Rymes, Betsy

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Associate Professor, Educational Linguistics

Introduction

Betsy Rymes' research, theoretically and methodologically informed by linguistic anthropology, is centered in educational contexts and examines how languages, social interaction, and institutions influence an individual’s educational trajectory. Her research on students and teaching in multiple contexts ranging from a Los Angeles alternative school, to rural elementary schools in Georgia, to bilingual teacher education, as well as her own experiences as a teacher all inform her new book, Classroom discourse analysis: A tool for critical reflection.

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2001 - 200932010 - 20112
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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Publication
    School in the City
    (2001-01-01) Rymes, Betsy R
    One does not expect to find a high school in downtown Los Angeles. Daily, thousands of cars are deposited among the tall buildings and swiftly funneled into underground parking, their drivers whisked up interior elevators to work. At the end of the day, well-engineered entrance ramps carry the cars back to homeward-bound freeways. These cars crisscross each other, making elaborate and split-second negotiations, but interaction between people, it seems, is an indoor activity here. The vision of high school students carrying backpacks, walking and talking in groups, seems incongruous with this urban efficiency.
  • Publication
    Relating Word to World: Indexicality During Literacy Events
    (2002-01-01) Rymes, Betsy R
    As methodological pendulums swing wildly and politicized education reform climates grow hot then cold, as teachers change their books and their seating arrangements, as laptops are issued, as blackboards change to whiteboards, and even as the complexion and language backgrounds of students change dramatically, a certain feature of classrooms may change very little. It is likely that certain students, those who have always struggled through school, will continue to do so. From one perspective, this persistent inequity in the classroom is rarely affected by policy changes because inequity is handed down from societal injustice at large. While certain critical theoretical perspectives on education (e.g., Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1992; Hooks, 1994) investigate, theorize, and practice education by first analyzing injustices outside the classroom, a linguistic anthropological perspective combines this awareness of larger societal patterns with a close look at how the particularities of interactions shape who gets to learn inside a classroom. Linguistic anthropology provides analytic tools to investigate and critique interactions inside, around, and relevant to these classrooms. The promise linguistic anthropology holds for education, then, is in the analytical insights it provides into the relationship between larger sociocultural patterns and the (re)production of inequity, on the level of person-to-person interaction, inside the classroom (Philips, 1993).
  • Publication
    Concepts and Models for Using Narrative in Teacher Education
    (2011-08-01) Rymes, Betsy R; Wortham, Stanton
  • Publication
    The Relationship between Mass Media and Classroom Discourse
    (2008-01-01) Rymes, Betsy R
    In this paper, I illustrate the cyclical proliferation of mass-mediated communicative repertoires through small-scale mechanisms of classroom discourse. I draw on examples of current advertising, classroom discourse data from diverse studies, my own study of an elementary ESL group's interaction, and mass mediated representations of classroom discourse on websites and TV shows about school to illustrate the relationship between mass media and classroom discourse. I analyze how mass-mediated metadiscourse creates new participation frameworks in classrooms that propel small-scale changes in classroom discourse and potentially facilitate the integration of new voices. Finally I discuss the implications of this analysis for how future research conceptualizes the roles of multilingual/multicultural students and teachers and the multiple communicative repertoires they command.
  • Publication
    Concepts and Methods for Using Narrative in Teacher Education
    (2011-01-01) Rymes, Betsy R; Wortham, Stanton
    Someone tells you a story. It seems wrong. It misrepresents someone you care about. But it has been told by someone you do not want to offend or contradict. What do you do? You feel you must say something—set the record straight, absolve your friend, clarify your relationship to her, assert your view on what is right and wrong. How do stories provoke this sense of urgency? When a story is told and interpreted, nothing less than truth, power, morality, and individual agency can be at stake, and these stakes are too high to ignore. The stories analyzed in this book illustrate that narratives bring into play those elements that bring meaning to life . . .

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