parents. Doing crafts and displaying

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familiarity and adeptness with school materials (glue, scissors, and so on) in ‘the school way’ are part of the practices of kindergarten and Mrs Clark judged Harvey as less than skilled in these areas. Harvey’s behaviour changed somewhat about the beginning of February. At the end of January, Abe (whose family spoke Kurdish) joined the class. Abe appeared bewildered by the kindergarten activities. For a time, Harvey mentored Abe’s involvement in classroom routines. Harvey reminded Abe where to put his backpack, when to come to circle, when it was snack time, and so on. The boys sat next to each other in the circle and engaged in play at activity time. Harvey ‘read’ to Abe at book-sharing time. This enjoyable interaction with Abe did not persist: at the beginning of March, I observed the boys having a heated resource dispute (both wanted the same toy car) and thereafter the pair very seldom interacted. My fieldnotes include five occasions after March on which Abe blamed Harvey for mishaps in the classroom (when the baby chicks’ aquarium got jarred, when the teacher reprimanded a group of boys for pushing while in line, and so on). Harvey used a variety of strategies for soliciting playmates, playing, handling conflict and fi nding affiliations in the classroom over the course of the year. In March, Harvey entered and sustained for about 20 minutes an interaction with two Chinese-speaking boys (Earl and John) in the afternoon class. During his interaction with the two (who switched from Chinese to English when Harvey was involved in the play), Harvey was careful to situate himself as a ‘track fi xer’; he continued to offer the cars to the other two boys as train ‘players’ throughout the interaction: Excerpt 3.40

Earl and John are playing with the wooden train. Harvey comes up. Harvey: Can I play? Earl: NO! Harvey: I know, I’m just helping you. The bridge is very hard to do. You need a block underneath. (He gets a block and puts it underneath.) John: No! Earl says nothing. Harvey: I’m very smart, do I, Earl? No response from Earl. Earl keeps assembling tracks. You can try this (offers another piece) Earl accepts. They both laugh as engine races downhill. Track breaks. Harvey immediately tries to fix it. John: (to Harvey) See this car? Harvey: This too swippers [?] here. Earl: It’s easy to make this, right? Harvey: Here are your trains. (to Earl) Harvey sits back as the other two boys play. John, your train! Harvey gets up and takes it to John, then takes it back to Earl. Earl, John didn’t need it.

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Tension seems to have gone down. Earl and John playing, Harvey watching. John, everything is going down. Abe approaches. Earl: Hey, no way! Not you guys play, just Abe! (Earl trying to get Abe in and the other two out, but the attempt was not apparently successful.) Harvey: I’m really good at helping Earl and John, do I? … This is more stronger. (Harvey offers a larger engine to Earl.) Earl: I don’t want this. Harvey: I can help you with this? Earl: No, stop. Harvey: Why? Earl: Because I want these. (the other pieces)

Harvey appeared to have found a successful strategy for access to the train and the train play, maintaining himself as an acceptable peripheral participant. Situating himself as a fi xer, and as not a full participant in the play, may have allowed him to stay without the other two boys becoming angry with him and invoking the ‘two kids only’ rule, or leaving themselves. In similar kinds of interactions afterwards, ‘the helper role’ allowed Harvey access to the materials he wished to use. In contradiction to his prevalent difficulties, Harvey engaged in a particularly friendly interaction with Martin in March. For about a month around Valentine’s day, the girls in particular engaged in gift-giving: during activity time, one, two or sometimes more girls would draw pictures or make things and then address them to one another. Upon their receipt, they would then elaborately thank one another with hugs and kisses. In March, Harvey gave Martin a drawing gift, framing the gift as an Easter present. The boys had a private friendly conversation about when Easter was, checking the wall calendar. Later in the circle time, Martin smiled and winked at Harvey in appreciation for the gift. The teacher reported to me in March that she had observed Harvey having a much better time in kindergarten as well, and attributed this to his taking Abe ‘under his wing’ and thus ‘developing social skills he did not have at the beginning of the year’. He also found a relatively reliable playmate, Mark, who seemed as interested in the wooden trains as he was and who appeared to enjoy their joint activities. Mrs Clark told me in March and then again in June that she was concerned that Harvey’s academic skills seemed to be at a bit of a standstill. In assessing him for the spring report card in March, she had noticed that Harvey was unable or unwilling to give information he had been able to relate some weeks before. He was also participating less and less in the large group literacy activities. I also had the impression that Harvey was engaging in fewer and fewer ‘long turns’; from about February, I did not hear him tell the long stories I heard so often at the beginning of the fieldwork. He participated less and less frequently in circle time activities and

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became generally less conspicuous than at the beginning of the year. In addition, beginning about the middle of April, Harvey left the classroom periodically for school-based ‘speech therapy’. Harvey’s identity in his interactions with other children appeared problematic for him at times. He often seemed unable to participate happily in all the activities in which he would have liked to engage. Although he could sometimes sustain enjoyable interactions with peers, his access to peer interactions was sometimes confl ictual. Harvey actively and enthusiastically participated in activities that included Mrs Clark, although he may have reduced the intensity of those interactions over the course of the year. Amy

Amy came to Suburban City from Hong Kong the weekend before kindergarten began, to live with an aunt, uncle, infant cousin and her grandmother. Her Cantonese-speaking maternal grandmother had cared for her since infancy. Amy’s father (who lived in Hong Kong and visited Amy, with Amy’s mother, whenever possible) thought that she knew ‘almost no English’ upon her entry to school but that she knew Chinese reasonably well for her age. Amy had attended a pre-school programme in Hong Kong which had focused on school readiness activities, and Amy began school in Canada evidently very experienced in using paper and pencils, crayons, scissors and glue. Unlike Harvey, Amy was not stigmatised, but rather usually petted by the other children. Shorter than any other child in the class but more physically adept than many, Amy was a favourite with many of the other children from the beginning. Each time I observed, at least one of the girls, Anglophone or bilingual, was in close contact with Amy, holding her hand, leaning on her in the circle. Amy returned her classmates’ physical affection and hugged and kissed them. Initially Amy spoke very little English to the other children, or to anybody else either in conversation, or during the choral recitations of the circle.16 In addition, she initially displayed little interest in the stories the teacher read to the students. However, her silence did not prohibit her from participating in activities with other children.17 Indeed, the other children appeared to enjoy her presence: she smiled at the others a lot, and laughed easily and quietly. She began school drawing, painting and using kindergarten tools maturely in comparison with many of the other children. Active in the girls’ February and March gift-giving, she frequently received gifts from other children and her own attractively completed gifts were valued by their recipients. At the circle, many of the girls bid for Amy to sit next to them. Quiet and compliant, she was a legitimate peripheral participant in most of the children’s activities; she was often invited and was rarely denied access if she requested it.

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Comments made by a female student in the afternoon class in January may explain some of her classmates’ perceptions. After I had asked Amy a question, to which she gave no reply, Agatha told me: Excerpt 3.41

Agatha:

She’s a little girl. Nobody can take care of her at home. So that’s why she comes to school. She can’t stay by herself. So, she could come here and we’d take care of her.

Despite her ‘little’ image and her initial reticence, Amy easily let others know what she needed or wanted. Using gestures and pointing, she got classmates, the teacher and me to give her any physical assistance she required. In December, for example, she told her classmates at the circle ‘Some here!’ and they rapidly complied with her request for more room to sit down. In November, Amy began to participate verbally in classroom routines, answering ‘Good morning, Mrs C’ at roll call, and participating in choral counting and other choral activities. Beginning about the end of November and continuing for about two months, Amy treated her interlocutors to word gifts: she would come up, say a word, smile and leave. On several occasions in January, as I watched Amy work on a craft or a drawing, she would unsolicited tell me the names of her classmates, the days of the week or something else the children had been practising in choral recitation. Beginning about February, Amy began to approach her teacher, her classmates and me with phrases and short sentences. In February, she asked me to cut something out for her, saying: ‘You get it out, this one here?’ She began to participate in storying play with some of the other bilingual children in her class; primarily in the housekeeping corner, she participated in assigning roles and rudimentary planning. In the following conversation, Amy’s minimal verbalisations were nevertheless sufficient to keep her part of the story line: Excerpt 3.42

In the housekeeping corner. Julie and Amy are playing. Oscar comes over. Julie: We are the sisters and pretend the mom and the dad died (Pause 4 seconds) Amy: Yeah (Pause 3 seconds) Oscar: Where’s the dad? Julie: That’s okay, we’re just pretending the dad died. Oscar: And the mom? Amy: Yeah Oscar: Who’s the mom? Amy: (gestures to Julie) Her Oscar: Oh.

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Oscar moves into the house. Amy is apparently not entirely happy to have him there. He starts to move things. Amy: No! Oscar persists. She puts the roof on the house and kneels on his finger. Oscar: Oh!! Amy: Oh, sorry. See! Oscar: Why’d the baby fall down, Julie? Julie: The mom and the dad died, but we’re going outside. That’s not the momma. Amy: We’re going to the kitchen to eat? Oscar: Are you going to the beach? Amy: No! Julie: Hello, let’s feed our babies. Amy: Hello baby, let’s eat. Julie: Where is the died dad? Oscar: I could be. Julie: Okay.

As the year wore on, Amy’s vocalisations in storying play and in conversation became more complex, but her interlocutors’ help continued to be crucial in her communicative success. A conversation in April, again involving Amy, Julie, Oscar and myself, illustrates this well: Excerpt 3.43

Julie clutching her stomach, groaning and putting her head down. Julie: OUCHY! I think I’m going to die from this stomach. Oscar: You can’t die in school. Julie: I think I’m going to die up to Hong Kong. KT: I don’t know what that means. Julie: (to Amy) Do your mom and dad live in Hong Kong? Amy: Yeah. Julie: Do you live by yourself? Amy: Yeah, my grandma and my sister and my uncle. I lost my uncle. My auntie baby. Very bad. Julie: What’s wrong with the baby? Amy: At night he WA WA WA Julie: Oh! Cry! Amy: My grandma have ouch her teeth. (I think she is tying back to Julie’s stomach pain.)

Not only the children collaborated with Amy as she attempted longer turns. In May, Amy had this conversation with her teacher: Excerpt 3.44

Amy:

Mrs C, at my house I saw a (she runs over and points to a picture of a ladybug) and my grandma (Pause 5 seconds) Mrs C: And she put him out? Amy nods and smiles.

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Amy seemed more typically present at some activities than at others. I never observed her (or any of the other bilingual girls) playing with the Anglophone boys, although some Anglophone girls played with them. She seldom participated when the Anglophone girls were engaging in storying play. However, at the beginning of March, she approached two Anglophone girls who were playing with dolls and making stories. She asked, ‘I can play here?’ One of the girls said no, the other said yes, and a discussion ensued between the two about whether three children at once were allowed to play with the dolls. They solicited the teacher’s judgement and she encouraged them to restate the classroom rule for themselves. Amy then left. Amy frequently initiated and engaged in conversations with Earl, the other Cantonese-speaker in her morning kindergarten class, and with him and John, another Cantonese-speaker in the afternoon class. In these Cantonese conversations (taped in the kindergarten and translated by research assistant Sarah Yip), she was forthright and assertive, as in this Cantonese exchange with John: Excerpt 3.45

Amy: John: Amy: John: Amy:

I’m not going to play with you anymore. Your mouth smells. Yours too. How many days are there to hot dog day? [bold print spoken in English] Don’t know. You don’t know, you say. If you don’t tell (discovers John has left the table so shouts to him) IF YOU DON’T TELL, I’LL SQUASH YOU FLAT!

Sarah began during the kindergarten year to have periodic Cantonese conversations with Amy in her home. Sarah described her impression of Amy as a bright, forthright, linguistically talented girl; she and another Chinese-speaking graduate student assistant were impressed with the maturity of Amy’s Chinese constructions. The Chinese-speaking boys in her kindergarten appeared to defer to her during Chinese conversations and she could successfully direct their activities. In a play period with cars and trucks with Earl, for example, Amy constructed a story with characters around the play equipment and told Earl specifi cally what to do. Earl, often a play director in English, did as she told him. At the end of the year, Mrs Clark was satisfied with Amy’s progress. She hoped that Amy would not forget all the English she had learned while she was in Hong Kong over the summer with her parents. Mrs Clark was hopeful about Amy’s preparation for Grade 1, believing that she would require some further help with learning English, but that she was quite a capable student.

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Coda

In this chapter, I have told stories about the six focal children and some of their experiences in kindergarten. While I noted near the beginning of the chapter that ‘life in this kindergarten seemed particularly smooth and enjoyable’, some of the stories I have told here portray disputes, subordinations, dominations, and so on that seem neither smooth nor enjoyable (for some). These contradictions underline for me the issue of perspective: by looking at the classroom from some distance, things looked smooth and enjoyable, while detailed ‘close-in’ observation might tell a different story. As teachers have responsibility for classrooms as a whole, and for many children, the time to observe closely what one or a few children are doing might be very scarce. In Chapter 4, I discuss how each of these focal children was characterised in reference to the ranking practices of schooling. The information and stories given here will provide evidence for the nature of school identities and for what is obscured in the creation of these identities. In this chapter, and in the descriptions of the Grade 1 and Grade 2 classrooms I believe, although I framed them as ‘stories’, I think that I considered that I was representing at least what I could see, of the ‘truth’. After thinking about the difficulties of the concept of representation from a new materialist perspective, I wonder about the other stories that could have been told, and if those other stories might have led to fruitful lines of flight, and helped the teacher and this researcher and even the children to think and act differently. In concert with Ingold (2014) I think that stories are helpful to the extent that they open up, rather than close down, thinking differently or experimentation. Notes (1) ESL was the term used at the time in this school district to refer to children who were thought to speak languages other than English in their homes. (2) This referral in fact never occurred since Randy’s silence ‘broke’ soon afterwards. Mrs Clark did not inform Randy’s parents that she was thinking about a possible referral for him. (3) Wood et al. (1976) fi rst offered the concept of ‘scaffolding’: when a more experienced participant performs those portions of a task beyond the competence of a less experienced participant, so that the latter can focus on those parts of the task she can perform. A great deal of debate has subsequently ensued about the use of this term. I here use it somewhat casually to mean one person helping another so that a particular task might be accomplished. (4) The transcription notation uses the following symbols: One or more colons represent an extension of the sound it follows (e.g. Who::s). Underlining indicates emphasis. Asterisks indicate incomprehensible words.

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Capital letters indicate loudness. Pauses and details of the conversational scene or various characterisations of the talk are indicated by italics. Pauses of more than minimal length were timed to the nearest second and are indicated in italics. Phonemic transcriptions are indicated by slashes (/swεtš/). This transcription notation system is similar to that described in Ochs (1996). (5) In another conversation I had with some older children and their teacher in this school, they said their teacher had told them not to use their fi rst languages. This teacher fi rmly denied having said this, having the strong conviction of the importance of fi rst language maintenance, and she and the children had a heated discussion about whether or not she had uttered this prohibition. The discussion ended with one child saying, ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t you [who uttered the prohibition], but we thought that was what you thought.’ What teachers say and what children hear may not always be congruent. (6) Dagenais and Berron (1998) discussed complexities in the home language uses of several families of Southeast Asian origin in Suburban City. Many Canadian speakers of Punjabi use many English words throughout their Punjabi speech, and the transcripts of conversations in Surjeet’s home with Punjabi-speaking research assistants displayed this hybridity. Although her mother saw her as primarily an English speaker, Surjeet has grown up in a bilingual home, with complex language practices that utilise the resources of at least two distinct language repertoires. (7) Although I did observe on the playground occasionally, I did not do it regularly; observation there was difficult because the playground was large and the children moved quickly among large numbers of others. I noticed Surjeet playing with older girls at recess sometimes, girls who appeared Punjabi in appearance. If she spoke Punjabi in interaction with those older girls, I did not hear it, but my observation was too incomplete for me to have strong confidence that she did not speak Punjabi. (8) In October, Surjeet brought candies to give the other children to celebrate her fi fth birthday. My fieldnotes reflect my indecision about her behaviour on that occasion: Surjeet rubbing her eyes as she takes candy around the circle. Body very tight and turned away from other children. Looks like very stereotypical display of ‘shy’. Is it? (9) On one occasion when I was watching a group of children in the classroom and not taking any fieldnotes, Surjeet came up to me, pointed to my notebook and said: ‘You write, not just looking!’ (she moves her hand as if writing). (10) Melanie appeared to direct activities in this conversation; she told Surjeet what to do several times during this interaction. However, she did ask Surjeet how to make bubbles and the emotional tone of their play appeared to me quite friendly. (11) This was the case possibly because the other girls were aware that Mrs Clark did not welcome tattling initiations. (12) Later that day, it seemed that Surjeet had made a phone: when she demonstrated the construction at a circle time, when Mrs Clark invited her to do so, she said it was a phone. (13) On several occasions I observed Oscar come up to children and whisper ‘Ooo la la!’ in their ears, whereupon both would laugh. Julie tried here to deflect Alice’s interest in the secret, but Alice did not accept this and continued to press for being let in. (14) Hall (1995: 214) cited Bakhtin (1981) when noting: ‘Our every use of language, while serving to respond to and move an interaction along at any particular moment, also serves as a sociopolitical statement indicating our stance toward the particular interactive moment, our place in that interaction and our positioning toward the others involved.’ The just-quoted interaction, I think, illustrates this point. (15) At the end of October, his classroom had a Halloween celebration with several parents coming in to help both kindergarten teachers manage the children at several project ‘stations’. At one point, Harvey spoke at some length to one of the mothers;

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I heard only a few words. The mother said to him, ‘You’re not speaking English, are you?’ Harvey then repeated his utterance, but the mother turned to help another child. (16) Amy’s period of silence in English in the classroom is similar to that noticed by other researchers with non-English speaking school beginners (Ervin-Tripp, 1974; Hakuta, 1974; Itoh & Hatch, 1978). (17) For example, in the housekeeping corner, Amy was often given the role of ‘baby’ and her verbal contributions then usually took the form of cooing and crying.

4 Constructing School Identities: Kindergarten

From the commonsense point of view, we can separate the articulate from the inarticulate and wonder why respectively they are the way they are. From the sociocultural point of view, we can only wonder how full members of the culture can come together and arrange for each other to look differentially able. McDermott, 1988: 41

This chapter examines McDermott’s question of how it was that the focal children came to ‘look differentially able’ in kindergarten. This kindergarten was arranged so as to have able and non-able members and, as observed in Chapter 1, many institutions globally engage in the practice of ranking persons, and in so doing they attach persons to individualities (Foucault, 1972). In this chapter I identify some of the metrics upon which the children in this study were judged as students, and discuss how rankings based on such metrics emphasised certain kinds of knowledge while ignoring and suppressing others. McDermott (1988) urged interrogating the practices that make stratification make sense in certain communities: in the present case, I do not ask how or why some children were ‘better’ than others at learning English or, indeed, learning anything, or even why individual children were considered to have more or less potential. Rather, taking McDermott’s advice, I am concerned with how it is we evaluate some children as successful (learning or having more) and others as unsuccessful (learning or having less). From a sociocultural theory (SCT) perspective, identities are socially ascribed, but also are formed through the agency of human subjects. Identities take on their particularities in the practices of specific communities, and thus are complex, sometimes contradictory, and changing. In shaded paragraphs throughout this chapter, I point out how a new materialist view of identity as a dynamic and relational phenomenon/event, agency as distributed among assemblages of human and non-human things, and language learning as intra-actions among different kinds of ‘stuff’ might offer some additional insights into these matters and, perhaps more importantly, may offer ideas for pedagogy. 87

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Being a Child/Becoming a Student

Practices of ranking and/or determining the normality of individual children (or its opposite) begin long before school in Western institutions. Physicians and others officially rate an infant’s vital functions at birth on scales constructed on the basis of numerical norming, and healthcare practitioners assess children’s development on a variety of scales throughout childhood. Parents also often compare their children with those of other families, and within their own families as well. As well, many children participate in larger communities of practice than their families before they begin school (neighbourhood and/or religious organisations, daycare, playschools, lessons, and so on) where they are also sometimes ranked. Nevertheless, compulsory kindergarten attendance marks a substantial shift in how children’s behaviour, growth, potential and development are assessed and compared with others. Although children come to kindergarten as kinds of children, very quickly they attain or are assigned identities as kinds of students. Kindergarten teachers explicitly bear the obligation to assess children’s development and, especially, to identify children who are outliers, particularly those whose development is ‘delayed’.1 Early identification of delay is seen as the key to remediating deficits in children’s development, to ‘normalising’ children, in Foucault’s (1972) terms. Davies (2014: 34) argued that the constant judging of individuals has intensified in neoliberal regimes. For her, ‘Neoliberalism heightens individualism by intensifying competition at school and at work, removing social safety nets … Each individual’s attempts to live up to the ideal are read in terms of free choice – anyone can succeed if they make the right choices’. Educators often look for causes of school demeanour and educational achievement (especially with regard to young children) in children’s genders, their psychological (personality/temperament) traits, and their preschool socialisation, familial experiences and cultural backgrounds. This traditional understanding of identity development holds that variations in inborn traits and pre-school experiences are causal of how children adjust to learning in school, and that while students’ identities might change as a result of any number of factors, their basic learning styles and/or personalities are stable. As discussed in Chapter 1, poststructural theorists saw identity development differently, as constructed by the institutional or other discourses in which individuals are situated or have situated themselves (Foucault, 1972, 1979; Weedon, 1997). Foucault (1979) observed that institutional discourse practices provide metrics and hierarchies with which to

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compare and differentiate people on the basis of their relation to standards. Following Bourdieu (1977), poststructuralists recognised that different ‘fields’ include diverse, dynamic and situated discourse practices, and thus identities change over time and place. A sociocultural perspective on educational identity builds on these poststructural insights, and examines the discourse practices of educational institutions to ascertain how those practices interact with students’ inborn traits or tendencies and preschool social and cultural experiences. For sociocultural researchers, school identities are not simply a result of innate traits and familial, cultural or outside-school practices, but are also a result of customary school discourse practices and hierarchies. I discuss below the metrics and hierarchies that were part of how identities were made in this kindergarten. Kindergarten presents a new community of practice to children, and my research investigated how kindergarten practices placed children in the range of identity positions this classroom offered.

SCT and poststructural identity theorists hold that specific, situated, discourse and other practices in effect create identities (or subjectivities) for persons, and those identities can change as practices change. They also see identity as subject to human agency, i.e. subjects can resist or accept others’ attributions of their identities. In new materialism, the concept of personal identity is seen as the result of the cutting apart of forces in an assemblage, as an ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2007). That is, in understanding intra-actions in assemblages, any one thing (person, apparatus, machine, weather, and so on) has porous boundaries, and thus disentangling the identity of any one thing on its own is impossible. So, in a documentation of a pedagogical event, for example, we might choose to examine the intra-actions of human-bodies-with-devices-and-architecture (a cut from all the other possible entangled agencies), and ignore other aspects of the intra-action that are also part of the event. With a commitment to relational ontologies, material things (and material people) are becoming in unique event/assemblages that include other agencies. Acknowledging the cut reminds us of the partiality of the documentation, the indeterminacy of causal relations and the impossibility of permanent knowledge.

Aspects of School Identity

In this chapter I analyse the stories told in Chapter 3 under the following headings, with the recognition that the distinctions are artificial and that these aspects of school identity are in reality closely interrelated and

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readers will see overlap among the categories. However, the following categories seemed a logical way to present how children were assessed. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Academic competence or learning potential. Physical presentation/competence. Behavioural competence. Social competence. English language proficiency.

Language proficiency, the aspect most frequently evaluated in traditional SLA research, here incorporates insights from the analyses of the other aspects. Academic competence or learning potential

Lenz Taguchi (2010) argued that, at the same time as we are recognising more complexity in children’s learning, there appear to be equally strong moves to assess children’s learning of pre-given facts or procedures. Assessment of individual students’ academic knowledge and learning potential is now and has long been a major focus of educational research. The evaluation practices of primary classrooms are relatively standard – teachers (as well as other children) observe individual children’s performance on school tasks throughout the year, and teachers ‘test’ the performance of children on a set of (sometimes government-mandated and norm-referenced) tasks and procedures.

With respect to normal school practices of testing children’s academic achievement, Liselott Mariett Olsson (2012) argued: Despite the contemporary discourse on a changed knowledge production, where knowledge is thought to be border-crossing, exchanging, changing … [we are also] caught within ontological and epistemological assumptions that contradict that defi nition and instead rely on knowledge as a stable and permanent feature. (Olsson, 2012: 91)

Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss (2005) similarly argued that, for educators who adopt this perspective, tests represent a ‘cognitiveinstrumental-performative-utilitarian rationality containing a desire to order the world and to tame nature through measuring and calculating in a rational manner to ensure the access of predefined outcomes’. Predefined outcomes are to new materialists uninteresting; rather than checking students’ appropriation of encyclopaedic facts or procedures, they are interested in ‘children’s preferences for intense, vital, and undomesticated experimental processes of learning, rather than a desperate search for predetermined outcomes of permanent knowledge’ (Olsson, 2012: 90).

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Vygotsky (1986) and sociocultural scholars criticised traditional forms of learning assessment because they argued that they provided mere snapshots of children’s performance on a particular occasion; for these critics, such assessments do not give any indication of individual children’s histories, nor their potential, and ignore the sociality at the heart of learning. These scholars instead recommended dynamic assessments, which also evaluated what a child is able to do with interventions from a more skilled partner, assessments that represent a child’s zone of proximal development (Poehner, 2008; Poehner & Lantolf, 2005). Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is an SCT concept that I see as  somewhat in alignment with new materialism’s focus on intraaction  and potentiality. Intra-action with a more skilled partner (and as well as or with the non-human materials present in the intra-action) can result in enhanced performance in a Vygotskian view. The particular material circumstances of the intra-actions will result in different possibilities. How testing apparatuses are constructed is relevant here. Vygotsky proposed a new apparatus; rather than giving children tests that they must complete individually, Vygotsky’s view was for a more dynamic assessment – the child completing a task in cooperation with a more skilled partner. On the basis of classroom observations as well as normed tests of the six focal children in this study, by the end of the year Mrs Clark judged Amy, Harvey, Julie, Martin and Randy as academically ‘average’ and adequately prepared for Grade 1 – at least as adequately prepared as other non-ESL students. As already mentioned, although she acknowledged ‘great progress’ in Surjeet’s classroom performance, Mrs Clark was beginning to suspect that Surjeet had learning difficulties above and beyond her ESLness; she thus recommended that the Grade 1 teacher have Surjeet assessed by a school psychologist for possible learning disabilities. The approach I took in the research reported in the fi rst edition of Learning English at school was to focus over time on individual children, an approach I have not seen in much empirical new materialist work in education, although Candace Kuby and Tara Gutshall Rucker (2016) do describe classroom events involving focal children. With the conviction that subjects are intra-active becomings, identifying individual children and seeing them as the locus of interactions might be seen as ignoring the character of assemblages of things and people and discourse, and so on. New materialist empirical educational research more commonly focuses on groups of children and how teachers attempt to follow those children’s leads, to examine carefully

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how they might intervene or supply various materials (things and questions and language and other people) to a group of children, so as to provide possibilities for their continuing to learn (Davies, 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Olsson, 2009; Smythe et al., 2017). Since much of the writing exploring new materialist or intra-active pedagogies is done with groups of young children, it is interesting to speculate about how curriculum guides, discourses about educational ‘standards’, usual furniture, and so on intra-act with the teaching of older learners. Teacher educator Cher Hill (in Smythe et al., 2017) illustrated the many diverse learning objects accessible to young children in their homes, at pre-schools or in outdoor spaces, as compared with the poverty of learning objects in university classrooms. My research did not aim to examine in detail the assessment practices in this classroom. However, as SCT might predict with respect to the situatedness of discourse practices, I observed variability in the children’s performances in particular classroom activities. Surjeet, for example, appeared most visibly to have academic ‘problems’ when Mrs Clark asked her to speak in front of the whole group of children or when she was asked questions during assessment sessions. She also sometimes appeared incoherent when speaking to other children, as evidenced by the dispute with Nina (Excerpt 3.17 in Chapter 3). Surjeet’s disorganised and incoherent verbal productions seemed to occur most often in conversations in which she appeared to be under threat, when other students were critically observing or interacting with her. An observer who watched her listening to her classmates, participating in choral activities near the end of the year, playing ‘Concentration’ or delivering Valentines might have been impressed with her focus, memory, budding literacies and strategies for problem-solving. However, somehow, her teacher and classmates found the competencies she displayed were not so visible as her problems. These problems might have been, at least to some extent, a result of her effort not to get caught ‘not-knowing’ or ‘not-able’ (cf. McDermott, 1993). An SCT-inspired pedagogy, as well as a new materialist pedagogy, might try to observe the differences in a child’s languaging when speaking with friends or hostile others, and/or when she or he intraacted with school signs, other children’s names or with the (for example) small and dull scissors given to young children. Teachers interested in such pedagogy might experiment with arranging classroom assemblages that build upon a child’s interests/competence. Olsson (2012), for example, described vivid examples of how young children worked with great enthusiasm on the creation of affectinfused writing of their own and classmates’ names.

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All speakers display vocabulary gaps, verbal confusion, disorganisation and incoherence at times. Julie was sometimes observed ‘not-knowing’ in her classroom. She customarily checked vocabulary with other children and on several occasions she queried the meaning of a word (e.g. ‘What’s a worm?’ in Excerpt 3.35 in Chapter 3). McDermott (1993), in an analysis of how a diagnosis of learning disability came to be applied to a child, suggested that in classrooms sometimes mistakes are regarded as just mistakes, not potential threats to self. Possibly this notion explains Julie’s apparent comfort with checking vocabulary. If not knowing the meaning of ‘worm’, for example, contained for her no particular threat and she had no need to hide her incompetence in this regard, she could engage in a practice that Wells (1986) suggested as particularly facilitative for keeping conversations going. Some of the other children, on the other hand, might have seen the potential costs of checking vocabulary as too great. I never heard Randy checking vocabulary with other students, but the verbal scaffolding Mrs Clark and some of his classmates provided for him may have served much the same function. Randy’s participation in the choral activities of the circle was also ‘scaffolded’ both by his teacher and by some classmates. By having access to their linguistic resources, Randy could participate, although initially very minimally, in classroom activities, and had enough time to practise the utterances he needed in order to participate.

The morning ‘circle’ routines (reciting chorally the days of the week, months of the year, numbers, describing weather conditions), to which Randy appeared very attentive, were certainly striated, in the Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) sense of being habitual, predictable and based on predetermined knowledge. The subject matter of these recitations is, of course, arbitrary and, interestingly, often based on divisions in time (days of the week, months of the year, and so on). These routines provided, I think, a particularly ‘safe space’ (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010) for the children learning English. Their participation was scaffolded by the group’s collective knowledge, and their rhythmic repetition allowed English language learners (ELLs) possibilities to gradually participate. Their volume (LOUD), rhythm, intensity and sometimes melody were also, I think, part of their appeal. The most salient events in the construction of Martin’s school identity concerned his compliance with directives (to be discussed below in the section on behavioural competence). However, with regard to academic competence, Martin’s occasional competent and thoughtful verbal responses (see Excerpts 3.28 and 3.29 in Chapter 3) did not seem as

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consequential in how Mrs Clark and his peers perceived him as his alsooccasional confusing responses did. Classroom practices that elicit thoughtful speech from children may not necessarily be those on which the judgements of academic competence most rely.

As we have seen in Chapter 3, Martin’s verbal contributions were not always (or even usually) grammatical Standard English, but he was obviously thinking about and experimenting with making sense. He was languaging in the moment. In education, children are continually ranked on their performance as compared to norms or standards, and children who are learning how to language in a new-to-them way are seen as lacking vocabulary, grammaticality and sometimes even phonological accuracy. The ranking apparatuses of tests provide ‘cuts’ that make some matters matter and others not. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016), in relation to literacy learning, proposed an alternative to this levelling and labelling of children; following a new materialist line, they argued that instruction might better focus on what children are producing, and then follow them as they explore their interests and desires.

Harvey presented other complexities with regard to ascription of academic competence. Although his mother believed, and told Mrs Clark and me, that he was a ‘very bright boy’, Mrs Clark was not so convinced. Throughout the year she commented to me about Harvey’s incompetence with printing, using scissors and other mediating means of the kindergarten. By the end of the year, Mrs Clark judged Harvey to have ‘speech pathologies’, but she felt he would have little difficulty with the Grade 1 curriculum.

Harvey was often visibly unhappy or socially isolated in his kindergarten classroom. His runny nose and his classmates’ response to this, intra-acting with his difficult-to-understand pronunciation, may have been part of the assemblage of him as an undesirable playmate. As well, although he was skilled with building with Lego™, he was not so experienced in the use of scissors, glue, pencils and balls, important material artefacts in school. An intra-active approach to pedagogy for him might have involved following his and other classmates’ interests in trains and Lego™ construction, and fi nding ways to encourage Harvey and his classmates to investigate and experiment with ‘train problems’.

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Before beginning school, Amy had little or no experience in speaking English. However, she came into kindergarten already familiar with the use of many kindergarten materials and she was keenly interested in completing the craft projects the teacher set up every day. She gradually over the course of the year came to participate more and more actively in the conversations the classroom offered, in particular ways (often, as has already been discussed, as a petted baby). Mrs Clark’s judgement that Amy was of average intelligence, and would only be temporarily handicapped by her lack of experience with English, no doubt rested on Amy’s increasing participation in classroom conversations, as well as her skilled participation in the classroom craft activities. Physical presentation/competence

Aspects of the children’s physical presentation included matters such as their size relative to the other children in the class or their adeptness at using coloured crayons, scissors, glue and other craft or art materials, as well as their physical agility and movement competence. Amy, for example, as already mentioned, was smaller than any of the other children in her class, and smaller than any of the children in the other kindergarten class. Children noticed this; indeed, Agatha commented, ‘She’s a little girl’, and told me that the school was providing a kind of daycare for Amy. Sometimes children tied Amy’s shoes for her or lifted her up as they might a much younger child. On the other hand, they also noticed and admired her agility and prowess in printing, colouring and using scissors. Many aspects of the children’s physical presentation in the classroom seemed to be involved in their school identities. Their racial identities might have been relevant; in kindergarten I never heard a child or a teacher explicitly mention this, although as presented in Chapter 5, in Grade 1 there was an excerpt in which an individual’s race/ethnicity was explicitly named. However, I do not think the children were unaware of these matters in kindergarten. The children also noticed and remarked on Harvey’s frequent nasal congestion. Hairstyles, missing teeth, haircuts and clothing were also sometimes matters for comment, both by the teacher and by other children. In addition to presentation, the teacher and the other children noticed and commented upon one another’s movements in the room and again, as we have already seen, upon their familiarity and experience with kindergarten tools (paint, glue, scissors, crayons, and so on) and particular ways of using these tools. These observations are part of how identities were constructed; recall the conversation about Harvey’s scribbling (Excerpt 3.18 in Chapter 3). Children also noticed other children’s ways of moving and of manipulating balls, hoops and other mediating means of their playground play or their physical education curriculum. And Mrs Clark, of

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course, needed to evaluate the children’s physical development as well as their academic development for the report cards sent home to parents. SCT questions whether ‘development’ is the same road that everybody travels on, with important milestones indicating whether the travel is going well, or is delayed. Sociocultural theorist Barbara Rogoff (2003: 6) presented a photograph of an 11-month-old Efe baby in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using a machete to cut fruit, ‘under the watchful eyes of a relative’. Maintaining that cultural processes affect human development, Rogoff argued for the recognition of development as a matter of increasing participation in cultural activities. How children’s bodies look and move are important metrics for constructing school identities, particularly for young children, whose physical prowess is often seen as indicating ‘development’. As we have seen in the descriptions of the kindergarten in Chapter 3, there is a politics to physical development, as some kinds of bodies and their moves are more highly valued than others. New materialist perspectives on physical development and competence are particularly evident in the work of feminist scholars who, while recognising and critiquing the discourse about the inferiority of women and their bodies, are interested in how ‘the discursive and the material interact in the constitution of bodies’ (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008: 7). Phenomena like thinking, learning, liking, saying, and so on happen within bodies and, as John Marks (1998) put it, this perspective calls for ‘the embodiment of the mind and the embrainment of the body’ (in Braidotti, 2011: 2). French philosopher Henri Bergson (1911) argued that a ‘true understanding of a body is achieved, not by regarding what it is, but by understanding the movements or problems that animate it’ (in Colebrook, 2008: 54–55). Like the SCT insight that cultural practices affect development, the new materialist view that bodies are always undergoing regeneration and change might encourage educators to think about how children’s development might be enhanced by engagement in new activities or problems that animate these activities. Some of the children (Julie, for example) seemed able to maintain a place for themselves in their classroom, while for others (like Surjeet) that position seemed much more precarious. Comparing Julie’s and Surjeet’s reactions to requests or commands to yield their position on chairs at various times in the classroom (cf. Excerpts 3.19 and 3.34 in Chapter 3) makes clear the connection between physical presence, status and identity. Julie claimed space and time in her classroom, and her claim seemed legitimated by her peers. Surjeet, on the other hand, seemed much less entitled in her claims to space an d her bearing and gestures were not self-assured or expansive.

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The contrast in physical appearance of Julie and Surjeet must also have had a bearing on what it was possible for each to do, learn, think and say in the classroom. Julie was blond and light-skinned. Surjeet had black hair and brown skin. We might see racism as part of the classroom assemblage, as it is in so many North American institutions. Jerry Rosiek (2017) speculated that racism might be an agential force that, while not always explicitly articulated, continues to be part of what matters in socio-material relations. Race has not been extensively discussed by scholars in new materialism, nor has colonialism and its legacies. In view of many nations’ efforts to come to some reconciliation about the historical and contemporary oppression of Indigenous peoples by settlers, for example, as well as that of other minoritised communities, such examination is overdue (Tuck, 2010).

Classrooms become interactive sites for about 10 months, during which participants develop historically situated identities. Sometimes ‘display’ or physical presentation and physical participation in community activities become matters for verbalisation. However, any individual’s display and participation also become part of the community’s shared historical knowledge, which may or may not be linguistically signalled or framed. Identities therefore develop not only ‘in the moment’ through discursive practices, but also through memory, which also may or may not be framed in terms of language. Rogoff et al. (1993) warned that the focus on discursive practices in learning and teaching in Western cultures may not adequately describe matters in some non-Western communities.

A new materialist account of school identity construction would be concerned with how physical presentation and movement are assembled along with the clothing of children, their ‘racial’ characteristics, scissors, warm classrooms, volleyballs, languaging, storybooks, curriculum guides, and so on. Such an account would not assume any deterministic account of what children look like, what they do and who they (can) become, given any particular constellation of entangled elements, but rather would direct our attention to what possibilities there might be for constructing those assemblages differently. Right-handed scissors, for example, can make incompetents of left-handed individuals: materials in classrooms matter. For second language learning research, new materiality perspectives remind us that learners have bodies as well as mouths, ears and brains.

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Behavioural competence

One thread in educational sociology has for a long time analysed the conventions and constraints on the behaviour of children in schools (e.g. Fine, 1985; Waller, 1961). In this section I discuss relations between the children and their teacher, specifically with regard to children’s compliance with the teacher’s directives (either explicitly or implicitly articulated) or other children’s repetitions of them (‘ventriloquations’). Kindergarten presents children with a more or less unfamiliar social milieu: many children, (usually) one adult, and mandated body placement, discourse behaviour and other activities. Some children may have had previous experience with similar arrangements in daycare, pre-school or religious schooling, but some have not. Kindergarten teachers, aware that school practices may be unfamiliar to the children, take pains to initiate the children into those routines and conventions as quickly as possible. They judge some children as more and some as less ‘mature’ in their acquiescence to the conventions. 2 Some school conventions are, for example, silence upon adult command, expeditious movement through transitions, ‘appropriate’ body demeanour, adept use of the tools (scissors, paste and others). The selection of these skills is arbitrary (as are judgements of their performance: e.g. what is ‘appropriate’, ‘adept’, ‘flawed’). Mrs Clark usually judged the demeanour of Julie, Amy, Surjeet and Randy as appropriate. All these children appeared quiet on demand, their speech volume was customarily low, and all appeared experienced in the use of classroom resources. On the other hand, Martin’s and Harvey’s behaviours were deemed problematic. 3 Martin acquired very early in the year an identity as a ‘behaviour problem’ in some situations from Mrs Clark’s point of view, and she spoke to his parents about this. Some of his classmates also seemed to feel that Martin’s behaviour often needed correction and they directed him frequently. One child’s report that ‘Martin talks rude’ again provided evidence that identity making was done by the children as well as by adults. I did not directly question Martin about his perceptions of this matter, and so I do not know whether he accepted or resisted the construction of him as someone needing correction. However, at times he made strenuous efforts to be a ‘good schoolboy’ and to participate actively in teacher-led activities. Mrs Clark noted in his fi nal report that ‘his enthusiasm for our classroom activities has been an asset to our class’. When he obviously resisted Mrs Clark’s directives, she framed this as his not ‘paying attention’. Martin and Surjeet were both judged as children who sometimes did not pay attention. Teachers and textbooks of pedagogy often defi ne listening or ‘paying attention’ as a skill that needs to be taught. Schools also commonly use the notion of listening as obedience, and children who listen (or, more often, those who do not listen) are sometimes described in

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fairly moralistic terms. It might be helpful for educators to consider that children listen or not on the basis of rational estimations of whether the material to be listened to has relevance to them. As I have already mentioned, Mrs Clark seemed less concerned about the girls’ acquiescence to classroom rules than about the boys’. Surjeet had cried and clung to her mother at the beginning of kindergarten; Mrs Clark had worried that this behaviour would continue throughout the year and she was relieved when it stopped about two weeks after school began. After this, neither in Mrs Clark’s discussions with me about the girls, nor in my observational fieldnotes, nor in their report cards were behavioural difficulties mentioned. Like many schoolgirls, they were seen by their teacher and their community as ‘behaving’ appropriately. Neither Mrs Clark nor most of the other children understood Amy’s occasional relatively aggressive statements in Cantonese to her interlocutors, and thus could not use them in making judgements about her behaviour. Mrs Clark read my translated transcripts of Amy’s Chinese interactions after the year was over and was surprised by them. Randy began school as a silent participant; his silence in his classroom became a matter of concern to Mrs Clark in November. She was about to refer him for psychological testing to one of the district psychologists, but before that occurred, Randy broke his silence and began to say a few things to Mrs Clark and later to the other children. His classroom demeanour as mostly quite silent was thereafter not a problem in Mrs Clark’s opinion and she was delighted with the progress she felt he had made over the course of the year. In fact, she used his quiet participation in classroom events as evidence of his maturity and readiness for Grade 1. Material bodies, fi ngers, tears, silence, pronunciation, gender, and so on are all relevant in classroom judgements of compliance with teacher directives, classroom rules and school conventions. Teacher examination of their perceptions in the light of documentation activities might help them understand differently their students’ behavioural competence in the various spaces and activities (and all the other matters brought to salience in any classroom event), and bring to light the ‘becomings’ of both students and teacher. Social competence

Social relations with other children are another way in which judgements about children’s competence are made. Many researchers have investigated how children interact with one another in classrooms and schools. I therefore searched for examples of the focal children’s social relations with other children to speculate about how they were assigned and assigned themselves particular positions with peers.

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Harvey apparently had the most disputes with other children especially early in the school year, and he was sometimes excluded from play.4 Children mocked him and gossiped about him. His position with his peers was rarely powerful or comfortable. Mrs Clark understood Harvey’s difficulties to result from his personality, his English phonology and his physical characteristics. The accommodations he made over the year to his classmates’ demands (often becoming a fi xer, less fully participating in the play) lessened the number and intensity of the disputes in which he was involved. Mrs Clark defi ned these accommodations as his ‘acquisition of social skills’. Contrary readings could point to difficulties in interaction as resulting not only from Harvey’s actions in the classroom, but also from the classroom group itself. The ‘social skills’ Harvey required to participate in play with others were different from the social skills other children, differently positioned, employed. As the year wore on, Surjeet began to have more apparently problematic interactions with her classmates. Frequently subordinately positioned, she did not always appear able to contest that subordination, and her attempts to counter the subordinating efforts of other children rarely succeeded. In fact, the focal children were less often able to contest their subordination than might have been expected or desired. At the beginning of the year, Harvey attempted to resist subordination loudly and fluently, but by the end of the year his resistance seemed subdued. Martin frequently stopped doing something when told to stop by other children. He was thus positioned as subordinate, as someone who did not know what to do or who was doing the wrong thing. When he told a child holding, in his opinion, too many cupcake holders, ‘It’s not to behave some lots’ (Excerpt 3.28 in Chapter 3), it was apparent that the other child did not understand (or did not credit) his reproach and continued to maintain her hold on the cupcake holders. Amy, when told to be the baby in play in the housekeeping centre, often did play the baby; on the one occasion I observed when she claimed mother position, Julie, her playmate said, ‘We’re both the moms’. Amy’s position as a ‘cute little girl’ in her classroom is instructive of the range of identity positions available in her community. There were, of course, costs associated with this identity, which is highly unstable in its rewards. The possibility of her being limited to ‘repressively stereotypic norms of gender appropriateness’ (Bryson & de Castell, 1997: 98) was always there. Amy’s compliance with being constructed as a cute little girl did not appear to help her claim a powerful position in her kindergarten. At this point in her learning of English, her forthright and assertive voice only became hearable in her Cantonese interactions. Randy and Julie appeared to be the only children in the focal group who successfully resisted other children’s attempts to subordinate them. They used different strategies: Randy typically ignored subordination moves and hence did not receive many; Julie resisted through engaging in

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counter-discourse and by making affiliations with other children who would come to her aid when subordination loomed. Children’s social relations in this classroom were not, of course, all disputatious. Children often acted out friendly relations with one another and the classroom predominantly created the impression of an extraordinarily peaceful and harmonious place. The language required to express friendship and care appeared easily accessible to the children. They heard a great deal of this kind of speech from Mrs Clark, who, for example, almost always referred to the children as ‘friends’. While the language of friends may be easily available, probably not much school curriculum focuses on how to address issues of power and conflict in the classrooms of young children, but the observations made here suggest that these issues require attention. 5 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 18) argued that politics should be ‘understood as an ongoing process of negotiating power relations’, and that ‘bodies communicate with other bodies through their gestures and conduct to arouse visceral responses and prompt forces of judgement that do not necessarily pass through conscious awareness’ (Coole & Frost, 2010: 20). These ‘visceral responses’ may be like what many new materialists call affect. Children’s social relations with other children are as complexly assembled as adults’ negotiations of power relations. Race, class, physical presentation, gender, academic accomplishments, languaging, dress, and so on are assembled with children as well as adults making judgements, which may or may not be conscious. Poststructural feminist materialists have drawn attention to the ways in which ‘political descriptions are scripted onto material bodies’ (Alaimo & Hekmann, 2008: 8). I have argued elsewhere that it is important to understand better how adults might most helpfully intervene in children’s ongoing negotiations of power (Toohey, 2001). Language proficiency

On the basis of testing by one of the ESL specialist teachers and on Mrs Clark’s recommendation, Amy and Surjeet received specialist ESL support in Grade 1. The other focal children were deemed to have enough English to participate in classroom activities without specialist instruction. Being ESL was an ascribed aspect of the identity of each of the focal children at the beginning of their kindergarten year, but it was a label that was inaccurate in Surjeet’s and Harvey’s cases. It was a label from which some of the children, in some sense, graduated. Despite the (to my ears and eyes) ingenious ways that the children had found to participate in classroom activities (e.g. Amy’s taking on baby roles in storying play; Randy’s

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enthusiastic participation in circle activities; Surjeet’s careful attention to the activities of her peers), part of the teacher’s legally defined responsibility was to evaluate some children as having ‘not enough English’ to participate, without specialist teacher support, in classroom activities. ‘Having enough English’ is a curious construct. From a new materialist perspective, we do not have language in our individual brains or bodies. Rather, we engage in various modes of languaging, much as we might engage in various modes of swimming, or moving through water. We don’t ‘have’ swimming; we swim, and we might swim differently in various locales (lakes, very buoyant oceans, along shores, in deep water, and so on) and for different purposes (cooling off, pleasure, avoiding drowning, rescuing someone or something, fleeing a shark). Persons engage in languaging in various social and material locales and for different purposes. Assessing ‘how much’ English any child has necessarily ignores these locales and purposes and reduces languaging to compliance with striated rules of grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation. It also ignores the variable socio-material circumstances in which different children language. Mrs Clark made her initial identification of the children as ESL on the basis of interviews with the children and their parents before school began. At these interviews, she asked the children’s parents who had indicated on the school entrance form that a language other than English was used in their homes whether they wished their children to attend the afternoon Language Development class after regular morning kindergarten. The children thus enrolled in the Language Development class were defi ned as ESL for purposes of identification in the school and also for funding arrangements involving the school district and the provincial Ministry of Education. At the end of the year, one of the school’s specialist ESL teachers, not previously known to the children, formally tested each student in an approximately 10-minute session; the children were to produce their names, the alphabet and short answers to questions. On the basis of their performance in these sessions, the specialist assigned them an ESL level, which determined whether separate provincial funding would or would not be available to support their learning in Grade 1. It became particularly evident near the end of the kindergarten year that ESLness, a shifting identity, varies with funding practices and schooling arrangements. In May, in a cost-cutting effort, the Suburban City’s school board decided to discontinue integration of beginning ESL students as of the next September and instead they would set up reception classes (classrooms composed entirely of ESL students) on the basis of teacher recommendations. Thus, some already enrolled students would be ‘un-integrated’ and ‘received’ in special classes. Mrs Clark was dismayed by this

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announcement and told me: ‘I worked hard to get all these kids ready for Grade 1 and I don’t want them to go into a reception class’. Asked which of the children she would recommend for such a class, she said, ‘Just Amy and Surjeet’; however, she was concerned that such an arrangement might mean that some of the other children would not receive necessary assistance. Furthermore, she was not even sure she should recommend Amy and Surjeet because she doubted that a ‘reception’ class would meet their needs. In any event, many teachers, school district officials, the teachers’ union and others resisted the school board initiative. Although a few new reception classes were set up in the district the following September, none was in Suburban School and all the focal children went on to a regular Grade 1 class. This incident exemplified the power of adults far removed from classrooms to affect children’s identities in those classrooms. Those identities are assigned on the basis of the ‘power/knowledge’ of the adults in the system. Assigning Identities: ESLness

As stated earlier, these five metrics (academics, physical presentation, behavioural competence, social competence and language competence) have no clear boundaries and are all involved in how identities are assigned and accepted or resisted. By the end of the year, Mrs Clark and the ESL teacher specialist designated four of the focal children (Randy, Martin, Julie and Harvey) as having enough English to not need specialist support in Grade 1; they defi ned Surjeet and Amy as requiring this support. How classroom social relations entered into how children were seen as language learners is complex. Consider the case of Julie, who graduated from ESL. Was Julie’s success because of her personality, her motivation and/or her strategies (as a traditional SLA account of her progress might predict), or can one understand Julie’s success in ways that take her social context more seriously into account? Julie had relatively easy access to many classroom interactions and resources. She successfully established friendly relations with the adults in her classroom. She seemed able to play with or beside the children whom she sought as playmates. When other children made attempts to subordinate her (a common practice of this and many other play groups, cf. Goodwin, 1990), she appeared able to deflect them, often with the aid of child-allies. On several occasions (including Excerpt 3.30 in Chapter 3), Julie’s responses to threats of subordination (with the aid of her ally, Oscar) evidently helped her to appear powerful, keep her place in the interaction and continue to have access to conversation with peers. Although Dr Karwowska saw her as a child who was ‘steadily losing’ Polish, Julie was the only focal child who explicitly declared affiliation at school with the minority language of her background and she sometimes used it as a way to interact with peers, as shown in Excerpt 3.36 in Chapter 3.

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In the cases of all the focal children, linguistic expertise, inheritances, affi liations and repertoires were complex. Surjeet and Harvey presented particularly dramatic examples of the non-utility of the dichotomies ‘bilingual/monolingual’. Both Surjeet’s and Harvey’s parents had decided to raise their children speaking English, believing that knowledge of English would give their children a schooling advantage. The school, on the other hand, defi ned these children as ‘ESL’ and that defi nition had consequences – in kindergarten they were enrolled in a full-day school programme. In contrast to Julie, both Surjeet’s and Harvey’s access to valued community resources (like interactions with peers) was precarious. They appeared neither powerful nor comfortable speaking English in their classroom, despite the fact that they had more experience using this tool in other milieux than some of the other children. The contradictions in these cases were myriad. Julie, who entered kindergarten speaking (in her mother’s words) ‘only a few words’ of English, graduated from ESL in kindergarten. Surjeet, who had spoken only English before school, was considered to be ‘still-ESL’ at the end of kindergarten. A traditional SLA perspective might have it that Julie came to kindergarten with different cognitive, personality, learning style and motivational strategies and traits from Surjeet and that she was able, therefore, to acquire more English during her time in kindergarten. A sociocultural view of language learning encourages us to consider how learners fi nd ways to come to voice, what struggles are involved for them as they appropriate new ways of speaking, how their interlocutors permit their appropriation of new ways of speaking, and what social practices structure their appropriation of voice. In her classroom, Julie was a relatively privileged speaker, who had child and adult allies and access to many classroom resources. Rather than seeing her as being highly motivated to learn English (all the children were so motivated), or as having internal traits or facilitative habits that predisposed her to learning, it might make more sense to think of her as a child who ‘graduated from ESL’ because she had enough access to experienced members of her community of practice and to their mediating means to be able to appropriate those means. Surjeet, on the other hand, by the end of the year appeared to have no particular allies in her classroom; on several occasions others usurped her place in conversations. Her access to classroom resources (including conversations with peers) never appeared secure, and her verbal contributions at such times seemed somewhat incoherent. The community of practice of the kindergarten made this context very different places for Surjeet and for Julie. If the practices of their community had been different, if the girls’ access to its tools had been different, their identities as language learners might have been different. However, how they were seen in terms of their academic, physical, behavioural and social competence overlapped considerably with how they were seen as

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language learners. These aspects of their identities interacted in complex ways to construct them as differentially able. Randy’s case points out other aspects of how classroom assessments of language operate. Randy developed in his classroom an increasingly powerful identity, and an English ‘voice’ that allowed him access to many classroom activities. His teacher and his classmates afforded him scaffolding that kept his place in conversations. At the same time, Randy denied affiliation to Punjabi and to the competence in it his parents and the bilingual researcher believed he had. He also discouraged his parents from participation in Punjabi community activities. His identity as an increasingly more powerful schoolboy was accompanied by a denial of affiliation to Punjabi language and culture. Children’s affiliation to and expertise in the languages of their milieux need careful examination. Although in this case the school identified them as ‘ESL learners’, the children’s parents sometimes ascribed confl icting identities in this regard. The children themselves appeared to be negotiating their relationships with the languages of their milieux in a variety of ways. The community of practice in which they spent their days made differential positions available to different children; those positions had a great deal to do with what they had access to and thus with what they were able to learn.

I might have taken more notice of how access to classroom materials was distributed, how a runny nose and tissues positioned a child, how bodies were racialised, and other related matters had I gone into this research with new materiality concepts. Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016: 18) described how they ‘thought with theory as [they] lived, taught and learned with children’. Such analysis would not be in order to produce ‘better’ representations of what went on in the kindergarten (see discussion about representation in Chapter 2), but rather to open up problems, issues, contradictions, and so on to stimulate new ways of seeing.

Discussion

Postmodern and sociocultural theorists stress the importance of exploring situated discursive practices in the construction of identities, rather than seeing identity as reflecting ‘essential’ aspects of human behaviour. As already discussed, Bakhtin (1981) argued that people become through communication and participation in dialogical discourse practices. McDermott (1993) similarly argued for the importance of investigating discursive practices occurring in particular communities, practices that permit the stratifying of participants’ abilities and permit assigning particular identities with regard to these abilities. This sociocultural and

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postmodern social constructivist view was summarised by French philosopher Lyotard: A self … exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at the ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. (Lyotard, 1979/1984: 8)

Lyotard went on to comment on agency and identity, arguing: No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee or referent. (Lyotard, 1979/1984: 8)

These views on identity, discourse and agency have been commonly taken up in second language learning research, and have stimulated a great deal of scholarship since the late 1990s (for a review, see Norton & Toohey, 2011). I was struck in my work with these children by the extent to which I needed to employ a broad interpretation of ‘language practices’ or communication when arguing that identity constructs and is constructed by discursive practices. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008: 3) argued that contemporary discussions which define materiality, the body, and nature as products of discourse ‘foreclosed attention to lived, material bodies and evolving corporeal practices’. In the fi rst edition of Learning English at School (LEaS), I needed to broaden the notion of discourse to include matters such as physical presentation. A new materialist perspective would encourage more attention to bodies and environments and things, and so on. Sociologist Goff man (1976) argued that the ethological notion of ‘display’ is helpful in understanding positions of actors in social settings. As he put it: Assume all of an individual’s behaviour and appearance informs those who witness him, minimally telling them something about his social identity, about his mood, intent, and expectations, and about the state of his relations to them. In every culture a distinctive range of this indicative behavior and appearance becomes specialized so as to more routinely and perhaps more effectively perform this informing function. (Goffman, 1976: 1)

I think in this case, as probably in many others, aspects of the children’s physical presentation were involved in the construction(s) of their identities, and hence in their place in the hierarchy of the classroom. The children’s physicality became another kind of ‘discourse’ in their struggle for identity.

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Bourdieu (1984) discussed how language use and the use of one’s body are implicated in power relations: One’s relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it is never more clearly expressed than in the space and time one feels entitled to take from others, more precisely, in the space one claims with one’s body in physical space, through a bearing and gestures that are selfassured or reserved, expansive or constricted (‘presence’ or ‘insignifi cance’) and with one’s speech in time, through the interaction time one appropriates and the self-assured or aggressive, careless or unconscious way one appropriates it. (Bourdieu, 1984: 474)

The focal children’s differentially successful claims to physical space and discursive time in their kindergarten classroom were also evident in the way they played there. Play has itself been subject to many of the same theoretical analyses as the other classroom phenomena discussed here, with some of the same philosophical debates. Varga (1998) noted that the play behaviour of children has been studied since early in the 20th century, the predominant view being that there is a developmental hierarchy from least to most interactive play. This notion of a developmental hierarchy and the consequently derived norms for play has led to the understanding that children’s interactional experiences result from internal, individual attributes. Children who have apparent difficulties in interactions with peers, for example, appear from this perspective as being ‘atypical in development’ (Varga, 1998: 314). In contrast, Maclean (1996), Matthews (1996), Varga (1998) and others analysed children’s play in its sociocultural contexts, seeing children as responding to the constraints and possibilities these contexts offer. Varga showed that alienation developed when specific children were stigmatised by others and, rather than seeing alienated play as a behavioural incapacity in the stigmatised children, she encouraged observers to consider the social relations of alienation in play. Maclean examined the participation of a child in playground disputes to see how identity positions were adopted and assigned to children. He showed the dynamism of positioning, that identity construction for school beginners involved ‘initiative[s] with which children use the discourse resources of the social group to achieve their ends’ (Maclean, 1996: 172). The focal children’s identities in my study were constructed with regard to aspects of their academic, physical, behavioural, social and linguistic competence in their first year of school. Evidently these children were positioned in a variety of ways with regard to these aspects of school identity. Particular school practices served to make visible certain aspects of their presentation of themselves and to obscure others from view. Julie’s, Randy’s and Amy’s identities were constructed so as to position these children in relatively desirable sites, although there were ambiguities in their constructions. They seemed able to interact with a variety of playmates,

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using a variety of resources; their behaviour was not problematic from their teacher’s point of view; they were constructed as developing appropriate physical, academic and linguistic (English) competence. The situation for Surjeet, Martin and Harvey appeared potentially more ambivalent. For these children, interaction with peers seemed less comfortable than it was for the other three children. Surjeet, Martin and Harvey occupied more frequently subordinated positions. Their teacher was less confident of their ‘normal’ development of a variety of competencies. Learners’ identities have defi nite and observable effects on what they can do in classrooms, what kinds of positions as legitimate peripheral participants in classrooms they can occupy and, therefore, how much they can ‘learn’. The above sentence reads to me now as if identity were primary and affected what learners can do. I am now not so sure about this observation, as I consider more deeply what learners do, how they act, how they move, how they language, and with what materials, and so on. Causality in new materialist thought is indeterminate, and I now see this notion of identity causing something else as problematic. A central notion of Vygotsky’s (cf. Berk & Winsler, 1995) was that children with disabilities were restricted not so much by their initial disability as by isolation and restriction from participation in the activities of their communities. Some of the focal children seemed to be developing/ being ascribed aspects of identities that might lead to their isolation, or to restricted and less powerful participation in their community. If Surjeet were continually subordinated by her peers, and excluded from, say, the imaginative play episodes that appear so facilitative of language learning, could she get enough practice to get better at using English in those practices? If Harvey continued to be sidelined to a less central position in play activities, he would not appropriate the language of powerful, centrally located players. Similarly, if Amy continued to occupy ‘baby’ and ‘cute little girl’ identities in English, more powerful voices might not become available to her. If Martin continued to be seen as someone who neither listened nor did the ‘right thing’, if these perceptions became power/ knowledge in his community, his efforts to ask sophisticated questions and to do things creatively might be thwarted and unrecognised. Certainly, classroom evaluation practices reinforce our notions of identities as fi xed and immutable, while at the same time teachers often speak of children’s progress over the course of a school year. Teachers have the legal obligation to report to parents about what kinds of students their children are, and to assign ranks to those children on the basis of their evaluations. On report cards, teachers need to report on most of the aspects of identity formation I have identified here. Thus, teachers are

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legally obligated to think in these ways about the children with whom they spend their time. Report cards are material apparatuses that have agency in how teachers think about their students. The computerised grids and their metrics often used for these report cards also become material ways of assigning identities. Some teachers resent and resist the ways in which these evaluations shape their interactions with their students. Many teachers, at a variety of levels, believe that evaluations of this sort sabotage the ‘community building’ work in which their classes are engaged. They recognise that participants’ differential skills and expertises are to be expected and that diversity is functional for the operation of the community (Rogoff, 1994). Second language researcher Joan Kelly Hall (1993: 143) asserted: ‘Active and frequent participation in the oral practices of one’s group leads to the development of sociocultural competence and the ability to use the resources to display and/or modify this competence’. Careful examination of how ‘active and frequent participation in the oral [and other] practices of one’s group’ leads to particular outcomes may be important. Taking the politics of communities into account may show what kind of ‘development of sociocultural competence’ is possible in particular milieux. Sociocultural competence in a community that ranks its members might mean, for a frequently subordinated person, taking a less active and less powerful role in oral practices. It may not be helpful to assert that learners are learning anything so unspecified as the ‘target language’ or even ‘sociocultural competence’. Leung et al. (1997) and Rampton (1995) pointed out the complexities of children’s social and linguistic identities in schools in England, showing the fallacy of assuming that minority language background children were, by definition, bilingual or were ‘learning English as social and linguistic outsiders’, in contrast with ‘idealised native speakers of English’ (Leung et al., 1997: 546). Norton similarly pointed out: The central questions teachers need to ask are not, ‘What is the learner’s mother tongue?’ and ‘Is the learner a native speaker of Punjabi?’ Rather the teacher should ask, ‘What is the learner’s linguistic repertoire? Is the learner’s relationship to these languages based on expertise, inheritance, affiliation, or a combination?’ (Norton, 1997b: 418)

It may be more accurate thus to recognise that learners of a language are participating in practices in which their particular subject positions become part of their interactive means. In this way, one recognises the politics of this situation – a situation in which participants struggle for positions in participation.

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The traditional perspective on SLA explains ‘facts’ of learners’ differential performance relatively unproblematically: because of greater cognitive ability, outgoingness, motivation, and other individually owned traits, some children acquire second languages more easily and rapidly. But there is a different perspective: that the community, in a sense, produces success and failure for the children. The identities available to these children with respect to ability were differential; different actions or practices provided the possibility for these identities to be assigned to and/or taken up by individuals. SCT has critiqued and reconceptualised assumptions of learning as individual internalisation of knowledge given by the outside world. McDermott (1993: 277), for example, argued that learning depends on the establishment of certain kinds of social relations that give participants enough practice in community activities to become ‘good at what they do’. Conversely, other kinds of social relations can prevent participants from access to this amount of practice. In the case he examined, McDermott noted that in ‘everyday life’ and under the ‘gentle circumstances’ of having a friend work with him, a boy labelled by his school as learning disabled (LD), Adam, ‘appeared in every way competent’. However, in classroom lessons and even more in testing sessions, Adam ‘stood out from his peers not just by his dismal performance but by the wild guesswork he tried to do’ (McDermott, 1993: 279), resulting in his characterisation as LD. McDermott argued that explaining the existence of these different Adams would be best accomplished by an approach that focused on: … how much and on what grounds a person is liable to degradation in the different settings. What is at stake here in an appreciation of how much each setting organises the search for and location of differential performances and how much that search further organises the degradation of those found at the bottom of the pile. (McDermott, 1993: 286)

In some settings, Adam was preoccupied with not getting caught at – and other participants were preoccupied with catching him at – not knowing how to do something. In those settings Adam was defined as LD. McDermott argued that learning in these kinds of settings centres around the potential for degradation. When he had limited possibilities to participate in whatever activities were ongoing, little time or attention available to get the information or little ‘time on task’ to become good at those activities, Adam acted LD. In other situations, with little possibility for degradation (e.g. when a mistake could be dismissed as simply a mistake and not as a threat to self), Adam performed effectively. McDermott asks with regard to LD: Where is LD to be found? Is it to be found at all? Is it anything more than a way of talking about some children and available for analysis only as a kind of rhetoric? Might it not best be described as a political label, a resource for keeping people in their place, a ‘display board’ for the contradictions of our school system? (McDermott, 1993: 271)

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He goes on to argue that, although some children learn differently or at different rates from other children, not all cultures make such a ‘fuss over different ways of learning’ as North Americans do (McDermott, 1993: 272). I have considered how six children labelled as learners of ESL construct and are assigned school identities. I have wondered throughout how it might be useful to consider ‘being ESL’ as McDermott considers LD: as a political label, a resource that has been used for keeping some students in their place. ‘ESL identity’ becomes a position, not an essence. Both Surjeet and Harvey were placed in an ‘ESL’ position analogous to McDermott’s ‘LD’ position, both by teachers and by their peers. Much SLA research has been concerned with assessing the different ways and rates by which learners seem to assimilate second languages. This traditional SLA research, and traditional classroom and school practices, ‘make a fuss’ over different ways and rates of acquisition. I have examined how six children in their fi rst year of school began to be seen as participants in classroom activities, participants of a variety of sorts. As we have seen, classrooms are organised to provide occasions on which some children look more and some less able, and judgements are made which become social facts about individual children. McDermott noted that settings differ in their capacity to search for and locate differential performances, and that ‘degradation is always a ceremony in which public agreement on what one can be degraded for is displayed and directed against the total identity of others’ (McDermott, 1993: 286). The term ‘degradation’ may seem too strong in connection with kindergarten practices. North American teaching practices and the teachers of young children with whom I am familiar have a tact that would make identification of flawed academic performance as gentle and non-explicit as possible. Teachers intervene if they notice children roughly identifying flaws in the performance of others. In kindergarten, Mrs Clark was at pains to make sure that all her students experienced success and that they were all well prepared for Grade 1. The effects of our assessment practices are not really so gentle, however. This matter is taken up again in Chapter 6. Conclusion

The focus in this chapter was primarily on how ranking practices operate within schools so as to position children differentially. Foucault’s (1972) and Walkerdine’s (1988, 1997) interest in how subjects are produced in practices provided background to my examination of schooling practices that produce different identities for children. At the same time as I wish to suggest the importance of the ranking practices of schools, I am heedful of Walkerdine’s (1997: 63) reminder that ‘a subject … produced in discursive practice … is not the same as an actual person’.

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Walkerdine argued for broad investigation of how persons take up or do not take up the discursive productions of them offered in their communities, arguing that SCT has not sufficiently theorised ‘how subjects are produced in practices’ (Walkerdine, 1997: 59). In the same vein, Agre observed: To what extent should we view the children as putty that is being passively shaped into the discursive ‘child’, and to what extent should we view the children as active participants in the process? This is, to be sure, a point of instability in many theories of development … What is missing in each case is a substantive account of the children’s noncooperation with the adults’ plan for them. (Agre, 1997: 80–81)

The idea that persons internalise others’ views about them is not new or specific to SCT. I did not in this research investigate how or if the children whose ranking I discuss here took up the identities their school offered them, but I have provided information in Chapter 3 which contradicts the official story of who each child ‘became’ in the context of his/her classroom. Walkerdine (1988, 1997) also provided observational data which explicitly contested teachers’ and the school’s views of particular children. Interviewing subjects to ascertain their understandings of their own and others’ views on these matters is another means of approaching this. I think such investigation is very important, for theorising about identity, but also so that educators might fi nd ways to help learners sometimes resist the identities their institutions offer them. Eisenhart wondered: What leads an individual to pursue some identities and abandon or ignore others? It seems that we must fi nd some way of understanding how individuals actively construct their personal goals, beliefs about themselves, and images of self out of the cultural models and socialisation processes to which they are exposed. (Eisenhart, 1995: 5)

Eisenhart showed how subjects in her study expressed narratives of self and how these stories might have been useful as ways to understand how individuals take up and/or resist the identities offered them by their cultural context. The adults with whom she was working were easily able to express such self-narratives, and their different trajectories of learning within a new institution seem closely tied to their self-narratives. Norton Peirce (1995) and McKay and Wong (1996) also underlined the importance of investigating the dialectic between the identities offered to learners and the ways in which learners accept, resist or repudiate those identities. Again, their work was with older learners (adults and adolescents) who were able to report on their efforts in this regard. Finding ways to investigate how young children deal with this dialectic will be important future work. This matter is raised in greater detail in Chapter 6.

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I do not suggest that the identities the children were assigned and/or established for themselves in kindergarten were maintained unchanging into subsequent grades. Rather, I argue here that identity is dynamic, that it is constructed in activity and that it is dependent on the power/knowledge of the adults (at least) in the system. Activities, in particular, change between kindergarten and Grade 1. The next chapter, which describes events in the Grade 1 classroom, focuses on classroom practices which regulated children’s access not so much to desirable identity positions as to material, linguistic, social and other mediating resources. As already discussed, the SCT attribution of ‘mediating’ to the materials children worked and played with is seen by new materialists as anthropocentric and underestimating the vitality of matter. For them, classroom materials enter into agential relations with other (material) humans and material non-humans, and are centrally involved in what happens there. Notes (1) Delay is a particular interest; children whose performances are outliers in the opposite direction are not usually accorded such attention. (2) Because kindergarten teachers have scant information about their students before they attend school, many schools set up kindergarten class lists on the basis that boys are not overrepresented in any one class. This often rests on the assumption that girls are less resistant to adopting appropriate classroom demeanour than boys are, again on the assumption that girls are more ‘mature’ than boys upon kindergarten entry. (3) Harvey’s difficulties in his classroom more often had to do with disputes he had with other children (discussed in terms of ‘social competence’), rather than with direct resistance to teacher directives, except the general tacit directive, ‘get along with your peers’. (4) See Toohey (2001) for a more extended discussion of children’s disputes. (5) Many of the classroom practices seemed explicitly organised to discourage disputes between children. The number of children participating in any one of the resource centres was set. When children covertly transgressed the quota rules, the level of disagreement in the activities seemed to rise immediately and become loud enough for the teacher to notice and then enforce the classroom rule.

5 ‘Break Them Up, Take Them Away’: Practices in the Grade 1 Classroom

‘Neapolitans know a lot,’ said Gianni. ‘But they know it collectively. Break them up, take them away, and they’re hopeless, just as stupid as anyone else. It’s the city, the phenomenon of Naples itself, that knows something …’ Hazzard, 1970: 38

The Grade 1 classroom was located on the south side of the school next to the library; it was smaller than the kindergarten room and had fewer play materials. Randy, Julie, Surjeet, Martin, Amy and Harvey1 were enrolled in this class along with 16 other children, four of whom were classified as ESL learners, together with Amy and Surjeet.2 Ms Reynolds, their teacher, had taught for three years previously as a specialist ESL teacher. She had decided to try teaching a regular class and had been assigned this group of Grade 1 students. Early observation in the Grade 1 classroom gave me the impression that in some ways the community established in the kindergarten had broken up. My initial sense was that the circle of children who in kindergarten ‘knew things collectively’ (Hazzard, 1970: 38) was not so evident in Grade 1. Every year children and teachers do the social work of developing a new community. The Grade 1 class involved different participants from the kindergarten class: some of the children were the same, but others had joined the class from other kindergarten classes and some of the kindergarten children had been placed in other Grade 1 classrooms. In addition, the school’s ESL specialist teacher withdrew Amy and Surjeet (and the four other children deemed to require ESL support) from the classroom several times a week for specialist instruction. I wondered whether the regular absences of these children meant that forming a supportive and harmonious classroom community would take more time. But, of course, relations in kindergarten had not always been harmonious. What was different here? My sense that the children in the Grade 1 classroom were becoming separated from one another increased as the year wore on. Finding ways to describe my sense of the separation of the 114

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children one from another led me to think about their physical locations in the classrooms and about how they sometimes were able to counter separation. In a new materialist analysis, I would perhaps have paid more attention to my sense that the kindergarten community had broken up. What did this affect produce in me? Did the children share this and, if so, what did it produce in them? I recall thinking at the time that the very close physical contact of the children in the kindergarten room was not evident in the Grade 1 classroom, and now think that the desks, as ‘oldtimers’ (a community of practice term) in the classroom, intra-acted with the children, contributing to the separation of the children one from another. Had I taken a new materialism perspective on the classroom, I might also have documented in detail what other kinds of furniture the room held, its size, the number of human bodies in the room, what kinds of materials were available, including play materials, what tasks children were to perform and how time was allocated. I did become interested in how school supplies seemed to contribute to the increasing individualisation of the children. I see now the productivity of thinking about how those desks and other materials intra-acted with the children, the teacher, the curriculum and no doubt many other things, and how they were implicated in the classroom’s becomings. The observations and analysis in this chapter directly address the significance of material objects in classroom practice but, in accordance with SCT, my focus was on the activities and practices on students’ opportunities for learning, and not so much on the materiality of the children themselves or on the materials accompanying them. Where possible, I suggest in shaded text how those materials ‘mattered’ in the classroom’s becoming. The kindergarten research had focused on practices that resulted in various constructions of the children’s identities. Examining practices associated with their identity constructions over several grades might have provided interesting information showing the fluidity (and, perhaps, the fossilising) of school identities over time. The identification of children as individual students continues throughout their schooling, and identity practices were certainly enacted in the Grade 1 classroom. However, I came to see that identity practices meshed with other school practices and that, indeed, most school practices resulted in the assignation of individual identities to the children, in ways much like how Bakhtin (1986) had reminded us that participation in discourse is positional. Lave and Wenger noted: To become a full member of a community of practice requires access to a wide range of ongoing activity, old-timers, and other members of the

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community; and to information, resources and opportunities for participation. (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 100–101)

Classroom practices affected the focal children’s access to language, and to their abilities to participate in the activities on offer there. Sociocultural theory (SCT) recognises the importance of the mediating means humans use to engage in practices, but the focus in SCT is on how those mediating means and the practices they permit have impact on, or are used by, the humans involved. The community of practice model I described in Chapter 1 focused on how different persons’ access to community resources influenced their identity (and agency) possibilities in those communities, which illustrates the anthropocentric focus we see in SCT. A new materialism analysis might explore also (or instead) how materials themselves are important members of the assemblages created in communities and, further, explore how those materials might change, resist their users and enter into other assemblages. My colleagues and I have explored actor-network theory, which tries to de-centre the human by describing non-human things as actants (with agency) in activity, attempting to flatten the hierarchy of humans over materials (Latour, 2005; Toohey et al., 2012). New materialist theory strives for that same flattened hierarchy (while proponents vary on the question of material non-human agency)3 in recognising, as educational researcher Margaret MacLure (2013: 659) put it, ‘the significance of materiality in social and cultural practice’. None of the practices I observed in the Grade 1 classroom was in any way unusual in primary classrooms, although they differed somewhat from the practices in the children’s kindergarten classroom. One difficulty in deconstructing routine, ordinary practices is that their everydayness renders them in some sense invisible. This does not reduce their importance; as Hall (1995: 209) noted, Bakhtin urged attention to ‘everyday, ordinary practices … as he claims that it is in our everyday world where life’s most fundamental meanings are created’. Because everyday practices in the Grade 1 classroom differed from those in the kindergarten, and because a knee injury in November of the Grade 1 year (and my crutches) constrained my movement around the classroom, I was perhaps more alert to where things were and how they moved. My own relatively brief mobility difficulties led me to recognise that where one can be and what one can do are importantly constitutive of what one can learn. I observed in this classroom during the time designated as ‘reading and language’ for an hour once a week, using many of the same techniques for observation as I did in the kindergarten classroom: writing fieldnotes and audiotaping, and once a month Linda Hof, the videographer from my university,

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videotaped in the classroom. The following describes some of the practices of the Grade 1 classroom that affected the focal children’s communicative participation. As we have seen in Chapter 2, we commonly use the word ‘data’ to reference ‘objectively gathered’ observations, calibrations and calculations; we have also seen that Tim Ingold (2014) argued that ‘data’ is not a good description of what participant observers are seeking as they learn with and from others. MacLure (2010) described how, in examining one’s observations, sometimes: Some detail – a fieldnote fragment or video image – starts to glimmer, gathering our attention. Things both slow down and speed up at this point. On the one hand, the detail arrests the listless traverse of our attention across the surface of the screen or page …, intensifying our gaze and making us pause to burrow inside it, mining it for meaning. … The shifting speeds and intensities of engagement with the example do not just prompt thought, but also generate sensations resonating in the body as well as the brain – frissons of excitement, energy, laughter, silliness. (MacLure, 2010: 282)

MacLure goes on to describe such fragments as ‘glowing’, and certainly, as I examined the videotapes and my fieldnotes from the Grade 1 class, the desks and their placement in the room and the children’s regulated general (and my temporary) immobility in those desks glowed and turned my attention to thinking about access and space. Sitting at Your Own Desk

Unlike the kindergarten, this classroom was furnished with individual desks and the children spent a great deal of time sitting at them. Figure 5.1 shows the placement of furniture in the Grade 1 classroom and the seating arrangement of the focal and other children with regard to the languages used in their homes. Early in the school year, one of the children was diagnosed with head lice and, in an effort to inhibit the spread of the mites, children’s desks were moved farther apart. This arrangement really spread out the children. Later the desks were moved closer so that the adjoining desks touched one another. Attention to the ‘agency’ of the lice in assembling intra-action in the classroom would have made for a very interesting analysis. Although Ms Reynolds had enacted several other arrangements, the configuration shown in Figure 5.1 lasted the longest, prevailing from the

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Figure 5.1 Seating arrangement in Grade 1 classroom

end of February to the end of the school year in June. The figure also shows the teacher’s customary position; her position and the direction children faced established the front of the room. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010: 5) argued that sitting in a specific space ‘with specific other human and non-human and non-human organisms and matter will regulate how and what we might say or do, or not say or do’. Management literature often recognises this in suggesting where managers might most powerfully sit, in relation to others they might be trying to manage, persuade, fi re, and so on.

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Unlike in the kindergarten classroom, where for each activity the children selected seating for themselves at tables (and where table groups changed often), the Grade 1 desk arrangements fi xed the children’s positions over long periods of time. Commonly, teachers assign seating in classrooms to children on the basis of matters to do with management (e.g. they do not put two noisy friends beside one another, they put a noisy child beside a quiet one, they keep children who are unlikely to complete assignments or who might be suspected of daydreaming closer to the teacher’s customary position). Ms  Reynolds remarked that such considerations guided her decision making in this Grade 1 classroom. As she received new information about children, as children joined or left the class or as she devised new strategies for encouraging them to complete tasks, she announced and enacted new seating arrangements. The children collaborated with the teacher in enforcing the classroom practice with regard to staying at one’s own desk, as shown by the following excerpts from my fieldnotes. Excerpt 5.1

Luke: Ms Reynolds:

Can we work at somebody else’s desks? No you work at your own desk. That’s why you have one.

Excerpt 5.2

Surjeet goes over to Amy’s desk. John: Surjeet, get in your desk!

Many of the minority language background children in this classroom were seated near the front of the room and no children speaking the same home languages (other than English) were seated together. Some of the Anglophone children were seated beside and among the minority language background children; Ms Reynolds perceived these Anglophone children as not managing well with the demands of the Grade 1 curriculum. With these children placed more closely to the position she usually occupied at the central hexagonal table, Ms Reynolds felt she could more easily help them. Evidently, she was able to monitor closely those children’s conversations and actions. The Anglophone children whom Ms Reynolds perceived to be in no danger of difficulties in school were seated on the right at the back of the room. They occasionally engaged in lengthy conversations with one another, conversations which went mostly uninterrupted by the teacher. Natalie, for example, frequently read and described to her neighbours the plots of the chapter books she was reading. Julie was seated in a back row; on either side of her were boys with whom she very seldom interacted. Ms Reynolds perceived Julie to have only minor problems with school despite her ‘ESL’ status, and to be well behaved. Indeed, Julie was very quiet in the classroom this year although, as in kindergarten, she continued to be lively, socially active and verbal on the playground.

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Martin was placed at the front corner of the room beside Ricardo, a student who had arrived in September from the Philippines and who was perceived by Ms Reynolds to have the most serious English language deficiencies of all the children. Martin was so placed because Ms Reynolds felt that she could monitor his completion of tasks more effectively if he were closer to her. It was my impression that Martin spoke very little in his Grade 1 class and mainly to Ricardo, who sometimes had difficulty in both understanding and responding to Martin’s initiations.4 After about the end of September, Surjeet went to ‘ESL’ four mornings a week for about half an hour, during ‘daily journal’ writing. During September, Surjeet was an enthusiastic journaller; she wrote and drew a great deal about her life with emergent spelling and sentence structure. Unfortunately, I did not collect any of this text. Surjeet was seated beside an Anglophone girl who, although verbally active, seldom spoke with Surjeet. Surjeet interacted more with another Anglophone girl seated across the aisle from her to her left (Tiffany), as well as with another Anglophone girl seated in the same row on the far left (Mary). Surjeet’s interactions with Tiffany were mostly friendly, but Mary frequently initiated unfriendly conversations with or about Surjeet. Excerpt 5.3

Mary:

(to Tiffany) Don’t go to Surjeet’s birthday. It would be Indian smell (wrinkling nose) Tiffany: I won’t. Mary: Will you come to my birthday? I’m Irish. Tiffany: OK. Surjeet covers her ears and turns away.

While I have forgotten many of the transcribed conversations in the first edition of Learning English at School (LEaS), this ‘data’ fragment certainly continues to glow or trouble me. Surjeet was within hearing distance of the conversation. I remember being shaken as I  listened, but I said nothing to the girls and moved away from them immediately to record in my fieldnotes their exact words. Having children of approximately the same age at the time myself, I was especially sensitive to the importance of birthday parties. Canadians commonly express dislike for Indo-Canadians by referring to the smell of Indian cooking and Mary was repeating a discourse she probably, and I have, heard many times before. Mary’s wrinkling her nose to express disgust was also part of this event and Surjeet’s physical response was too. When the children left the classroom for lunch, I approached the teacher and showed her my fieldnotes. I don’t remember what she said (and didn’t record it in my notes), but I remember the feeling I had that she was under-reacting to this event. I didn’t know what I wanted her

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to do, but I thought something should have been done. This brings up a dilemma that educational researchers have in participant observation sometimes – positioned as we are, as guests in classrooms, it is difficult for us to know what voice we can legitimately use with children or their teachers in those classrooms. But my response or nonresponse to this instance of racist discourse was as someone who felt that participation and observation were opposites, and that my observer stance at this time was more important or at least less problematic than a participatory stance. I see things differently now. I am convinced by Ingold’s (2014) argument that as researchers we must join with things (and people) in the processes of their formation and dissolution, and I now see that I participated in this conversation by witnessing it, and by saying nothing. In Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016: xv), the authors describe their classroom research as collaborative with students and teachers. They wrote: ‘[O]n the days Candace was in Tara’s room, it was her responsibility to actively engage in learning with Tara and students’. Davies (2014) considered angry intra-actions she witnessed in a Swedish pre-school involving two boys. The response from the Reggio Emilia-trained teachers was to participate more actively in the children’s play, in an effort to understand the conflicts in ways other than the customary – that is, seeing one child as the aggressor and one child as the victim. They were, as Readings (1996: 165) put it, ‘trying to hear that which cannot be said but which tries to make itself understood’. Davies showed how fi nding ‘ways to rethink human subjects not as bounded entities but as intersecting lines of force or intensity’ (Davies, 2014: 54), permitted the teachers to understand both boys as fearful of social exclusion, and to look for ways to support both of them, and their classmates as well. She cited Barad’s (2007) remarks on ethics: [Justice] entails acknowledgement, recognition, [and] … the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade in each meeting. How then shall we understand our role in helping constitute who and what comes to matter? (Barad, 2007: x, in Davies, 2014: 54)

In the classroom I observed, experimentation with various kinds of activities, materials and groups of children might have made it clearer when exclusion was threatened, and what might have been done, said, given or arranged to prevent such, or change it, or understand it better. How might things have been different so that Surjeet was protected and Mary did not find it necessary or possible to define her own desirability

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by pointing out another’s undesirability? How are teachers to do this in a world in which racist (sexist, homophobic, hate, and so on) discourse is ubiquitous/rewarded? I do not suggest this kind of subversion of the common discourse is easy, but I think it is essential. While research on classrooms, teachers and students has been very common in educational literature, with detached observation being the norm, it is not a stance I could embody after this project. My next project was a collaboration with a group of teachers and research students (Denos et al., 2009), in which the teachers themselves documented events in their classrooms (sometimes with the aid of videotaping) and created their own questions about those observations. Together, we struggled to understand what might be driving children’s behaviours and what these interpretations suggested for action on the part of those teachers. Despite not having read the Reggio Emilia literature at the time, what we were doing was similar to pedagogical documentation. With respect to sitting at one’s own desk, Randy was seated at the back of the classroom between two Anglophone boys with whom he had apparently enjoyable, sustained conversations. Randy’s family moved to a new home in November of his Grade 1 year and he changed schools. Before his move, Ms Reynolds considered Randy one of her highestachieving students. 5 Amy was seated at the front of the room beside an Anglophone girl who was frequently absent. Amy talked to this girl when she was present, and talked as well with the boy of Polish language background in her row. Her borrowing excursions (to be described later) afforded her more opportunities to talk to other children. None of the focal children was seated beside children with whom they typically chose to play at playtime. None of them was placed beside children from the same language background. By placing Martin, Amy and Surjeet close to her, Ms Reynolds could monitor and sometimes terminate conversations with the peers with whom these three did sit. Their seating facilitated conversations with her, but I did not see extended conversations of this sort occurring more often with these children than with others. As well, by being placed where they were, these children could not hear or participate in Natalie’s ‘book talk’. The children did not always sit at their desks. As they had in kindergarten, they also sat daily on the floor at the back of the room for the teacher’s reading of stories, for discussions and for sharing time. Although Martin, Randy and Julie were relatively immobile at such times, maintaining what looked like very close attention to the speaker, Amy and Surjeet were very mobile, with Surjeet often moving seven or eight times during a 10-minute reading. By the end of the year, both girls would start

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on the floor but move to their desks quite soon after the group had assembled itself on the floor, occupying themselves with tidying their desks, drawing or watching other children. I now wonder what all this movement was about, and what it produced for/with these children. I am also curious about what effects their movements had on the other children and Ms Reynolds. I cannot remember if she condoned children moving to desks from the carpet, nor can I remember if Amy and Surjeet were the only children who did this. In kindergarten, when Mrs Clark read the children a story, the children would move very close to one another and, sometimes, stroke one another or play with one another’s hair or clothing or toys brought for sharing time. This closeness and activity did not occur in Grade 1, and I wonder about the children’s movement to desks from the floor. In kindergarten, Amy, Martin and Julie had sustained first language subcommunities within the larger kindergarten community. The different physical arrangements of the Grade 1 classroom may have contributed to the fact that, at least publicly within the classroom, the children very infrequently spoke their fi rst languages except when they were addressed in them by their parents visiting the classroom at school opening or closing. As well, many of the kindergarten fi rst language conversations occurred when children of the same language background were playing with toys, or were sitting next to one another on chairs at the tables. One of the objectives and apparent effects in placing the children in this way, then, was to restrict some children from conversations with some other children and for the teacher to watch some children more closely than others. On the other hand, the children would try to resist their physical separation from one another, to at least some extent, as I will describe later. Using Your Own Things

The children in this classroom were individually responsible for keeping their resources for task completion (crayons, scissors, rulers, glue sticks, notebooks, and the like) in box-shelves built under their individual desktops. Ms Reynolds frequently reminded the children of the classroom rule to use their own materials, and some of the children, as well, reminded others. Excerpt 5.4

Surjeet: Martin, use your own things, not other people’s.

The children also engaged in a home reading programme in which every day each child took home one of the school’s collection of early literacy

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readers. These books were taken home in addition to those that individual children had selected at the school library once a week. Excerpt 5.5

Ms Reynolds: Boys and girls, it’s silent reading. You each have to have your own book.

The under-desk shelves in which the children’s materials were stored were vertically short, horizontally deep, dark, and placed so that the children had to huddle low in their chairs or get out of their chairs and squat on the floor in order to see inside. The children frequently lost or misplaced their individually owned materials in or outside their desks. In addition, when they lost or used up some or any of their supplies, the children were responsible for telling their parents to replace them. Many children’s supplies were incomplete fairly soon after school opening. In the children’s kindergarten class, as described earlier, materials for task completion were available and used communally. When the kindergarten teacher or a child noticed something missing from the collective store, replacements were made by the teacher immediately. Such was not the case in the Grade 1 classroom. Rather, individuals owned these resources. While in kindergarten, children sometimes had disputes with one another about who could use a particular object and when, claims for objects or spaces were not there based on ownership. A new materialist perspective might encourage focus on the movement of a resource throughout the classroom, for example, to see who used it, what for, how it got to its user, and so on, and what its movement produced. Many of the children solved their problems with keeping and managing their own inventory of materials by asking other children to lend materials. Borrowing and lending led to social interaction, some conflict and physical movement in the class. Although some children most frequently borrowed from children sitting next to them, others would move to other children’s desks to borrow. Ms Reynolds did not always tolerate this movement around the classroom and the children knew she could terminate their movements. Julie’s and Martin’s lending and borrowing practices were somewhat simpler than Amy’s and Surjeet’s. Julie and Martin borrowed relatively infrequently and in no examples in the data was Julie asked to lend her materials to others. Martin borrowed reciprocally with Ricardo, and occasionally moved across the room to ask the Polish-background boy sitting at the opposite corner to lend him felt crayons. Surjeet’s and Amy’s patterns of borrowing were more complex. Amy initially did not move

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much around the classroom to borrow. For some months before the arrangement noted in Figure 5.1, she was seated next to two boys who borrowed reciprocally with her. Later in the year, beginning in February, Amy began to range further afield to borrow. She borrowed even when she had her own materials easily available. She would move around the classroom, lean on the desk of the potential lender and engage him or her in short conversations. She thus continued her friendly and affiliative practices of soliciting connections with other children, despite her physical separation from them at her desk. Amy seldom lent anything to others (and was seldom asked to lend anything); on those infrequent occasions when other children used her things, they went into her desk on their own, with her tacit permission, and retrieved the materials themselves. Surjeet, unlike Amy, was not always a welcome participant in other children’s activities. I have already described Mary’s occasional hostile initiations with her. From the middle of February, Surjeet sat beside another Anglophone girl, Carla, who also was unfriendly toward her. Carla would rebuff Surjeet’s conversational advances and refuse to lend her materials. After a few refusals, Surjeet did not solicit the loan of materials from Carla. However, she often borrowed felt crayons from Mary (who was also occasionally hostile), as well as from Tiffany, seated close beside her. Surjeet had to move a little away from her desk for borrowing, especially from Mary, but the purpose of her solicitation did not appear to be primarily to engage the lender in friendly conversation, as it appeared to be with Amy. Rather, Surjeet seemed sometimes fairly tense when borrowing from Mary, as if she thought that her presence or her request might lead to a hostile remark. She was not apparently tense when exchanging materials with Tiff any; these interactions seemed friendly and easy. Surjeet was an enthusiastic lender and was alert to occasions on which children seated near her could use one of her resources. Despite Carla’s unfriendliness, Surjeet continued to offer to lend her materials.

I do not have records of the specific Grade 1 classroom tasks that necessitated the use of crayons, scissors, pencils, or whatever. This information would have been helpful in analysing how the teacher’s instructions, set tasks and other materials were assembled and how they constituted learning/knowing in the classroom. Karen Barad (2007: 379) makes a strong argument for regarding knowing as ‘direct, material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring’. The tasks a teacher sets for students, how those tasks relate to the (also material) provincially mandated curriculum, and the material artefacts used to accomplish these tasks are all entangled in what any child comes to know.

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The Anglophone children also borrowed and lent materials. In particular, it was evident that several of the Anglophone boys roamed quite freely around the class on borrowing excursions. The Anglophone girls moved less, but their choices about whom to lend to and from whom to solicit loans, like the boys’, reflected their changing social allegiances. Items that were particularly attractive were often solicited by many children. The Anglophone children who sat at the back of the room often appeared to have the most attractive materials in terms of other children’s requests to borrow them. New materiality theorists might urge attention to the seemingly commonsensical distinctions (cuts) I make or imply above (Anglophone/ ESL, boys/girls). Feminist theorists have drawn our attention to the ways in which gender is a relational performance, rather than a fi xed identity (Butler, 1990), and to how such distinctions can lead to essentialism and inequities. New materialists reject a priori distinctions between objects but they are very interested in boundary making, observing that boundaries produce effects that need to be explored. I take up this issue of boundary making between Anglophone and ESL students later in this chapter. Evidently the borrowing and lending practices in this classroom reflected the children’s social relations. Julie and Martin seldom lent or borrowed; these particular children were also relatively quiet verbal participants in their classroom. Amy borrowed a great deal from other children in what appeared to be attempts to solicit enjoyable affiliations with them. For Surjeet, borrowing and lending were more ambiguous: although she sought often to participate in the practices, they did not always appear to lead to enjoyable interactions with other children. Surjeet’s attempts to lend to other children appeared to be attempts to ‘buy’ acceptability; the fact that children did not often solicit loans from her reinforced her position as subordinate. The Anglophone children at the back of the room, on the other hand, had higher status in the children’s social relations and they were frequently asked for loans. As we have seen, classroom practices of borrowing and lending material resources intersected with community participants’ social relations. How these material resources were accessible or available to individual children intersected with issues of ownership of words and ideas. Using Your Own Words and Ideas

In this Grade 1 classroom, as in many others, the teacher frequently enjoined the children to ‘do their own work’, and the children quickly learned this ‘rule’ and enforced it themselves.

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Excerpt 5.6

Amy is drawing a picture on a piece of paper on Martin’s desk. Ms Reynolds: Oh no, Amy, you’re supposed to do that on your own. Everybody needs to do this sheet on their own. I need to know what everybody can do on their own. Excerpt 5.7

Luke: Ms Reynolds, can I help Rita? Ms Reynolds: No. (Luke goes to Rita’s desk. He sits on a bench near Rita) John: (classmate next to Rita, to Luke) Ms Reynolds said no. Luke, I’m keeping my eye on you. Excerpt 5.8

Linda comes up to teacher who is talking to an aide. Linda: Ms Reynolds, Surjeet was helping Tiffany. Ms Reynolds: Thank you Linda. Surjeet, do your own work. (Pause 10 seconds) Natalie: Ms Reynolds, Terry and Amy are looking at our work! Ms Reynolds: Maybe you could move.

The teacher’s and the children’s customary responses to oral ‘copying’ also exemplified the management of intellectual resources in the classroom. Frequently, Ms Reynolds asked the children individually to speculate on answers to mathematical estimations, or to ask questions or make comments on one another’s sharing time contributions. Both the teacher (gently) and the children (often forcefully) made it known that repetitions were illegitimate contributions. Excerpt 5.9

Natalie shows the class a book she has produced at home. Natalie: Any questions or comments? Surjeet: You like it? Natalie: (nods) May: How did you make that picture? Natalie: Like this. Amy: You like that book? Luke: We’ve already had that question, Amy. Excerpt 5.10

Children estimating how many pumpkin seeds are in the pumpkin. Ms Reynolds writing the numbers on chart next to their names. Martin: One zillion. Ms Reynolds: I don’t know how to write that. Martin: One and a lot of zeros. Ms Reynolds: Pick a smaller number. Martin: One million.

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May: Surjeet: Ms Reynolds:

One thousand! One million. Somebody already guessed that. You can choose a number above or below. Surjeet turns away.

At the beginning of the year, the focal children often orally repeated like this, but there were no instances after Christmas. Apparently, the children had learned effectively not to repeat in this way. In kindergarten, some children sometimes used oral and written (drawing) copying as an affiliative practice of flattery. Apparently, their attempts to copy the models of crafts assigned by the teacher were attempts to please. Children would also repeat their friends’ statements in language play. If one child drew a picture in a particularly innovative way, several of that child’s friends would draw similar pictures and their efforts seemed greeted by the innovator with pleasure. In Grade 1, by contrast, children would frequently huddle over their drawings or written ‘stories’ in exaggerated attempts to shield their work from the eyes of others. All the children appeared to learn quickly that oral repetitions and copying others’ written or artistic work were illegitimate. In this classroom, ambiguity surrounded the notion of ‘helping’. On Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016: xix) cited Husbye et al. (2012: 84): Over the past 30 years a variety of writing paradigms have been implemented in primary classrooms; however, even process-oriented paradigms have predominantly positioned children as independent authors expected to represent their unique voice on paper.

Canadian Grade 1 students are in their second year of school, and while material arrangements in their kindergartens might have been rather different from those in Grade 1, these children all seemed to have quickly come to understand the generalised notion in Grade 1 that they were individuals who were responsible for their own independent thought and words. Recall that rhythmic choral recitation was common in kindergarten, but I did not see it ever used in this Grade 1 language and literacy class. (Of course, children received instruction in music at times other than when I was observing, so the socio-material practice of choral singing was not completely banished from their school experience.)

the one hand, children helping other children with their tasks was commonly prohibited; children ‘helping themselves’ (by copying or repeating) was similarly negatively regarded. However, on other occasions, helping

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was regarded positively. From time to time, Ms Reynolds organised the children into small groups to complete a group task. These group tasks suspended the usual classroom rule of ‘doing your own work’ and the children, not surprisingly, appeared to require some negotiation time, especially at the beginning of such activities, to decide how to manage their contributions. Another task that required helping was associated with journal writing. Before the children wrote in their journals (about their weekend activities, for example), Ms Reynolds encouraged them to speak with an assigned classmate about what they were going to write. Most children did not avail themselves of this help. In summary, it was apparent that for children to help other children with their tasks was commonly a prohibited practice and that children ‘helping themselves’ (by copying or repeating) was similarly negatively regarded. ‘Helping’ was not always so regarded, however, and some tasks were set up explicitly so that children might help each other. However, normally, children were to do ‘their own work with their own ideas’. Discussion

The physical placement of participants in a classroom is one of those everyday practices which ‘exhibit, indeed generate the social structures of the relevant domain’ (Mehan, 1993: 243). Requiring children to work at desks assigned by the teacher is a very common practice of primary classrooms. In this classroom, the practice obviously controlled which children were in proximity to one another, brought some children under close teacher surveillance, and disrupted verbal interactions for some – but not all – of the children. Those children defi ned as needing help because they were ‘ESL’, as well as Anglophone children perceived to be having some difficulty with school, were so placed as to make chatting between them more difficult than it was for other children. Children perceived to be coping well with the requirements of Grade 1 sat at the back of the room together, further from the teacher; they thus could engage with one another in lengthy, obviously enjoyable conversations. Applied linguist Suresh Canagarajah (2017) recently advocated in a conference presentation that we become: More sensitive to space as a defining and generative resource in communicative success … [as it involves] one’s emplacement in relevant spatiotemporal scales to strategically align with diverse semiotic features beyond language, participate in an assemblage of ecological and material resources, and collaborate in complex social networks.

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Canagarajah was here recognising the importance of how space and where anyone is situated in that space shapes their access to many things and how that in turn effects their participation in social and material practices, including languaging. His view is congruent with new materiality, although his last sentence might have read ‘… collaborate in complex social and material networks’. Postmodern philosophers have made us alert to the purposes and effects of surveillance. Foucault (1979) wrote about 18th century innovations in French education, envisioned by educational reformer de la Salle, directed toward improving the efficiency of schooling: By assigning individual places it made possible the supervision of each individual and the simultaneous work of all … It made the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchising, rewarding. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle dreamt of a classroom in which the spatial distribution might provide a whole series of distinctions at once: according to the pupils’ progress, worth, character, application, cleanliness and parents’ fortune … ‘Pupils attending the highest lessons will be placed in the benches closest to the wall, followed by the others according to the order of the lessons moving toward the middle of the classroom …’ Things must be arranged so that ‘those whose parents are neglectful and verminous must be separated from those who are careful and clean; that an unruly and frivolous pupil should be placed between two who are well-behaved and serious …’. (Foucault, 1979: 147)

Foucault (1979: 146–147) further observed that classroom spatial arrangements that place individuals in separate locations – facilitating supervision, hierarchy and rewards – historically trace to about the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Perpetual observation of individuals under this system provided for the establishment of norms and rank: In the eighteenth century, ‘rank’ begins to defi ne the great form of distribution of individuals in the educational order: rows or ranks of pupils in the class, corridors, courtyards; rank attributed to each pupil at the end of each task and each examination; the rank he obtains from week to week, month to month, year to year. (Foucault, 1979: 146–147)

Ryan (1989) noted, with regard to the same period: [W]orkers, prisoners, patients, students and citizens were compared, differentiated, and ranked according to where they stood in relation to the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ … [S]anctions were universally employed to ‘normalise’ deviants who by their actions departed from accepted standards. (Ryan, 1989: 400)

Perhaps students who enter school speaking languages other than English are defi ned as something like ‘benignly deviant’, in Ryan’s terms, in that

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their language departs from accepted standards and in that as a group they constitute a rank requiring normalisation. The boundaries Foucault and Ryan wrote about (the verminous as opposed to the careful and clean, the good and the bad, for example) bring to mind the taken-for-granted and also financially consequential distinction for schools (in Canada at least) of English-speaking students and ESL learners. New materialists, like postmodern theorists, wonder about boundaries, asking when/how they arose, whose interests they serve and/or what the socio-material effects are in making these boundaries. Barad (2007: 93) called attention to material-discursive ‘boundary-drawing practices’ that produce ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality. In the case we examine here, the polarity – English speakers and ESL learners – does not even accurately describe the language practices of the students. I did not take this up at any length in the first edition of LEaS, but I learned during fieldwork that some of the English-speaking children spoke languages other than English in their homes or churches or on Skype, and Surjeet and Harvey spoke no language other than English. I suspect the same complexity is the case in many other schools. Making distinctions between English-speaking students and ESL students begs the following questions. ‘How much’ English does one need to speak in order to be included in the former designation rather than the latter? What kinds of English? To do what? With no translanguaging? Is speaking enough? Does one have to read and write in English in order to be counted an Anglophone student? Does being designated ESL make one more or less likely to access school or classroom resources (like playmates, journal-writing practice, and so on)? A new materialist might ask: what does making such distinctions produce? I have elsewhere described the difficulties I see in assessments of the degrees of language and literacy children ‘have’, and think such assessments are boundary-making devices that justify differential valuing of children (Toohey, 2008). These aspects of an ‘audit’ culture have received much critical attention in a variety of fields.

McDermott (1993) and Mehan (1993) both pointed out the ways in which the rank of ‘learning disabled’ has a reality in schools independent of the individuals assigned to the rank. Thinking about ESL status as a similar rank, requiring normalisation, could help in disrupting our taken-forgranted notions of what learning a second language in schools comprises. The children whose desks were placed close to the teacher’s customary position in the class were seen as appropriately interacting only or at least primarily with the teacher and then working on their own in the

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completion of teacher-assigned tasks. When Amy and Surjeet were removed from the class for ESL instruction, they came under the very close supervision of another teacher, as members of a much smaller group of children. In this way, relative to the children whom the teacher saw as capable students, the focal children had relatively few unobstructed (or unsupervised) opportunities to speak with peers, including more experienced users of English. Children sitting at the front of the room legitimately interacted only with the teacher. From a community of practice perspective, this might have been seen as facilitating their second language learning – in interacting primarily with the most expert ‘old-timer’ (in English) in the room. Shuy (1981) pointed out a particular difficulty with this arrangement, however, noting the sociolinguistic inappropriateness of students speaking like teachers. Amy’s and Surjeet’s voluntary removal of themselves from large group sessions, combined with their removal from the class for ESL pullout, contributed to the impression of their increasing ‘marginalisation’. ‘Marginalisation’ is the customary, but in this case rather inapt, metaphor. In truth, being on the margins, farther from teacher surveillance, in some ways could put a child in a more powerful position; one had more autonomy in choosing one’s own activities and verbal participation than when one was more centrally located with regard to the teacher. Amy’s and Surjeet’s removal of themselves to their desks might, therefore, have been a practice of resistance to the centrally defi ned classroom activities. A second practice had to do with individual management of material resources. The children had desks in which they stored their individually purchased materials; they were to use their own materials, bring their own books, and so on. For a variety of reasons, many children did not always have available individually the resources they needed for task completion, and so they borrowed from other students. Borrowing subverted in some ways the intent of the fi rst classroom practice: keeping children at their separate desks. Roaming for borrowing was risky, because the teacher could and did stop the children from doing so and reprimanded them for it, and because other children could legitimately complain about it. The performance of this borrowing practice reinforced the lesson that some children had more resources than others, that some had ‘better’ resources than others, and that individual children had the power to decide whether or not they would share their resources. Lending was not stigmatised; borrowing was. In addition, children learned that although lending and borrowing were not teacher-legitimated practices, they could engage in these practices surreptitiously. Finally, both the teacher and the children enforced the practice of requiring that the children not copy one another’s written or verbal productions. Throughout the year, all the children became more physically vigilant about protecting their written productions from others. At the beginning of the year, the focal children more frequently copied

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(repeated) other children’s verbal productions than did the Anglophone children. By the end of the year, very little of this kind of verbal copying took place. Its unequivocally negative valuation might have been responsible for its disappearance. Learners of English in this classroom, discouraged from explicit appropriation of others’ words, were taught that words, like things, were individually owned and were not community resources. Lave and Wenger (1991: 31) wrote that ‘learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice’; what did these children learn in these three social practices? These classroom practices, so commonplace as to be almost invisible, contribute to instantiating the notion that the children’s individuality must be established, reinforced and protected. Children sit at their own desks, use their own materials, do their own work, read their own books and use their own words. Knowing and staying in one’s place, having good materials in one’s own place, keeping track of and taking care of them oneself, having one’s own ‘things’ to write and draw and say, establish each child as an individual who, on her own, negotiates classroom life. Identity practices operate so that the community learns to see some children as more or less privileged with regard to their acquisitions and more or less autonomous in deciding their activities and verbal participation. In the same way as one child may have more or fewer crayons in her desk than another, these economic practices contribute to some children being seen by the whole community as having more or less English, literacy, mathematics or whatever in their heads than others. Teachers ascertain how much of what any individual child’s head contains and report that to parents and authorities. In the Grade 1 classroom, it seemed to me that there were particularly frequent reminders to the children to work on their own just before report cards were written and distributed. Because extra funding is given to Canadian schools based on the number of children with special designation (ESL, LD, behavioural, physical disabilities, and so on), it is in the interests of schools to have more ‘special’ students, while the government agencies that provide this funding are interested in the strict policing of these calculations. What difference might it make to schooling if it were not in anyone’s interest to identify which children had experience in language communities other than that of the school? (And further, what difference might it make to schooling if we were convinced of the slipperiness of the term language, and were more interested in how children intraacted with language or languaged in particular settings, with particular tools, with particular interlocutors and particular ‘problems’, in the Reggio Emilia sense?)

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Lave and Wenger’s (1991: 49) discussion of learning as participation in communities of practice offers a way to ‘extend … the study of learning beyond the context of pedagogical structuring, includ[e] the structure of the social world in the analysis, and tak[e] into account in a central way the conflictual nature of social practice’. If one takes such a perspective on this classroom, it is a community whose practices construct children as individuals and their acquisitions (such as crayons, language and ideas) as personal belongings. I believe this individualising of the children starts a process of community stratification which increasingly leads to the exclusion of some students from certain activities, practices, identities and affi liations. Schools ‘break them up/take them away’. First language subcommunities do not survive; second language learners become systematically excluded from just those conversations in which they might legitimately peripherally participate with child experts, English old-timers. They cannot speak like teachers, but those are the only experts with whom they are to interact legitimately. In a stratified community in which the terms of stratification become increasingly visible to all, some students become defi ned as deficient; this systematically excludes them from just those practices in which they might otherwise appropriate identities and practices of growing competence and expertise. Of course, many other practices of classrooms and their wider context reinforce the notion that knowledge is owned by individuals. Certainly, the practices of those researchers who have investigated second language learning, as well as most educational psychologists (as discussed by Wertsch, 1991), also contribute to reinforcing this notion. The three locally observable practices identified here contributed to the beginning of a process by which children from minority language backgrounds began to acquire school identities as persons whose ‘inventory’ was smaller than the inventories of others. They began to acquire identities that, in some very problematic and contradictory ways, were seen to require normalising. The focal children were, at this time, six and seven years old. Any longterm effects of their positioning in their Grade 1 classroom are impossible to determine. Nevertheless, a Toronto secondary student, a Japanese learner of ESL, expressed a disturbing possible future for these children: You go to [a non-ESL class] and sit with white people. You understand the content of the class, but when you have to fi nd a partner and work on a group project, you can’t get into a group. You feel too embarrassed to ask someone to be your partner. You feel like you’re gonna be a burden on them. So you don’t ask them; you wait until they ask you. (Kanno & Applebaum, 1995: 40)

Kanno and Applebaum (1995: 41) also cited research (Brislin, 1981; Furnham & Bochner, 1986; Klein et al., 1971) that showed ‘that many students from the Far East have difficulty developing a viable social

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network with North Americans’. My research suggests that the everyday, almost invisible practices of classrooms, beginning very early, contribute to these long-term effects. Reversal of these effects will not be a simple matter of putting the children back together again. As Kanno and Applebaum (1995: 43) remarked, ‘Perhaps it is high time we discarded our romantic notion that if we put children of all ethnic/linguistic backgrounds in one place we will witness the development of true cross-cultural understanding’. Mary’s racist comments about birthday parties serve as a reminder that patterns of exclusion and domination persist. Paley (1992) described her attempts to build resistance to ‘habits of rejection’ by instituting the classroom rule for children, ‘You can’t say you can’t play’. She observed in her classroom work that some children were positioned as outsiders and she observed: The [traditional] approach has been to help the outsiders develop the characteristics which will make them more acceptable to the insiders. I am suggesting something different: The group must change its attitudes and expectations toward those who, for whatever reasons, are not yet part of the system. (Paley, 1992: 33)

Certainly, the approach in the education of children who go to North American schools speaking languages other than the majority language has been to attempt to help them ‘develop the characteristics [the language] which will make them more acceptable to insiders’. Paley asked how to make those insider groups more inclusive, that is, how the group can change to allow those outsiders in. Freire (1970) saw the problem of outsider/insider somewhat differently: The truth is that the oppressed are not ‘marginals’, are not people living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’ – inside the structure which made them ‘beings for others’. The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’. (Freire, 1970: 55)

Packer (1993) cited Cazden’s (1993) argument that coming ‘to “participate” in a linguistic community is not … a process without confl ict: it involves the meeting and clash of divergent interests and the points of view to which these interests give rise’ (Packer, 1993: 259). As speakers struggle to appropriate the voices of others and to ‘bend’ those voices to their own purposes, they are also struggling to appropriate the identity positions expressed by those voices, and to ‘bend’ those identities to their own purposes. As Hull and Rose put it: A fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse – oral or written – is that human beings continually appropriate each other’s language to establish group membership, to grow and to defi ne themselves … [Our own] clearly documented writing may let us forget or even, camouflage how much more it is that we borrow from existing texts, how much

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we depend on membership in a community for our language, our voices, our very arguments. (Hull & Rose, 1989: 151–152)

However, in a stratified community, those from whom words and positions are appropriated may resist their appropriation, denying the legitimacy of those words and those positions in other people’s mouths and bodies. Much SLA research has assessed how individual second language learners move progressively (and more or less quickly) toward more extensive acquisition of the second language and (hence, assumedly), fuller participation in the activities of the second language community. Nevertheless, the practices of the particular community documented here appear in effect to prevent the increasing empowerment and active participation of some of those defi ned as second language learners. Coming to understand how research practices as well as classroom practices have collaborated in constructing ESL students as individuals who, on their own, acquire or do not acquire the capital of the classroom (the language) may go some way to help fi nd alternative practices that will permit those students to become and be seen as ‘beings for themselves’. Notes (1) Concerned about the safety of videotapes of children, Harvey’s parents asked that he not be observed or taped in Grade 1. So although he was enrolled in the same class as the other focal children, he was not observed there. (2) These six designated ESL children received instruction from the school’s specialist ESL teacher, who removed them from their classroom for this specialist support. All the children who had been enrolled in the kindergarten Language Development class were tested at the end of kindergarten with regard to their English language proficiency, as described in Chapter 3. On the basis of this test, the assessor had decided that only Amy and Surjeet of the focal kindergarten children required specialist ESL support in Grade 1. (3) Ingold (2011) has a clever and amusing description of how network theory might differ from his notion of meshworks. (4) Typical of their sometimes apparently difficult interactions was this recorded in March: Martin: Ricardo, where you got your ruler? Ricardo: (Pause 5 seconds) I got this from store. (shows ‘action figure’) Martin: NO! (angry, loud) Ruler! Ricardo goes to back of room. (5) I observed Randy until the end of Grade 1 at his new school, which was not far from Suburban School and had a similar ethnic and linguistic mix. Although Mrs Reynolds was sorry to lose him, as she believed that Randy was one of the ‘brightest’ children in her class, his teacher at his new school told me in an interview in February that he was ‘the most dramatically affected ESL child [she] had ever taught’ and that she was ‘referring him for learning assistance’ because she was convinced that he had some very serious learning disability. Randy was observably very quiet in his new classroom. The referral in fact never happened, probably due to his teacher’s requiring a medical leave shortly after this conversation. Randy’s next teacher was not so concerned about him; by the end of the year, Randy was evaluated as developing normally and as being only slightly handicapped by his ‘ESLness’.

6 Discursive Practices in Grade 2: Language Arts Lessons

The challenge for ESL teachers … is to recognise that classroom relationships and interactions both consciously and unconsciously defi ne what is desirable and possible for newcomers Morgan, 1997: 433

In September of the third year of this project, Martin, Julie, Amy and Surjeet were enrolled in Mrs Larson’s Grade 2 class, along with 10 children classified as learners of ESL and eight children designated as English speakers. This classroom was somewhat bigger than the Grade 1 classroom; desks were placed together in ‘pods’ of four or five. Mrs Larson, in consultation with the children, changed seating arrangements every two weeks or so. Mrs Larson was in her sixth year of teaching, and had spent all six years at Suburban School. During the summer vacation between Grades 1 and 2, Julie’s family had begun to have serious difficulties with regard to their immigration status and were threatened with deportation. Because they were resisting the deportation, they did not know whether or when they would be required to leave Canada. As it happened, they were deported in June of the next year. Amy had spent some of the summer between Grades 1 and 2 in Hong Kong with her parents and her grandmother; her parents were considering where they would live after the repatriation of Hong Kong to China. Martin’s family reported that their summer had been ‘relatively uneventful’ and that both Martin and his brother (who was about to enter Grade 1) were looking forward to school. Surjeet’s grandparents had returned from an extended trip to India over the summer and they reported to Karen Dhaliwal-Rai that they had begun to be ‘active in assisting [Surjeet and two cousins] in completing homework and additional work that the grandfather feels is needed for their learning’. I interviewed Mrs Larson early in the school year (in October) about the focal children as they entered her classroom. The following are excerpts from that interview: 137

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Excerpt 6.1

Julie’s doing okay. She’s average Grade 2 in reading … Her spelling is not very good and I’m having a hard time getting her to study … Verbally she does well. I’m pleased with her verbal communication. There’s some problems at home, immigration problems. They will have to go back to Poland and she was born here. And she’s upset about this … In my opinion, she’s progressed, but it’s been small … Amy is doing well. I noticed that her language is really coming up since the beginning of the year … She’s a bright little girl … She had a lot of trouble focusing at the beginning of this year, too busy watching the other kids [but] she’s really come around … She does her work and she does it well. Martin does well, his reading is also average Grade 2 … Martin is a very bright boy. He’s also very single minded and [his] Mum has expressed some concern about this. Martin seems to move to the beat of his own drum. Surjeet continues to have difficulties with reading, spelling and even a little bit of oral language. However, I don’t feel it’s necessarily an ESL problem, I think Surjeet is just low … She’s limited in just what she can absorb and in what she can understand and I think that’s going to dog her all her life …

During this school year, Sarah Yip and I and occasionally Elaine Day observed the children weekly during one of their Language Arts lessons, which were usually approximately 80 minutes in length. About once a month, the SFU videographer videotaped the children. In many of the lessons the children completed written work, usually as the penultimate activity (the teacher’s checking student work being the fi nal activity). However, rather than the written work the children produced in these lessons, here I focus on the oral discourse practices of these lessons. I consider here how the oral discursive practices of these lessons allowed the focal children to use classroom language. In Chapters 3 and 4, I examined identity practices, in Chapter 5, I examined resource distribution practices, and for each I analysed effects on children’s access to classroom language. This chapter focuses on discourse practices and how well they provided the focal children with access to using powerful and desirable voices in their community. Examining how these discourse practices are organised allows another perspective (in addition to identity and resource distribution practices) on how classroom practices enable certain social relations and ultimately learning. Margaret MacLure (2013: 663–664) argued that we ‘need to fi nd ways of researching and thinking that are able to engage more fully with the materiality of language itself – the fact that language is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the

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body; affecting other bodies. Yet also, of course, always leaving the body, becoming immaterial, ideational, representational, a striated, collective cultural and symbolic resource’. These categories (in and outside the body; material and immaterial) might be seen to be somewhat problematic in an ontology that tries to disrupt dichotomies. But MacLure wrote that language is material and also immaterial. In new materiality theory, discourse practices, resource distribution, settings, things and identities are bound up together, and the agential cut (Barad, 2007) I used here to discuss these matters (oral discourse practices) might seem quite arbitrary. Discourse analysis is aligned with sociocultural theory (SCT), however, and that was the perspective underlying the first edition of Learning English at School (LEaS). Language Arts Lessons

In a 1988 review of research on classroom discourse, Cazden pointed out two predominant kinds of social organisation in elementary schools in the UK and the US: large group instruction (‘with the teacher in control at the front of the room’) and individualised instruction (‘with children working alone on assigned tasks, and the teacher monitoring and checking their individual progress’) (Cazden, 1988: 124). Most of the Language Arts lessons in the Grade 2 classroom were organised around large group and individualised instruction, with the addition of some small group and partner conversations. The following activity pattern was typical: (1) Presentation of a common experience to the whole group of children (e.g. teacher reading a storybook to the children or teacher and children viewing a videotape). (2) Whole group discussion of the above event (sometimes discussion itself was the common experience) in the form of ‘recitation sequences’. (3) Teacher-mandated partner or small group conversations between or among children about the topic under discussion (common, but not in every lesson, and not always in the same place in the lesson sequence). (4) Individual completion of a written exercise by children at their desks, with children talking with one another about the task at hand, and/or about other matters (student-managed conversations). (5) Examination and evaluation of individual children’s work by the teacher. In this chapter, I examine in most detail the three central oral discourse activities (whole group discussions, teacher-mandated partner and small group conversations and student-managed conversations). For each of these, I consider (a) the purposes of the discourse structure, (b) the positional possibilities the structure offers to interactants, and (c) the

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possibilities the structure offers to interactants to appropriate voices for themselves and thus to create meaning. Hymes (1972) pointed out the complexity of the construct of speech act purposes, noting that community and individual goals for any particular interaction might vary, and that there might be distinctions between the conventionally expected or ascribed goals of an interaction and the latent or unintended goals. Here, I discuss purpose both in terms of the teacher’s and the conventionally recognised, expected and ostensible goals for each practice, as well as latent or unintended outcomes. Examining teachers’ intentions for these practices, students’ intentions, and observers’ ideas about what purposes the practices serve might enhance our understandings of what goes on in classrooms. As well as purposes, I examine how each practice set up for students, positions them vis-à-vis one another and the teacher. All discourse practices set  up particular kinds of social relations between participants. Citing Bakhtin (1981), Hall (1995: 214) commented: ‘Our every use of language … serves as a sociopolitical statement indicating our stance toward the particular interactive moment, our place in that interaction and our positioning toward the others involved’. The particular kinds of positioning possibilities that classroom discourse practices set up are also centrally related to the possibilities they present for students to develop classroom voices. Finally, the discourse practices of the Language Arts lessons constrained or enabled appropriation of voices for the children, for them to express meanings from their own points of view. Bakhtin believed that speakers construct their messages in response to the utterances of others, and that the discursive as well as the social and political contexts of utterances might be seen as joint ‘producers’ of utterances with their human speakers. For him, speakers are able to make words ‘their own’ when they are able to adapt them to ‘their own semantic and expressive intention’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 293). This expression of ‘one’s own’ meanings is, for Bakhtin, the construction of a ‘voice’, ‘a perspective, a conceptual horizon, intention and world view’ (Wertsch, 1991: 51). I wish to examine, therefore, how each of the three discourse practices enabled the construction of voice in this classroom.

Recitation Sequences Background

There has been a great deal of research on a common discourse practice in schools: three-part recitation sequence formats (also termed triadic dialogue, initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) or initiation-responsefollow-up/feedback (IRF)), in which, typically, a teacher asks a question, a student responds, and the teacher evaluates or follows up on the

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student’s response in some way. Courtney Cazden (1988: 29), for example, described this as ‘the most common pattern of classroom discourse at all grade levels’. Tony (A.D.) Edwards and David Westgate (1994) called the pattern ‘the deep grooves along which most classroom talk seems to run’1 and Gordon Wells (1993: 2) noted that ‘in some primary classrooms it has been found to be the dominant mode in which the teacher converses’. Many researchers have examined this discursive practice and have variously evaluated it. Some (Mercer, 1992; Newman et al., 1989) have seen it as a practice well-designed to accomplish the educational goals of transmitting information and monitoring children’s understandings or internalisation of information. Others (Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Gutierrez & Larson, 1994; MacLure & French, 1981; Wood, 1992) saw the practice as involving children somewhat trivially in a type of ‘oral cloze’ test in which they merely contribute to meanings constructed by the teacher. Wertsch (1998: 123), for example, claimed that recitation sequences involve teachers asking ‘test questions’ (questions to which they already know the answer) and that these test questions are ‘creating and maintaining the relations of power and authority in classrooms’. He further claimed that sociocultural practices mutually reinforce each other, and that practices such as the customary arrangement of speech acts in classrooms are congruent with relations of power in other arenas. Kris Gutierrez and Joanne Larson (1994), using critical pedagogical and sociocultural theory, saw the practice as serving what they called hegemonic functions (preserving the ‘naturalness’ of teacher power to control who speaks, about what and under what conditions). Maintaining the teacher as the locus of power and authority in classrooms appropriately and adaptively fits a system of which a central practice is ranking children on the basis of their performance on tests. Having individual children display their ‘individually owned pieces of knowledge’ before others congruently suits a philosophy of individual development and functioning (see Chapters 4 and 5). From this perspective, recalling, creating, exchanging or extending information or knowledge between students and teachers plays a less salient role in recitations than does creating and maintaining power positions for classroom participants. Many commentators have maintained that the teacher’s centrality in recitation sequences reduces opportunities for students to participate in the creation of divergent meanings (e.g. Gutierrez et al., 1995; Nystrand et al., 1997). In an analysis of one child’s language in and out of school, Valerie Tootoosis (1983) observed: On the whole, Leiha’s language and that of her classmates in the context of the teacher-to-whole-class lesson format was limited in quantity, substance and purpose. The only purpose their language appeared to have was to demonstrate ‘knowledge’ by performing fill-in-the-blank and leadin patterns for the teacher. There was no observed discovery, clarification or reworking of meaning. (Tootoosis, 1983: 155)

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Still another view has been offered on the value of recitation discourse practices. Wells (1993: 3) argued that the practice is ‘neither good nor bad’, observing that it serves important educational purposes of ‘cultural reproduction’, but that it might not be so effective at engendering ‘cultural renewal and […] the formation and empowerment of individual[s]’. He examined several enactments of the sequence in a classroom in which a teacher’s varying goals for the practice entailed varying outcomes in students’ possibilities for expressing meanings and for coconstructing knowledge with their teacher. Hall (1998) reported on her investigation of a secondary school classroom in which the teacher used the IRF pattern with the purpose of providing opportunities for second language students to speak and practise the second language. In Hall’s data, the teacher frequently asked students questions about information they had which the teacher didn’t (personal preferences, activities, and so on); this practice allowed at least some students extended speaking opportunities. ‘Cultural reproduction’ might be seen as another way of talking about reproducing striated knowledge. Like Gordon Wells (1993), Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010: 95) pointed out: ‘we are in an interdependent relationship with what simultaneously already structures our thinking and doing [striated knowledge] and with what might become infinitely possible [creative lines of flight].’ In other words, she claimed that cultural reproduction and cultural renewal are interdependent and both are necessary for learning. In this chapter, I wish to examine how the practice occurred in Mrs Larson’s Grade 2 classroom and how it seemed to affect the focal children’s possibilities for access to voice there.

Recitation sequences and the focal children

Surjeet reluctantly performed in recitation sequences and, judging by the number of times she volunteered, more reluctantly at the end of the year than at the beginning. She was commonly nominated by Mrs Larson, 2 although rarely by other children (part of the conventions of the classroom: nominated children could nominate other children in an ‘I need help’ move). Typical of her performance was the following: in March, after groups of children had presented reports on planets in the solar system, Mrs Larson opened a discussion about what would be essential for the establishment of human communities on these planets. Two children volunteered ‘air’ and ‘food’; Mrs Larson then asked Surjeet (without Surjeet bidding to answer) for another essential:

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Excerpt 6.2

Mrs L:

So, we need air and we need food. What else is super important to have on that space ship? Many children bidding to answer. Not Surjeet, though. Surjeet, what would you want to have on that space ship? (Silence 6 seconds) 3 Surjeet is mouthing words, not saying anything audible. She is looking down. Maybe it’s something you’re taking to your new planet. What would you want? (Silence 11 seconds) Surjeet looks down. You’ve got air to breathe, and you’ve got your ‘Shreddies’ to eat, what else would you need. (Silence 21 seconds) Surjeet looks at ceiling, looks to the right, starts mouthing words again, but doesn’t say anything audible. What else would you need? What would be really important to have with you? (Silence 4 seconds) Surjeet: A space ship? Mrs L: Well, you all, what we’re talking about is what would be on that space ship with you. Now think along that line. You’re on the right track. Surjeet: Fire. Mrs L: You want fi re? Surjeet: On the out, outside. Mrs L: You want fi re outside the spaceship? So the space ship can go? Surjeet nods. Okay, but I’m thinking of something that you would pack inside. Something you would need to take inside the space ship. Something you might need on the other planet. Surjeet: M::: (looking around, shifting position) Mrs L: We’ve got air. Remember some of those planets don’t have air. So we’ve got air. The air in the space ship. And we have food. What else would you need? (Silence 5 seconds) Surjeet is looking down. Many children raise their hands, and Mrs Larson addresses them. I’m sorry, she hasn’t asked for help. I don’t know why your hands are up. Thank you. (Silence 7 seconds) Surjeet is mouthing words. Either pass or ask for help, dear. Surjeet: Pass.

In this sequence Mrs Larson attempted repeatedly to scaffold Surjeet’s answer. She summarised (‘You’ve got air to breathe and you’ve got your “Shreddies” to eat. What else would you need?’), made leading remarks

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(‘Something you might need on another planet …’) and waited a long time for Surjeet to answer. Despite this, Surjeet remained silent. Literature in SCT frequently stresses the value of group work among students and of how collaboration with more experienced peers or adults may help a learner to be able to function ‘a head taller than herself’. While the rule in this class was that you could ask for help, this help did not allow children to collaborate with others in meaning-making. Rather, asking for help in this situation was to admit defeat. The above intra-action was videotaped and, like the ‘birthday party’ episode in Grade 1, I remember this intra-action vividly. I recall feeling sadness, anger, helplessness and embarrassment in response to what felt to me like the teacher badgering and humiliating Surjeet. Again, this was an event that ‘glowed’ for me and I hope if I experience the same intensity of affect in other circumstances that I will be able to respond more helpfully. Surjeet frequently responded with silence when called on in this way. In interviews, Mrs Larson referred to this throughout the year. In March, she said: Excerpt 6.3

I truly believe Surjeet is doing as well as she is going to do. She’s very very hesitant about answering questions. I try to ask her when her hand is up. Unfortunately her hand is rarely up. It’s just come to the point now where she would just rather relax. I will ask her and my thing is, you have to try, and I know this embarrasses her sometimes but I have to get across to her that she has to make the effort. But she’ll sit there and she’ll sit there and I say, it’s okay, Surjeet, but you have to answer, you do have to give some answer, we’ll help you. As I said [in an earlier statement in which she remarked that Surjeet might have learning limitations], this is as good as it’s going to get for Surjeet.

Martin also rarely bid for the position of respondent in recitation sequences; however, Mrs Larson nominated him much less than she did Surjeet. In one lesson in April, however, he did volunteer more frequently and participate more actively. Early in the lesson, Mrs Larson was asking the children for the names of food groups and for examples of food falling in these groups. After a child had volunteered ‘crackers’ as belonging to the bread and cereals group, Mrs Larson asked the children why this food might belong in that group. Excerpt 6.4

Agatha: Because I think they’re made out of like um bread dough and [I think something Mrs L: [They’re made from flour, yes. Same thing that bread is made from. But you add diff erent ingredients to get bread. So, uh, that’s why it’s in the bread and

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cereals. What are some of those other things? Can you tell me about another food that would be found in the group? My, not too many people are thinking today. I hardly see any hands up. Martin? Martin: The Egg Waffles?4 Mrs L: (to Martin) How do you know they are egg waffles? (to whole group) You don’t know what kind of waffles they are so you just have to say waffles. Yes. Why are they in that group, Martin? Martin: Uh:: (Pause 13 seconds) Jean Paul puts up his hand with a loud intake of breath. Mrs L: He hasn’t asked for help, Jean Paul. Hand down please. Why would waffles be in the bread and cereal group? Martin: Uh::: (Pause 13 seconds) They are made out of (playing with his shirt collar, tapping his chin) Mrs L: A little louder sweetie. Martin: Because they are made, they are made out of (Pause 3 seconds) flour? Mrs L: Yes, sure. There is a lot of flour in them. You mix them with egg and a few other ingredients.

In this example, Mrs Larson waited for Martin to answer for almost half a minute in all. She protected Martin’s turn (‘He hasn’t asked for help, Jean Paul’), suggesting that there was importance in Martin giving the answer, not in the answer being available for the group discussion of ‘breads and cereals’. Amy and Julie more frequently performed in recitation sequences than the other two focal children. In a lesson on ‘multiculturalism’ in January, Mrs Larson read the children a storybook about multiculturalism and then elicited from them their ideas about ‘what makes up culture’. The children had offered ‘music’ and ‘food’, and Mrs Larson continued to question them. On this occasion, Sarah Yip was observing; just before the following excerpt, Amy had come up to Sarah and whispered in Cantonese some question that Sarah was not able to make out. This is an excerpt from Sarah’s fieldnotes. Excerpt 6.5

While Mrs Larson is talking, Amy has risen and come over to me [Sarah], and whispers in Chinese. I can’t hear much of what she said so I shake my head. Amy looks back at Mrs L. I open my eyes questioningly at Amy. She opens her eyes and looks at me. Mrs L: Let’s just go over what we’ve discussed with this class, please. We’ve talked about culture is the language that a different people speak, it’s a thing they listen to, it’s the clothes they wear. It’s the

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food they eat. Anything else? Anything else? Amy, anything else you want to add? Amy: The colour of your um, body. Mrs L: Well:: not really. Not really. I could, uh be born and raised in a culture where the people looked quite diff erent from me but it would still be my culture because I listen to that music. I eat that food. I dress that way. So the way you look doesn’t have as much to do with culture as all those other things. But you often associate the way people look with a certain culture, you’re right there. Later in the sequence, Amy again offered ‘hair colours’, with Mrs Larson responding similarly to above. She continued:

Excerpt 6.6

Mrs L:

Amy: Mrs L:

Amy: Mrs L: Amy: Agatha: Mrs L: Peter: Mrs L:

Think about something else, Amy. We’ve got clothes, music, foods. What else? What else makes up culture? All the things we read and talked about. You and I were just talking about one of those things. When you came to Canada you had to learn? (Pause 3 seconds) You weren’t born in Canada, were you? When you came to school you had to learn? (Pause 5 seconds) What did you learn at school? Learn things. Yes, you had to learn a lot of things, but before you could learn those things you had to be able to do what with all the children and the teacher? Oh I’m sorry, Leo. I’m talking to Amy now and you know better. And I don’t want to see that again. (Silence 6 seconds) You’ve never thought hard about it. If you can’t figure it out you can pass or ask for help. Um:: Right. Can you ask for help? Agatha. Dancing. OK, it’s not quite what I was thinking of, but defi nitely we can put dance down. What else can we put down here? Peter? Language. Language, yes. Did – you had to learn English. Amy. Amy, listen please. You had to learn English so you can talk – communicate with each other ** you can hear ***. language. (to all the children) Something else that makes up culture?

Amy had raised a complicated issue (the relation of race to culture) and Mrs Larson tried to acknowledge and address Amy’s answer while moving the sequence along. But she had difficulty eliciting from Amy the item she (Mrs Larson) needed, ‘language’, so as to construct the relatively sophisticated but personal answer she wished to give to Amy. Most teachers would

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recognise the difficulty Mrs Larson had in this sequence, knowing that constructing questions so that children will supply the linguistic items needed to move the discourse along in ways the teacher intends is not always particularly easy. Agatha’s ‘dancing’ is a good example of the problem: she answered a previous question accurately with this item, but it didn’t help Mrs Larson construct the meaning she wanted to develop.

Teacher-mandated Partner and Small Group Conversations Background

Asking students to discuss something with a partner or a small group of peers is a fairly common and much recommended classroom practice and many have recommended it for second language classrooms (Long, 1981, 1997; Long & Porter, 1985; Long et  al., 1976; Pica & Doughty, 1986). Recognising that large group formats give students limited opportunities for language practice, many educators have claimed that small group work allows students more turns at talk in conditions of relative power equality with other interlocutors (Pica, 1987). As well as permitting children to take longer and more frequent turns at talk than they might in large group formats, this format is intended to give students the opportunity to ask as well as answer questions, to learn from peers, to make errors with reduced risk and to rehearse for later performances. In Mrs Larson’s Language Arts lessons, the timing of teachermandated conversations between or among peers varied. Sometimes the teacher asked the children to speak with partners or small groups during short breaks while listening to stories – to speculate on the motives of characters, on possible plot outcomes, and so on. She also set up small group or partner conversations at the end of a story or videotape. Sometimes she interrupted a whole class discussion in order to get the children to engage in partner or small group discussion for ‘brainstorming’, and so on. How the focal children engaged in these conversations and the possibilities they seemed to offer the children for constructing classroom voices are the foci here. Teacher-mandated peer conversations and the focal children

Peer conversations mandated by Mrs Larson sometimes allowed the children the opportunity to express their own meanings in apparently enjoyable ways, although not always. For example, in a February lesson centred around reading a children’s book, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain (Lobel, 1982), Mrs Larson stopped reading after every page or so and asked the children to discuss with a partner what might come next in the story. Amy and a classmate Mary (in whose home only English was used) engaged in an apparently lively and pleasurable conversation:

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Excerpt 6.7

Mary:

With the um woods on your head and the mountain would move far far away and you could dig and build your house again. Amy: *** Mary: Yup. Amy: Okay, so that wise man said that. Mary: And that wise man was covered in smoke so they can’t see him Both girls giggle. Amy: Yeah, the wise man sticks glue like this to your feet and put a log on your head and Mary: No, like put the logs of your house on, no on [over your head and hold them and close your eyes Amy: [over your head and hold them and close your eyes. Mary: [And keep on doing this for many hours Amy: [And keep on doing this for many hours] And the mountain will go away, far far away. Mary: So they can build the house again. Mary is squatting. The girls join hands and start to bounce, each word in the next utterance corresponds with a bounce. But - they - did - not - say - that - so - I - think - it - will - not - work. Amy: I think it will work. Mary: Well (rising intonation) I think it will work too. Uh, I gotta get up. Mrs L: And stop, please.

Birdwhistell (1970), in an extended study of ‘kinesics’ (body motion and communication) points out that conversations can be like ‘dances’, and Amy’s and Mary’s non-verbal behaviour here looked pleasurable, coordinated and a lot like a dance. When Mary began her ‘But-they-didnot-’ utterance, the girls held hands and bounced together on their heels. Both girls contributed to the conversation; indeed, several parts were completed chorally (although Mary’s seems the ‘lead’ voice in this chorus). Despite Mary’s longer experience with speaking English, Amy did not hesitate to disagree with her about whether ‘it will work’. The girls were able in this excerpt to ‘play’ in their response and to build together a collaborative response to the teacher’s prompt. This and the following transcript illustrate how children in this case took what could have been a rather striated task and ‘set … off into their imaginations as a line of flight’ (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010: 106). The children’s laughter and overlapping speech and their bouncing show marked

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contrasts from other striated activities. In terms of affect, it appeared the girls were enjoying the possibility they had to extend a story that was not limited by the text of the picture book the teacher had presented. The ‘Ming Lo’ conversation prompt also elicited very animated conversation between Martin and his partner, Jean Paul. Jean Paul’s family were from Quebec and they used French in their home. Jean Paul received ESL specialist support in his Grade 2 classroom. He had many health problems in Grade 2 and missed a great deal of school. Early in the reading of the story, when none of the children knew very much about the story’s plot, Mrs Larson prompted the children to engage in partner conversation concerning what had already happened in the story: Excerpt 6.8

Martin speaking to Jean Paul before teacher has finished giving students instructions for the exercise. Martin looks happy and makes many hand and arm movements throughout his first utterance. Martin: *** When, when, um, Ming Lo tries to move the mountain, he looks down and he sees a lamp, he sees a dirty *(rubs his hands around as if he is rubbing a lamp) A genie comes out of it. ‘I wish that this mountain would be crushed to pieces!’ And he crushes it to pieces. Then he * (more arm and hand movements). Your turn. Jean Paul: What? (Pause 3 seconds) Oh, there was a big hole (he traces a circle on the rug) There’s lots of things (his hands are moving around as if he is drawing things in the air) and he jumps and splats, oh:: ** (more vocalisations, probably not words. Smiles, Martin smiles and moves with Jean Paul) Martin: Hey, I know! When there’s a puppy when ** Jean Paul: Wuh, wuh, wuh * big nose and then he goes (again lots of hand and arm movements) Martin: He goes like this (makes a biting and then spitting motion)

Although Mrs Larson had asked the children to tell what had already happened in the story, Martin and Jean Paul interpreted the partner set-up as an invitation to imagine a story. Their stories bore little relation plot-wise to the story the teacher has started to read. Martin’s story resembled a plot from a then-popular American children’s movie, while Jean Paul’s story was difficult to trace. However, both joyfully engaged in a partly verbal, partly vocalic, largely bodily enacted creation of two narratives. They had pleasurable ‘places’ in this task, and had access to each other as resources in it. Martin and Jean Paul’s interaction affi rmed both as storytellers,

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despite the fact that much of their stories was accomplished non-verbally, and bore little relation to the story the teacher had just read. As we have already seen, for Deleuze and Guattari (1984) and others, desire is not rational or coherent but, rather, ‘the ontological drive to become’ (Braidotti, 2013: 134). Olsson (2009) drew parallels between children’s eagerness to move in new ways, to extend their bodily abilities, with children’s eagerness to experiment with ideas and representations and, in so doing, extending their thinking capacities. She discussed the joy that accompanies increasing one’s body’s capacity to move: ‘you have joined other forces and together with these your body is capable of doing more’. Martin and Jean Paul (and Amy and Mary in the previous transcript) might be described, from this viewpoint, as ‘story desiring’, and as they make these stories they experience pleasure. Peer conversations sometimes led to enjoyable and collaborative knowledge creation, but not always. As part of the Canada’s Food Guide lesson described earlier (Excerpt 6.4), Mrs Larson paired children with others and had them interview each other about their favourite food in each food group, so as to complete a worksheet. She had given general instructions on how to complete the sheet to the whole class, and given a sheet to each child. Julie and Amy had begun their interviews; Mrs Larson walked by where they were sitting: Excerpt 6.9

Mrs L: Girls, you have to do this section too. (pointing to their sheets) Julie: I know, we are. Mrs L: Okay. Julie: Cause we don’t get it very much. Mrs L: Pardon? Julie: We don’t get it. Mrs L: You don’t understand what to do? Julie shakes her head and looks down. Okay, you’re going to say to Amy, ‘Amy, what’s your favourite grain product? What is your favourite thing from the bread and cereal group?’ Julie: Cereal? Mrs L: No, no, I’m asking Amy. See you would ask Amy this. Amy: Cereal. Mrs L: Do you like um, so you like your morning cereal? That’s your favourite thing? Okay, then you would put down cereal. (pointing to Julie) Don’t worry about your spelling. That’s a girl. And now, Amy, you ask Julie what her favourite thing from the grain products or bread and cereal group is. Maybe she likes bran muffi ns the best. Maybe she like waffles the best, I don’t know, you ask her. And you write it down.

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(Mrs L leaves) Amy: Uh what’s your favourite, um Julie: [vegetable or grain Amy: [vegetable or grain – products. Julie: Um:::. Amy: Did you know how to write cereal? Julie: I know it’s up there but I can’t look. (gestures to the board upon which is the Canada Food Guide poster) Amy: C-E, C-E makes S sound. Julie: ‘Kay, um, waffles. Amy: Waffles? (tries to write this down. Julie leans closer.) Julie: /w::ɔ::: / (J. helping A. ‘sound it out’) Julie: Ok, now, Amy, what is your veg, favourite vegetable and fruit? Amy: Um, apple. Julie: Apple is fruit. Do you like bananas? Amy: Well, um, sometimes … (looks away) Julie: They’re good for you. Amy: The yellow ones. Julie: Okay, I’ll print banana, okay? Amy: Okay. Julie: /b::: æ::::n::::::æ::::n:::æ::/ (as she writes it) There’s banana. Amy: (leans in toward Julie) Those, those apples makes your teeth, when you teeth is wob, wobb, um, really like moving when you move it, push it. Like when you eat apple, it will fall in, into the apple and you will eat the tooth. Julie: (smiles very briefly) ‘Kay, now you ask me. Amy: What’s your favourite vegetable or fruit? Fruit? Julie: Mmmm. I like, I like um apple.

In this excerpt, Mrs Larson explicitly coached Amy and Julie in the language they were to use to accomplish the task. Although she then left, she had set up the speech acts in which the girls subsequently engaged. The worksheet also structured their verbal activity. Julie, in particular, seemed to regard Mrs Larson’s instructions and the worksheet as mandating her verbal behaviour. In the videotape of this interaction, the girls were noticeably physically disengaged from one another during this conversation. Both spend a good deal of the time looking away and twisting their bodies away from one another. Amy moved in closer to Julie during her applescan-make-you-swallow-your-teeth turn, but Julie was looking away from Amy. When Amy fi nished this utterance, Julie smiled very quickly, not looking at Amy, and said, ‘’Kay, now you ask me’. The girls collaborated to some extent in this conversation: They said ‘vegetable or grain’ in chorus, helped one another spell the words, and they cued one another about asking the questions. However, on the whole, they did not really speculate about their own meanings or create knowledge together. Negotiations of power relations between them were only subtly manifested here, but Julie rather easily persuaded Amy that she should choose bananas as her favourite fruit and vegetable rather than apples, and she

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ignored Amy’s conversational gambit about how apples can make you swallow a loose tooth. Julie took the role of teacher or leader in this exchange; consequently, parts of the conversation resemble a recitation sequence. Despite their status equality as children and the fact that mistakes here were inconsequential, the girls did not stray very far from the set task. Amy’s attempt to speculate beyond the sheet got nowhere. This school event is a good example of a striated assemblage, in which the worksheet, the children’s bodies, the teacher’s voice, the pencil, and so on had agency in determining what happened there. Amy’s desired line of flight from the set task is ignored by her partner. This event involving the girls and the interviewing technique (and myriad other things in this environment) is reminiscent of Lenz Taguchi’s description of two five-year-old boys who obediently drew maps from their houses to the pre-school as requested by their teachers. Lenz Taguchi (2010) pointed out that the children entered into assemblages with the available pens and paper, their hands, their memories of previous occasions on which they had been asked to think and then draw, and so on, in order to accomplish the task the teachers requested. Being aware of the striations that may operate (or emerge) in various school tasks may be helpful for teachers as they plan activities with children, so that if a task should be striated, it is. However, if teachers wish to encourage new thought, other possibilities, other desirings, they might well think about how assemblages that might produce those are arranged. Amy and Julie’s conversation was between partners. In the lesson on establishing communities on other planets discussed earlier (in Excerpt 6.2), Mrs Larson asked the children to discuss in small groups what would be needed. Surjeet was in a small group with three boys: Sam and Jason who used only English at home with their families and Ricardo who spoke Tagalog at home. Mrs Larson was present at the beginning of their conversation: Excerpt 6.10

Mrs L: Child: Mrs L: Children: Child: Mrs L: Jason, Sam, Ricardo: Surjeet: Mrs L:

Is a dog essential? It’s an air. Is it something you absolutely have to have? NO! We need air. No, but what do you absolutely have to have? Air, air, air. Air. Yes, you need air. What else do you absolutely have to have?

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Surjeet looking thoughtful, says ‘eh:::’. Mrs Larson walks away . Ricardo: Food! food! (claps his hands) Surjeet: (looks at Ricardo) Food! (bounces as she says it, then stands up and looks at what Jason is writing) Food. Drink. Drink. Jason: Food’s the same as drink, Surjeet. Surjeet: Okay. Sam: (to Jason) No! You just keep printing it down there. Jason: Sorry I’m gonna do it on this. Ricardo: Yeah, don’t just **. Drink! Drink! Jason: (looks at Ricardo) Drink is the same as, oh yeah, drink! (He writes it down). Surjeet: Put drink there. No, put food with drink, eh? Nahh. Jason: Nah. Surjeet: Nah. Jason: D-r-ink (sounding out) Surjeet: ink, ink (offering the final syllable) Jason: No. Drink. Surjeet: Drink Ricardo: Drink-ing. Drinking? Surjeet: Drinking. Jason: Okay what else?

Surjeet’s participation in this conversation was minimal, but complex. Her initial contribution was repeating ‘air’ after the other children. Later, she suggested that they need ‘drink’, but Jason rather witheringly told her that ‘Food’s the same as drink’, a point with which she acquiesced. Several turns later, Ricardo told Jason that drink should be separate and Jason started to write it down. Surjeet’s ‘Put drink there. No, put food with drink. Nahh’ shows some of the internal contradictions sometimes evident in her speech. I think she was initially echoing Ricardo’s ‘drink’, then recalled Jason’s point that ‘food is the same as drink’, then noticed that Jason was writing ‘drink’ down, so she contradicted her assertion with ‘nahh’. Throughout the rest of the interaction, she echoed the boys’ statements, except in the following: Excerpt 6.11

Sam: Jason: Surjeet: Sam: Jason: Surjeet: Ricardo: Sam: Ricardo: Jason: Surjeet:

Water! Water, water, water! Of course you need water (starts to write it) Drink Drink No, drink is water (stops writing) Yeah I got it! We need a, like when we, Mrs Larson showed that Shelter Yeah What’s shelter? Shelter

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While interpretation is difficult here, it appears that Surjeet was the fi rst to remember that water might already be covered with ‘drink’, but one has the sense that her interlocutors did not credit her with detecting the possible error. Her later turns again echoed the boys’ utterances. Physically as well as linguistically, Surjeet was placed subordinately less centrally than the other children in the group and her placement affected her participation. The boys were sitting at three desks clustered together and Surjeet stood at her desk leaning over toward the boys. She was, of all the children, furthest from Jason and the worksheet. Eye contact between the boys was maintained throughout most of the conversation, with very little gaze toward Surjeet on anyone’s part. Surjeet’s difficulties with being seen as a speaker who is ‘understood … believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished’ are evident here (Bourdieu, 1977: 650) as they were in the previous grades. As the interaction proceeded, she continued to echo utterances of the boys, attempting (I think) to be a participant in the group work. The drive to extend one’s bodily capacities (‘to move in resonance with the ground or the sea’ (Olsson, 2009: 3)) requires intense experimentation and desiring. We might see Surjeet’s attempts to join with the boys in accomplishing a teacher-given task as desiring to belong and to contribute and she experiments with repeating other children’s statements, offering her own ideas, but contradicting them if they do not meet with the group’s approval. The aim of her desiring is perhaps thwarted by the location of her body in this assemblage, perhaps also by the boys’ memories of her school performances, and by other material factors as well (recall she does not have the pencil, for example). What might have been arranged differently so that Surjeet’s desire to contribute and belong might have been more successful? Would the size of the group matter? Would Surjeet have had more air time if the children had not had to huddle around a desk? While teachers ultimately have little control over everything that might matter in educational events, all of these matters could be questions for experimentation.

Student-managed Conversations Background

Much interesting work from a sociolinguistic perspective has examined how children manage conversations with one another (e.g. Corsaro & Rizzo, 1990; Goodwin, 1990). One of the purposes for child-managed conversations is a little different from those in conversations mandated by teachers for instrumental (reproducing, exchanging, extending and

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sometimes creating information) purposes. Child-managed conversations sometimes served ‘phatic’ purposes: communication for the purpose of maintaining connections, for the sake of things being said. Hymes (1972: 40) noted that anthropologists Malinowski and Sapir had observed that phatic communication, ‘talk for the sake of something being said … is far from a universally important or even acceptable motive’ for conversations. In classrooms, teachers certainly sometimes see this motive as illegitimate. However, in many classrooms, teachers allow conversations for phatic purposes at certain times. In the Grade 2 classroom during Language Arts lessons, they occurred while students were completing written exercises at their desks, when they were preparing to start an activity or at other transition points in the class. These conversations typically did not involve the lesson’s topics. They showed similarities with the kindergarten ‘colouring conversations’ discussed in Excerpts 3.7, 3.16 and 3.18 in Chapter 3. I examine several of these conversations here and make observations about the purpose, positionality and meaningcreation aspects of this discourse practice. Student-managed conversations and the focal children

The following conversation occurred as the children were colouring pictures near the end of the year, in June. Student-managed conversations in Language Arts lessons toward the end of their Grade 2 year were relatively infrequent and notably quiet, with many children whispering; recording them became diffi cult. Throughout most of this lesson, Mrs Larson had monitored fairly closely the children’s written completion of ‘goal’ statements for June. Some children had fi nished the activity and Mrs Larson was occupied in speaking to individual children about their task completion. Sitting at one pod of tables were Julie, Amy, Leo and Jason: Excerpt 6.12

Amy:

(whispering) Hey, Jason, guess which one is orange? (holding up some felt crayons with the bottoms shielded by her hand) Jason: Orange? Amy: Yeah. Jason: Yellow. Amy: This one is yellow, is yellow. (She shows the felts to Julie and Jason and giggles. She rearranges her seating, gets out another felt crayon and starts to colour again.) (Silence 15 seconds)5 (to Jason concerning a crayon he is using) Hey, that’s Donald’s. Jason: I know. Julie is very focused on her colouring, head bent over her paper, intent. Amy getting stuff out of her desk. (Silence 38 seconds)

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Amy:

(to Jason) Does it smells, does it smells? Does it? How rude! (looking in her supply box) (Silence 7 seconds) Oh man, this is messy. Leo holds up some felts, covering part of them with his hand, like Amy did. Leo: Which one is, which one is blue? Amy: It’s easy! You don’t Jason reaches over and takes one. Amy: No:::! Jason holds up a blue one. Amy: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Leo: Come on. Amy: Okay, (laughs) my turn, my turn, my turn. (She continues colouring.) Julie is watching. She looks at classmates with wide eyes for a few seconds and then continues with her work. Amy: (to someone out of frame, big intake of breath) Hu::: You’re in big trouble.

Amy apparently led this conversation, at least at its beginning, addressing Jason and showing her felts to Julie and Jason. Then Leo addressed her, continuing the guessing game she had started. The conversation was verbal, but also non-verbal; ‘showing the felts’ made up part of the conversation. The conversation appeared as if Amy wished mainly to ‘talk to talk’ and to keep up some connection among the children at the table. The talk was relatively cooperative, with children responding to one another and not engaging in any obvious attempts to subordinate one another (except for Amy’s ‘It’s easy!’, which could have been a mildly scornful comment on Leo’s attempt to play the guess-the-marker-colour). Other positional efforts in student-managed conversations were not quite so benign. Student-managed conversations commonly included attempts to subordinate or degrade, as in the following: Excerpt 6.13

Surjeet: Earl: Jean Paul: Earl: Jean Paul: Surjeet: Jean Paul:

Look! Two more pages (She shows her notebook to Jean Paul.) So what? I don’t care. Yeah, we don’t care. We’ve got two pages too. Look! No, three. (aggressive tone, stands up to look at Surjeet’s) Oh! There’s not three. Earl: I’ve got one page. Jean Paul: Let’s see. Surjeet: You’re m::: (to Earl) She watches as Jean Paul inspects Earl’s book. Mrs L: (calling across the room) Jean Paul. Have you written out your goal yet?

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Earl and Jean Paul dismissed Surjeet’s initiating gambit, ‘Look! Two more pages’ as unworthy of attention. Earl attempted to ‘one up’ her by pointing out that he has even fewer pages left. Whatever Surjeet meant to say in her last turn, she cut herself off. We see Surjeet desiring to belong in this group of two boys, and desiring to say and show something that might interest them (‘I’ve only got two more pages in my notebook’). Again she is thwarted in her desiring. What could have happened in this classroom to assure Surjeet that she is a part of the community, that she says and shows interesting things and that she is believed? And what about the other children? As Davies (2014: 50), citing Søndergard (2012), noted, ‘social exclusion is not an emotion that is experienced only by the ones who are excluded. It drives everyone to find ways to ensure their own continuing inclusion.’ Again, teacher-researcher-student analyses, experimentation and documentation might explore ethical responses to these matters. The next example highlights how meanings were created in a studentmanaged conversation. Martin, Monique, Daisy and Earl were seated at the same pod of desks, cutting out paper stars on which to write their goals for the coming month. Excerpt 6.14

Monique: (sneezes) Oh, I was, I have, I have the sneezies. Martin: *** (Colouring) Monique: I’m allergic to dust mites. (Gets up and goes out of frame) (Pause 12 seconds) Martin: (To whom he is speaking is not clear. Daisy and Earl are possible, but he isn’t looking at them.) Nobody would be allergic to water, because water is everywhere. Water is in you. If somebody would be allergic to water, he wouldn’t even be born. And someone would be allergic when he’s a grown up, he would squeeze in him. Monique comes back to her desk. And if not, if you’re allergic to water and you’re grown up, people would be squeezing all your water out of your body. Monique: No, I’m allergic to dust mites. Martin: Well you know what? Water’s everywhere. Even in you. (leans forward) Monique: No, dust mites! Martin: I know, but if you were allergic to water, you know how, what would happen? Monique: What? Martin: You wouldn’t even get born. Monique: Why? Martin: That what happens. Water’s everywhere – Monique: I sneeze all the time. Achoo, achoo, achoo. Just like

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Martin:

And if you sneezed out, and then you sneezed on this (gestures to his picture) ‘Achoo! I ruined it!’ (holds his head in mock horror) ‘It’s all sneezie!’ Mrs L: (calling out to class) Now, these people have still not given me their June goals. Listen for your name. Martin. I’ve asked you to cut it out. That’s what you should be doing. Martin takes his scissors out of his desk and starts cutting. Anthony: Amy. Same to you. Monique. Cut it out now. Monique: (to herself, irritated) All right! Mrs L: Mary. And Jean Paul you’re in line. Agatha. And Daisy. Please bring them up to me. Get them cut out and bring them up. Whether you’re fi nished your colouring or not. Monique: (is cutting out her star now) If there’s dust mites, probably I’ll sniff and sneeze, ‘cause I’m allergic to them. I am. Martin: Oh, I’m allergic to nothing. Daisy: I’m allergic to nothing. Martin: I’ll become allergic to something soon. Daisy: Yeah, me too. Martin finishes cutting his star out and writes something on it, very focused.

In this excerpt, Martin, Monique and Daisy ‘passed the time’, expressed position, and thought and talked about allergies, sneezing, dust mites and water. They struggled for topic control (‘No, dust mites!’), speculated and reasoned. The conversation looked cooperative, collaborative and pleasurable. Although Martin held the floor more than the girls did, meaning was accomplished with them. The speakers contributed to a communicative chain. Each ‘appropriates … word[s], adapting [them] to [their] own semantic and expressive intention’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 293–294). In these two student-managed conversation, we see not only what appears to be joyful extension of a student’s thought through attention and pick up by the other students (dust mites), but also exclusion and subordination (two more pages). Davies (2014) described a series of intra-actions among children in which confl ict arose between a newcomer to the Reggio Emilia pre-school and a boy who had been in the school since infancy. She described the conflict affect as touching every one of the children, as well as her, and further described the teachers’ and her attempts to come to understand the conflict in new ways, rather than blaming one or the other of the children, and trying to understand it differently. In the classroom I observed, experimentation with various kinds of activities, materials and groups of children might have made it clearer when exclusion was threatened, and what might have been done, said, given or arranged to prevent such, or change it or understand it better. I do not suggest this is easy, but I think it is essential.

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Discussion Recitation sequences

Although teacher dominance in recitation sequences has been discussed frequently, few analyses have examined in detail the concomitant subordination of students. My data illustrate some aspects of how students were subordinated in recitation sequences.6 Mrs Larson’s purposes for recitation sequences seemed relatively uniform – in most cases, she used the recitation sequence to have children recall information that she believed the class had already discussed, or that the students knew (or should know).

In the sense that recitation sequences call for individual students to respond with known information to a teacher, they are striated and do not encourage children to make their own meanings or even respond at length. They are public oral performances in which attention is focused on one child (or more if the child requests help), and on the teacher’s rhythms and pacing – speaking, questioning, wait time and silence – for the whole group to witness. The silences intensify the affect of the moment. Recalling previously given information is a striated task, but it might have been accomplished in many other ways that did not embarrass persons who do not recall that information. In the example of the Canada Food Rules sequence with Surjeet, her failure to supply the answer Mrs Larson expected was apparent to everyone. As such, she was positioned in a less desirable position in her community. One of the larger consequences of Surjeet’s commonly ‘flawed’ participation in recitation sequences was her teacher’s evaluation of her as slow, unwilling to take risks and sometimes ‘lazy’. Her failure to supply expeditiously the items needed to move the discourse along constructed her as occupying a flawed and undesirable identity position. This matter of ‘expeditious supplying’ brings up another possibility for flaws in recitation performance. The preferred pacing of recitation sequences allows only minimal silences between teacher questions and student responses. Beginning teachers are sometimes advised to allow children longer than ordinary conversation ‘wait time’ to allow them the opportunity to organise responses. However, extraordinary ‘wait time’ violates classroom verbal interaction norms. Teachers are not usually seen as the perpetrators of norm violations in this regard; rather, individual children are. Hence, not only can children be differentiated on the basis of their failure to supply ‘right answers’; if they do not answer teacher questions at the ‘right time’, their performances can be judged as flawed.7

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Surjeet was often silent when called upon by her teacher and her verbal contributions were slight and very quiet. The recitation pattern did not permit her a desirable place for legitimate peripheral participation, but rather functioned to show her as unable and subordinated. Martin rarely contributed to recitation sequences; he seldom volunteered for them, and the teacher nominated him infrequently as well. The verbal inventiveness and risk-taking with language he had displayed in kindergarten were not evident in his recitation sequence performances. Amy and Julie more frequently participated in recitation sequences; however, the form of student participation the sequence permitted meant that their contributions were never lengthy nor demonstrably useful for appropriating classroom language. Recitation sequences in this Grade 2 classroom presented few possibilities for the minority language focal children to engage in extended performance of language. Rather, these sequences affi rmed the teacher’s right to make classroom meaning, becoming one of many school practices that provided this affi rmation. They thus exposed children to a dominant participation practice of school, linked to many other aspects of school social organisation, and gave them practice with contributing to teacher meanings. Although children could contribute to teacher meanings, they could not easily construct meanings (or voices) of their own in this practice. Although the teacher might have intended many of the recitation sequences to off er children the possibility of creating, exchanging and extending information and knowledge, the practice off ered children little opportunity to construct extended utterances; their brevity meant that students got very little practice in actually speaking English. If the major purpose of recitation sequences is to represent knowledge and memory, different kinds of representations of memory (such as drawings, body movements or even oral retellings) with varied materials might accomplish this purpose more usefully.

Teacher-mandated peer conversations

Mrs Larson had two types of purposes for these small group and partner conversations. Sometimes she intended the children to complete relatively ‘closed’ tasks – completion of a worksheet or of a group picture, or compilation of a group list. Sometimes the tasks appeared more ‘open’; she asked children to speculate about personal meanings, about possible endings to stories, motives of characters, and so on. The ways in which the focal children participated in the practice seemed to vary depending on whether the task was open or closed.

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As we have already seen, the closed tasks the students were asked to perform could also be seen as ‘striated’ tasks, in Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) terms. In the examples I have presented, these tasks did not seem to elicit much imaginative (or apparently enjoyable) conversation, but other dyads may have had more ‘success’ with them, and perhaps Amy and Julie learned to language in ways with which they were previously unfamiliar. In pedagogical documentation of Julie’s and Amy’s interview, their initial confusion (‘We don’t get it very much’), their bodily demeanour throughout task completion, the worksheet itself, and so on could have suggested other kinds of learning tasks or objects to get at the same content. On the other hand, tasks that were open (‘smooth’) seemed to elicit imaginative talk which some of the children appeared to enjoy, but they did not eliminate domination and subordination efforts. Advocates for peer conversations in classrooms have often remarked how, when children are grouped together without a teacher, their equal status relations as students promote their participation in a risk-free environment. In the Grade 2 classroom, sometimes the children did seem to be in partnerships or groups in which they negotiated relatively equal relations with their interlocutors (for example, Mary and Amy in Excerpt 6.7 and Martin and Jean-Paul in Excerpt 6.8). When children were friendly with one another, they seemed able to participate fully. However, such horizontal positioning did not always characterise peer conversations; sometimes power relations were not horizontal (for example, among a group of boys and Surjeet in Excerpt 6.10, and between Amy and Julie in Excerpt 6.9). The children’s positions in the interaction of course affected their participation. Citing Holland (1992), Eisenhart (1995: 21) commented: ‘Resistance, avoidance and lack of interest – when newcomers do not “have their hearts in it” or, in other words, when they do not identify themselves as agents or actors in a cultural or social system – are associated with strikingly less expertise’. In my data, when children could participate actively, and when they saw themselves as participants in the tasks mandated by the teacher, they did ‘have their hearts in it’, as when Martin and Jean Paul were storytellers (Excerpt 6.8). However, when the task was one in which they could not actively participate or when the place they occupied was not pleasurable or desirable, the children, obviously alienated, did not appropriate classroom language nor did they attempt to express their own meanings. When Mrs Larson gave the children a relatively open oral assignment like ‘Tell your partner what you think might happen in this story’, the children obviously had a great deal of pleasure in composing fanciful storylines. In the Ming Lo Moves the Mountain lesson (Excerpts 6.7 and 6.8), Mrs Larson’s questions were more or less open throughout the lesson: she asked the children to ‘Tell what might happen in this story’, ‘Tell what

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has happened in the story so far’, ‘Tell what might happen next’ and fi nally ‘Tell what has happened in this story’. In cases where children could perform the mandated task (or when they transformed it into something they could do), partner and small group conversations obviously engaged the children and led them to express vividly their own meanings. Jean Paul’s and Martin’s affirmation of themselves as storytellers appeared important in terms of maintaining them as legitimate peripheral participants in this activity (Excerpt 6.8). When the tasks were less open, and when variant meanings seemed less welcome, the children evidenced less engagement. When the students had to interview one another about their food preferences within ‘Canada’s Food Groups’, and fi ll in their fi ndings on a photocopied worksheet, the worksheet and its implicit interview script took on authoritative presence in the conversation. The children interviewed one another with a script that discouraged their attempts to make their own meanings (Excerpt 6.9, for example, when Julie spurned Amy’s swallowing your teeth foray). In cases when one child was the ‘recorder’ and had the piece of paper to write the answers to group work, to the extent that other children were distant from the paper, to that extent they appeared less central to the activity. Surjeet’s participation in peer conversations mandated by the teacher was difficult at times, especially under the circumstances of working in a small group with children with whom she did not have friendly relations otherwise. However, the practice ‘freed’ her voice in some ways; she participated more actively than she did in recitation sequences, although her participation often consisted of repetition of what other children had said (Excerpt 6.10). In light of the importance of verbal copying (see Chapter 4), this kind of participation appears as an initial stage in coming to voice in a setting. Martin’s participation in small group conversations was usually enthusiastic and verbally inventive; he sometimes transformed the mandated tasks into tasks in which he was interested (Excerpt 6.8). Amy’s participation in teacher-mandated small group and partner tasks illustrated a number of matters with regard to positionality. In some of these conversations, Amy actively participated and interacted with more experienced speakers of English so as to facilitate her appropriating a place in the conversation. However, in the ‘food groups’ conversation with Julie (Excerpt 6.9), Amy seemed somewhat subdued by the demands of the practice: although Amy wanted to speculate and comment beyond the sheet and beyond the task, Julie enforced the question, answer, question sequence which the worksheet set up. Julie’s compliance with the task conventions prevented, rather than facilitated, her own and Amy’s possibilities for using the conversation to go further. In other small group and partner conversations dealing with stringently mandated tasks, children similarly took on (ventriloquated) the ‘voice’ of the teacher, acting as ‘initiator’ and ‘evaluator’; other children

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acted as responders (or non-responders). Despite their status equality as children, and the teacher’s assumption that mistakes here did not matter much, the children would not stray very far from the task set for them. Conversely, when they were able to speculate, the children obviously found small group and partner conversations very engaging; they could express their own meanings and participate in collaborative meaningmaking with peers. Peer-managed conversations

Children in this study viewed talking-to-talk as an acceptable, common motive for speech. While some might assume status equality among children, the Grade 2 children’s conversations obviously include attempts to position speakers and hearers, and attempts to position oneself and others. The sociopolitical function of each utterance in student conversations was not always apparent; it was much easier to take conversations, or at least exchanges, as the unit of analysis. I suspect that my occasional difficulties in understanding positionality at the utterance level had to do with my only part-time presence in the children’s community. I think insiders can do utterance-level sociopolitical discursive analysis, but outsiders lack the requisite depth and historicity of understanding of the community’s knowledge, except occasionally and serendipitously, to understand each utterance sociopolitically. Sometimes the children’s positioning did not appear obvious or hurtful, or the children could counter subordination attempts and maintain relations of (continually negotiated) equality with other speakers in ways that allowed each to contribute meaningfully to the conversations (Martin and Monique in Excerpt 6.14). In other cases, children rather crudely expressed positioning and subordinated members could not counter their subordination. Throughout the years of research, the other children frequently dismissed and subordinated Surjeet. However, such behaviour not uncommonly occurs in children’s conversations generally (Goodwin, 1990). Lensmire noted this same concern in his examination of the ‘carnivalesque’ aspects of writing workshops: There is an underside to children’s relations that workshop advocates have not confronted. As in carnival, workshop participants sometimes use the free and playful space not to work out humane new relations, not to lampoon and discredit an unjust official order, but to reassert and reinforce ugly aspects of exactly that same unjust, larger society. Abuse in carnival (and the writing workshop) is not, as Bakhtin wanted it to be, solely aimed at worthy objects of uncrowning. Some targets are chosen because they are easy targets, because already uncrowned, never crowned. (Lensmire, 1996: 135)

Children engage in positioning themselves and their peers, not only in conversations where teachers are involved, but also in conversations

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among themselves. Helping children fi nd desirable and powerful places in classroom activities requires attention to political as well as linguistic aspects of classroom interactions.

A new materialism perspective on these matters would encourage attention not only to these human-centred issues, but also to the material intra-actions that occur in various school discourse arrangements. Discourse practices are usually taken to be about how humans use language, and we have seen that languaging involves much more than the words that emerge from different bodies. For researcherseducators, experimentation with many different arrangements of material human bodies and material non-human objects, and attentiveness to the flows of affect and desiring in classrooms, might yield more ways to think about how children might be aided in languaging in classrooms.

Conclusion

Bakhtin’s distinction between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse helps understand some of the interactions in these Grade 2 Language Arts lessons. In authoritative discourse, someone assumes a position of authority over other speakers and allows other speakers no opportunity to ‘play’ in the text: ‘the words of a father, of adults, of teachers, etc.’ Bakhtin observes: Authoritative discourse permits no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylising variants on it … It is indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands and falls together with that authority. (Bakhtin, 1981: 343)

In contrast to this kind of discourse, Bakhtin poses the possibility of ‘internally persuasive discourse’, which is open to the ‘interanimation’ of other voices: Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organises masses of our words from within … The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogise it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean. (Bakhtin, 1981: 345–346, his italics)

The notion of internally persuasive discourse encourages the image of speakers engaging in a kind of mutual zone of proximal development, where participants have access to the expertise of others, the words of others, so that they are able to function ‘as if they were a head taller than

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themselves’ (Vygotsky, 1978: 102). The classroom speech situations that eased the focal children’s ‘appropriation of words’ were situations in which there was play with the borders, and where children could find ‘ever new ways to mean’. When children could find desirable identities in words, play in words, when those words allowed them to ‘answer back’ and when the words of their community were open and accessible to them, then they transformed their participation, ‘developing a range of voices … within and through [their] social identities in the many and varied interactive practices through which [they live] their lives’ (Hall, 1995).

Notes (1) Many teachers of my acquaintance have claimed that recitation sequences are much less common now than in the past. However, in the 1990s, contemporary researchers (Gutierrez & Larson, 1994; Johnson, 1995; Lemke, 1990; Nystrand et al., 1997; Wertsch, 1998) found them common, and more recent research (e.g. Hellerman, 2003; Sinclair & Coulthard, 2005; Walsh, 2002) has shown them to be ubiquitous. In the classrooms with which these researchers are familiar, as in the classrooms which I have observed, this sequence persists, although perhaps less frequently than before. (2) Mrs Larson remarked that she had been concerned since early in the year that Surjeet see herself as an able student, so she deliberately asked Surjeet what she (Mrs Larson) thought were easy questions. Believing that Surjeet often knew the answers to such, Mrs Larson made efforts to give her every opportunity to display her knowledge. (3) Baker (1997) discussed the complexity in transcription of assigning silences to speakers, making the point that attribution of silence constructs implications about character and competence. In this questioning routine in this class, I am confident that interactants understood the pauses in such interactions as being the student’s silence. (4) ‘Egg Waffles’ is the name of a frozen prepared food available in local grocery stores. Capitalisation in this transcript provides a way of understanding this exchange not apparent without the capitalisation. (5) One of the interesting aspects of student-managed conversations as shown above is that silence in them doesn’t ‘belong’ to anyone, unlike in recitation sequences or even in teacher-mandated conversations. There are long silences in the conversation above, but I think it is clear that no-one is responsible for fi lling this silence, and no one is liable to degradation on this basis. Much more than in recitation sequences and in mandated conversations, participation looks to be a matter of personal choice. One should probably not overstate this matter of personal choice, however. Julie does not verbally participate in this conversation, but apparently listens. In view of Mrs Larson’s frequent reminders to the children to be quiet and stay focused on their task, Julie’s silence here may be understood as not precisely her choice, but as compliance with a teacher directive. Amy’s initiations, from this perspective, might be understood as resistance of a sort. (6) McDermott (1993) showed graphically how some schooling activities are organised so as to defi ne some participants as more able and some as less so; in his terms, they organise the search for differential performance and provide degradation possibilities. Recitation sequences belong to this class of activities. (7) This observation, of course, begs the question, how long is extraordinary? I think that classrooms probably develop rhythms of their own, so that short and long wait times are defi ned situationally. It is thus impossible to quantify this except in relation to a particular classroom at particular times.

7 Appropriating Voices and Telling Stories

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. Bakhtin, 1981: 294 Language is not a neutral medium; it comes to us loaded with social structure. It comes to us loaded with sensitivities to the circumstances under which it was born and maintained in previous encounters. It comes to us biased with the social agendas of a school system that pits all children against all children in a battle for school success. McDermott, 1993: 293 Schools have never been neutral places. For centuries schools have been places where some people’s children learn to be subordinate to other people’s children. Grumet, 1988: 181

The quotes above remind us of the close ties between language and schooling, and of inequities in access to and achievement in both. Children who come to school in North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand (as well as in some African and Asian countries) speaking languages other than English are learning, in Grumet’s words, ‘to be subordinate to other people’s children’. Researchers have reported this phenomenon in many places for a long time (August & Shanahan, 2006; Benzie, 2010; Bourne, 1992; Gunderson, 2007; Gutiérrez et al., 2010; Toohey & Derwing, 2008). A report for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (US) released in February 2017 stated: ‘Despite their potential, many young English learners are struggling to meet the requirements for educational success, a difficulty that jeopardizes their prospects for success in post-secondary education and in the workforce’. These struggles were documented in research before 2000, and they persist. And, as noted in the Introduction to this book, support for educating teachers about English language learners’ (ELLs) struggles has recently diminished 166

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internationally. I believe that even to go some way toward addressing these inequities, transdisciplinary research and the application of diverse theoretical and practical insights will be required. Learning English at School describes three years in the lives of a group of children from minority language backgrounds, viewing the children’s engagements in the practices of their classrooms and these children’s experiences in using and learning English there. In the discussion about the kindergarten year, I examined how school identity practices worked together to construct each child as a particular kind of student, and how that interacted with their possibilities for learning and using English in their classroom. With respect to the Grade 1 classroom, I noted physical, intellectual and linguistic practices that individualised the children one from another and differentially affected their access to classroom resources, including English. These practices had influence on each focal child differently as the identity practices of kindergarten continued. In the Grade 2 classroom, identity making, individualising and specific physical, intellectual and linguistic practices continued, but my focus in this grade was on how the organisation of oral practices sometimes facilitated and sometimes blocked the focal children’s access to opportunities for appropriating classroom language. Identity, resource distribution and discourse practices provided variable but overlapping views of classroom events, to which I could then apply analytical perspectives derived from sociocultural theory (SCT). The agential cuts I made in framing and describing my research for the fi rst edition aligned with postmodern concepts of identity and with SCT about discourse and other practices. While other researchers might have been interested in assessment of the children’s English language development over time, I did not examine the focal children’s fluency, pronunciation, extent of vocabulary or grammatical accuracy. Focus on these matters would have produced a different description of those children over the first three years of their schooling, as different apparatuses (tests of grammatical accuracy, comparisons of the focal children’s fluency with that of native speakers, and so on) would have been used to gather ‘data’. For both kinds of investigation (SCT and psycholinguistic), representations of the children and their learning would be as Margaret MacDonald (in Smythe et al., 2017: n.p.) put it, ‘an assemblage of our knowing … a useful part of the continual (ongoing) learning journey or a way to reach a higher level of understanding’. In this second edition, I present the representations and analyses from the fi rst edition, but attempt to understand also how new materialist concepts might help us understand differently what learning English at school might be like now, and how it might be changed.

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Identity, Resource Distribution and Discourse Practices

In alignment with SCT, I have argued in this book that identity is not best regarded as an individual attribute or acquisition, but rather as the product of specific identity practices. The social practices of their classrooms ‘produced’ the focal children as specific kinds of students, with the identity ‘ESL learners’ as a more or less important marker. I argued that they held the positions, not the internal essence, of being ‘ESL’ and ‘quiet’ or ‘clever’ or ‘not so clever’, and so on; these identities made sense within the context of these particular school practices. That identity practices are congruent with many other school practices as well as with larger, societal ones should not lead to the supposition that they are natural or inevitable. Schools evaluate and rank children on their school performances and school metrics and thus manufacture identities for them. New materialism builds upon the postmodern insights of SCT, recognising that children/persons do not have essences, but come to identities through interactional practices. However, in new materialism, human and non-human things are seen to be intra-acting with one another, and gain their ‘being-ness’ (or more accurately, their ‘becoming-ness’) through these relations. If being is relational, and relations are always in a state of flux, we might better think about what things are becoming rather than what they are. With respect to children learning to language in English at school, we might more usefully consider not what any one child is, or how much English she ‘has’, but how she and her peers, their languaging, their classroom and things are entangled in one another and how they are becoming different from what they have been. As teachers and researchers we would be, as Liselott Mariett Olsson (2009: 89) suggested, ‘on the lookout for some sort of track to follow with the children’. The tracks we fi nd may sometimes be striated and at other times smooth, and both could constitute learning opportunities. We would thus be interested in experimenting with various classroom material, social and emotional arrangements to see what those arrangements might call forth in terms of languaging and learning. Such a view rejects the notion that ‘best practices’ can address educational struggles; there are no onesize-fits-all solutions. Rather, teachers and children and classrooms and discourse intra-act in indeterminate ways and solutions are not the goal. Rather, the hope is that, with expansive investigation of specific assemblages, teachers and children and researchers can come to new problems, new learning and more experimentation. In addition to identity practices, schools and classrooms (like other communities) have customary ways of distributing resources within them.

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I have argued that access to peers and their words and ideas are differentially distributed resources for children in classrooms that have major effects on their possibilities to participate in classroom activities, and thereby learn. Distribution of classroom resources are congruent, I argued, with practices in other arenas and, in this case, contributed to stratifying the classroom community on the ‘natural’ basis that some individuals had more or less than others in their heads (English, knowledge, numeracy, and so on). Classrooms also organise particular ways for children and teachers to talk, read, write and listen, which differ from discursive practices in other communities. I examined oral discourse practices in lessons in a classroom with the objective of assessing how these practices had impacts on children’s opportunities to appropriate classroom language and to create their own meanings. My research showed that children had most opportunities for appropriating classroom language in situations when they could speak from desirable and powerful identity positions, when they had access to the expertise of their peers and their teacher, and when they could play in language. The above paragraph implies that there are solutions (e.g. imaginative play) to problems of access to classroom language, a view I now find not wholly satisfying. Striated practices (and learning materials and environments, and so on) also produce learning opportunities for child language learners, and smooth, lines-of-flight practices (and learning materials and environments, and so on) sometimes restrict some learners’ access to learning opportunities. So while I observed imaginative languaging occurring (sometimes) in imaginative play, I do not mean to argue that teachers must always engage children in imaginative play. New materialism sees languaging as entangled in the becoming of humans, language practices, classrooms, curriculum, and so on. In new materialism, languaging is seen as evanescent assembling of speakers (or signers) and listeners, environments, vocal musculature, air, hands, mouths, ears, arms and faces, memories of previous languaging (‘stored’ in human bodies), and so forth, all of which are intra-acting together and changing continuously at different scales and at different speeds. While this presents a sometimes formidably complex view of learning and teaching, it also presents teachers and researchers with many degrees of freedom in experimentation. Access to Voice

A variety of sociocultural theorists (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991), considering the sociality of instructional events and instructional ‘mediations’, have provided ways to think about language

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not so much as an isolated body of knowledge (and a goal in itself), but more as a tool that humans use to mediate their interactions (in McDermott’s, 1993, terms, their ‘conversations’). Obviously, this tool was – and sometimes remained – a resource differentially available to participants in the classroom communities I observed; they made differently successful attempts to use it. Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984, 1986) ideas about how learners come to participate in conversations, through appropriating the utterances of others, provided a means to examine how these novice users of English began to participate in classroom conversations. Bakhtin stressed that the appropriation of the words of others is a complex and conflictual process: because the historical, present and future positioning of speakers and those of their interlocutors are expressed in the ‘very words’ of utterances, words are not neutral but express particular cognitive predispositions, value systems and identity positions. Utterances, for Bakhtin, represent a voice, a perspective. Second language learning, then, becomes a struggle to come to voice. Learners must appropriate unfamiliar words and identity positions from others who may resist their appropriation – denying the legitimacy of ‘those words’ in ‘those mouths’. Language learners face the complex and conflictual task of expressing their own meanings (suff used throughout with others’ meanings) and finding responses for others’ words. Seeing speakers as members of specific social and historical collectivities moves observers toward examining the conditions for learning, for the appropriation of practices, in any particular community. Scholars of SCT (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990) have seen learning as a process of co-participation in community practices. From this perspective, educational research should focus not so much on trying to fi nd out what individuals are doing ‘beneath the skin and between the ears’ (in Mehan’s 1993: 241, apt phrase), but rather on the variety of positionings available for learners to occupy in their communities, social relations in particular communities, and the design and structure of the practices which bound the community. Conditions in different communities vary with regard to ease of access to expertise, to opportunities for practice, to consequences for error in practice, and so on. All of these matters are important in analysing how particular communities organise learning.

For new materialists, languaging occurs in events, in the intra-actions in which humans and non-humans are entangled. With this understanding, certainly the social positioning of interlocutors matters, but what also matters are the settings in which conversations happen, the non-human objects available to speakers and/or listeners, who is seated where, what the school task requires, the particular (but also changing) states of the human bodies involved, the noise level of the

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setting, what kinds of furniture or writing surfaces are available, and so on. Again, this listing of possible agents in intra-action is not provided so that observers might ‘represent’ learning events more accurately. Rather, the aim of broadening the agents that might be involved in intra-actions is to encourage thought, to take lines of flight in considering possible next courses of action. Lave and Wenger (1991) only point to the conflictual nature of social practice. Several other critical and poststructural theorists (Foucault, 1972, 1979; Gal, 1991; Hall, 1990; Taylor, 1989) have provided ways to discuss the nature of the identity positions and practices learners struggle to appropriate. In particular, Foucault (1972, 1979) discussed how discourse practices in contemporary Western cultures operate so that individuals are ‘attached’ to their own identities, positioned and categorised. He discussed practices for ranking individuals, as well as for normalising deviants. Children as well as adults create positionings through discourse practices; I discussed the effects of both children’s and adults’ efforts in this regard in terms of events in the classrooms I observed. The classroom practices the children met in these three years provided differential opportunities for minority language background children to participate actively in classroom conversations and, in so doing, to appropriate voices in English. When children were legitimate peripheral participants in classroom activities, when the identities they occupied in those activities were desirable and powerful, and when they had access to their community’s expertise, the children developed fuller roles in those activities. Sometimes children were prevented from full participation in these practices; the identities available to them were neither desirable nor powerful and their community’s expertise was not available. Such situations correspondingly limited their opportunities for appropriation of school language as well as for appropriation of increasingly more active participation in other school activities. A new materialist perspective would incorporate the critical insights provided by SCT and add an awareness that language learning is affected not only by the social positioning of students and teachers, but also by the distribution of material resources, the capabilities of the bodies of students and teachers, their memories, and other such matters. ‘Identity’, for new materialists, is a temporary congealing, an assemblage of many different agencies. Attention to the elements of these congealings might suggest different ways of thinking of classroom events and classroom identities, and might also suggest different ways for teachers and researchers to experiment with the structure of such events.

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Facilitating Access

This analysis implies that educators should attempt to fi nd ways to build communities in which community resources are accessible to all, and in which desirable and powerful positions are available to all children. In the observed kindergarten classroom, imaginative play sometimes facilitated temporary construction of such communities and also facilitated minority language background children’s appropriation of English voices. Choral work also permitted the children to be legitimate peripheral participants in activities, with little threat of degradation for inexperienced performance. Finding ways to encourage more of these kinds of activities in classrooms seems an important direction for further investigation. The search for more nearly equitable classrooms will also require attention to the things, the materials that affect students’ access to desirable and powerful identities, and linguistic and other practices. Recognition of the entanglement of all these matters will help observers think deeply about current arrangements and encourage them to experiment with other arrangements of things, people and settings. In classrooms where young children are enrolled, many of the rather ordinary languaging practices engaged in (some of which are striated, others smooth), such as choral speech, singing, repetition, free play with various kinds of materials, and so on, appear to allow children opportunities for expression. However, of course, such practices will not be ‘successful’ all the time and with all children. Activities like pedagogical documentation, might help as teachers closely observe and try to show what they see happening in their classrooms, and then discuss with other professionals and sometimes the children themselves, arrangements that might encourage more experimentation. In so doing, they may come to understand better how the children they teach might be encouraged to describe their learning linguistically and/or visually and/or aurally, using the ‘100 languages of children’ (Edwards et al., 1998), and how their desirings for more learning might be supported. Observations in the Grade 1 classroom centred around access to the physical and intellectual resources of classrooms. This analysis suggested that attention to everyday matters like seating plans and permitted discursive contributions can provide useful information for easing children’s opportunities to appropriate school language. My observations in the Grade 2 classroom also give rise to some other simple recommendations for instructional practice for minority language background children: reduce recitation sequence time; increase peer conversation time; and explore ways to make partner and group work on the part

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of students more nearly collaborative than it sometimes is. Teachers will also face the challenge of trying to offset the subordination and domination efforts of students in conversations in which the teachers are not present. Again, widening the scope of what is observed in classrooms from individuals and social relations to material distribution and settings may lead to more pedagogical experimentation and new questions and problems. What is to be hoped for is that teachers’ and researchers’ experiments (like children’s experiments) lead to new problems and ongoing learning. Paley (1992) described a policy she developed in her classroom to block exclusion moves (‘You Can’t Say You Can’t Play’) and suggested detailed steps to implement this policy. Researchers and educators could also usefully investigate how to explicitly teach children to resist the subordination that seems omnipresent in their environments, so as to resist their exclusion from the conversations in which they need to be involved. Morgan (1997: 431) described work with adults in which the ‘foregrounding of social power and identity issues … [lead to] … strategic resources for (re)defining social relationships’, and which offers promise for some ‘liberation’ in children’s classroom communities too. Norton Peirce (1995) described conversations with immigrant women in which aspects of power and identity were explicitly discussed and which appeared to lead to attempts on the women’s part to resist subordination. These studies provocatively point out possible directions for work with children on resisting subordination and exclusion. This work also implicitly challenges teachers to fi nd new voices for themselves in classrooms. Students need teachers to scaffold their learning, to be more expert, to initiate them into new activities and the communities of practitioners of those activities. Teachers can no doubt accomplish these charges by sometimes using authoritative voices (Bakhtin, 1981) with their students. However, Bakhtin’s work also highlights the need for teachers to struggle to appropriate voices for conversations with their students, to acquire points of view which allow teachers’ and students’ voices to interanimate one another’s, to play with their borders and to ‘fi nd ever newer ways to mean’ together (Bakhtin, 1981: 345–346). Finding locally appropriate ways to structure such interaction is important future work. It may be that new materialism would add to SCT’s insights about what students need to ‘scaffold’ their learning: in addition to teachers and more expert other humans, materials and environments are also involved in their learning. From this perspective, the metaphor of scaffolding may be too static to represent the intra-actions among children, teachers and all the other entities that are assembled in

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classroom events. Certainly, some classroom events can provide striated understandings to students, understandings that reflect conventional knowledge (in this case, perhaps, how to use elements of English ‘correctly’), but we also need to search for events that encourage students’ and teachers’ lines of flight – ways of creating knowledge (creating and/or using language) that are emergent, provisional, and that lead to more experimentation and more knowledge creation. The Politics of Representation

This book offers stories about events and people, selections among the many events that I observed during the three years. I told individual stories about the focal children, using my observations and transcriptions of interactions, to ‘build up the case’ for regarding the children in specific ways, and sometimes for contesting representations made of them by their teachers. As the cultural theorist S. Hall (1990: 222) remarked, ‘Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write’. As a university researcher, I had the employment (and research grant) obligation to make sense of what I observed, to represent that sense-making in written academic discourse, and to do so competently, credibly, persuasively and interestingly to academic colleagues and (I hoped) eventually to practising teachers. My discourse communities, my obligations to them, and the discourse (and other) activities in which I customarily and obligatorily engaged differed from those of the teachers, parents and children in whose classrooms I observed. Teachers also make representations of persons and events in their classrooms; they are obligated by virtue of their employment to do so. They make representations of their students orally in discussions with colleagues and parents. They are obligated to represent the children in writing on report cards for an audience of administrators, parents, future teachers of the children and sometimes the children themselves. With the further legal obligations to maintain order and teach governmentmandated curricula in their classrooms, teachers’ activities and discourse communities differ from those of researchers, parents and children; their representations of people and events likewise differ. I think that many educational researchers are attracted to new materialist theories of pedagogy because they offer new ways to think about the stories we and others tell about classrooms and students and learning. These theories do not provide explanations or foolproof ideas about how schools and language learning can be improved, but they raise interesting questions and encourage us to think in new ways about students, classrooms and pedagogy.

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Parents and children also represent people and events in classrooms. Their perceptions, interpretive frameworks, and modes of and audiences for reporting are different from those of researchers and teachers. Thus, what they see and what they say about what they see may well be very different from what other participants might see and say. The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo (1990: 140), quoting Friedrich Nietzsche (1969: 119), noted that seeing and knowing are always perspectival and never ‘innocent’: ‘We always “see” from points of view that are invested with our social, political and personal interests, inescapably “centric” in one way or another, even in the desire to do justice to heterogeneity’. Thus, aspects of identity affect the representations people create; aspects of the practices in which they engage also affect their representations. My various positions and practices as an observer, researcher, mother of elementary school-aged children, white middle-aged Canadian woman who went to Canadian schools, speaker of English, former teacher of children, and current university teacher, and so on were implicated in the ways I represented this classroom and the persons therein.

‘Coming clean’ about one’s own positioning, interests and investments was, for a time, very popular in social science and educational studies – in the hope that readers could see that representations were not ‘views from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1989). This view accepted the notion that there was an ‘out there’ to represent, but that the representer had a certain limited perspective. As discussed in Chapter 2, ‘representation’ is a problematic concept for new materialists, who have argued that representations are static and cannot reveal ‘becomings’ or the entanglements of viewers, actors, apparatuses and other matters. As explained previously in Chapter 2, Tim Ingold (2014: 389) advocated ‘join[ing] in correspondence with those with whom we learn or among whom we study’ and ‘coupl[ing] the forward movement of one’s own perception and action with the movements of others’, in which we respond to what we observe with ‘interventions, questions and responses of our own’. Rather than claiming to represent reality, we can tell stories about our observations, and hope that the stories lead to our own new understandings and those of others. Contradictions between my perceptions of the identities of the children I observed, their parents’ perceptions, their teachers’ perceptions, their classmates’ perceptions and the children’s own perceptions would be logical, given our different positions not only within the classroom but also within the wider social networks in which we live.

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However, acknowledging that there will be difference in differently positioned observers’ representations may not be quite enough. As Mehan (1993) pointed out, representations have politics: Events in the world are ambiguous. We struggle to understand these events, to imbue them with meaning. The choice of a particular way of representing events gives them a particular meaning. There is often a competition over the correct, appropriate, or preferred way of representing objects, events, or people. Competition over the meaning of ambiguous events, people, and objects in the world has been called the ‘politics of representation’. (Mehan, 1993: 241)

Mehan described the case of a child involved in a referral process for special education; the psychologist’s view of the child became privileged over those of the child’s mother and classroom teacher. Although the psychologist had the least historical and contextual knowledge of the child, the psychologist’s view – a view with which the teacher and mother did not initially agree – prevailed. Mehan pointed out, ‘The psychologist’s language obtains its privileged status because it is ambiguous, because it is full of technical terms, because it is difficult to understand’ (Mehan, 1993: 258). The psychologist’s view is presented to others in a report; the mother’s and the classroom teacher’s views are elicited from them by questions. In research, privilege with regard to representation is complex. Although writing a book might in some ways privilege my voice over those of the children, their teachers and parents, my version of events is not necessarily that which survives in the written documentation of the children’s report cards, or in their memories, or in those of their teachers and parents. Many researchers, concerned about the politics of representation in qualitative educational research, have advocated official collaboration between teachers and researchers (and sometimes students) so that research would reflect more broadly all participants’ perceptions and so that the researcher’s voice, an outsider’s, is de-centred. Such researchers hope that the presentation of multiple points of view, which may well contradict each other, will lead to increased understandings of particular events or sites. Although I am sympathetic to such views, I did not engage in collaboration with the children or the teachers in this study for the following reasons. I began this exploratory study with the intention of observing in the classrooms in as non-obtrusive a manner as possible, more as a matter of tact with regard to the research site and its participants, and uncertainty with respect to what was (or should be) going on in the classrooms of young children, than as a deliberate methodological stance. As it happened, observation and fieldnote recording occupied so much of my attention that occasional conversations in the classrooms with any particular child or group of children meant missed opportunities to record other events or aspects of context not accessible to audio- or

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videotape recording. This stance of relative non-engagement with the children allowed me to be quietly present in many of their interactions. Later, I worried that more actively pursuing conversations with the children in or out of school might negatively aff ect my observer status. My interest in seeing what the children did in their classrooms, whom they became, and what they said as a result of those activities, also made me less interested in what they might say in outside-school interviews about school. Hence, this account does not directly represent the children’s voices in refl ection on matters in their classroom or on what I observed. However, the extensive and, insofar as practical, accurate (cf. Roberts, 1997) quotations of the children’s voices while engaged in classroom activities ought to give other observers the data they might need to engage with and assess my interpretations. I also present here sociological (at least with regard to their classrooms) and limited historical information about the children.

Almost 20 years along, I see the above justifications for not engaging in intra-actions with the children (or their teachers) quite differently from how I saw them then. Barad (2003: 827) and many others have reminded us that ‘particular possibilities exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering’. Ingold (2014: 389) also pointed out the responsibility of participant observers to respond to what we observe with ‘interventions, questions and responses of our own’. Having been a public school teacher, having taught in a variety of adult education agencies while completing my graduate studies, having various family members who are teachers and having taught teachers for a long time, I was aware that in many ways I perceive and act on the world from the perspective of a teacher. I do not now teach children, but I am certainly a legitimate peripheral participant in a community of teachers. In this research, I wished to disrupt my usual affiliation so that I might primarily observe children and not participate in a teacher discourse community about those children. Knowing that this would only partially succeed did not dissuade me. I wanted to develop analyses of activities in these classrooms as someone who saw them as ‘artificial creations … organised around beliefs and practices that control and regulate the intellectual life of students’ (Moll, 1992: 23). I believed that classroom practices would appear more salient to me, and that I could better maintain a position of speculation about them, if I occupied in some sense a ‘newcomer’ or ‘outsider’ position.

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Linda Hof, the videographer who made video-recordings throughout the years of this research, described how over time she had come to regard the children we observed with something like love and protectiveness (Denos et al., 2009). Because of this, at the end of the Grade 2 field observation, she felt that she could no longer engage in merely observing in classrooms with her camera without responding to unfolding events with the children and teachers. Linda decided she needed to ask questions of the participants in the events she was filming, intervene if she felt it was necessary, and engage in conversations with teachers and students about classroom happenings. My process of coming to believe in the importance of ‘interven[ing] in the world’s becoming’ (Barad, 2003: 827) was similar, although Linda’s articulation of the problem came first, and the apparatus she used (a camera) may have been important in the assemblage of her understanding. Despite not collaborating in depth with the teachers, I did interview them several times over the course of the study and incorporated their information, suggestions, speculations and explanations into this text. Mehan (1993) illustrates problems inherent in privileging the voice of persons who have the least experience with the children. To deal in some way with these problems, I presented drafts of the chapters that concerned them to the teachers involved and asked them to respond in whatever way suited them. Although some of my descriptions and analyses could be construed as critical of classroom practices, the teachers in whose classrooms observations were made, in every case, met them with professional interest. One teacher said after reading the first draft of a chapter: ‘It’s not at all how I would have described the classroom, but there’s nothing in it that’s inaccurate’. Another teacher vigorously disagreed with some aspects of my fi rst attempts at analysis of practices in her classroom. The discussions I had with all the teachers about their perceptions of what I had written sharpened and clarified my writing, and provided some different perspectives (see, for example, Toohey, 1998). Although they still may not agree with everything I have written, they acknowledge the differences in our perspectives and have approved of my quotation of their voices here. Bordo cautioned against the ‘supposition that if we employ the right method’, we can produce representations which can be ‘politically correct’. As she put it: The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion … are played out on multiple and shifting fronts, and all ideas (no matter how ‘liberatory’ in some contexts or for some purposes) are condemned to be haunted by a voice from the margins, already speaking (or perhaps presently muted but awaiting the conditions for speech), awakening us to what has been excluded, effaced, damaged. (Bordo, 1990: 138)

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I acknowledge that the methods employed in this study do not provide all participants’ voices with equal access to the ‘floor’: some speak from the margins; some mutely wait. Foucault (1979) argued that it is naive to believe that there can be production of knowledge without differential power. Knowing that someone or some ideas would always be excluded, I decided in this case that it was worthwhile trying to examine classroom interactions without collaboration with other participants. Many educational researchers have powerfully demonstrated teachers’ contributions to enriching understandings of classroom events (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Jervis et al., 1996; Nunan, 1992, and many others). However, Bell observed a paucity of ‘teacher research’ in the field of second language learning. She argued that teachers’ involvement in research in their classrooms would make this research more likely ‘to improve our understanding of the field and eventually to influence practice’ (Bell, 1997: 5). Educational research since the 1990s has increasingly been done by teachers themselves, or in various kinds of affiliations with researchers (relatively recent discussions of this may be found in McNiff & Whitehead, 2010; Mills, 2006; Stringer, 2008; and the Journal of Teacher Action Research). Action research, aimed at improving educational practice, involves teachers, sometimes in collaboration with researchers, considering their classrooms and their pedagogy in the light of some issue they wish to investigate. In 1999, I convened an action research group, which we called The Teacher Action Research Group (TARG), and which included teachers, graduate students, our videographer and me. Meeting weekly outside school time over about five years, we described our research in classrooms of children who spoke languages other than English in their homes (Denos et  al., 2009). Participation in the group, which I think was pivotally important in the intellectual and practical development of all participants (including me), and the reading in new materiality I have subsequently done, has convinced me that at least some classroom research must be done in collaboration with teachers who are interested in documenting and perhaps changing events in their classrooms. I believe the rewards of such conversations to teachers and researchers can be equally shared. As Olsson (2009: 103) put it: ‘As a researcher you have no inherent right to know better than teachers their own problems and questions, but at the same time teachers might benefit from an encounter with researchers’. I cannot stress enough the benefits that accrued to me as a researcher in encounters with all the members of TARG.

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Documentation

Despite their necessity, conversations between teachers and researchers about what is going on in their classrooms are sensitive and complicated. Research reports of collaborations with teachers in the 1990s often described disrupted relationships, ‘betrayals’ and a variety of difficulties (e.g. Evans, 1998; Moje, 1998). It seems to me that these confl icts arise because such conversations occur in particularly delicate circumstances. All teachers have personal experience of being students of university professors. Bakhtin described ‘the words of a father, of adults, of teachers’ as examples of authoritative texts. The words of university professors in university classrooms often take the form of authoritative text; in education classes, professors commonly offer opinions about preferred and nonpreferred classroom practices – in effect, telling teachers what they should do. The positioning this sets up in university classrooms has effects on subsequent professor–teacher discussions. In schools, however, teachers are the authorities, not professors or researchers. Conversations in schools between teachers and researchers about classroom practice are influenced by relations of power. A researcher’s critical remarks about a teacher’s practices in a school research site (perhaps acceptable in university classrooms when the critiqued practices are hypothetical) might easily disrupt their relationship, which usually exists only at the teacher’s sufferance. Researchers thus fi nd it easier (and less dangerous) to maintain in such situations a friendly and non-challenging demeanour. Finding ways to have respectful, productive and sometimes conflictual conversations with teachers about classroom practice in these circumstances is difficult; teachers as well as researchers must enter willingly into such conversations. Asking respectful but critical questions, reframing utterances, voicing disagreement dialogically, strategically selfdisclosing and displaying commitment to further dialogue are elements of a ‘social language’ (cf. Bakhtin, 1981), which appears less well-known in schools and universities than it might be. However, I believe it is only in such discourse that teachers and researchers will affect one another’s practice. Speaking about classroom events that might be construed as troubling or ambiguous, in ways that allow the continuation of the relationship, will involve both parties fi nding new ways to speak. Bakhtin (1981) posed the possibility of ‘internally persuasive discourse’, which is open to the ‘interanimation’ of other voices, which allows participants to create ‘ever newer ways to mean’. Learning ways of speaking about classroom practices that are authoritative, as well as open, playful and able to reveal ever new ways to mean, will perhaps involve developing new and unfamiliar teaching and research practices. These new practices will have to examine explicitly issues of power inherent in teacher–researcher relationships and issues of individual versus joint responsibility. Future work that explores

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these relationships and discourse practices will no doubt guide researchers to other necessary issues. Too often in the past and currently, teacher education and research has aimed at discovering what are taken to be ‘scalable’ or universally successful teaching practices, and then delivering these insights to pre- or in-service teachers. New materialism challenges us to go beyond these ‘domesticated truths’. It encourages experimentation in languaging with teachers and students, and to come therefore to understand how words and things can be assembled and can intra-act to produce outcomes that have no finality. The ‘ever newer ways to mean’ (Bakhtin, 1981) aligns well with the perspective I have been arguing throughout this book: second language learning can be an ever newer way to mean if not only striated second language information can be available to learners, but also if learners can experiment in language (language understood in the broad sense of the ‘100 languages of children’), in order to make new meanings. I also think a focus on the ‘100 languages of teachers and researchers’ will encourage adults to experiment in their practice, and to continue to fi nd thinking about school intra-actions fascinating, indeterminate and rewarding.

Future Second Language Acquisition Research

I have argued here that the traditional SLA notion of language learning as individual internal processing of second language input and production of second language output has not sufficiently examined the practices, activities and social contexts in which learners engage. I also argued that attention to these matters is important, not only because they are commonly overlooked in much SLA research, but also because the development of socially and pedagogically useful understandings of SLA must take into account the realities of learners’ circumstances. Learners’ investments in learning a second language (Norton, 2000, 2014; Norton Peirce, 1995), the ways in which their social identities and positioning affect their participation in second language conversations (Leung et al., 1997; McKay & Wong, 1996; Morgan, 1997), their access to participation in the activities of their communities, and the obstacles to participation they experience must all be matters of consideration in future research. At the same time as this newer research takes the social world of learners seriously into account, future SLA research will also need to develop complex understandings of how individual human learners understand their social worlds and their place(s) in them. Forman et al. (1993: 6) pointed out that an emphasis on the sociocultural contexts of human beings should not obscure from view ‘real people who develop a variety of interpersonal relationships with one another in the course of

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their shared activity in a given institutional context’. Kirshner and Whitson (1997) argued that ‘the notion of the individual in situated cognition theory needs to be fundamentally reformulated’ so as to avoid reducing human experience to only the socially given. For them, this reformulation involves investigation of the ‘physiological, psychoanalytic, and semiotic constitution of persons’ and their collection includes studies which illustrate these approaches (Lave, 1997; Walkerdine, 1997). Litowitz (1997) discussed psychoanalytic and sociological work which emphasises the importance of intersubjectivity, resistance and identification in desires to learn and participate in certain activities. Elaine Day (2002) explored how a young English learner participated in a variety of communities of practice in his classroom and the affiliations and identifications he developed in these practices. All of these studies provide models of how this reformulation of ideas of individuals as embodied, semiotic and emotional persons, situated in communities, might be accomplished. Reformulation of language learning theory will require investigation and integration of these complex means of understanding learners and learning. These critiques of the conceptualisations of individuals in SCT, emphasising humans’ embodiment and emotions, are addressed to some extent in the concepts of new materialism. Although not discussed extensively in this book, the concept of affect goes some way toward reimagining persons as not only rational and social beings.

Afterword

At the beginning of Chapter 2, I noted many social scientists’ and philosophers’ dismay at the seeming inability of scholarship to have positive effects on the myriad problems of the contemporary world: income and educational inequities, gender and other kinds of violences, environmental degradation, colonialism and suffering of many sorts. My conclusions after examining the experiences of children learning English at school may be unsatisfying to those who want striated representations of what is (was), and what should be, in classrooms. However, the new materialist theorists I have cited here argue that the material world matters, that intra-actions in assemblages are indeterminate, unique and unpredictable, that learning language is a kind of becoming and, thus, we cannot rely on simple answers to the problems many second language learners experience in classrooms, just as we cannot rely on simple answers to problems in larger arenas. Rather, educational ‘answers’ will always be provisional, and are best formulated by teachers, researchers and students who, in correspondence with one another, use all their senses to experiment with learning.

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My experiment in this book of having new materialism ‘talk to’ SCT- influenced stories and interpretations of these stories over three years involving the same children (although with new materialists, I am now not so sure they were the same children!) has been very rewarding for me. I have found productive the freedom of not having to deconstruct or try to dismiss the theoretical positions and intellectual work of myself and others who use(d) other lenses to observe second language learning. Spelling out in detail what many others deem necessary in educational research – its pedagogical implications, striated knowledge about what will work in every classroom all the time – has not been my aim. I have told stories, which, as Gatt and Ingold (2013: 147) reminded us, should be ‘generous, open-ended, comparative yet critical enquiry into the conditions and potential of human life’, stories that bring to our attention possibilities, without explicitly advocating any one course of action. For Ingold (2013: 110), the ‘telling of stories is an education of attention. Through [stories], things are pointed out to novices, so that they can discover for themselves what meanings their stories might hold in the situations of their current practice’. Enid Lee (1985) used the genre of letters full of stories between a teacher and a researcher to open a conversation about how teachers can engage in anti-racist practices. Vivian Gussin Paley (1986, 1989, 1992, 1996) used narrative, speculation and direct quotation from the children in her kindergarten to explore a variety of educational issues. Educators interested in new materialism, Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016), experimented with various genres for reporting the activities of children in classrooms. Ingeniously, they made those representations in the genres the children were using: that is, for example, they reported on students’ experiments with making board games through the medium of a board game. Although educational researchers struggle to fi nd ever new ways to write about educational practices, I believe that conversations that teachers have among themselves, with children as well as with researchers, will result in concrete ideas for changing classroom practices/materials/locations, and so on, in specific sites for specific children. I have suggested that the Reggio Emilia practice of pedagogical documentation, described by Wien et al. (2011: n.p.) as ‘the teacher’s story of the movement of children’s understanding’, may well offer teachers possibilities ‘not to know with certainty but instead to wonder, to enquire with grace into some temporary state of mind and feeling in children’ (Wien et al., 2011: n.p.), and may be a vehicle to open up such enquiries.

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My SCT analysis of the stories in this project argued that what school practices are determines who particular participants can be, what they can do and thus what they can learn in that setting. I noted, for example, that if the children had been less commonly engaged in solo speech performance in front of their peers, their teacher’s and peers’ evaluations of their achievements might have been different. If accuracy of performance on ‘Concentration’ memory games with cards, or intricacy and detail of drawings, or elaborateness of construction of Lego™ structures, or sensitivity to peers and the teacher were items for school evaluation, for example, the focal children’s identities and their languaging might have occurred somewhat differently. What is done in schools, and what is considered knowledge in schools, are socially and culturally specific; some children will be disadvantaged and others advantaged by the decisions made about these matters. Had practices been different in the classrooms in which they were enrolled, the focal children might have fi nished Grade 2 with identities other than those they had. Surjeet might have been seen as an enthusiastic writer, whose family was very supportive of and concerned with her educational progress, and her careful attention to many events in her classroom might have been seen as evidence of her learning capabilities. Martin might have been seen as a gifted young artist with formidable powers of concentration and dedication to fi nishing his projects: his attempts to examine his world creatively, his humour and his struggle to represent his experiences, despite his beginner status with respect to English, might have been a matter for celebration. Harvey’s structural skills with model building might have been noticed and cited as evidence of his potential as a learner. Julie’s and Amy’s strengths in their classroom might have been formulated as other than ‘nice little girl’. These children might have been different, had school practices been different. Virginia Woolf (1977: 123) provided a lyrical estimation of the worth of stories, writing ‘… inconclusive stories are legitimate; that is to say, though they leave us feeling melancholy and perhaps uncertain, yet somehow or other they provide a resting point for the mind’. The stories I have told here about the children and their classrooms are inconclusive, but I hope they do provide resting (or in some cases, troubling) points for the mind. They began with the children’s entry into kindergarten, and end at the end of the children’s Grade 2 year. Two of the children left Canada, Julie for Poland and Amy for Hong Kong. Randy moved to a different elementary school in Suburban City. The other children, Harvey, Martin and Surjeet, continued to attend Suburban School and continued to learn to use the English of their classrooms and community. I hope that my observations of these

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children during their fi rst three years of school and my stories about their participation in classroom activities with varied kinds of materials in varied settings might, in Ingold’s (2013: 110) words, ‘educate the attention’ of other teachers and educators. Observing other children, they might consider how classroom materials and practices might be arranged so that their students, and they themselves, can fi nd voices from which to speak, and to develop ever newer ways to mean.

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Author Index

Adams, L., 193 Agre, P., 112 Alaimo, S., 96, 101, 106 Allen, V., 5 Angus, I., 12 Appel, G., 16 Applebaum, S.D., 16, 134, 135 Aronsson, L., 33 Atkinson, D., 15 Atwood, E., 29 Au, K., 2 August, D., 166

Bruner, J., 199 Bryson, M., 15, 100 Burt, M., 10, 189 Butler, J., 12, 126 Canagarajah, S., 129, 130 Castaños, F., 193 Cazden, C., 2, 135, 139, 141 Celce-Murcia, M., 9, 10 Cenoz, J., 35 Clandinin, J., 179 Cole, M., 2, 12, 16, 194 Colebrook, C., 96 Collins, B., 5 Collins, J., 18 Connelly, M., 179 Coole, D., 25, 101 Corder, P., 10 Corsaro, D., 154 Coulthard, M., 165 Curinga, M., 7, 36–37

Baker, C.D., 165 Bakhtin, M., 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 34, 43, 44, 85 105, 116, 140, 158, 163, 164, 166, 170, 173, 178, 180, 181 Ball, A., 19 Barad, K., 28–30, 32, 38–39, 42, 44, 89, 121, 125, 131, 139, 177 Becker, A., 34 Bell, J., 179 Benzie, H.J., 166 Berdoussis, N., 199 Bergson, H., 9 Berk, L., 108 Berron, C., 85 Bhatt, I., 28 Bialystok, E., 9 Birdwhistell, R., 36, 148 Block, D., 11 Blommaert, J., 4 Bochner, S., 134 Bordo, S., 175, 178 Bourdieu, P., 2, 34, 89, 107, 154 Bourne, J., 16, 166 Braidotti, R., 25, 33, 37, 42, 96, 150 Breen, M., 1 Brislin, R.W., 134 Brooks, L., 16

Dagenais, D., x, 37, 85, 197, 198 Dahlberg, G., 30, 34, 90 Darvin, R., 16 Davies, B., 27, 33, 42, 55, 62, 63, 88, 92, 121, 157, 158 Davis, K., 10 Day, E., 23, 138, 182 de Beauvoir, S., 15 de Castell, S., x, 15, 100 de Freitas, E., 6, 7, 30, 36, 37 De Goes, M.C., 197 Deleuze, G., 2, 4, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 52, 93, 150, 161 Deloria,V., 26 Denos, C., x De Roock, R., 28 de Saussure, F., 9 Dewey, J., 30 200

Author Index

Doughty, C., 147 Douglas Fir Group, 11 Dulay, H., 10 Duranti, A., 16 Edwards, A.D., 27, 141 Edwards, C. 42, 172 Edwards, R., 27 Ehret, C., 28, 33 Eisenhart, M., 112, 161 Ellis, R., 10 Ervin-Tripp, S., 86 Evans, K.S., 180 Faltis, C., 5 Fenwick, T., 27 Fine, M., 98 Fleming, D., 3 Flowerdew, J., 19 Fodor, A., 197 Forman, E., 18, 181 Foucault, M., 2, 16, 19, 33, 87, 88, 111, 130, 131, 171, 179 Freeman, S., 19 Frede, E.C., 7 Freire, P., 135 French, P., 141 Frodeman, R., 25 Fröhlich, M., 194 Frost, S., 25, 101 Furnham, A., 134 Gal, S., 15, 171 Gamoran, A., 195 Gandini, L., 189 Gannon, S., 27 García, E.E., 7 García, O., 34, 35, 36 Gatt, C., 41, 183 Genesee, F., 5 George, J. (Chepximiya Siyam), 197 Gibbons, P., 5 Goffman, E., 106 Göncü, A., 196 Goodnow, J., 81 Goodwin, C., 16, 197 Goodwin, M.H., 103, 154, 163 Gorter, D., 35 Graves, B., 19 Griffin, P., 194 Grumet, M., 166

201

Guattari, F., 2, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 52, 93, 150, 161 Gunderson, L., 166 Gutierrez, K., 16, 141, 145, 166 Gutshall Rucker, T., 44, 91, 94, 105, 121, 128, 183 Guyevskey, V., 199 Hakuta, K., 10, 86 Hall, J.K., 11, 19, 85, 109, 116, 140, 142, 165 Hall, S., 15, 16, 171, 174 Hamilton, M., 7 Hanks, W., 17 Harris, R., 193 Hatch, E., 10, 86 Hawkins, M., 16 Hazzard, S., 114 Heath, S.B., 2, 186 Hekman, S., 96, 101, 106 Hellerman, J., 165 Hill, C., 197 Hof, L., 197 Holbraad, M., 27 Holland, D., 161 Hollett, T., 189 Howes, C., 7, 191 Huang, J., 10 Hughes, J., 18, 191 Hull, G., 135, 136 Husbye, N.E., 128, 191 Hymes, D., 2, 140, 155, 187 Ingold, T., 27, 39–40, 41, 43, 45, 84, 117, 121, 136, 175, 177, 183, 185 Itoh, H., 86 Jervis, K., 179 Jewson, N., 191 Jocius, R., 189 John, V., 187 Johnson, K.E., 15, 16, 165 Jordan, C., 2 Joseph, W. (Skwetsimltexw), 197 Julé-Lemke, A., 197 Kachur, R. 195 Kanno, Y., 16, 19, 134, 135 Kell, C., 52 Kirschner, S., 11, 27 Kirshner, D., 18, 182

202

Learning English at School

Klein, M.H., 134 Kleinmann, A., 30 Knouzi, I., 16 Krashen, S., 189 Kuby, C., 44, 91, 94, 105, 121, 128, 183 Kusters, A., 36, 44 Lantolf, J., 2, 15, 16, 19, 91 Lapkin, S., 16 Larsen-Freeman, D., 10 Larson, J., 16, 141, 165, 190 Last, A., 44 Latour, B., 25, 32, 116 Lave, J., 17, 18, 116, 133, 134,170, 171, 182 LeBaron, C., 197 Lee, E., 183 Lemke, J., 165 Lensmire, T., 163 Leung, C., 109, 181 Ley, R., 33 Li, W., 34, 35, 36 Lightbown, P., 9, 12 Litowitz, B., 182 Lobel, A., 147 Loewen, S., 12 Long, M.H., 1, 10, 147 López, G., 186 Loring, Maclean, R., 107 Lyotard, J-F., 106 MacDonald, M., 197 Mackey, A., 195 Maclean, M., 193 Maclean, R., 107 MacLure, M., 3, 34, 35, 36, 40, 116, 117, 138, 139, 141 Maguire, M., 19 Malaguzzi, I., 30, 31, 66 Marchenkova, L., 190 Marks, J., 96 Martin, J., 11, 27 Massumi, B., 33 Matthews, M., 107 Matusov, E., 196 McDermott, R., 1, 4, 6, 8, 15, 43, 87, 92, 93, 105, 110, 111, 131, 165, 166, 170 McKay, S., 112, 181 McNamee, S., 9 McNiff, J. 179 Measures, E., 14

Mehan, H., 129, 131, 170, 176, 178 Mercer, N., 141 Michaels, S., 188 Miller, P., 32 Mills, G., 179 Minick, N., 189 Mistry, J., 196 Moje, E.B., 180 Moll, L.C., 177 Montero, I., 14 Morgan, B., 37, 38, 135, 173, 181 Morita, N., 19 Mosier, C., 196 Moss, P., 34, 90, 188 Murphy, E., 7 Nagel, T., 175 Naiman, N., 9 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 166 Neilson, K., 189 Newman, D., 141 Nietzsche, F., 175 Norton, B., 2, 16, 19, 33, 106, 109, 112, 181 Norton Peirce, B., 173 Nunan, D., 179 Nystrand, M., 141, 165 Ochs, E., 16, 85 Oliver, R., 195 Olsson, L.M., 30–31, 33, 36, 38, 43, 90, 92, 150, 154, 168, 179 Ortega, L., 11, 44 Pacheco, R., 189 Packer, M., 135 Paley, V.G., 135, 173, 183 Pavlenko, A., 2 Pease-Alvarez, L., 198 Pence, A., 188 Pennycook, A., 35, 37 Philips, J., 7 Philips, S., 2 Pianta, R.C., 191 Pica, T., 147 Piller, I., 2 Pins, A., 197 Poehner, A., 16, 19, 91 Porter, P., 147 Prendergast, C., 195

Author Index

Qitsualik, R., 26 Quell, C., 14 Ramanathan, V., 4 Rampton, B., 109, 193 Ravem, R., 10 Readings, B., 121 Richards, J., 9, 10 Rigg, P., 5 Rizzo, T., 154 Roberts, C., 177 Rogoff, B., 14, 15, 16, 24, 96, 97, 109, 169, 170 Rosa, A., 14 Rose, M., 135–136 Rosiek, G., 97 Ross, G., 199 Rubin, J., 9 Rutherford, W., 190 Ryan, W., 130, 131 Rymes, B., 190 Samson, J., 5 Sampson, E.D., 9 Sato, M., 12 Saville-Troike, M., 10 Schachter, J., 9, 10 Schulz, E., 197, 198 Selinker, L., 10, 24 Shanahan, T., 166 Shannon, S.M., 198 Shuy, R., 132 Sinclair, N., 165 Sinclair, Nathalie, x, 6, 30, 197 Singh, A., 197 Skehan, P., 9 Smolka, A.L.B., 13 Smythe, S., x, 2, 28, 30, 41, 92 Søndergaard, D.M., 197 Spada, N., 9, 12 Stern, H.H., 194 Stone, C.A., 187 Streeck, J., 16, 36, 52 Street, B., 2 Stringer, E., 179 Strong, M., 9, 24 Sundberg, J., 27 Swain, M., 2, 15, 16, 44 Tabor, P., 188 Taylor, C., 24, 171

203

Tepper, L., 28 Thompson Klein, J., 189 Thorne, S., 2, 19 Todd, Z., ix Todesco, A., 194 Toohey, K., 19, 23, 33, 37, 75, 101, 106, 113, 116, 131, 166, 178, 197 Tootoosis, V., 141 Unwin, L., 191 Varela, F.J., 35 Varga, D., 107 Vasquez, O.A., 16 Vitanova, G., 190 Vygotsky, L.S., 12, 14, 17, 19, 24, 27, 47, 91, 108, 165, 169 Walkerdine, V., 111, 112, 182 Waller, W., 98 Walsh, S., 165 Waterhouse, M., 3, 189 Waterstone, B., 189 Weedon, C., 2 Wells, G., 93, 141, 142, 194 Wenger, E., 17, 18, 115, 116, 133, 134, 170, 171 Wertsch, J., 2, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 24, 25, 47, 134, 140, 141, 165, 169 Wessel-Powell, C., 191 Westgate, D.P.G., 141 Whitehead, A.N., 2 Whitehead, J., 179 Whitson, J.A., 18, 182 Wien, C.A., 183 Willett, J., 16 Winsler, A., 108 Wodak, R., 4 Wohlwend, K., 191 Wong, S.-L.C., 112, 181 Wong Fillmore, L., 9 Wood, D., 84, 141 Woolf, V., 184 Youdell, D., 33 Zepeda, M., 190

Subject Index

Academic competence, 90–95 Access classroom ‘stuff’, 117–123, 171 effects of seating arrangements on, 123–126 other children and, 126–129 Appropriation, 13, 15, 19, 90, 104, 133, 135, 136, 140, 165, 170, 171, 172 Amy, 80–84 academic competence, 58, 83, 98 participation in activities, 81–83 verbal performance, 146–147, 151–152, 155–156, 162 physical presentation, 80 positioning, 83 silence, 80, 86 social competence, 81 use of first language, 83

Entanglements, 3, 27, 29, 38–39, 44, 175 Ethnography, 39, 40, 42, 43, 122 Exclusion, 77, 134–135, 157 Future SLA research, 181–182 Grade 1 classroom, 112–136 individualising of children, 114–115 practices of, 117 ranking, 131–132, 134 Grade 2 classroom, 137–165 discourse practices of, 139 effects of discourse practices in, 159–164 teacher’s views of children, 138 Harvey, 75–80 academic competence, 75, 91, 92 participation in activities, 75–78, 80 physical presentation, 76, 77 positioning, 76–78 social competence, 78, 79 use of first language, 75

Behavioural competence, 98–99 beliefs about gender differences, 98, 99, 113 Body, 96, 97, 101, 106, 115, 116, 123, 138–139 Communities of practice, 17–18, 115 definition, 17 learning in, 115, 123, 134 ranks in, 123, 124 Comparisons of sociocultural theory and new materialism, 27, 33, 38, 43–44, 46–47, 87, 96, 113, 167, 168, 171, 183

Identity practices, 61–79 and appropriating voice, 20 as created in discourse, 2, 11, 20 as learner traits, 8–10, 24 as positioning, 15–16, 88 degradation practices, 110, 111 practices in kindergarten, 61–79, 74–75 Identity in new materialism, 3, 55, 62, 87, 89, 168 Indigenous people and new materialism, 26–27, 28, 44 Individualizing subjects assigning individual places and, 130 classroom practices and, 133, 136, 138, 171

Deaf communication, 36–37 Dialogicality, 13–14 Discourse practices, 20, 43, 88, 89, 137–163 authoritative and internally persuasive, 164–165

204

Subject Index

Julie, 69–75 academic competence, 75 participation in activities, 71–73 physical presentation/competence, 65 positioning, 73–74 social competence, 73–74 use of first language, 44, 49, 74–75 verbal performance, 104–105, 106, 108–109, 112–113, 117, 119, 150–152 Kindergarten, 45–113 emotional tone, 47, 101 Language Development class, 46 practices, 46 students in, 47 teacher, 47 Language in new materialism, 34–38 Language proficiency attitudes toward first languages, 72 being ‘ESL’, 103–105 ESL as a ranking label, 103–105, 136 first language proficiency, 70 graduating from ESL, 104 Languaging, 34–35, 37, 52, 94,102, 133, 170–171 Legitimate peripheral participation, 17, 18, 160 Martin, 64–69 academic competence, 69, 91, 92, 138 participation in activities, 66, 67, 69, 70 verbal performance, 68, 145, 149, 157–158 positioning, 65, 161 social competence, 100 use of first language, 64, 67 Methodology, 22–24 interviews, 24 transcription, 24 transcription conventions, 84–85 New materiality concepts, 26–44 agency and ‘agential cuts’, 32–33, 89, 126 assemblages, 28–29

205

being/becoming, 29, 30, 89, 168 desire and affect, 33–34, 36, 92, 144, 150, 157 intra-action, 29–30 new materialist research, 38–40 non-dualism, relational ontologies and non-essentialism, 26–29 representation, 41–43 smooth and striated spaces, 31–32, 93, 148–149 Normalization, 16, 19, 88–89, 130 Pedagogical documentation, 31, 42, 62, 172, 183 Peer-managed conversations, 163 Performativity, 12 Physical presentation/competence, 95–97 Psycholinguistic research, 1, 2, 8–12 Randy, 48–56 academic competence, 55, 63, 122, 136 participation in activities, 26, 27–29, 64 teacher scaffolding for, 50–51 silence in classroom, 49, 50, 55, 84 use of first language, 49, 54 verbal performances, 27, 64 Recitation sequences, 142–147, 159, 160 purposes of, 115–116 positioning in, 159, 160 timing and rhythm, 159 student meaning-making, 160 Reggio Emilia pre-schools, 30, 66 Representation, 3, 26, 32, 34, 35, 38, 41, 43, 84, 175 Recommendations for practice, 158, 160, 161, 164, 168, 172, 183 professor and researcher voices, 121, 122, 133–134, 135 teacher voices, 128 Research collaboration with teachers, 179, 180–181, 183 new materialist research, 38–43 Resource distribution, 123–126, 173 and appropriating voice, 20, 169, 171 resource management, 123–124

206

Learning English at School

Social competence, 99–101 play and, 107–108 Social practices and identity, 104–105, 184 conflictual nature of, 134–135 learning, 17, 133 Sociocultural theory and research, 2, 12–17, 19 examination of identity practices, 2, 16, 106, 111 limitations of, 15 positioning in community practices, 126 sociality of learning, 13, 14, 15 zone of proximal development, 14 Space, 117, 118, 119, 120, 129–130 Stories, 41–42, 43, 84, 175, 184 Student-managed conversations, 154–158 meaning-making in, 157–158 positioning in, 156–157

Subordination exclusion, 134–135 racist comments, 120–122 resistance to, 100–101 Suburban School , 21–22 Surjeet, 56–64 academic competence, 57, 63, 91, 138, 144 participation in activities, 58, 59–62, 92 verbal performances, 142–144, 153–154, 156, 162 competence in English, 56 social relations/competence, 57, 58, 85, 100 use of first language, 56, 85 Teacher-mandated peer conversations 147–154 Testing knowledge, 90, 91, 94, 102, 109, 131, 133, 160 Ventriloquation, 14