Wotham

95
"How can we best conceptualize students’ socialization to academic life and development
of school identities? This article sketches an approach, one that builds on
research in “language socialization” (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and
Ochs 1986). The body of work on language socialization provides a useful starting
point for analyzing academic socialization, because of its sensitivity to the interrelations
between language and culture and its focus on pragmatics as well as semantic
content."

"Along with others in this volume working on intertextuality and
interdiscursivity, however, I argue that we must also study chains or trajectories of
events across which academic socialization occurs. I borrow the concept of “speech
chains,” developed by Agha in the introduction to this volume, to describe “trajectories
of socialization” across which individual students are socialized academically
and develop school identities"
96
"A language socialization approach to the phenomenon of academic socialization
would examine how habitual academic ways of speaking embed assumptions about
appropriate academic practice. We would study practices in which novices, like new
ninth-grade students, “through interaction with more expert members (e.g., teachers),
become competent participants of that community” (Schieffelin and Ochs
1996:252). Such competence is developed through “recurrent communicative practices”
(Schieffelin and Ochs 1996:253). We would examine how classroom participation
in recurring types of speech events not only helps students learn to participate
competently in academic discourse but also conveys assumptions central to school
culture."

" Such a language socialization approach has several useful aspects. It directs us to
language use as a site for examining academic socialization, and becoming a competent
student is clearly accomplished in significant part through language use. It directs
us to move beyond the referential function of language, to study the social,
cultural, and interactional presuppositions of speech, since becoming a competent
high school student clearly involves pragmatic as well as semantic competence."

"One limitation of classic language socialization research has been its emphasis on
“recurrent communicative practices of novice and expert members” (Schieffelin and
Ochs 1996:253, emphasis added). Defining culture as “a set of socially recognized
and organized practices and theories” (Ochs 1996:409), classic language socialization
research has identified recurrent types of practices characteristic of a culture
and has attributed much of socialization to novices’ repeated exposure to these
practices."
97
"Current work on intertextuality and interdiscursivity shows how the insights of language
socialization research can be extended beyond recurrent types of speech events.
Socialization is a process that happens across events, as an individual moves from
more peripheral or novice participation to fuller participation in a set of practices
(Dreier 2003; Lave and Wenger 1991). Individuals’ trajectories across events vary, in
their ultimate direction and in the nature of the links among specific events."
drivers license/ job
 "A classic
language socialization approach would not study this complex intertextual process of
moving across such a trajectory, exploring instead stable types of events characteristic
of a group. Recurrent types of events certainly play a role in academic and other types
of socialization. But to focus only on recurrent events would be to miss the indeterminacies
and complexities of how individuals move across specific trajectories and how
events in a trajectory are linked."

move beyond the static

" Contemporary studies of socialization, then, must go “beyond the speech event,”
in two respects. First, as I have just argued, socialization involves a series of events,
intertextually linked, across which an individual moves from novice to more established
community member. Empirical studies of socialization must do more than
identify recurrent types of speech events. We must also examine trajectories of socialization
across which individuals move. Second, because individuals’ trajectories
often diverge, research on socialization should also attend to individual and not just
generic trajectories. The links between events that compose an individual’s trajectory
are contingent accomplishments, and we must examine how trajectories are accomplished
in both typical and unusual cases."
students - pregnancies even though they did well in school

speech chain -" trajectory of socialization"

" Speech chains help explain
how series of events are linked together and do the work that constitutes registers and
other phenomena (cf. Agha in press). In this article I use the concept of speech chain
to study the socialization and identity development of a biographical individual. In
studying the academic socialization of an individual, I am concerned with linked series
of events that partly constitute the phenomenon of socialization."
98
"Establishing a trajectory of socialization is in some ways similar to establishing coherence
in a single speech event. In a speech event, participants and analysts can interpret
a sign (say, a sign of identity that helps establish a participant’s social position)
only as the meaning of that sign gets presupposed by subsequent discourse (Garfinkel
and Sacks 1970; Goffman 1976; Silverstein 1992). No matter how robust the typical
meaning of a sign, it must always be contextualized in use. At the moment of utterance,
participants and analysts often do not know what context is relevant for interpreting
a sign. In general, although there are of course many formulaic, predictable
utterances and interactions, participants and analysts can (provisionally) interpret a
sign of identity only as a pattern of mutually presupposing indexical signs allows entextualization—
the solidification of an interactional text such that the sign in question
comes to have a more determinate meaning (Silverstein 1998; Silverstein and Urban
1996; Wortham 2001). Sometimes one denotationally explicit metasign suffices to frame
other signs as having meant something in particular. But more often several subsequent
utterances, each of which presuppose the same meaning for the focal sign, are
required. Each of these signs ends up presupposing both a reading of the focal sign and
a reading of each other. Locked together in such a poetic structure—a configurational,
tacit, “reflexive” metasign (Jakobson 1960; Silverstein 1993)—all the signs can presuppose
something more definite about how the focal participant is being identified."

 A “poetic structure” of signs and event-segments
gets established, across events, as these signs and segments become mutually
presupposing. Such a structure of mutually presupposing signs and segments allows
a trajectory to form, across which an individual gets socialized and emerges as a recognizable
type of person.

 The various events in a trajectory thus cohere not only because of chain-like links
tying prior events to subsequent ones. A trajectory also depends on other indexical
links that tie together more than just temporally contiguous events. Signs and eventsegments
from various events come to presuppose each other and thereby establish
a more determinate social identity for the individual in question. Across the trajectory
of events, a model of identity emerges as signs and segments from several
events converge and come to presuppose each other.
 99
 In order to conceptualize how trajectories of socialization sometimes diverge, it
will help to distinguish several “timescales” (Cole 1996; Lemke 2000). There are “social-
historical” patterns, which develop over decades and centuries. The development
of capitalism, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and similar processes happen at
a social-historical timescale.
time and patterns

As Lemke (2000) argues, human semiotic processes are characterized by interdependence
among processes at widely varying timescales. Many natural phenomena
can be understood with reference to a focal timescale and the timescales immediately
surrounding it. But most interesting human phenomena depend on processes from
disparate timescales

This means, among other things, that we must go beyond studying socialization into
generic cultural types and also study the contingent social identification of individuals.
But we cannot understand ontogenetic trajectories without attending both to
the contingent emergence of identity in particular events and to more stable socialhistorical
and local categories that help give shape both to events and to individual
trajectories. We must understand events, trajectories, social-historical and local categories,
and their interrelations.

100
 We cannot always understand socialization, for instance,
by studying only three timescales—say, centuries-long social-historical
processes, years-long ontogenetic processes, and minutes-long microgenetic
processes. Instead, we must determine which timescales are relevant to explaining a
given phenomenon, and we should expect that the relevant configuration of
timescales may differ from phenomenon to phenomenon. Students may proceed
through academic socialization and get socially identified in different ways in different
contexts, such that analysts must draw on different configurations of
timescales to explain different cases.

 In addition to requiring attention to the local timescale, in a way that many instances
of academic socialization will not, the focal student’s trajectory of socialization
also contains an unexpected twist. For the first few months of the year, the focal student
followed predictably along a widespread trajectory specified both by more
widely circulating classroom expectations and by emerging local models of identity.
But after a few months she veered onto an unusual trajectory that ran counter to those
expectations and models. Understanding academic socialization in this case thus requires
attention to a particular configuration of timescales—including both the local
classroom development of shared models of identity and the unusual months-long
ontogenetic identity development of this student with respect to those local models.

101-102

At the beginning of the year, Tyisha fit this gender stereotype: she was an active,
successful female student. Most of the students started the year trying to figure out
and parrot back what the teachers wanted them to say. Because Tyisha rarely did
this, but instead offered her own opinions, the teachers initially identified her as a
student who made her own arguments.


 103
 As her local social identity shifted from “good student” to “disruptive student” in
December and January, Tyisha’s trajectory of socialization diverged from the one
typical for girls in this class. In the first few months of the academic year she had
been learning to articulate and defend her own opinions, like most other girls in the
class. A series of events involving Tyisha and other students all presupposed this
common trajectory, toward the Paideia goal of students developing their own arguments
about issues of enduring concern. In December, however, some events involving
Tyisha began to have a different character. Teachers and other students
started to identify her statements of opinion as disruptive instead of productive.
104
 At lines 1052–1055, Mrs. Bailey is summarizing her interpretation of a point.
Tyisha offers a gloss at lines 1056–1057, and the teacher reacts immediately by
telling Tyisha she’s wrong. This quick and blunt response contrasts with the teachers’
habitual reaction to other students, and to Tyisha earlier in the year, when they
would have explored her point or been gentler. Another student gives a more accurate
gloss at lines 1059–1060 and the class continues discussing the point, ignoring
Tyisha.
105
 Tyisha herself
became the favored example when a text included an outcast—someone who
acts for his or her own good without considering the good of the society. As students
discussed these examples, Tyisha’s identity as an outcast became more and
more heavily presupposed. Local curricular categories became a resource for identity
development, through these participant examples, because the discussion of
Tyisha’s hypothetical identity as an outcast within the examples communicated that
Tyisha herself was becoming an outcast in the classroom.
108
Tyisha’s persistence makes clear that there have been at least two possible “interactional
texts” (Silverstein 1992) in play since Tyisha’s initial comment at line 658.
First, Tyisha may have been making an argument, one that contributes to the academic
substance of the discussion. In this case, teachers and students would be on
the same side, collaboratively and earnestly discussing Aristotle’s account of human
nature. Second, Tyisha may have been using her example as an opportunity to make
jokes, by referring to aspects of everyday life that students would not normally discuss
in the classroom. The laughter at lines 665 and 673 might reflect Tyisha’s skillful
manipulation of the academic genre of an “example” to introduce inappropriate
topics. In this case, Tyisha would be like a “clown,” and she might gain some status
by successfully bending the teachers’ expectations about what can legitimately be
discussed. This second interactional text presupposes an opposition between teachers
and students, with teachers as disciplinarians and students as sometimes resisting
or evading their rules.

In the first segment and the beginning of the second segment above, Mrs. Bailey
works hard to entextualize (Silverstein 1992; Silverstein and Urban 1996) Tyisha’s example
as a contribution to academic substance, and she initially succeeds. Tyisha did
make a good academic argument, with the counterexample of her cat’s goals, and
Mrs. Bailey helped her articulate it. But the “joking” frame remains potentially relevant
throughout the second segment. A few students laugh at line 695, probably because
the topic of playing Nintendo is not one normally discussed or admitted to in
school—yet Tyisha has managed to mention it by placing it within her example.
After Mrs. Bailey accepts Tyisha’s argument at line 709 and goes on to pursue the distinction
between uniquely human and more beast-like goals, the teachers have taken
control of Tyisha’s example, making it part of an academic argument.