Literary Critical Literacies: Scaffolding Identity Wrestling/Civic Reasoning With Sense-Making in the Disciplines Digital Tool

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

Abstract

Literature offers unique opportunities for readers to wrestle with conundrums of the human condition, including conundrums entailed in normative human development across the age spans but also conundrums that emerge out of structural forces and ideologies that can either support or make resilience in light of challenge more difficult. Literary authors invite readers into these complexities through linguistic and structural choices they make. We argue preparing students in developing the skills, dispositions and epistemological orientations to engage literature critically as a resource for identity wrestling, both personally and in the broader civic domain is a public good. This paper reports on the design of a digital authoring tool developed under two IES grants, embedded in a Cultural Modeling pedagogical design, to support critical literary reasoning and argumentation. As an authoring tool, teachers can input their own content. Studies presented include texts that invite identity wrestling around experiences of race/ethnicity in adolescence. The tool supports the creation of embedded hyperlinks for relevant prior knowledge, note cards for annotations with tags that signal metacognitive attention for the purpose of the annotation, close reading questions and heuristic organizers that draw students’ attention to linguistic choices made by authors to signal symbolism, irony, satire, unreliable narration, character types and archetypal themes.

Data:
The study takes place over three years across two funded projects with middle and high school African-American students. Data include analyses of talk-aloud protocols to establish a baseline of what challenges students face in interpreting structural generalizations in literature, used to inform the design of the tool and the logic of the pedagogical model ; correlational analyses of relations between racial identity, coping, and literary epistemology with outcomes of close and far transfer measures of literary and general comprehension, to examine the identity affordances of the pedagogical model; how students used the tool, and the quality of their reasoning and argumentation.

Findings:
Talk aloud analyses of students who did not experience the intervention revealed challenges in identifying and interpreting structural generalizations. Correlational study of students who experienced the pedagogical model showed over multiple years positive relations between positive racial identity, a positive sense of coping ability, and a literary epistemology that valued multiple readings and the relevance of literature for personal development. In classrooms using the digital tool consistent with the pedagogical model, students made greater use of the tools in the system.

Significance:
The take-away from across the studies reported support the proposition that literary reasoning focusing on structural generalizations (e.g. detecting and interrogating linguistic structural representations) with texts that invite interrogation of identity related opportunities and threats support comprehension and critical reasoning. The significance of the digital tool is the affordances of its structures and the opportunity to specialize content to be responsive to the cultural communities of students being taught. Differences in quality of uptake of the resources in the tool are impacted by teachers’ conceptions of the goals of instruction, with specific implications for the foci of professional development.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University