Ethnographic context, methods and data

This article is part of a larger study on the construction and contestation of the smart student role in primary school (Lundqvist 2017). It draws on three years of collaborative linguistic ethnographic fieldwork (Copland and Creese 2015) centred on a primary school in Copenhagen, Denmark⁵⁴. Accessing the field and building rapport with the research participants, I deliberately positioned myself as an ethnographic researcher interested in language and schooling. The role I came to inhabit, throughout time, compares to what Corsaro (1996: 425) coined as “an atypical adult”⁵⁵. Data includes field note entries, audio and video recordings of teaching and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers and parents, self-recordings of school-home conferences and transcripts of those recordings, children’s textbooks, exercise books, photographs and Facebook profiles. All participants are anonymised. All the quotes that I attribute to teachers when talking about students are originally in Danish (or in some cases Swedish) and have been translated in English for this article by me. As many of the students in the school are children of immigrants from Arab-speaking countries, and therefore bilingual, their Arabic speech was transcribed into English with the aid of my research assistant.

54 See Madsen et al. (2015) for more information about the school.

6.4.1 Classroom context and participants

This article focuses on data from fourth through sixth form mainstream classes (Danish,

mathematics and history classes) and fifth form Arabic heritage language classes (supplementary education offered by the municipality). Teaching activities across the curriculum often included textbook assignments and whole-class talk around textbook material. Sometimes these activities involved a digital whiteboard, which students were able to operate in turns. Whole-class talks, and the main part of teaching activities, were usually framed around the classic

initiation-reply-evaluation (IRE) format (Mehan 1979).

The students had two teachers: Sanne and Aslan. Sanne, the head teacher, taught Danish, mathematics and history classes from fourth through sixth form classes. Aslan taught Arabic heritage language classes and Danish as a second language classes. The students had different language backgrounds (Pashto, Chinese, Danish, French, Icelandic, Arabic, Irish and Turkish). The students of Arabic decent, including Iman and Mohsen, attended all classroom settings. Like most students in the cohort, Iman and Mohsen were born in Denmark. Iman was twelve years old (fifth form) and from a family with an Iraqi background. Mohsen, also twelve years old and in the fifth form, was from a family with a Lebanese background.

6.4.2 Data analysis

The analyses of this article focuses on puzzles I encountered during fieldwork and data analysis.

When I entered the field, previous fieldworkers told me that Iman was viewed as one of the best students in class. During fieldwork, however, I noticed that the teachers often ignored or dismissed Iman’s efforts and achievements. I kept wondering why my observations conflicted with the observations of my research colleagues. I thoroughly reviewed the entire data corpus, including the data collected by my colleagues. I immersed myself in data from fourth form classes, and noticed that Iman often participated in teaching activities. The teachers explicitly appreciated Iman’s

contributions. The apparent change in Iman’s role compelled me to revise my theoretical framing to attend to temporality in order to grasp how Iman’s social identity changed during fifth form classes.

Accordingly, I included the social identification approach (Wortham 2006).

As I embarked on the story of Iman’s trajectory I found myself compelled to reorganize my data. I drafted a taxonomy that included events in which Iman was identified as smart, but also quiet and

disruptive. The taxonomy was an attempt to organize approximately 79 situations that I had selected from field note entries and while listening to recordings. I printed out all these event narratives on paper, and using a scissors organized them according to their date, constructing a hard copy chronological timeline lying on the table before me. I was struck by the finding that the teachers often positioned Mohsen and Iman relative to one another. Iman was ascribed what we could call

“disapproved identities”, whereas Mohsen achieved more favourable identities. The relative positioning occurred in comparable ways across mainstream classes and Arabic classes.

It became clear to me that what initially seemed to be a puzzle of conflicting observations turned out to be a process by which Iman’s school identity was changing relative to Mohsen’s identity across time. I identified more than thirty such linking events. Twenty-two of these events occurred from the latter part of the fifth form classes to the beginning of the sixth form classes (March to October). I labelled this social phenomenon “linked identification”, which I define as the

interpersonal socio-historical processes throughout which two or more individuals’ trajectories of identification are connected. I selected three examples to illustrate the pattern of how the linked identification emerged, thickened and how they became socially consequential for Iman. My analysis of the participants’ face-to-face interaction is supported by ethnographic description of the broader bulk of data.

How can the social identification of one student come to link with the identification of another student? In answering this question, I will argue that while Mohsen’s smart student role thickens into a favoured role, Iman struggles to maintain her role as smart relative to Mohsen. The teachers come to view Iman’s actions relative to Mohsen and increasingly overlook or dismiss her efforts and achievements. Iman then comes to be seen as troublesome. Moreover, such linking of students’

social identities evolves vis-à-vis institutional conceptions of smartness.

6.4.3 The institutional smart student model

This section sets the scene for the microanalyses by accounting for the smart student model that predominated across the school of my study. The smart student was associated with docile and compliant behaviours, and in classroom talk, this model of a smart student was often enacted by the action of the student delivering the correct answer to the teacher’s question. I derive this model

from interactional data in great detail elsewhere (Lundqvist 2015; Lundqvist 2017a). Moreover, the model is evidenced across a variety of data sources.

In terms of docile behaviours, recordings of school home conferences show teachers explaining to students and their parents that students should behave “nicely,” “accept the school’s offers,” “obey instructions,” “listen to the teacher,” and display “moderate” behaviours. These behavioural expectations are reiterated in interviews with students, parents, in many of my field note entries, and in teachers’ disciplining students in whole-class talk. Docility and compliance index

mainstream smart student models (Bartholdsson 2007, 137-139; Foucault 1977, 136; Hatt 2012, 449; Korp 2011, 30; Thornberg 2009, 251).

With regard to answering the teacher’s question correctly, I observed a plethora of comparable situations across classes and cohorts in which teachers made comments such as “If you don’t raise your hand, it must mean that you don’t know anything” or “Raise your hands, you ought to know this.” This feature of the model is further evidenced in interviews with students, informal

conversations with teachers and during home school conferences. This feature also fits mainstream models. For instance, Mehan (1980) describes how the competent student is constructed through interactional alignment of the student’s participation, display of academic knowledge and the established classroom discourse. MacLure and French (1980) show how students' systematically draw on the teachers’ hints in classroom interaction and thereby try to guess what the teacher wants in terms of desired answer. The teachers view these student strategies as competent. I now turn to Iman’s trajectory of identification from fourth through sixth form classes.