The long weekend is gone! I have to revisit where we left it with professor Rebecca Rogers. In her book Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, she uses Gee's lens to map out the learning construct by elucidating the components of Discourse. We referred to Gee (1996) and concurred that social interaction patterns, personal identity, and sharing of experiences are what constitutes a discourse. Several factors permeate social interaction patterns; math teachers' figured identity (Shabtay & Heyd-Metzuyanim, 2019), students' background, language disposition, institutional culture, ethnicity, and race. An individual personal character would also play a role in advancing math classroom discourse; for instance, introverts tend to share less compared to extroverts. I limit my sight to those experiences in or out of the classroom that qualifies and relates to mathematics. Masingila (1993) believes that students' everyday situation experiences are just as valuable as the conventional mathematics curriculum. Tate (2008) asserts that students' social backgrounds, first language, ethnicity, race, and geographical residence dictate their experiences and shape their character. Such experiences are a valuable starting point in classroom discourse.
As math teachers, we will always have the challenge of how to make students' in-class discourse count. Most of the time, converting the students' out-of-class experiences and relating them to conventional math curricula is a daunting task. To facilitate productive math classroom social interactions; the teacher should be well informed about the students' text inference, social context, culture, and institutional values (Gee, 1999).
Let me drop it here for now. Next, I will be listening to James Gee and Fairclough in a bid to understand the differences between Discourse and discourse.
Focusing my Lenses to Understand the Terrain.
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