“All That Jazz”

We have two goals in this chapter. The first is to construct a dialectic between Bourdieu's sociology as applied to education and literacy (see Chapter 4; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977a; Grenfell, 2009; Grenfell and James, 1998), the New Literacy Studies (see Chapter 3; Street 1984, 1995, 1997), and classroom ethnography (see Chapter 2). The field-based data collected for this study were of a seventh-grade language arts classroom. Inherent in the construction of this dialectic are two assumptions: first, that theory guides the conduct and interpretation of empirical research ¹ while simultaneously the conduct and interpretation of empirical research challenges, revises, and builds theory (cf., Bloome et al., 2005); second, that in any social event there is a tension between stability and change (what Bakhtin, 1935/1981, termed centripetal and centrifugal forces) defined by the event itself. As an aside, we note that both classroom lessons and academic research (including the activity of theorizing) are social events in which people are continuously engaged, explicitly or implicitly, in theorizing the event itself and the world in which the event is embedded; as such, teaching and researching are both inherently reflexive processes embedded in social contexts (see Schon, 1983; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992b).