Classroom Ethnography on Critical Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Using findings from language classrooms, this chapter aims to illustrate how ethnographic studies with poststructuralist and feminist orientations have informed and are informed by sociocultural literacy developments. It particularly argues for the pertinence of adopting an ethnographic perspective (Bloome, Classroom ethnography. In: Grenfell M, Bloome D, Hardy C, Pahl K, Rowsell J, Street B (eds) Language, ethnography, and education: Bridging new literacy studies and Bourdieu (pp 7–26). Routledge, New York, 2012) to critical language and literacy education (CLLE). CLL teaching – the cultivation of students’ ability to analyze and evaluate texts for transformed actions and critical social choices – is often bound up with contradictions and controversies regarding institutionalized power structures and the plural partial nature of knowledge. Ethnographic studies informed by poststructuralist and feminist theories have helped illuminate not only the inherent paradoxes in critical education and its ironic oppressive potential, but also the complex shifting interstices between power, identities, and agency within the classroom and wider social environment. This chapter describes some of the major changes in critical education as informed by such ethnographic perspectives, which include the problematization of the grandiose emancipation claims, the centering of emotions and relationality in critical praxis, and the attention to the embodied – lived and performed – CLLE practices.