ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to look at how knowledge, and what sort of knowledge, is talked into being in one small primary school in Brunei, in an upriver interior community where three minority groups exist side by side. Following a period of ethnographic fieldwork in the community, subsequent visits focused on the school, and on one classroom, in particular. This study provides a microanalysis of the language practices in one lesson. Interaction around text in this classroom plays a key role in shaping what is considered as knowledge and competence for the pupils. Emerging from the discussion, I locus on how such knowledge is talked into being in educational encounters around text. The discussion is framed within the context of the ideologies and tensions of the bilingual education system in Brunei. Following this brief introduction, I provide some background for the study, both the general context of Brunei, and the specific local context in which the study took place. The major part of the chapter is a discussion of one lesson and the way the participants in the lesson attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the text that is the focus of the lesson. In the final part of the chapter, I discuss the ways the participants use local knowledge and a range of linguistic resources to contest the knowledge in the textbook and the curriculum.
