Classroom encounters with the unspeakable: “Do you see, Danelle?”

Abstract

This analysis of a sequence of grammar instruction in a fifth grade classroom addresses the following question: How are the familiar instructional objects called problems, answers, errors, and solutions made visible to the cohort? Summed as the “visibility of instruction,” the question is warranted by a round of instruction in which producing the visibility of an actual problem, error, and solution is the teacher's actual, practical task. In the course of pursuing it, she reveals to us the work and resources of leading her students to “see” the board. Outstanding among those resources is what I will call an “essential instructional fiction.” Not only is this fiction essential to the coherence of the lesson in hand, “essential fictions” may hold relevance for teaching contexts, broadly conceived.