Complicated Conversations

This is a case study of one teacher’s decision to add multicultural children’s books to her social studies curriculum and an analysis of how her ideologies about race shaped the classroom discourse. A class of fourth and fifth grade students in a small, Midwestern city work to understand American history and racial tolerance through reading and discussing fiction. By applying critical discourse analysis techniques to the dialogue between the teacher, the students, and the text itself, this work explores how an elementary teacher balances the need to manage the classroom conversation and to create a safe classroom environment at the same time she attempts to explore the issue of social inequity through classroom discourses.