Cross-Case Comparisons of Teachers Learning to Use Everyday Knowledge to Support Literary Reasoning

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

Abstract

Objectives and perspectives

We report a cross-case analysis of implementations of instructional modules designed using the Cultural Modeling Framework (Author, year) and the learning objectives of Project READI, with particular focus on student and teacher discourse practices, heuristic strategies for literary interpretation, and generative tasks.

Each case is of a specific teacher, one working in grade 8 and the other in grade 11, across several iterations of literary reasoning modules over two school years. The time frame allows within-case comparison of changes across successive implementations as well as comparisons across the two teacher cases, allowing us to explore differences from developmental perspectives related to students’ and teachers’ experiences implementing the modules, particularly with respect to use of everyday resources and practices in supporting students’ reasoning and argumentation.


Methods and data

Both cases were located in urban schools serving African American and Latino students. Instructional modules focused on themes of coming-of-age and gender, and interpretive problems such as symbolism and point-of-view. Participating teachers practiced the tenets of cultural modeling: identifying their students’ cultural knowledge and everyday practices that could be connected to the themes and skills of the modules. For example, students were well-versed in an episode of a popular TV show in which varying unreliable narrators described the same event. Teachers used that TV show as a cultural data set, so students could identify and make explicit the analytical skills students they brought to the show, and recruit those skills to more complex literary texts.

Modules were collaboratively designed by the Project READI Literature team (the case-study teachers and university-based researchers). Using an iterative design cycle process, the team planned and discussed the ongoing implementations every week, reflecting on teachers’ personal challenges in preparation and implementation. At the conclusion of each module, a more comprehensive reflection guided the team’s design revisions in preparation for subsequent implementations.

Data included: module planning templates; teachers’ reflections; participant-observer field notes; classroom videos; and student work samples from across each module. Thematic content analysis was applied to the planning templates to explore the evolution of teachers’ understanding of cultural modeling. Class discussions and student work were examined for evidence of everyday knowledge use in literary reasoning instruction.


Results

Each teacher’s initial efforts to build on everyday experiences were less successful than in later implementations. Teachers learned over time how to make effective choices of texts that invoked their particular students’ everyday resources and skills and helped them make meta-cognitive reflections on how they made interpretations of literary texts.

Revisions across implementation cycles focused on similar issues, such as supports for moving from oral to written expression, and ways to orchestrate discussions so that students rather than teachers were doing the intellectual work.


Significance

The similarity in sources of challenges for teachers and students at different grade levels contributes to understanding developmental trajectories for teaching and learning about literary interpretation. These findings illustrate the robustness of the architecture for design of modules that engage students from culturally diverse backgrounds in reading and writing about literature.

Authors

• Susan R. Goldman, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Teresa Sosa, Indiana University - IUPUI

• Allison H. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Candice Burkett, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Rick Coppola, Chicago Public Schools

• Jessica Chambers, University of Illinois at Chicago

• MariAnne George, University of Illinois at Chicago