Diversity As A Transformative Force:Discourse Of Teacher Learning In Disciplinary Innovation

This ethnographic study, running for a period of over three years of fieldwork, investigates a case of disciplinary innovation in the English language department of a Chinese university. The study combines discourse analysis of organizational change, conversation analysis of teacher community dialogue with narrative inquiry of individual teachers’ identity exploration.Three aspects of learning are investigated, namely, institutional boundary practice as a discursive space for learning, teachers’transformative learning experienced within that space as well as teachers’ collaborative inquiry at communities. The analysis offers an interpretive framework to examine how teachers at various discourse communities use language to construct knowledge, to negotiate their disciplinary identities, and to revise their understandings for teaching. It is discussed how a restructuring of institutional discursive practice by transcending boundaries could create a dynamic space of learning, a space characterized with dialogic diversity. It illuminates to us that boundary practices can be a source of transformative forces for the development of learning culture, where individuals experienced a process of identity integration through socialization into diverse forms of communities of practice that cuts across both institutional and disciplinary boundaries. The study unfolds a picture how teachers negotiate multiple disciplinary discourses and identities in light of a multiplicity of voices and modes of inquiry and practices. As a resistance to such a multiplicity, the discourse of performance evaluation serves as a linguistic unification, imposing standardization and homongenization. The complexity of education reform in contemporary China is therefore reflected in the study.