Leveraging High School Students’ Empathic Responses to Literature: Speaking and Listening for the 21st Century

• In Event: Metacognition, Collaboration, and Response: Innovative Approaches to Building Literacy

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards challenge high school students to “propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that relate the current discussion to broader themes or larger ideas.” To encourage these discourse practices, literature circles have been used in classrooms for quite some time to promote the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of texts. In this paper, we examine 35 literature circle discussions among 5 different small groups of secondary English students to address the following question: How did students speak in ways that related the discussion to “broader themes or larger ideas”? Findings demonstrate the diverse ways in which the concept of empathy shaped how students collaborated to meet, exceed, and reframe the new standards for speaking and listening.

Authors

• James S. Chisholm, University of Louisville

• Bethany L. Keller, University of Louisville