Narrative Construction of Motive and Identity in the Classroom Lesson Occasion : An Interpretive Participant Observational Research in Classroom

Abstract

It has been criticized that the classroom research is based on P-P paradigm. By contrast, the research which is focus on the process of meaning-making is called "qualitative research". In these kind of research, the most important place is given to qualitative analysis of excerpts of actual classroom talk. In this paper, I adopted the methodology called "interpretive participant observational research" and analyzed the actual talk in the classroom. In the school culture, children get to master the roles they are given under a dominant discourse though the mastery and performance are not always connected automatically. They appropriate the dominant discourse as the cultural tool for mediating to participate the classroom practice and re-construct the discourse. The discourse also function as the cultural tool for constructing the power. The power is potentially possessed by both teachers and students. This means, although teachers are normally assigned authority to control the lessons, the social formation could be changed because the classroom lesson is a texture of various voices and it is constructed by the irreducible tension between teachers and each children. In this paper, I discuss that motive and identity is socially constructed according to the contexts or relations. The motives are not in the individual but constructed as the device of making the action understandable which describe actor's life as narrative. Identity is also not substantial notion but constructed by means of narratives as cultural tools according to the sociocultural contexts. Both motive and identity in the classroom practice constructed from multi-voiced narratives of all the participants of the practice. But some voices of the participant are tend to be ignored under the power relations in the practice. As so, it could be the way to make classroom practice better to take care of that kind of voices.