JOINT ACTION ON THE WILD SIDE OF
MANHATTAN:
THE POWER OF THE CULTURAL CENTER
ON AN EDUCATIONAL ALTERNATIVE
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the paradoxical qualities of the successful
performance of a teacher generated discussion by a group of
African-American and Hispanic students in an urban alternative
high school. Five minutes of this discussion were videotaped and
submitted to a form of discourse analysis which demonstrated the
students' sensitivity to each other and to the features of the task
as a particular kind of task within
an overall school framing. Despite this pragmatic success, the
initial interpretation by teachers watching this performance was
that the students "had not learned." While it cannot be determined
what it is that the
students did or did not learn, it can be shown that the
students organized
themselves as sensitive participants in an overall cultural
system which
identifies them, and their school, as Other ("alternative").
In their everyday life within the school, along with their teachers
and administrators, they continually perform, for each other and
various observers, both the signs of "otherness" and the signs of
the "center" to which they are Other. This research suggests the
need to go beyond a "difference" model when trying to explain
educational failure in American school, particularly when the
participants can be shown to take into account in their own
behavior the general conditions which they have not themselves
generatedbut which are embodiments of the dominant School culture.
Figure 4.1
Figure 4.2
Figure 4.3
Figure 4.4
Transcript
Hervé
Varenne
Box 115
Teachers College, Columbia University
212-678-3190
hhv1@columbia.edu
Last revision: August 14, 1997