Small stories as performative resources: An emerging framework for studying literacy teacher identity.

SMALL STORIES AS PERFORMATIVE RESOURCES

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Abstract

Taking a functionalist small stories approach, we conceptualize and study teacher identity

as theatrical performance of self. From that perspective, we ask: What identity work do

small stories do for teachers in literacy classrooms? How do interlocuters use available

resources – including curricular resources, small-scale discursive resources, and

circulating master narratives/storylines about “how the world is” – to accomplish that

identity work through small stories? Analyzing a focal small story event in an urban U.S.

middle school English classroom, we show how a teacher a) mobilized human and

nonhuman story characters to perform being “owner” of the classroom “territory,” b)

appropriated a micro-discursive routine in the classroom, the IRE sequence, to

accomplish that performance of self, and c) construed a reality, a naturalized set of

assumptions about the social order of the classroom, by recruiting assumptions available

in more broadly circulating cultural “master narratives” about teachers, students and

classroom discipline. Combining layers of small story analysis allows us to trace teacher

identity through locally enacted, interactionally negotiated performances.

Key Words: performance, identity, small stories, teachers, classrooms, literacy


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1. Introduction

Often what talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time

not engaged in giving information but in giving shows. And observe, this theatricality is not based on mere displays of feelings or faked exhibitions of

spontaneity or anything else by way of the huffing and puffing we might derogate by calling theatrical. The parallel between stage and conversation is much, much deeper than that. The point is that ordinarily when an individual says something, he is not saying it as a bald statement of fact on his own behalf. He is recounting. He is running through a strip of already determined events for the engagement of

his listeners (Erving Goffman, 1974, p.508).

Identity research in education has proliferated in recent years, and scholarship on

identity within the field of literacy has enjoyed especially robust engagement. In a review

of identity studies in literacy, Moje and Luke (2009) use five metaphors to chart the

scholarly terrain of this work: identity as difference, identity as self, identity as

mind/consciousness, identity as narrative, and identity as positioning. Developing each

metaphor in the review to examine “how literacy matters to identity and how identity

matters to literacy” (415), they point to the value of locating where, in the universe of

identity scholarship, a particular study of literacy and identity might emerge and

contribute back to the ongoing conversation.

The logic of Moje and Luke’s article seems to develop progressively, with each

subsequent metaphor being a more highly preferred vantage point for conceptualizing

identity studies in literacy. Thus, the last metaphor is preferred, because, as they explain,

positioning metaphors allow for the doing of identity – or identity in activity – to

be as powerful a means of self-construction and representation as the narrativizing

of identity because positioning metaphors require that the researcher follow

people through different physical/spatial and social/metaphorical positions of their


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lives, documenting activity, artifacts, and discursive productions simultaneously

(p. 431).

In considering implications of each metaphor for identity study in literacy, Moje and

Luke write almost exclusively about students’ identities in questions and

conceptualizations of literacy learning.

Despite being virtually absent in the review, no doubt reflecting its scarcity in the

scholarship, literacy teaching also involves identity work. Handfield, Crumpler, and Dean

(2010), for example, show how a fourth grade teacher tactically recontextualized and

creatively adapted the discourses of standardization, bilingual education, writer’s

workshop, and novice teacher status across space and time. From this analysis, they show

the difficulties and complexities of locating literacy teaching identity. McKinney and

Giorgis (2009) take up the question of how elementary writing teacher identities were

performed in literacy autiobiographies and in qualitative interviews. In studying a middle

school classroom, Author examined how a literacy teacher accomplished identity work

through narrative events that primarily referred to the curricular content, rather than to

events from her own life. These and other exceptions notwithstanding (e.g., Hunt &

Handsfield, 2013; Rainville & Jones, 2009), the scarcity of work – either conceptual or

empirical – on identity in/and literacy teaching deserves more attention from the field,

because of its implications for literacy teacher education and professional development

(Author), as well as for literacy curriculum and instruction.

Our present goal, then, is to contribute to the project of advancing theoretical and

empirical understandings of teacher identity studies in literacy through examination of

how “small stories” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Georgakopoulou 2007) can


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function as identity performances for literacy teachers in classrooms. We focus not only

on how such performances happen across physical/spatial and social/metaphorical

domains, as Moje and Luke discuss, but also on how small stories performatively

function in relation to curricular, discursive, material, and other available resources. The

study therefore asks two focal questions: What identity work do small stories do for

people – especially teachers – in literacy classrooms? How do interlocutors mobilize

available resources – including curricular resources, small-scale discursive resources, and

circulating master narratives/storylines about “how the world is” – to accomplish that

identity work?

In addressing the questions, we first conceptualize teacher identity as

performative in nature, elaborating a metaphor that is mentioned, but not foregrounded,

by Moje and Luke (2009), but that seems particularly relevant for the study of teaching

and teacher discourse. Secondly, building from the work of Bamberg and

Georgakopoulou (2008), we situate small story research as a mechanism for studying

teacher identity performances. In that discussion, we identify three interpretive layers for

such study – a framework that organizes our presentation of findings in the subsequent

section. In discussion, we summarize and explore the implications of our argument that

teachers draw on curriculum, micro-discursive classroom routines, and circulating grand

narratives in order to perform selves through small stories across discursive spaces.

2. Analytic framework and background research 2.1 Identity as performance

In this paper, we take up the ideas of narrative and positioning with respect to

identity, but we foreground the metaphor of theatrical drama or performance as evoked


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by interactional sociologist Erving Goffman and rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1968),

among others. In a series of books, Goffman developed the idea that in mundane

everyday interactions, what he evocatively called “the performance of self in everyday

life” (the title of his 1959 book), humans perform dramas for one another – as if they

were actors upon a stage, performing elaborately structured and creatively improvised

shows for various audiences. The metaphor is famously captured in Macbeth’s haunting

soliloquy:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts (Shakespeare, Act II, Scene VII, Lines

142-145).

The metaphor mobilized here, as alluded to in the epitaph above, is theatrical in nature. It

likens identity – and more broadly human existence – to the situation of actors on stages

and audiences looking on. Interactional situations, when guided by this metaphor, are

seen as aesthetic in nature, quite often involving the poetic function of language

(Jakobson, 1960) to produce effects on audiences (Burke, 1968). The performance

metaphor also evokes a host of coordinated, behind-the-scenes work and negotiations that

go into theatrical productions.

What does such a performative metaphor for identity entail? What follows from

the metaphor for classroom-based literacy scholarship on teacher identity? And how is

the performance metaphor different from the positioning metaphor foregrounded by Moje

and Luke (2009)? First, a performative perspective holds that identity claims are based on


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what discourse does as much or, in some cases, more than on what discourse says. This

insight was developed – to an extent – in the work of philosopher of language Austin

(1964), who described illocutionary speech acts as doing more than referring to the

world, but also performing acts through language, one famous example being “I now

pronounce you husband and wife.”

Second, the theatrical metaphor does suggest the interactional sociological project

of everyday people telling narratives and stories, but not the sorts of stories that seem to

be a primary focus in work on teacher identity from a performance perspective (e.g.,

McKinney & Giorgis, 2009): “fully formed” personal narratives about singular past

events experienced by the teller (Labov, 1972). Goffman (1974) observes,

The recounting of a lengthy incident by a practiced raconteur can easily be seen to

qualify [as storytelling], but linguists have been less ready to appreciate the

replayed character of sentence-long stories contributed by persons on the

run…Yet if long stories are examples of replayed experience, so are quite short

ones” (p. 504).

Building on Goffman’s observation, small stories researchers study just such sentence-

long (sometimes longer) replays, told casually by persons in the give and take of ordinary

conversation (e.g., Bamberg & Georgakopolou, 2008; Georgakopolou, 2007; Ochs &

Capps, 2001; Wortham, 2006). Such conversation can, but need not necessarily, take

place in classrooms (Author).

Wortham (2006) pointed out the affordances of a performative perspective to

understanding the dynamics of literacy classroom discourse and its interrelationship with

identity – this body of work importantly informs our perspective here. For example,


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Wortham (2001) elucidated the distinction between narrated events and storytelling

events (an insight taken up by McKinney & Giorgis, 2009, p. 113), drawing from the

work of Jakobson (1971). This work noted how the content of narrative-in-use may be

self-telling, but the interactional performance of a narrative (i.e., the storytelling event)

may be self-enacting. In the case of teacher narrating, for example the participant

examples discussed in Wortham (2006), interactional performances may be other-

enacting (e.g., teachers ascribing certain identities to students). Wortham (2006) goes

further to show how identity performances accumulate over time to sediment student

identity trajectories within a given classroom setting.

The perspective we take here goes beyond Wortham’s exploration into deeper

appreciation for the poetic function of language, that is language spoken or written for its

own sake (Jakobson, 1960). Moreover, the situation of engaging with poetic language is

said to be aesthetic in its nature (Author). Literary studies, which historically has – as a

discipline – been more attuned to this sort of discourse than the social sciences (including

research in literacy education), has also historically been claimed as part of the curricular

content of English language arts. A theatrical perspective thus suggests an aesthetic way

of listening to narrative-talk-in-interaction in classrooms more akin to savoring,

critiquing, and otherwise responding to an artistic performance than taking in information

(Goffman, 1974, p. 506). This perspective goes beyond considering how “players” in

classrooms are enacting positions in relation to one another, although that is certainly a

focal interest, because it also takes an interest in how classroom agents mobilize the

poetic function of language – artful language for its own sake – to do identity work in

face-to-face interaction.


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An implication for scholarship on teacher identity is the idea of taking a more

literary or poetic approach in interpreting classroom narratives, in order to appreciate the

way in which teacher identity is a kind of artful accomplishment. However, that

accomplishment is studied as an interactionally and historically emergent social practice,

rather than as an abstracted, formalist text. In bringing a theatrical metaphor to bear on

small story performances in classroom talk, therefore, we focus on the performative

function – the theatrical dimensions – of narrative. The project of performing a self

(indeed, drawing attention to the self-as-skilled-performer) in relation to others (ratified

listeners, bystanders) is one aspect of this theatricality, but so is the engagement of an

audience in some constructed world. We might refer to the worlds constructed in the

“everyday theater” of the classroom as “social imaginaries” (LeFebvre, 1991),

cumulating, normalizing construals of how the social imaginary of the classroom is and

works.

In this sense, our conception of identifying performances relates to Butler’s

(1988) notion of performativity. According to Butler (1988, 2004) identity is something

one does, rather than something one is. “Self is not only irretrievably ‘outside,’

constituted in social discourse,” but “the ascription of interiority is itself a publicly

regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication” (p. 8). Identities are neither

expressions, nor performances, of “normal” or “natural” selves or relations, but instead

are constituted through performances, or “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler, 1984,

p.1). One aspect to which we draw particular attention here is “stylization.” When

identity is conceived as performative, identifying performances become sites both for

understanding a) how identity categories, such as teacher/student, are constructed through


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artful – yet mundane, under-the-radar, sometimes unconscious – classroom discourse and

b) for destabilizing and resisting potentially oppressive, “grand narratives,” about the

naturalness of such categories.

Although related, our identity-as-performance conceptualization does not appear

to fall within Lewis and del Valle’s (2009) characterization of “performative” approaches

that belong in the “second wave” of research on literacy and identity (work happening in

the 1990s and 2000s) which they argue the field has now moved beyond into a “third

wave” of identity research focused more on hybridity, metadiscursivity, and spatiality.

Our notion of “performance” is somewhat different from the sense of performativity

highlighted in their discussion, which seems more aligned with Moje and Luke’s (2009)

discussion of identity-as-positioning. What distinguishes our approach from Lewis and

del Valle’s characterization of performative research is the theatrical metaphor guiding

our work – a notion that they don’t develop in depth. We also fold notions of hybridity,

metadiscursivity, and particularly spatiality into our conception of identity-as-

performance. Finally, given the research showing that – for better or for worse – teachers

do most of the talking in literacy classrooms (Applebee et al., 2003; Nystrand, 1997), the

theatricality emphasized here seems especially appropriate for the study of teacher

identity discussed here, in contrast to the study of adolescent literacy and identity

focusing the handbook in which Lewis and del Valle’s chapter appeared.

2.2 Small stories as performative resources: An emerging framework for studying

literacy teacher identity

Although literacy scholarship on identity is ever more richly theorized and

studied, with some scholarship taking an explicitly performative stance toward student


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identity (e.g., Enciso, 1998; Enriquez, 2011) and other work focused on teacher identity

as interactionally accomplished positioning work (e.g., Handsfield et al 2010; Hunt &

Handsfield, 2013; Rainville & Jones, 2009; Watson, 2007), few studies have trained the

focus on the theatricality of teacher identity performances. Especially relevant to our

project here are the teacher identity studies of Handsfield et al (2010) and McKinney and

Giorgis (2009). Handsfield et al (2010) argue “for a theoretical and analytical approach to

literacy research that considers literacy instruction and teacher identities as discursively

co-constructed in the particulars of everyday practice” (405). Investigating how a focal

teacher negotiates “multiple and conflicting ideologies of literacy and teaching” (p. 405)

as part of her work, Handsfield et al (2010) do not invoke narrative or performance as a

conceptual, metaphorical, or analytic framework. Yet we find what we would call “small

story” data in their article (p. 417), parsed into “interactional units. They analyze the data

primarily in terms of how the referential content of the talk positions the teacher in

relation to broader social discourses, or “chronotopes,” of standardization, bilingual

education, writers’ workshop, and novice teacher status. At the same time, they notice the

particular identity positioning happening in the moment-by-moment unfolding of the

research interview, as Isobel “enacts” what it means to be a teacher for, or perhaps more

accurately, in concert with the interviewer. Yet, we notice a poetic, or aesthetic shaping

of the teacher language that gets eclipsed by the focus on positioning.

In a broader study of nine elementary literacy specialists, McKinney and Giorgis

(2009) studied writing teacher identities. These researchers explicitly took up a

performative metaphor, as we do here. Foregrounding the identity-constituting capacities

of narrative writing and narrative-in-interaction, they investigated a) how literacy


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specialists constructed identities as writers and as teachers of writing in writers’

autobiographies and in research interviews and b) how the two identity performances

interrelated. Because of their performative understanding of narrative-in-interaction,

McKinney and Giorgis’s multi-layered analysis suggests how curricular content (e.g.,

narrative writing) can become a resource for teacher identity performance (e.g., teacher

of writing), just as teacher identity performances (i.e., as “writer” or “non-writer”) can

become resources for curriculum and instruction (e.g., the work of teaching writing).

Thus we respond to the existing discursively oriented teacher identity scholarship by

examining small stories in classroom literacy events as performances of teacher identity.

To pursue this interpretive work, we turn to the already-introduced sociolinguistic

scholarship on small stories.

Small story research emerged as a response to the canonical narrative research

conducted in sociolinguistics since at least the 1960s. That body of work tended to focus

on long, “fully formed” stories of personal experiences that were elicited in interviews

and often analyzed in structuralist terms (e.g., Labov, 1972; Polanyi, 1985).

Georgakopoulou (2007) calls such stories “canonical” because they tended to obscure

other sorts of stories told by people, often “on the run” (as Goffman puts it), that may not

have fit those criteria. Scholars conceptualize small stories more as social practices than

as highly structured texts, although they are structured, often poetically, according to

logics of social practice (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Georgakopoulou, 2007). Indeed, the

“interactional units” labeled in Handsfield et al’s (2010) transcript could just as well have

been labeled “poetic units,” given how the lay-out of the transcript evokes many of the


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ethnopoetic conventions for narrative analysis (Author; Gee, 1985; Hymes, 1981;

Poveda, 2002).

Small stories tend to be short, fleeting in nature, and interactionally contingent.

Such stories are often future oriented, meaning that they function rhetorically to induce

some change in an audience (Burke, 1968) or to spur some social (inter)action in

response (Author). A part of that future orientation is aesthetic in nature, as Goffman

elaborates:

talking is likely to involve the reporting of an event – past, current, conditional, or

future, containing a human figure or not – and this reporting need not be, but

commonly is, presented as something to reexperience, to dwell on, to savor,

whatever the eventual action the presenter hopes his little show will induce the

audience to undertake (p.506).

Indeed, Goffman’s attention to past, current, conditional, and future orientations of

stories points to a similar way of categorizing small stories:

• Past event. Some narratives, often told by the “practiced raconteur” alluded to

by Goffman, include lengthy stories of past experience, for example those

studied in life story interviews (Labov, 1972).

• Current. Other narratives recount what happens, or is happening, in the

present, for example procedural narratives describing what routinely happens

or happened (Author).

• Conditional and future – Still other stories index hypothetical past, present, or

perhaps most often future possible worlds (Author; Ochs & Capps, 2001).


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Olson and Terry (2006) suggest that hypothetical narratives can offer insights

into tellers’ hopes and expectations for the future.

We have thus far been speaking as if there were two simple figures at play in the

theatricality of (classroom) discourse: speakers and audiences. Goffman (1981) broke

down that binary into a set of “positions” he called production formats and participant

roles. Production formats could, following the theatrical imagery, include authors (those

responsible for the precise language talk upon the stage), animators (actors uttering the

words), and producers (those ultimately responsible for the production of talk). Footing

breaks down the notion of audience to include ratified listeners, bystanders, etc. All of

these ideas about “participant roles” are complicated further by subsequent scholarship

(e.g., Irvine, 1996) that further breaks down the speaker/audience binary to show the

complex lamination of roles, including performances-within-performances, that may

characterize social interaction.

Some small stories research has focused on classrooms, for example

Georgakopoulou’s (2009) study of girls’ exchanging extra-curricular stories, some of

them texted, about their dating lives under the radar of the teacher. An emerging body of

work conceptualizes at least some sorts of teacher narratives as “small stories” (Author)

offering an analytic entrée into the study of teacher identity. It is that approach we pursue

here in a three-part analysis. Following a model of positioning developed by Bamberg

and Georgakopoulou (2008) we analyze the teacher’s small story in terms of three

positioning levels: Level 1, how characters are performed within the story; Level 2, how

the speaker/narrator performs a self in relation to others within the interactive situation;

and Level 3, how the speaker/narrator performs a sense of self/identity with regard to


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dominant discourses or grand narratives. This model enables us to view identity

performances as constructed with characters (e.g., self/others) in time and space. It allows

us to demonstrate “how the referential world is constructed as a function of the

interactive engagement, where the way the referential world is constructed points to how

the teller wants to be understood, or more appropriately, to how tellers index a sense of

self” (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008, p.379). Finally, this model – because it takes

interaction as a fundamental unit (most explicitly in Level 2) – yields examination of

students’ co-construction and uptake of small stories performed by a teacher.

3. Methods

3.1 Site and participants

The data presented here come from a qualitative case study of one middle school

teacher’s use of small stories as pedagogical resources for teaching writing in English

language arts (Author(s)). The study was conducted at a middle school we call Hoyt,

located in the urban center of mid-sized Midwestern city that had been beset with

economic hardship for many years. The school primarily served African-American

students living below the poverty line. At the time of the study, the school had failed to

make Adequate Yearly Progress, as defined by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

act, for four consecutive years and was therefore required to enlist the services of an

external “turn around” company. AchieveFirst (pseudonym) was the company hired to

help improve instruction and subsequently raise test scores as Hoyt.

The focal teacher, who we call Ms. Wagner, was a European American woman

who had begun teaching in her early thirties after previously working in business. At the

time of the study, she had taught sixth grade language arts at the school for twelve years,


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the duration of her teaching career, and now managed many roles and responsibilities

there. For instance, she often mentored teachers at Hoyt as well as student teachers from

the local university. In addition, she served on the School Improvement Team and as one

of her building’s curriculum leaders in the district, roles that often took her out of the

classroom to attend meetings. Ms. Wagner was selected as a participant for this study

based on Author One’s assessment, made during previous research conducted in her

classroom, that she employed storytelling in her teaching.

Ms. Wagner, an English language arts teacher, described herself as an avid reader

and writer explaining that she wrote poetry in her spare time and hoped to publish a

children’ book someday. She also said she “tried to always use best practices” in her

teaching and worked hard to stay abreast of and align her instruction with frequently

changing federal, state, and district curricular expectations for sixth grade language arts.

Occasionally, Ms. Wagner expressed her frustration with “the system” or “society” or

“her students.” By in large, though, Ms. Wagner was confident about her skills as a

teacher and optimistic that she could successfully adapt to whatever might be required of

her as a teacher.

The sixth grade students featured in the case study were the members of Ms.

Wagner’s English language arts class, what Ms. Wagner referred to as an “accelerated

class.” According to Ms. Wagner, students for this accelerated class had been hand

selected by the sixth grade teaching team because of their relatively high test scores, good

attitudes, and supportive home environments. Of the 24 students in the class, 16 were

females and 8 were males. Of the students, 22 were African American. The other two

students, both girls, were of European American descent.


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3.2 Data collection and analysis

Following previous case study research in English language arts classrooms at the

middle and high school levels (e.g., Lee, 1993), we focused the study on an instructional

unit. The focus of the study was a period of six months (January – June 2006), the time

span of an integrated language arts unit based on Gary Paulsen’s young adult novel,

Hatchet. Hatchet is a fictional adventure novel chronicling the experience of 13 year-old

Brian Robeson, a city boy, who is stranded alone in the Canadian wilderness after a plane

crash. In the story Brian survives 54 days in a harsh and unfamiliar environment with

nothing but a hatchet before being rescued. The unit, which the teacher had created

herself and used with previous classes, was an integrated novel unit designed to teach

English language arts content objectives related to reading, writing, listening, speaking,

and viewing through novel-related activities. During the course of the novel unit, students

would read aloud as a whole class and in literature circle groups, complete literature

circle role sheets, learn about story elements and text features, answer comprehension

questions, write journal entries, compose essays, take a multiple choice test, view a

movie, and more.

Data sources include researcher field notes, video recordings of all class sessions,

occasional video recordings of lunch conversations among the focal teacher, Ms. Wagner,

and her colleagues, interviews with Ms. Wagner and focal students, curricular texts (e.g.,

the text of the novel Hatchet), and student writing. Authors One and Two collaborated to

design the study and both were present when the study was introduced to the participants.

Author One conducted the majority of classroom observations and other data collection

activities. Both researchers adopted a stance of participant observer throughout their time


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in the classroom, most often operating recording equipment and taking field notes, but

also occasionally answering questions and assisting students with assignments and having

informal conversations about all manner of topics with Ms. Wagner.

Analysis of data began by identifying narrative utterances, or small stories, told

by Ms. Wagner during the literacy events of the novel study unit. A total of twenty-five

small stories were ultimately identified. The small story at the center of this analysis, a

story we call The Wolf, was selected for further analysis due to what we considered its

unsettling character (i.e., a white teacher narrating herself as “owner” of her black

students) as well as its apparent connection to discourse(s) beyond the classroom (e.g.,

they come in like they own the place). The transcript of The Wolf, presented below,

includes talk that contextualizes the small story performance.

Ms. Wagner performed the small story during the first ten minutes of the pre-

lunch session of her English Language Arts class on April 11th as part of a routine

literacy event, a review of correct answers to written discussion questions about the

novel. At the beginning of the novel unit, Ms. Wagner had given students a 20-page

double-sided packet containing a variety of worksheets including discussion questions

related to each chapter of the novel the class was reading. To guide movement through

the novel, she assigned reading and discussion questions for each chapter. Typically, in a

class session immediately following one in which students had been assigned to read and

answer questions, Ms. Wagner would review correct answers aloud with the whole class.

The following exchange between Ms. Wagner and students occurred as part of just such

an answer-sharing session.

1. T: Five.


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2. T: What does Gary Paulsen mean by owns him?

3. T: When on page 121 he says, “He knew Brian, knew him and owned him.”

4. T: First of all, what’s he talking about?

5. S: (All answering at once, making most responses unintelligible) Survival.

6. T: The wolf.

7. T: Look at 121.

8. T: What do you think, Paris?

9. Paris: Uh, uh, if you make that the wolf, that Brian was scared of him.

10. Paris: And he wouldn’t do anything to him.

11. T: In the woods, who do you think is higher up, a wolf or Brian?

12. S: (in unison) The wolf.

13. T: The wolf.

14. T: So Brian is owned by the wolf because what does the wolf own?

15. S: The territory.

16. T: The territory.

17. T: And Brian was in his territory.

18. T: And so, it’s like you coming in this classroom.

19. T: You’re walking into MY territory.

20. T: Now all of us work in it, and we want to be a team,

21. T: But I am going to tell you what to do.

22. T: So, I’m like the wolf, and you are like who?

23. S: (in unison) Brian.

24. T: Okay, so what does he mean by he owned him?


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25. T: Brian was in the wolf’s territory, and animals are all about territory.

Lines 18-21 (in bold above) constitute what we identify as Ms. Wagner’s small story,

“The Wolf.” At the core of this small story are two sequentially linked events: 1) you,

coming in this classroom, are walking into my territory and 2) I am going to tell you what

to do. The narrated events are set in a particular location—where the small story is being

told—“this classroom.” The narrative defines the setting, this classroom, as the teller’s

“territory” and therefore, a place where the audience can expect the teller to “tell them

what to do.”

Following Gee’s (1991) narrative approach we present the talk according to idea

units, where each line constitutes an idea unit. Though we were able to recover the

teacher’s talk and corresponding paralinguistic information such as gesture, gaze,

intonation and the like for our analysis, because of the camera angle (i.e., directed at the

students’ backs) and quality of the audio-recording we were not always able to make out

the utterances and/or nonverbal responses of individual students.

Drawing on Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), we examine the small story at

three levels which might be labeled 1) story characters, 2) narrative interlocutors, and 3)

grand narratives. For Level One we analyzed the parallel relations among the central

characters in the small story text—the teacher and students in the classroom—in

relationship to the characters in the literary text – the wolf and Brian – that the small

story references. Level Two focuses on the interlocutors in the “here-and-now” of the

small story performance, situating the small story within a specific literacy event and type

of classroom discourse, a recitation reviewing questions students about a chapter in the

novel. At the third level of analysis, we consider the small story in relation to lunchtime


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conversational data to show how Ms. Wagner through her small story simultaneously co-

constructed and recruited circulating, normalizing “grand narratives” about teachers,

students and classrooms. Throughout, we highlight the poetic, or aesthetic, nature of Ms.

Wagner’s small story performance arguing that it was an artful accomplishment and as

such possessed a creative, or constitutive, force for engaging and producing effects on the

audience.

4. Findings and Discussion 4.1 Performing characters and their relations to one another

Ms. Wagner’s small story—“And so, it’s like you coming in this classroom.

You’re walking into MY territory. Now all of us work in it, and we want to be a team, but

I am going to tell you what to do—indexed another known narrative excerpted from the

novel under study. In lines 17 and 18 she says, “and Brian was in his territory, and so it’s

like.” The words “and so it’s like” frame the small story as a metaphorical comparison to

the narrative in the text:

The wolf claimed all that was below him as his own, took Brian as his own. Brian

looked back and for a moment felt afraid because the wolf was so. . . so right. He

knew Brian, knew him and owned him and chose not to do anything to him. But

the fear moved then, moved away, and Brian knew the wolf for what it was—

another part of the woods, another part of all of it.

The comparison includes characters, setting, and events. The characters in Ms. Wagner’s

small story are “I”, referring to the storyteller, and “you” plural, referring to the audience,

or the students. In her story, “I” the teacher performs telling “you” the students what to


22

do when “you” walk into this classroom, “my territory.” She likens this arrangement to

the one between two characters in the novel: the wolf and Brian.



Through questioning, Ms. Wagner guides her students to the seemingly natural

conclusion that because Brian was “in the woods” where a wolf is clearly “higher up,” he

is therefore “owned by” the wolf:



13. T: The wolf.


15. S: The territory.

16. T: The territory.

17. T: And Brian was in his territory.

Line 20 further elaborates the relationship between “I” and “you” in “this

classroom” including what “I and you” do in the classroom. The line begins with “now”,

perhaps marking it as a qualifying statement, then continues “all of us work in it and we

want to be a team.” The teacher includes herself as one who works in the setting along

with the students and identifies herself as part of “a team” which includes the students.

This statement may function to acknowledge the existence of more student-centered

narratives about teacher/student relationships in classrooms and perhaps her desire to

associate with such a model. However, with her use of the term “but” at the beginning of

line 20 she makes it clear that on this “team” she plays the role of one that tells others


23

(i.e., students) on the team “what to do” (i.e., insofar as the classroom is a team, she is

captain of that team). Interestingly, the phrase “want to be” implies something “hoped

for, or ideal”--perhaps up to the students themselves--rather than an already existing, or

“natural” state of affairs. While the phrase, “I am going to tell you what to do” seems

more definitive. In this way what initially appears to be a retelling of a current event—

you coming in here—may actually be a conditional or future event. Rather than “like you

do come in here,” it might be intended to mean “like you ought to come in here,” or in an

ideal world—one where her students conform to the rules—they know Ms. Wagner owns

the territory and that they are, therefore, owned by her.

Ms. Wagner prefaced her small story with a recounted event from the novel;

Brian was in the wolf’s territory. As Goffman (1974) has suggested, Ms. Wagner

retelling the event from the novel as part of her small story may have functioned not

simply to transmit information, but to create a drama for an audience. Here, she creates

that sense of drama by comparing the characters in the novel being read to herself, the

storyteller, and her students, both her co-narrators and audience. Such a comparison may

have had the aesthetic effect of transferring the emotional content of the events

transpiring in the story to the classroom actors. In the recounted event, initially “Brian

felt afraid” but once Brian understood and accepted the natural relationship between

himself and the wolf—that the wolf “knew Brian, knew him and owned him and chose

not to do anything to him”—then “the fear moved away.” In fact, the emotion invoked by

indexing the event in the novel may have operated to background the content (i.e., I am

the owner and you are the owned) of the story while foregrounding the feelings

associated with the performance. The effects produced on the audience may have been to


24

feel fear (of the teacher) and then acceptance of “what is”—the natural order of things in

Ms. Wagner’s classroom.

4.2 Performing relations with interlocutors

Ms. Wagner’s small story was embedded in a particular kind of literacy event, a

review of answers to written comprehension questions about a chapter in the novel.

Within the broader review Ms. Wagner read each question and opened the floor to

students to provide an answer. Often, multiple students answered simultaneously and Ms.

Wagner identified the correct answer by either revoicing a student answer or providing an

alternative answer. Occasionally, Ms. Wagner would either expand on correct answers or

ask a series of subquestions with the intention of guiding students to the correct answer,

that is, the answer she had in mind. This pattern is evident in the exchange dealing with

question number five.

In line 2, Ms. Wagner reads the question: “What does Gary Paulsen mean by

owns him?” Students do not immediately respond, and so to support students in

answering the question, she tries several tacks. First, she directs students to the page in

the text where the phrase is found: “When on page 121 he says, ‘He knew Brian, knew

him and owned him.’” She then asks a subquestion, “First of all, what’s he talking

about?” to further reorient students to the text. The most audible response given by

students to this question is “survival.” However, Ms. Wagner does not take up this

response, indicating it is not correct, and instead answers her own question with “the

wolf.” Second, after again referring students to page 121, she poses the question directly

to a specific student, Paris. In lines 9 and 10 Paris answers, “Uh, uh, if you make that the

wolf, that Brian was scared of him, and he wouldn’t do anything to him.” Ms. Wagner


25

fails to positively evaluate Paris’s response, though, once again signaling that this

response is not what she is looking for. Third, Ms. Wagner poses another subquestion to

the whole class. “In the woods, who do you think is higher up, a wolf or Brian?” Students

now have a 50% chance of responding the way Ms. Wagner wants them to, and

apparently they do, because when they call out “the wolf,” Ms. Wagner repeats “the

wolf” to indicate a correct response. She follows up with “So Brian is owned by the wolf

because what does the wolf own?” When students respond “territory,” Ms. Wagner

repeats the word territory and adds “and Brian was in his territory.” After telling a small

story comparing herself and her students to Brian and the wolf respectively, Ms. Wagner

finally returns to the original question “Okay, so what does he mean by he owned him?”

and provides the following answer: “Brian was in the wolf’s territory, and animals are all

about territory.”

Ms. Wagner’s small story was deftly woven into the middle of this routine

question and answer event, between a response given by students to a previous question,


15. S: The territory,

and the posing of a new question,



This interaction appears to have many features of a typical “monologic” recitation

exchange between teacher and students (Mehan, 1979; Nystrand, 1997). That is, the

dialogue follows the ubiquitous Initiate-Respond-Evaluate (IRE) instructional pattern

(Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), driven primarily by the teacher’s questions


26

and varying evaluations of student responses. In lines 4-6, for example, Ms. Wagner

asked a question, and appeared to evaluate the students’ response negatively by providing

an answer herself when the students did not produce the one for which she was looking.

4. T: First of all, what’s he talking about?

5. S: (All answering at once, making most responses unintelligible) Survival.

6. T: The wolf.

Then again, in lines 11-13, Ms. Wagner posed a question and evaluated the students’

response. In contrast to the previous example, however, she repeated the students’

response, indicating a correct answer.



13. T: The wolf.

It is likely that Ms. Wagner’s students experienced this recitation pattern as being

naturalized: teachers and students were playing known and agreed upon social roles

(Cazden, 2001). Given their experiences in schooling to date and given their experiences

in Ms. Wagner’s classroom throughout the academic year, the students likely expected

Ms. Wagner to lead such an interaction through questioning, themselves to respond

briefly, and Ms. Wagner to evaluate their responses (See Authors, Author, Author).

The fact that Ms. Wagner’s small story was situated within a larger recitation has

implications for the roles the teller and audience played. This structured, even ritualistic,

pattern of interaction characterized by the teacher initiating and evaluating student

responses constrained students’ participation in a number of ways. Most notable, perhaps,

is that the teacher was able to guide participants toward her interpretation of the language


27

of the novel through her articulation of initiating utterances and evaluations of competing

interpretations. Still, students were not simply passive recipients of information, but were

participating along side the teacher in the construction of the overall response. While this

pattern of participation gave the appearance that students agreed with the content of the

performance it may, in fact, have been more indicative of their understanding of the

student’s role in the IRE organized recitation. Still, the mere act of students producing

responses they thought the teacher was looking for contributed to discursively

constructing exactly the norm the teacher was describing—one in which she tells students

what to do and, in this case, what to think (or at least say) about who they are in relation

to their teacher.

The small story, however, introduced opportunities for students to shape the

interaction in ways the IRE format did not seem to allow. In Ms. Wagner’s telling of

“The Wolf,” students shaped the content and participated in the unfolding of the narrative

in two ways. First, the students provided key language taken up by the teacher and

revoiced in the narrative. Originally contributed by a student, the word territory, a key

term, was repeated twice by Ms. Wagner in the small story (an example of what Collins

[1982] calls uptake). Secondly, the students themselves actually concluded the story by

responding to Ms. Wagner’s question, in unison, that they were like Brian. Thus they

anticipated and co-constructed her narrative evaluation – the “moral of the story.”

Though Ms. Wagner certainly led students to answer that they were “like Brian,”

the performance of some students in the room demonstrated that there were other (albeit

limited) options for resistance. For example, one student drew in his notebook with his

eyes downcast while Ms. Wagner spoke to the class. He did not lift his eyes to look at


28

Ms. Wagner during the interchange and he did not participate in the choral response. In

fact, this young man showed the first indication he was even paying attention when he

“harrumphed” derisively under his breath as the other students answered Brian. Despite

possibilities for resistance the combination of IRE and metaphorical small story was a

powerful combination for producing the desired effects on the audience—an almost

automatic (and perhaps unconscious) choral response that cast students as “owned” and

the teacher as “owner.”

4.3 Performing grand narratives about teachers, students and classrooms

Ostensibly, the purpose of the small story told in this instructional exchange was

to clarify the meaning of a phrase employed by the author: “What does Gary Paulsen

mean by owns him?/ When on page 121 he says, ‘He knew Brian, knew him and owned

him” (lines 5-6). Ms. Wagner explained to students that the phrase “owned him” meant

“Brian is owned by the wolf because the wolf owns”… “the territory”… “and Brian was

in his territory” (lines 14-17). To further clarify, and perhaps reinforce, this particular

interpretation of the novelistic phrase “the wolf owned Brian,” Ms. Wagner’s told the

small story which metaphorically equated the protagonist wandering into a wolf’s

territory to students entering her classroom. Beyond serving the purpose of facilitating a

common curricular goal in language arts, literary understanding, Ms. Wagner’s small

story performance also contributed to establishing the social order in the classroom.

An analysis of talk that occurred during a lunchtime conversation between Ms.

Wagner and two colleagues provides insight related to this constitutive purpose.

Additionally, it reveals “behind the scenes work” (Goffman, 1981) related to grand

narratives about teachers and students that contributed to Ms. Wagner’s performance.


29

In the lunch period directly following the class session where Ms. Wagner shared

the small story, she ate lunch in her classroom and engaged in a conversation with two

other colleagues: James, the gym teacher, and Don, a teaching coach working for

AchieveFirst, a reform company employed by the district to improve the teaching at

Hoyt. The three educators had discussed a range of topics during the lunch period. The

exchange from which we excerpt below was part of a discussion about classroom

management, and the following interaction addresses what pre-service teachers most

need to know about managing classrooms.

1. Ms. W.: It starts from the minute they walk in.

2. James: It does.

3. Ms. W.: The knowledge of knowing that is what some people are not grasping.

4. Ms. W.: Er, that they should not be allowed to come running in here,

5. Ms. W: Like you own the place or something, you know?

6. Ms. W.: Like they’re just going to come in, well, you know.

7. Don: The person that has control of this 24 by 24 is, is you.

8. Don: Like ‘I control this.’ The principal doesn’t control this 24 by 24, you do.

9. Don: So, we’ve had, I’ve seen teachers, uh, go to a whole different room

10. Don: And go through all the rules and regulations and everything

11. Don: And when you step across this room, there’s all the routines are in place

12. Don: And everything. And this is what you do.

13. Don: I’ve seen teachers line their kids up outside the door.

14. Ms. Wagner: And then, now you walk in.


30

From this exchange we get a sense that a) Ms. Wagner is not alone in her belief

that the classroom is, or should be, the rightful territory of the teacher and, b) that

communicating this norm to students requires on-going action on the part of the teacher.

Both the content and the action represented in this lunchtime exchange (what

might be equivalent to a “teacher’s lounge conversation”) seem to inform Ms. Wagner’s

small story. In this sense, Ms. Wagner’s colleagues might be viewed as co-authors, or

producers, of The Wolf and imagined to be behind the scenes of her classroom

performance. In her story, students coming in to the classroom are walking into her

territory where she will be telling them what to do. In line 4, Ms. Wagner states that

“they” – meaning students – should not come running in “here”, referring to the

classroom, like “they own the place”. The lunchtime conversation also makes it clear that

establishing ownership is not something that just happens on it’s own; it is a condition

that must be shaped and maintained by those who are rightful owners of the classroom, or

those who control “this 24 x 24.” We interpret the numbers to refer to the dimensions of

the classroom - the space within the classroom walls. The participants in the conversation

equate ownership of a physical space with control over the people in it. They also detail

multiple strategies for delimiting the space within the classroom walls as a territory

separate from other territories. They observe that to demarcate the classroom as a

territory “it starts from the minute they walk in” and “when you step across this room”

this is what you do.” Teachers articulate “rules and regulation” outside the “territory”—in

another classroom, in the hall, the minute they walk in—in order to clearly establish

boundaries, to emphasize who controls the classroom space.


31

When read in relationship to this practice of establishing ownership of territory,

and by association control of those entering the territory, Ms. Wagner’s small story can

be seen as a tactic for constructing the classroom space as belonging to the teacher not

unlike explaining rules of the classroom to kids lined up in the hall or in an entirely

different room. Simultaneously, the content and the discursive structure of the focal small

story event established Ms. Wagner as the owner who maintains control of the space and

therefore rules those within the territory. Following this logic, students fall into place as

those “owned” by the teacher or subject to her rule(s). Our interpretation of the lunchtime

conversation leads us to interpret “control” as establishing the rules and regulations and

routines.

Though the educators involved in this conversation seem to agree that teachers

own the classroom territory and ought to tell students in that territory what to do, both the

teachers’ lunch conversation and Ms. Wagner’s small story testify to the socially

constructed nature of the “teacher as owner of the classroom” storyline. The storyline is

socially constructed, because the relations among teachers and students might be

constructed and performed otherwise. There are other possible ways of defining the

relationship of teacher and student to the classroom and each other. For example, when

Ms. Wagner says, “The knowledge of knowing that is what some people are not

grasping/er, that they should not be allowed to come running in here,/ like you own the

place or something, you know?” (lines 3-5), she seems to suggest that “some people” are

defining a different relation between students and teachers where students “own the

place.” Though she seems to be imagining classrooms without order, rather than

classrooms where students are co-owners of the classroom along with their teachers.


32

The teacher’s small story might represent more of an attempt to actively construct

the world in a certain way, rather than to simply name a naturally existing state of affairs

and, therefore, be a self-enacting rather than a self-telling identity performance. Line 20

indicates the constructed nature of the discourse: Ms. Wagner qualifies her statement that

she is the owner of the classroom and entitled to tell them what to do with the comment,

“Now all of us work in it, and we want to be a team.” This statement may reflect a

discursive pull--or a counter narrative defining classroom spaces as collaborative,

student-centered, and co-constructed by teachers and students (Bamberg &

Georgakopoulou, 2008). It also has the effect of communicating the sense that though she

may own them, she like the wolf, is a benevolent ruler who has no desire to “hurt them”

unnecessarily.

5. Conclusion

By elucidating meanings in the novel being read, Ms. Wagner’s small story

served the pedagogical function of teaching curricular content. At the same time, Ms.

Wagner mobilized curricular content and classroom routines to teach students something

entirely different: how they ought to read the context of this classroom. Hence, the

context of a review of end-of-chapter discussion questions and the recitation around those

questions became a pedagogical opportunity to perform something about teacher-student

relationships and about how Ms. Wagner identifies herself in the social position/role of

“teacher.” The content—the characters, themes, and relationships—of the novel became

discursive resources for an identifying narrative-in-interaction that could so effectively

accomplish just such an identity performance (Wortham, 2006).


33

In that moment in time, then, through “The Wolf,” a small story woven together

from textual threads of both the novel being read and the classroom life being lived,

teacher and students interactionally performed a particular co-construction of teacher

identification (and by implication student identification). The comparison drawn in the

small story illuminates the status, role, and expectations of both teacher and students in

the broader context of this classroom. That is, just as in the woods in Hatchet, where a

wolf is higher up than Brian, because the wolf owns the territory; so in this classroom,

because it was claimed as Ms. Wagner’s territory, she performed being higher up (as in a

“pecking order,” to mix metaphors) than the students. Owning the territory meant owning

those who were in the territory. Owning those in your territory meant telling them what to

do. The owner-owned or teacher-student comparison drawn here appeared to boil down

to the following classroom norm: Those who are owned, are of lower status, and must

expect to be told what to do by those who own the territory.

It seems that “The Wolf” metaphorically laid out a set of classroom norms and

also set forth what some might call a “tough love” approach and what others might call

an “authoritarian” approach to identifying as a teacher. The content of Ms. Wagner’s

identification-as-teacher emerged through classroom dialogue about literature, but also

constituted one point in an ongoing trajectory of identification for Ms. Wagner across

larger scales of time in and beyond the classroom (Lemke, 2000). By following threads of

this identity-performing small story across time in Ms. Wagner’s classroom (and across

social spaces, e.g., the lunchtime conversations with colleagues as well as the whole class

interactions with students), it was possible to catch a glimpse of the “behind the scenes

work” that is part of any identity performance (Goffman, 1981). The work of authors


34

(those responsible for the precise language talk upon the stage) and producers (those

ultimately responsible for the production of talk) revealed itself alongside the work of the

animators (actors uttering the words). For instance, here we have tried to show at the

third layer of analysis how circulations of power –how this teacher naturalized and

normalized certain patterns of talk and relationship (e.g., being “higher up”)– was

analyzed by careful attention to small story-in-interaction.

Finally, we argue that viewing Ms. Wagner’s performance of The Wolf through

the lens of theatricality showcased its creative power for constituting identities. A focus

on the theatrical treats small story performances as artful accomplishments that “engag[e]

the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities” and embrace those “in its dynamic field to its

constructive and experientially constitutive force” (Hobart & Kapferer, 2005, p. 1).

Attention to the aesthetic reveals the function, or purpose, and intention (consciously or

unconsciously) of an effect (affect) in the specific organization of symbolic form that,

“through its formation in and to the senses, marries feeling to cognition and meaning” (p.

14) In other words, theatricality highlights the relationship between the form, including

composition and style, and the feelings or understandings induced by the performance. In

the case of Ms. Wagner’s performance of The Wolf, for example, we are able to see how

weaving the small story into another kind of discursive ritual, a recitation, set the stage

for her message about teacher/student relationships to both sound and feel authoritative

and commonsensical. In this sense Ms. Wagner’s performance could be viewed as artful.

This artful performance was a powerful tool by which this teacher engaged her

student audience in a particular constructed world. This teacher performer mobilized

curricular and discursive resources to convincingly communicate “truths” about herself


35

and about her students. Because of “the power of aesthetic forms,” this performance was

especially successful in “appeal[ing] to universal subjectivities, to break through the

categories and limits of reason” (Hobart & Kapferer, 2005, p.4). However, the metaphor

of theatricality also reminds us that Ms. Wagner was not alone on the stage; behind the

scenes of her individual performance were her colleagues, co-authors and producers of

grand narratives advanced in The Wolf. Through small story events, this literacy teacher

negotiated among other authors and storylines to narrate her life, to actively identify

herself as a certain kind of person in relation to others and in relation to curricular

content. Through her narrative performance, Ms. Wagner braided together elements of

past, present and future storylines, settings, and characters in order to construct grand

narratives about herself as teacher, her students, and the curricular content. All of these

elements and echoes of other stories (the flotsam and jetsom of everyday narrating) is the

stuff by which social actors – such as Ms. Wagner – perform their lives and identities and

define the social spaces (i.e., classrooms) they inhabit.


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