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The Role of Text in Collaborative Social Reasoning Discussions

Sun, April 19, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Virtual Room

Abstract

Critical dialogue about complex social issues has been a primary vehicle for students to reflect on and reconstruct their own social practices (Nucci, 2016; Nucci, Creane, & Powers, 2015). Literary texts are often used as conduits for this type of discussion-based instructions, such as literature circles (Eeds & Wells, 1989) and Collaborative Reasoning (Anderson et al., 2001). However, little is known about the roles of literacy texts in students’ social-behavioral development in the context of dialogic inquiry. Drawing from both sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives, we discuss how Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR), a small-group dialogic inquiry approach based on literary texts can be integrated into regular Language Arts or Social Studies instructions in an effort to stimulate students’ interpersonal competences.

In the current CSR intervention, a series of fiction stories were selected, excerpted, and adapted to meet specific design principles:
(a) To facilitate collaborative argumentation with peers (Walton, 1989), each story raised controversial issues that can be debated, while authentic questions are both embedded in text and introduced in discussion;
(b) To promote students’ understanding of social-moral principles through inter-textual comparisons and analogical inferences (Holyoak, 1985), the stories in the study were chosen to overlap the concepts of friendship, social exclusion, ethics of care, and responsibility;
(c) To stimulate social perspective taking, multiple, competing voices (Bakhtin, 1981) were introduced in text, presenting unique perspectives on critical issues;
(d) To help students connect thought and actions, storylines were linked to current social or political issues in the students’ everyday life (e.g., fitting into a social group at school);

Participants were 250 fifth-grade students from 12 classrooms in two public schools in a large Midwestern city. Classrooms were assigned to one of three conditions: 1) Collaborative Social Reasoning group (CSR), 2) active-control Read-Aloud group (RA), and 3) regular instruction group (RI). The CSR group received a six-week language arts curriculum where small heterogeneous groups discussed issues social exclusion embedded on texts. Students discussed one story per week for six consecutive weeks. Teachers’ role involved helping students set goals, follow dialogic norms, and facilitate students’ engagement with text. The RA group read the same texts in whole-class teacher Read-Aloud without in-text prompts for dialogic inquiry. The RI group received their regular language arts curriculum. All students were assessed on interpersonal competencies, including peer-rated social acceptance, peer-nominated aggressive behavior and withdrawn behavior, and self-report normative beliefs about aggression.

Results showed higher tolerance and lower levels aggressive and withdrawn behavior in CSR classrooms. RA students became more aggressive and socially withdrawn over time. The positive effects of CSR may be attributed to the opportunities for students to construe the deep meanings of social-moral principles and to reflect on their own social behavior through multi-text inferencing, multi-perspective coordination, and social perspective taking. We believe findings point to the idea of students benefiting through exploration of texts that present multiple voices and challenge thinking on difficult subjects. Intra and inter-textual dialogue can serve as a gateway to social tolerance and well-being.

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