Reading week was a productive break: not only did I get caught up with my weekly readings (staring fixedly at my iPad for six days while also flipping actual pages to find the 101 variations on the “What kind of person is Dee?” question in Bloome et al.‘s (2008) On discourse analysis in classrooms), but also had some extra time to work as a substitute teacher. Since earning my Bachelor of Education at UBC in 2009, I was fortunate enough to start work as a Teacher On Call for the North Vancouver School District that same year. My cohort was in the Fine Arts and New Media Education program, and many FAME grads found work in North Van as well. Last Friday I ran into two of my classmates who just recently got semi-permanent contracts in the primary grades. It was a long wait for many on the often bumpy TOC list, with long stretches of not enough work and occasional flurries of not enough TOCs. During the past four year, I have begun to feel a bit like the “andys” featured in Philip K. Dick’s (1968) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that have a four-year lifespan built into their design. Perhaps more familiar as a Replicant in Ridley Scott’s (1982) eye-candyland film Blade Runner, one particular speech must be on a constant loop in the minds of long-term TOCs.
Blade Runner (1982) Tears in Rain
Of course, none of us are planning to go out like Rutger Hauer, symbolically releasing a dove at the end of our TOC careers, as most of us will get permanent jobs as teachers. Yet there are many moments I have seen while working on call, all the discourse that has yet to be analyzed and most likely never will due to meaningful yet hindering ethical requirements. Not knowing where I will be teaching from one day to the next is one of the challenges to conducting research in classrooms, and while I am aware that I could have gone through the proper channels to conduct an ethnographic study during my Master degree, the catch would have been that I was taking away from much needed calls to work as sub (and therefore afford to study educational technology, a program that didn’t need a research thesis in any case). All of this is to say that I understand why I cannot share discourse very similar to what Mökkonen observes in a Finnish primary classroom. Inspired by her study of socialization and subteaching in a multilingual classroom, I had to share a story that might have happened to me earlier last week, when I could have been TOCing at an école.
Firstly, in a certain school district, there are several elementary schools that are partially French Immersion. The schools are typically bilingual, and depending on their size, might have equal numbers of French and English classrooms for each grade. Split classrooms are common when there is not enough students to make up a full class in one or the other language. When a TOC like myself gets called into a French classroom, it can generally be assumed that all of the French-speaking TOCs are already booked (or found full-time position!) and even before the morning bell rings the students know that there won’t be much French spoken all day. The scene in my story takes place, however, in an English split K/1 classroom. The incident of subteaching arose when a student chided another for asking yet another to say something in this child’s native language. The student’s censure was captured in the command “No, English only!” As the TOC is usually the last person in the room to know about classroom procedures (doubly so in primary grades when it is Calendar time), the TOC in this K/1 asked the class “Whose rule is that? I thought this was an French and English school.” When gently provoked to provide details, none of the students could say who told them to speak only English in the classroom, but most were assured that “those are the rules” and further discussion quickly ceased. Situations like these seem to be crying out for a proper discourse analysis, but like Hauer’s line “tears in rain” I could just be making it all up!
Here is the latest draft of my review assignment:
