This two-year ethnographic study explores how two teachers provided particular opportunities for students to learn a situated disciplinary knowledge in English and in Studio Art. The original intent of Year One was to observe and identify opportunities that a proposed two-year interdisciplinary curriculum would extend to students in two high school classes. Through analyses of teachers' planning sessions and theoretically sampled events used for contrastive analysis, I examined opportunities each teacher provided students for learning a local disciplinary knowledge and how their collaboration was supported and constrained.
The research focus shifted to the Art teacher for Year Two to further examine the opportunities the teacher provided students for learning and taking up the practices of artists within a community of artists. The analysis describes and explains how the teacher initiated an intergenerational community of artists and the discourse and literate practices used by members. An analysis of a cycle of activity, “public critique,” demonstrates how practices were socially constructed and available for students to learn a situated disciplinary knowledge, i.e., what came to count as Advanced Placement Studio Art.
The sociocultural orienting theory of the study led to the use of interactional ethnography in education. Data were collected through participant observation in the form of fieldnotes, videotape, interviews and selected artifacts. Discourse and action was analyzed to examine the role that discourse played in providing opportunities for students to engage in the disciplinary practices of a class and subject.
The analysis suggests that it is important for teachers to explicitly collaborate with their students as well as other teachers in constructing a metadiscourse for learning. A metadiscourse can make visible what counts as situated disciplinary knowledge and does not leave this to be induced by members of the class. Without such discourse, what counts may remain invisible to many, whether students or other teachers, as was the case in this study. Furthermore, the Art teacher's belief that “all” students can learn to practice as artists implies that becoming an artist is a process, not a state of grace.
