Arguing and Learning About Dominance in Hemingway's "Indian Camp"

• In Event: Using the Teaching of Argumentation to Explore Issues of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Abstract

Purposes
In this paper, we consider the nature of the teaching and learning of argumentation and its role in fostering critical thinking about culturally significant issues such as power relations and social dominance. We focus on an instructional conversation about a short story in which the teacher provides opportunities to explore multiple perspectives and issues of power relations.

Theoretical Framework
For us, the teaching and learning of argumentation involves a complex set of social, communicative, philosophical, and intellectual practices that are constituted through uses of language and related semiotic systems. Our view of argumentation builds on philosophical discussions of rationality by Habermas (1984), Gadamer (1976), and Flyvbjerg (1998), among others, in which rationality is located and defined within the complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities of particular social situations in which people, often with diverse perspectives, goals, and intentions, must work together in constructing a working consensus about what is happening, what meanings the event and situation has, and what its import is for future events and for the relationships of people to each other.

Methods
We employed a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis analyzing each message unit in the instructional conversations with regard to how it builds upon previous utterances, how it implies social relations among people including the readers and the student writer, indexes particular forms of logic, shifts between the topics and the structure of an argument, and links to various social contexts at multiple levels.

Data Sources
As part of a larger study of argumentation, we observed and video-recorded an IB/ELA teacher (bi-racial, female, with 12 years of teaching experience) recommended for her reputation as an excellent teacher, twice weekly during the 2014-2015 school year. She taught 26 eleventh grade students (16 white and 10 other ethnicities). We also interviewed the teacher and students. Near the end of October 2014, the teacher and her students engaged in multiple instructional conversations about Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp”.

Findings
In the targeted instructional conversations, the teacher had two related purposes: to prepare the students to write a literary argument and to engage them in exploratory talk about the theme of dominance. The theme of dominance is not necessarily inherent in the story text; however, the teacher asked that the students to read the story as a story of dominance and to read it framed as readers making an argument about the meaning of the text. The teacher orchestrated a discussion that explored male dominance and subsequently racial dominance. As the students engaged in the discussion they had to address and acknowledge evidence and warrants that required them to construct a complex conception of dominance that contained contradictions and ambiguities. This challenged their monolithic conceptions of argumentation and of social dominance and raises questions about how the teaching and learning argumentation might be theorized to accommodate discussions of race, gender, sexuality and dominance.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Seung Yon Ha, The Ohio State University