Generously co-sponsored by the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies

Note: Supplemental readings for this presentation are available at the links below:

Baquedano-López, Patricia, Solís, Jorge, & Kattan, Shlomy. (2005). Adaptation: The Language of Classroom Learning. Linguistics and Education. 6:1-26. 

http://files.me.com/solis/fonaik

Solís, Jorge, Kattan, Shlomy, & Baquedano-López, Patricia. (2009). Locating Time in Science Learning Activity: Adaptation as a Theory of Learning and Change. In K. Richardson Bruna & K. Gomez (Eds.). Talking Science, Writing Science: The Work of Language in Multicultural Classrooms. (pp. 139-166). New York/London: Routledge.

http://files.me.com/solis/g2s7g7 (WARNING: LARGE FILE)

In a 3rd grade science classroom at an elementary school in Northern California, Mr. Pepp, a Chinese American teacher leads his class through the last lesson of the year. The students in the class were expected to complete all unfinished work in their lab notebooks in quiet seatwork. Sitting at the last row of desks in the back of the room, Emily and Claire, two Latina students, were busily completing the task when Emily began to quickly and purposefully flip the pages of her workbook. Claire turned to her and asked: "Are you finished with this?" Emily responded in a high-pitched tone: "M-hum. Y eso que yo empecé más late que tú" (roughly: "M-hm, and that's even when I started [after] you did"). This bit of interaction between the two students suggest a local, temporal organization in this classroom that ordered where students were supposed to be in relation to each other's work and in relation to the teacher's expectations for this class. Why was there such an urgency to complete this assignment? Why was there such an overt display of time-based competency by Emily even to the point of teasing and chastising Claire for falling behind? And why was this exchange produced in Spanish in the back of the room?

In this talk I analyze examples from a database of video-recorded lessons collected as part of a 4-year project to implement a scientific inquiry curriculum in 3rd and 4th grade classrooms that were linguistically and racially diverse. Drawing from collaborative work that examined the inherent tensions in classroom interaction as productive sites for learning (Baquedano-López, Solís, & Kattan, 2005), I discuss how notions of 'time' are discursively and interactionally managed by teachers and students to represent ongoing, shifting, and projected curricular end-goals. I provide an overview of theories of learning and educational policies that have at their core a notion of time that is linear and objective and which is imposed on all learners in schools. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), for example, has codified cognitive progress so that individual development corresponds to tangible, measurable, time-coded outcomes of educational policy (completed lessons, number of tests taken, units covered). Emily and Claire, in the example above, engage in precisely this type of learning activity. Such organization of learning limits the opportunities to engage the linguistic and cultural resources that teachers and students can bring to the classroom, and, as the example above demonstrates, Emily and Claire are Spanish-English bilingual students. The result of this orientation to time is the production of an economy of educational labor that creates a false democratic system in which all students appear to have the same opportunity for accomplishing expected classroom tasks, yet we know, from the widening achievement gap, that many Latino and African American students consistently lag in terms of academic achievement. Grounded in a perspective that draws on both educational and linguistic anthropological approaches to learning in schools, I examine examples of classroom talk as teachers and students negotiate and construct meanings of 'time' and 'learning' through talk. I discuss the usefulness of the notion of a chronolect of classroom discourse and interaction to examine how racially diverse classroom communities develop their own dialect for talking about time and for temporalizing learning activity (Solís, Kattan, & Baquedano-López, 2009). I examine, through analysis of classroom data, the ways students and teachers consistently resist and attempt to break an imposed linearity of time as they seek to engage in meaningful learning activity.