Literature, Identity, and Opportunity to Learn

• In Event: 58.027 - Reading Literature—Reading Worlds: The Equity Opportunity

Abstract

Literature offers unique opportunities to wrestle with conundrums of the human experience, offering meaning making repertoires for wrestling with challenge. African-American youth must wrestle with both normative challenges of adolescence – consolidating identities, imagining future possibilities, managing peer social relationships and relationships with adults who play critical roles for them; the general tasks of humans to feel efficacious and connected; but also specialized challenges growing out of their positionings with regard to race, ethnicity, class and gender. This paper presents findings from a longitudinal study of a literature intervention at a low-income urban high school serving African-American youth. The study hypothesized that expanding what we consider as equity outcomes to include an epistemological shift in viewing literature as a resource for personal meaning making and viewing argumentation as an opportunity to wrestle with complexity and to consider alternative perspectives on one’s views is generative.

Drawing on the Cultural Modeling Framework, the intervention design hypothesized that making problem solving heuristics for literary reasoning explicit and public by scaffolding meaning-making repertoires that these youth developed from their everyday practices would address core needs for a sense of efficacy, of relevance, and would re-position students as meaningful contributors to the intellective work. The explication of teachable heuristics for literary reasoning and expanding how we conceptualize what students need to know and be able to do are major contributions of this work – epistemology, key concepts, discourse strategies, problem solving strategies, and re-thinking literary genres. Texts were selected that posed conundrums with which youth wrestled because of their positioning with regard to race, ethnicity, gender and class. The intervention also included the design and use of a digital tool to support literary reasoning, SenseMaking in the Disciplines.

Data included pre-post assessments developed by the project, measuring literary reasoning and the ability to compose written arguments drawing on literary norms as close transfer measures and PSAE scores as far transfer measures. The broader project also developed and validated a measure of literary epistemology. Mediators included the epistemology measure, a survey of students’ perceptions of the instructional practices. We also analyzed data on students’ close reading and argumentation in using the digital tool as well as analysis of videos of classroom instruction. We have this data for each of the 4 years of the intervention. By cohort year, we examined correlations between pre-post growth on our close transfer task and those factors we hypothesized would influence what students’ learned. We also used micro-genetic analyses of videos to document the nature and distribution of argumentation, including how issues of identity wrestling emerged.

Findings: Epistemology and positive perceptions of instructional practices were positively correlated with pre-post growth and PSAE scores. Students employed African-American rhetorical and cultural resources in argumentation. Insights from analyses in the digital tool were taken up in classroom discourse, although there were challenges in how teachers took up students’ emergent understandings.

Significance: The joint attention on recruiting cultural resources, on identity wrestling, and making complex problem solving explicit proved generative for enhancing opportunity to learn.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University