The authors of this volume explore a microethnographic approach to the study of classroom literacy events and provide useful models for analyzing classroom discourse. The heart of the book centers upon close analysis of transcripts of literacy events unfolding in various classrooms. These data reveal three methodological “issues in research on classroom literacy events: (a) classroom literacy events as cultural actions, (b) the social construction of identity, and (c) power relations in and through classroom literacy events” (p. xx). The final chapter attempts to locate this microethnographic approach within new literacy studies, “a broader intellectual movement concerned with people's everyday lives” (p. xxii). Readers will find useful models for how researchers might go about doing the kinds of analysis that lead to connections between local classrooms and larger social and cultural contexts.
Chapters 1 and 5 are theoretical overviews. The first explores the linguistic turn in the social sciences and the ways in which classroom language and discourse analysis are located within this historical moment. Chapter 5 situates microethnographic approaches within new literacy studies. Readers new to the discussions will find these chapters helpful in understanding the intellectual heritage of discourse analysis.
Chapter 2 reveals the ways in which this microethnographic approach can move beyond a typical read of a classroom that might find fault with traditional, more teacher-centered approaches to literary analysis. When read one way, the form and structure of this teacher's I-R-E (i.e., teacher initiates, students respond, teacher evaluates) pedagogy could be seen as “traditional” (p. 56); however, a closer examination of the discourse reveals that this teacher is practicing a culturally relevant pedagogy that does indeed engage students in exploring “how language, race, education, and power operate in their world…” (p. 93). The authors argue that a microethnographic approach works at the dual levels of pedagogical form and discursive content.
Chapter 3 explores how one might analyze identity using discourse analysis. Interestingly, this chapter reveals the limits of discourse analysis when used to fix a person's identity into a category. Rather, the authors argue that discourse should be applied in order to show how identities develop across multiple trajectories and over time. They contend that “the agenda laid out here, therefore, is concerned with understanding social identities in motion, as part of a process of continuity and change within and across events, settings and social institutions” (p. 158). Rather than fixing students into categories based on an analysis of the discursive features of their texts and interactions, the authors would use discourse analysis to unfold students' developing constructions of identity.
Chapter 4 outlines three ways one might look at power: as product, as process, and as a set of caring relationships. The analysis of power in the classroom is demonstrated through these frameworks, although each one has its limits. The analysis of power would have benefited from a notion of power as a circulation of types of capital, social obligations, and social roles, all of which are discursive formations and contain types of agency. Because such ideas of power articulate in relations over time and in individual dispositions, these notions of power would have better complemented the authors' previous chapters, which explore cultural practices and identity formation over time and across interactions.
Readers should not be frustrated that the close analysis of classroom discourse does not lead to new contributions to the field of new literacy studies; the authors' analysis of these classroom events was meant to demonstrate these analytical frameworks and the resulting methodological conundrums that emerge when working within a microethnographic perspective. It is a helpful demonstration of how to do discourse analysis of classroom literacy events and would be well paired in a methodology class with Geissler's (2003) Analyzing Streams of Language. Because the volume is well grounded in current literacy theories, observant of discourse analysis techniques and methods, and written by those who have a long-standing interest in understanding the contingencies of classroom discourse as these enact power, identity, and cultural practices, readers of this volume will find it helpful in analyzing the discourse of any classroom. What this book promises, it delivers with considerable aplomb.
