Examining Students' Uptake of Everyday Cultural Resources to Support Literary Reasoning

• In Event: 63.032 - Literary Reasoning and Interpretation as Cultural Repertoires of Practice

Abstract

Objectives and perspectives

This study examined a year-long intervention developed from the literature framework of Project READI. The framework is multidimensional, including attention to epistemology, genre, discourse practices, strategies and generative tasks. The intervention addressed how to scaffold students’ everyday knowledge and practices to support learning to critically interpret complex literary texts by developing deep knowledge in each area of the framework.

The scaffolding is based on principles of the Cultural Modeling Framework (Author, year; year) involving the use of cultural data sets to scaffold strategies for noticing and interpreting authorial rhetorical moves and gateway activities (Hillocks, 1999) to build criteria for evaluating character and theme.


Methods and data

The intervention took place over a full year in an urban high school serving a low-income African American population. The instructional unit addressed in this paper focuses on problems of symbolism in coming of age stories, anchored in a detailed study of Morrison’s very challenging novel Beloved (2004).

This paper examines how opportunities to learn were structured over time (Green & Dixon, 1993), how students responded to these opportunities in ways that illustrate their uptake and transformation of everyday knowledge as they engage in complex acts of literary interpretation (Author, Year), including how they interrogated the texts in terms of their own lives.

Data collection includes videos of classroom instruction, student work samples from across the unit that includes multi-media documents and blog posts by students. Data was sampled during initial scaffolding and at middle and end points of the unit. Video analyses focused on text-based discussions in terms of participation structures, distributed argumentation, and the structures of teacher and student scaffolding.


Results

Findings show that participation structures were most engaging when they employed African-American rhetorical discourse moves (Smitherman, 1986) argumentation occurred more under these culturally based participation structures and involved debates over opposing claims with warrants largely drawn from their world knowledge, but still tightly connected to the texts; and the role of teacher scaffolding faded over time while the role of student to student scaffolding increased.


Significance

This study contributes to a growing body of evidence that scaffolding everyday knowledge, especially of students from historically disenfranchised groups, to support discipline specific knowledge building – in this case literary reasoning – offers generative pathways to support robust opportunities to learn. It further illustrates the power of rich canonical literature to open up entry points for wrestling with life adversities, when students are able to draw upon their everyday repertoires of practice to view wrestling with complex literature as a meaningful enterprise.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University