What Do You Mean By Complexities?
I’ve been hearing this word a lot lately. Have you also?
It has come up in many different settings.
I am using my training and expertise as a public scholar using #InstitutionalEthnography to understand the nuances.
Of whom are we speaking?
And where does that talk go?
I’m inviting #education PLN to listen for a word what’s quickly becoming spoken of as “complexities” of schools
What role does demographic data play in determining complexities?
Socio Economic Status (referred to quickly as SES)
Behaviour that is logged and tracked without or with little support due to funding cuts and other aspects.
Immigration: From where, when and how?
Asylum seeking status: From where, when and how?
Disabilities of students and families
And oh yes that insidious sorting tool of single mother families
How do these conversations of “our families” seep into reputations and narratives ?
Listen for this word: Complexities. And ask “What do you mean by complexities?”
It’s coming up a lot in Ontario and other places in all spaces.
Such as https://www.alberta.ca/taking-action-on-classroom-complexity
Discourse
Griffith and Smith taught me and many to examine discourse and how it enters texts.
So when I write about Talk, Texts And Trajectories such as in resource, it’s for a reason.
Professional Collaboration to Support Students with Learning Disabilities – LD@School
Something to think about…
Activating and re-activating texts is not a neutral process. We always bring ourselves into the materials we read , and Dorothy Smith builds on Bahktin to call it the Text-Reader Dialogic. As do I. Who writes the text and who reads it then and next and adds further information is something we miss. Yet, that is a key determinant of how institutional relations travel.
All texts generated will be likely archived over the summer and when you go down the list in September which families are in column A and which ones are in column B?
How will you and I engage with the textual mediation of discourse (the way language is used to transmit power relations) and how will the dialogue between the seemingly inert text and one’s biases play an invisibilized part in snowballing that narrative?
It helps to talk to about Institutional Ethnography.
Beyond Book Clubs and Hashtags
Dr. Rashmee Karnad-Jani
