Constructing Personhood and Race Within Dialogic Literary Argumentation in the Poetry of Langston Hughes

• In Event: Reading and Writing in Personhood and Childhood

Abstract

In recognizing the ubiquity of race permeating and defining nearly all aspects of daily life in the United States, how did a teacher and her students use personhood, intertextuality, narrative, and other sources to construct classroom events characterizable as Dialogic Literary Argumentation (DLA) and in doing so examine issues of race? Ms. Hill’s (Black, female) 11th grade “high level” International Baccalaureate English class (26 students; 16 white and 10 other ethnicities) was embedded in an urban high school’s “humanities” program. Grounded in theoretical work in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse anaysis revealed that both in their conversations about Hughes’s biography and in the literary text(s) itself, teachers and students negotiated what it means be human, when, where, how, and with what consequences.

Authors

• Theresa Thanos, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University