Negotiating stances to immigration, positioning themselves and others: Narrative texts in a dialogic critical pedagogy
Submitted by:
Triantafillia Kostouli
Abstract:
While critical literacy has been proposed as an important pedagogical approach that may reshape classroom practices (Janks, 2010), little is known about the specifics of the processes involved to redefine literacy learning. How is genre learning revisited in this paradigm? What are the conditions to be met so that students appropriate genres as meaning-making tools and as ideological resources through which they may project their own voice? This paper addresses this research void by presenting an intervention implemented in a 6th grade Greek classroom with the aim to privilege students’ voice and autonomy - notions that run against the locally-dominant pedagogies.
The data (a series of teacher-student interactions on the topic of immigration along with the narrative texts produced over a 2-month period) are analysed with the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (i.e. identities, positionings) (Harré & Langenhove, 1999; Ivanic, 1998). Analysis illustrates how teacher and students collaborated to select the topic to focus upon and the texts to analyze. Important literate and social strategies were acquired as part of this process, as students, interacting in-groups and in-whole-class situations, selected texts and discussed them as ideological resources via which specific Discourses and stances to immigration are constructed. These processes proved to be important precursors to students’ own writing.
Analysis of students’ narrative texts on two different topics (first and second versions) illuminates the rich polyphonic universe students gradually constructed, how they populated it with main and subordinate characters, dense episodes with action and reaction scenes, and enriched the evaluative forms to depict nuances in characters’ identities. In addition, they appropriated important text-building strategies to draft a complex moral world through which they assessed the ideologies on immigration circulating in the wider social context, negotiated their positionings to them and projected their own stance to this socially-important topic.
Finally, various educational implications are discussed on how critical literacy may enrich genre learning with ideological perspectives that develop student voice.
References
Harré, R., & van Langenhove, L. (1999). Positioning Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Janks, H. (2010). Literacy and Power. New York: Routledge.