Identity Wrestling as a Pedagogical Resource for Guiding Complex Literary Reasoning

• In Event: Critical Literacies: Investigating Textual Linguistic Representations to Engage Productive Identity Wrestling and Civic Reasoning

Abstract

This paper addresses challenges of teaching classroom literary analysis practices to adolescents. Problems around text selection and sequencing – particularly for struggling readers – are often not informed by understanding discipline specific sources of challenge, nor linked to helping students develop knowledge and dispositions around epistemology, key concepts or types of texts. This paper focuses on comprehension strategies in literature as an exemplar to address the complexity of disciplinary demands, for teachers and students, when reasoning around literary texts.

We argue that 1) the kind of complex literate thinking we hope to socialize youth into requires more than teaching cognitive strategies, and 2) that teachers must be able to attend to students’ emergent understandings of literary constructs in order to address the persistent achievement gap in reading associated with race, ethnicity, and class. We illustrate how adolescent learners’ emergent understandings and identity wrestling materialize in the context of problem-solving attempts at literary analysis.

Research indicates that strategy instruction in middle and high school literature classrooms typically is not explicit and often generic. Further, what is necessary to delve into new literary domains requires more than a cognitive strategy. It involves possibly re-organizing how learners see themselves; wrestling with competing demands for commitments of time and
energy stemming from poverty and the salience of peer social networks; struggling to make sense of socioeconomic and sociocultural stereotypes that surround them and reading the instructional context as supportive rather than threatening. These navigations are particularly challenging for students who have also experienced academic failures in their prior schooling.

Data: We offer micro-discourse analyses from a case study, drawn from video data transcriptions to examine how literary problem solving is intertwined with individuals’ perceptions, cognitions, and emotions. This observational data was gathered from 10 different class periods of the same English class within one literary unit on symbolism with themes around racial identity and resilience.

Findings: We document how one teacher’s lack of recognition of her students’ emergent literary understandings and engagement with their identity wrestling leads to a series of missed pedagogical opportunities, but also how classroom norms with everyday cultural data sets around detecting and interpreting rhetorical and structural generalizations opened opportunities for students to raise structural generalization questions around themes and symbolism that the teacher did not anticipate in the moment, and thus was unable to take up and expand.

Significance: For teachers, designing supportive learning environments that meet disciplinary norms is a complex and multi-dimensional problem space. Not only must they have deep content and pedagogical knowledge, they must also understand the identity and developmental challenges youth face; be able to recognize and wrestle with their own unconscious biases; and integrate this knowledge into productive evaluations of learners. The knowledge base for literary reasoning is well established – including competing paradigms – in literary theory, literary criticism, and empirical studies of literature. However, there is insufficient research in education that integrates underlying principles from these relevant disciplines to support the joint goals of deep literary reasoning in tandem with personal and community identity wrestling.

Author

• Yolanda J. Majors, Hurston Institute for Learning & Development