Central to the development of community in schooling is the co-development of context with/in social interaction. A significant but understudied aspect of the relation between context and community is the production of social space. Students and teachers mediate the production and reproduction of community spaces with dynamically interactive discursive and material/embodied resources. In their use of these resources, interactants index and construct alignments that reach beyond present interactions to institutional and broad social positionings. The reproduction and production (or stabilization and change) of community in schooling can be traced by following this production of space. This production in turn has important implications for the development of community spaces in social worlds beyond schooling.  

This research is based upon ethnographic data collection (e.g., video-taped discussions, course papers, field notes, institutional data) in a high school Academy ("school within a school"). I studied the Junior Class of the Academy across their English and History (team-taught) courses as well as on an out-of-state trip. The group's racial diversity (45% African American, 55% European American), its development as a cohort over a three year history, and the teachers' emphasis of large group discussion made this research setting particularly rich for analyzing the potentials and difficulties of developing "communities of difference." In my analysis I interpret large group discussions across social and historical planes that project beyond the classroom, including broad-based discourses of race and gender, state funding networks, and the history and geography of the Academy.

In order to develop an understanding of how discourse, community, and context are co-constituted, I focus upon the production of social space. I relate neo-Marxist and postmodern work in "space theory" or "human geography" (e.g., Gregory, Harvey, Lefebvre, Peet, Soja) to analyses of communication and social space developed from textual and interactional research (e.g., Bakhtin, Duranti, Goffman, Kendon). For example, in one section I draw upon Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope to analyze how a discussion of Huckleberry Finn is related to how students (historically and geographically) position themselves and one another in relation to the text, to the Academy as an institution, and to classroom discourse itself as a relatively stable chronotopic practice. In developing educational practice, my work has significant implications for understanding discussion dynamics within multicultural education.

Dissertation Committee:

Chair: Bertram C. Bruce, Curriculum & Instruction, UIUC

Paul Prior, English Department, UIUC

Peggy Miller, Speech Communication, UIUC

James V. Wertsch, School of Education, Washington University