Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom
23
and legitimization of the established social order.
50
Similarly, anthropologists and
sociolinguists working in classroom settings have frequently
found in the language
of the classroom a powerful orienting social practice.
51
Hidden beneath the appar-
ent content of a lesson may be a deeper message about how the world operates,
about what kind of knowledge counts, about who may speak and how to proceed—
a cultural epistemology that is quietly conveyed through classroom language. Thus,
we can see broader social patterns and struggles played out and transformed in the
smaller-scale dynamics of classroom interaction. Insights from linguistics and
sociolinguistics have been very useful in analyzing these dynamics.
Formal education typically takes place through linguistic exchanges in class-
rooms and through interaction with written texts. Sociolinguistic approaches to
classroom education analyze these interactions as
socially embedded linguistic
practices, asking how the form and content of language work to accomplish (or, in
some cases, fail to accomplish) the social transformation that is the aim of much
formal education. Some of the central debates in this literature have centered on
how to conceptualize the role of writing in formal education, asking, for example,
whether written language achieves an “autonomy” or “rationality” not found in
spoken language. Scholars have also examined the connection between the language
of education and social structures or epistemologies,
with a particular focus on
whether the language used in classrooms might be linked with the wider goals of
Western educational systems and states. In addition, research in this area has studied
the relationship between identity, social class, ideology, ethnicity, race, culture, and
gender,
on the one hand, and the language of the classroom, on the other. (Chap-
ter 8 examines studies on diversity in schooling in more depth, with a particular
focus on research in the area of legal education.) This section gives a brief over-
view of scholarly work on language in education to set the stage for our consider-
ation of the law school classroom in particular.
Early work on literacy suggested that written language is connected with pe-
culiarly abstract and autonomous qualities of cognition.
52
However, anthropolo-
gists and psychologists have criticized the earlier focus
on a particular linguistic
medium (in this case, writing), without sufficient attention to the role of context.
53
Thus, in their study of Vai literacy, Scribner and Cole pointed out that writing in
the context of schooling is quite different from writing in other contexts.
54
Studies
of writing in classroom settings may not be capturing any essential quality of writ-
ten language per se, but instead are likely to be tapping aspects of a particular set-
ting in which writing occurs. Street took the critique one step further,
arguing that
even Scribner and Cole err in attempting to parcel out the effects of schooled lit-
eracy versus nonschooled literacy, as if the literacy itself were an isolable variable
to be dealt with neutrally, apart from its social character and valorization as social
practice.
55
Street’s socially embedded approach to literacy has much in common
with Bourdieu’s treatment of education more generally as a social institution.
From these critiques of the “autonomous” view of literacy,
there emerges a
methodological caution: in analyzing spoken versus written discourse, or particular
forms of spoken or written language, it is important to look at those discourses as
they are situated in particular contexts. James Collins urges a focus on the role of
“relativist or situated literac
ies
, seen as diverse, historically
and culturally variable
24
Introduction
practices” in creating, circulating, and interpreting written texts, as opposed to “a
universalist or autonomous literacy, seen as a general, uniform set of techniques
and uses of language.”
56
Thus, rather than characterizing literacy in school settings
as tantamount to
a training to abstract logic, we must specify the kind of logics
involved in various kinds of literacies, questioning whether lessons vary across
different school settings, and asking how abstraction of a particular sort might
serve institutional or wider social goals.
57
As Shirley Brice Heath documented in
her classic research on training to “schooled literacy” by parents as well as schools,
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