Patterns of Listening in Interpretive Discussion and the Formation of Shared Doubt

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Listening to Student Voices

Abstract

   Interpretive discussion (Haroutunian-Gordon, 2009) is conversation about the meaning of some text. Its aim is to identify a point of doubt that the group wishes to resolve and to make progress toward its resolution by studying textual evidence. How does the group come to a shared point of doubt? My paper will address that question by examining a case in which a group of high-school seniors discusses Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Lecture (delivered 1993). Research (e.g., Haroutunian-Gordon 2004, 2009, 2009/2011, 2011) indicates that leaders of interpretive discussion seem to follow patterns that help discussants find a shared point of doubt and address it. The present paper will argue that discussants in a particular case study follow patterns of listening in response to particular discussion leading patterns. Evidently, the discussion leader is teaching discussants to listen by focusing their attention on particular things that have been said. Then, the discussants initiate the leading patterns in which they have been engaged, thus directing attention toward particular things that have been said in the text and by their peers so that the shared point of doubt begins to form.

Author

• Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, Northwestern University