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Intercultural Discourse and Communication in Education
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a tenth-grade English class about the relationship between identity, language, and power. As part of the curriculum, the students discussed issues of dialect, identity, and power that emerged in their own lives. Nearly all the students in the class and in the school were African American, were bidialectal (speakers of both Standard English and African American English1), and lived in the same low-income, predominantly African American neighborhood in a Rust Belt US city. The classroom teacher and I, both white and living in predominantly upper-income, white communities, co-taught the curriculum. The following excerpt from the class highlights the convergence of different communication patterns and expectations for appropriate classroom discourse.
The excerpt includes three different perspectives on appropriate communication in the classroom: the students’ (especially Brenda’s), their teacher’s, and mine. During the discussion about language that is excerpted above, the students in the class often communicated their ideas by talking simultaneously and by talking loudly, often to show passion for the topic and to emphasize their points of view. Humor was often intermixed with serious propositions, such as in Glenisha’s opening comment about “white boys.” Students also supported each other’s points of view through repetition and backchanneling, giving short affirmative ...
