The Role of Narrative in Developing Critical Language Awareness: Multiple Writings and Classroom Discourse

Abstract

This paper is based on a pilot research project undertaken with fourteen year-old girls at a private school in Melbourne. One of the primary aims was to listen to what my students had to say about their classroom and their experience of school. Intuitively, I knew that if I was going to find out something new about learning and teaching, I should listen to their voices, juxtaposing what they had to say with my own view of my teaching. Secondly, I wanted to focus on narrative as a way of introducing critical literacy so that we could ask questions of how language organises experiences into culturally shaped understandings of the world. I explicitly asked my students to tell a story about their classroom, to conceive of their classroom as a setting providing the features of a narrative such as characters, atmosphere and so on and then, to use their stories to open up critical understandings of the nature of language and discourse. The understandings that emerged from the research were also used to investigate my own teaching strategies and interpretations, my influence in the classroom and the kind of stories I had been telling about learning and teaching.