Contested Relations and Authoritative Texts

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Abstract
In this article, orientations to text taken by seventh-grade students preparing for a simulation of the 1954 school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, are compared with those taken by legal professionals in the historical event itself. The author uses Halliday's definition of register to show that meanings are made on several dimensions of social life simultaneously, along with Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia to show that meaning is made from divergent social positions. Textual analysis shows that seventh-grade students rejected what they saw as violations of the conventions of Supreme Court argument, while the winning argument in the actual Supreme Court hearing of Brown plays with conventions by signaling conflicting social positions. The author suggests that teachers might encourage students to reflect on their own positioning within a complex rhetorical context and draw attention to how registers are actually realized in historically significant texts.

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