Fruitful Text Selection in Dialogic Reading Discussion

• In Event: The Role of Texts in Dialogic Teaching

Abstract

Objective and mode of inquiry
This conceptual paper asks: How might texts be selected specifically for their affordances in facilitating fruitful dialogic talk about text? The goal is to develop guiding questions that serve as a tool for educators, elucidating both discussion purposes and match of potential texts to those purposes.

Perspective
While there is a paucity of research on text selection (Friese, D., Parkes, & Rezak, 2008), researchers have suggested that educators seek out text that is high-quality, high-interest, culturally relevant, etc. (Friese et al., 2008; Swanson & Wexler, 2017; Thomas, 2016). In dialogic pedagogy, these concerns arguably matter no less, but a further set of concerns, more specific to dialogic teaching, are the targeted focus here.

The orientation teachers adopt toward dialogic teaching depends on pedagogical purposes that do not always align (Lefstein & Snell, 2014). Educators might value shared textual authority, interanimation of voices, quality of reasoning, student voice, and relationship quality (Aukerman & Boyd, forthcoming). What counts as fruitful dialogue, and hence fruitful text selection, may depend on which valued purposes are foregrounded.

Conceptual frame
I propose and elaborate three questions as a tool to guide dialogic text selection:

How will the text be positioned? During dialogic discussion, texts might be positioned in service of:

responding (highlighting aesthetic/personal responses; Sipe, 2008);
springboarding (taking the text mainly as starting point, Wartenberg, 2007);
sensemaking (exploring possible text meanings, Aukerman, 2013);
investigating (analyzing/evaluating text, Lefstein and Snell, 2014)

I examine how each positioning links to aforementioned purposes, e.g., textual response may facilitate more student voice but less interanimation.

How will students and teacher be positioned? For example, some texts may demand considerable teacher scaffolding – however, such scaffolding may work against positioning students as textual authorities. If the teacher is to share textual authority and honor student voice, then dialogizing text selection and text positioning through the active involvement of students may be important; however, if concepts such as quality of reasoning are foregrounded there may be reason not to do so.

What makes text discussable, given anticipated text, teacher, and student positioning – as well as what teacher and students currently bring into the conversation? For example, for textual sensemaking the fruitful “sweet spot” may be a text with considerable ambiguity that is not so ambiguous that it becomes frustrating; the same text may be too ambiguous or insufficiently ambiguous depending on the students involved. Different modalities (e.g., images, video) also afford different possibilities, e.g., young students and those with less decoding proficiency may be particularly drawn to textual illustrations (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2016), and Belfatti (2012) found that text/image relationships frequently sparked student inquiries that fomented discussion.

Significance
Several studies have found that literacy teachers can find dialogic pedagogy challenging despite its pedagogical promise (Aukerman, Belfatti & Santori, 2008; Christoph & Nystrand, 2001). While future research should empirically examine the tool’s usefulness, teachers could potentially find dialogic text discussion less daunting if they are able to select texts matched to their purposes in the ways describe here.

Author

• Maren S Aukerman, University of Calgary