Beyond the Literal: Microtransformations in a Secondary ESL Classroom

摘要

There has been little exploration regarding how Anglo teacher's interactions with Latina/o language learners influence student subjectivities. In this article the author attempts to use a theoretical tool from Critical Race Theory called "microaggressions " and her theoretical construct "microtransformations" to explore how a teacher's linguistic engagements with Latina/o language learning students can create and disrupt particular racialized student subjectivities. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an ideological framework that asks scholars to use race as the primary construct through which data is viewed (Ladson-Billings, 2001). Along with exploring how oppressive structures deny access to racial groups (Crenshaw, 1995), CRT takes as primary those moments when people of color transcend stereotypes and successfully negotiate institutions (Tate, 1997). An important theoretical tool of CRT then is the notion of how student identities are impacted by their experiences in school. Identities in this sense may more accurately be called subjectivities because identity is construed as "a fixed autonomous self" (Hagood, 2002, p. 249), whereas subjectivity suggests a "decentered self" (Hagood, 2002, p. 255) that is constantly forming and reforming, taking and retaking shape, and responsive to history, contexts, cultures, language, and relationships. Walkerdine (1997) argued that subjectivities are created by institutional practices that do the work of making a particular person be seen (and perhaps see herself) in a particular way (e.g., intelligent or incompetent). Institutional practices are designed, for the most part, to deny access of resources to specific groups of people (people of color, women). In educational institutions the range of subjectivities available to oppressed groups tends to be limited and the available identities are often self-pathologizing (Walkerdine, 1997).