Presentation 1
Title: Teacher agency and authority in the context of Russian community language schools in Queensland.
Speaker: Anna Mikhaylova
Community languages (CL) schools serve as a major source of support for ethnolinguistic vitality and community building for many minority language speakers in Australia, while remaining largely invisible to the larger English-speaking community and peripheral to the state education system (Cruickshank, Jung & Li, 2020; Nordstrom, 2020). Despite Russian being a major world language and a lingua franca for large Russian-speaking diasporas in North America and Europe, it is a rather small community language in Australia and is not taught in either public or private schools in Queensland. I argue that, through their mission and positionality at the periphery of the educational system, Russian CL schools in Queensland exercise a great amount of power, i.e. both agency and authority, as they support linguistic and cultural continuity for families they serve.
The data were collected within a larger research partnership project with the schools and include qualitative data from observations and professional development workshops held by the researchers at the school, semi-structured interviews with teachers as well as the results of an online survey of both teachers and parents in each community school. We examined the perspectives of both CL school teachers and parents, as key stakeholders co-providing language support for the learners, regarding their roles, priorities, and challenges in CL language maintenance.
Data suggests that, while the schools may vary in their core missions, organisational structures and approaches to building curriculum and despite many challenges, all school prioritize providing the children with an immersive educational experience where the Russian language becomes an instrument, rather than an end goal, for examining and articulating the world around them. We found that the teachers and parents have to carefully balance and continuously negotiate their personal experience, expectations and priorities developed in the (post-)Soviet education system and previous migration history with those afforded by the Australian education system they are experiencing through their school-aged children. I will discuss these and further findings from the ongoing thematic analysis and their implications for further research and practice from a funds of knowledge perspective (Hedges, 2012).
Presentation 2
Title: “I don’t wear shoes”: Power management and membership categorisation in sibling interactions in Chinese-speaking family discourse.
Speaker: Zhiyi Liu
In everyday family life, interaction is the main channel through which members collaboratively accomplish various family (routine) activities and is also a crucial means of constructing and negotiating affective, moral, and power dimensions of their relationships. As a key relational dimension, power has not been examined thoroughly as a discursive accomplishment in the studies of family discourse, especially in families with Chinese linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Drawing on audio-recorded interactions between two sisters in a Chinese-speaking family in Australia, this study aims to contribute to such an under-explored topic to investigate how power is interactionally managed in Chinese-speaking sibling interactions, with a particular focus on authority and relational entitlements. Using a combination of interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, the study considers how the two sisters construct and negotiate power attributions to different family members in interaction, in light of their knowledge of specific (relationship) categories. The preliminary findings have shown that the emergent sibling relationship of power in interaction is not always consistent with the culture-expected order that jiating guanxi (family relationships) in Chinese culture should be exercised in a vertical way, characterized by an asymmetric power distribution based on age, birth order, and gender (Hwang, 1997; Pan, 2000). Interestingly, it has been observed that the mother category is invoked by the two sisters as a tool, indicating what each other should or could do within the mother-child relationship, to justify their own conduct and challenge the other’s power orientation.
Presentation 3
Title: Some qualitative numbers in pandemic life.
Speaker: Sheng-Hsun Lee
During the COVID-19 pandemic, numbers were not just for quantifying the speed and degree of outbreaks but also for qualitatively annotating the outbreaks. Numbers develop their qualitative meanings through classifications that sort numerical tokens into categorical types. To illustrate the type-token relationship and their associated meanings, I draw on a press-conference episode about the numerical representation of COVID-19 cases in Taiwan during its first large community outbreak. The episode centers on the official revisions of previously reported case numbers due to a backlog of cases. A public health official classified the revised numbers into the categorical type of ‘retrospective adjustment,’ which provoked public support and criticism. To quell public criticism, the official contextualized numerical classifications in narratives, graphs, gestures, and metadiscourse. Numbers were aggregated and disaggregated to form different patterns and relations, which enabled public health officials to communicate their control of the outbreak trend and fleeting time. These qualities of numerical classification suggest that numbers are not just decontextualized variables or cold logicality. Instead, through classifications, numbers are infused with subjective judgements and relationships to past, present, and hypothetical time.