Emergent Understandings and Identity Wrestling Through Literature

• In Event: Opportunities for Identity Work in the Face of Risk and Resilience Through Literature

Abstract

Objectives:
Efficacy studies typically focus on the achievement mastery. Work on learning progressions focuses largely on science and mathematics. This study frames a taxonomy of emergent understandings of core constructs in the development of literary reasoning among high school students, including how these emergent understandings arise in the context of classroom instruction and documentation of the consequences of teachers’ recognizing these emergent understandings or not, and the nature of supports of such understandings that can scaffold them. This taxonomy derives from an instructional architecture developed in Project READI and rooted in the Cultural Modeling Framework, including epistemology, key constructs, ways of using language, strategies, knowledge of text structures.

Project interventions focused on generative constructs readers draw on to interrogate literature, explicit strategies for noticing authorial choices in language and structure, and for constructing warrantable interpretations and thematic abstractions based on the features to which the reader attends. Pedagogical strategies included: examining cultural data sets and gateway activities to scaffold relevant prior knowledge of strategies and establish criteria for making judgments about theme and characters; heuristic worksheets to facilitate strategic thinking and use of academic language to articulate claims; facilitation of distributed argumentation in oral discussion; and supports for writing arguments. Text sets focused on a key construct (e.g. symbolism, unreliable narration) and a theme inviting engagement with an issue of identity and wrestling with resilience. The design hypothesized explicit scaffolds for generative skills in the context of a socially and personally meaningful problem would invite engagement and persistence, supporting the need for competence and relevance.

Data:
Analyses of videos of instruction, student work, and pre-post literature assessments developed by the project revealed patterns of emergent understandings. Using argument as the unit of analysis, we identified relations among claims, evidence and warrants, and identified the distribution of the argumentation among students and the teacher when analyzing video. We used the same analysis of argument structure in student work, including pre-post assessments. We analyzed themes within arguments and how engagement measured by distribution and prosodic intensity of talk related to levels of understanding. We analyzed relations between identity measures (race, resilience) and pre-post assessments, and how these were instantiated in student argumentation and themes.

Findings:
Student work and pre-post assessments revealed a continuum of emergent understandings characterized by evidence of strong epistemological orientation in claims but insufficient explicitness in the use of academic language to make clear the logic of warrants connecting claims and evidence. We found the same patterns in classroom discussions when teachers did not explicitly take up the press for warrants and model repertoires of academic language. We provide contrastive cases from student work and discussions with different levels of such emergent understandings; instances of robust scaffolding by teachers; and how engagement in meaningful questions yields greater demonstrations of expertise. Findings are augmented positive correlations between formal identity measures and pre-post outcomes.

Significance:
Findings expand our understanding of developmental trajectories in literary understanding and its possibilities for using literature to develop both literate expertise and identity development.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University