Pedagogy of Possibility: Proleptic Teaching and Language Learning

We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language—or language that invoked students’ imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present—situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of college students, litigators, music producers, and activists which her students aspired to join. Students demonstrated transformative agency in aligning, resisting, and reinterpreting these proleptic bids, which appeared to create opportunities for students to engage in authentic uses of academic discourse as well as to develop critical rhetorical flexibility—or skill in using all language resources flexibly and critically as a part of participation in an array of social contexts. We suggest that the use of proleptic talk transforms the tenor of academic language instruction by centering students’—rather than teachers’—goals for language learning and by recognizing learners’ past, present, and future selves.