'I am a historian': Examining the discursive construction of locally situated academic identities in linguistically diverse settings (California)

In this study, the socially constructed nature of classroom life in a linguistically diverse setting is examined by analyzing the discursive processes in and through which opportunities for talking as, acting as, and being a student are formulated and reformulated over time. This study adopts an interactional ethnographic approach, which combines theories from cognitive anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics for examining the processes in and through which potential academic identities in classrooms are constructed for the collective and become available to individuals-incollective. Drawing on critical discourse analysis as well, this study examines the ways in which students may, as individuals-in-collective, take up and/or inscribe locally situated academic identities from particular perspectives or stances. This study addresses the challenge of making visible the complexity of classroom life and what it is that students in linguistically diverse settings can do rather than what they cannot do.; This study was first piloted as part of ongoing teacher research in the author's own 5th grade bilingual classroom in a public school in Santa Barbara, California. Data were collected in the form of video and audio tape records, as well as student written texts, during the 1996--1997 school year. Data were analyzed from multiple angles of vision using both macro and micro levels of analysis. Analysis of the initiation of particular ways of being a student on the first day led to additional unfolding analyses of subsequent events (e.g., second day of school and history/social science cycle of activity as telling case), including the oral, written and spatial texts produced in and through those events. Each of these analyses provided insight into and contributed to an understanding of the ways in which teachers can potentially orient and reorient students to the classroom in particular ways and from different angles of vision in and through a kind of metadiscourse. The teacher's metadiscursive choices in this study could be seen as shaping parameters that served as resources for students in taking up and inscribing potential academic identities as historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers, among others, from particular angles of vision as authorities and experts.