Constructing Interpretive Communities Through Indexicality in Text-Based Classroom Talk

• In Event: Cosmopolitical Approaches to Intersectional Readings of Literature

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes/Frameworks:
In English Language Arts classrooms, state and advanced placement exams have long tested disciplinary content (Levine, 2019), exerting persistent pressures to center narrow notions of literary reading while silencing youth’s literary practices (Kirkland, 2013). However, ELA classrooms can be imaginatively re-envisioned to create hybridized spaces that value multiple ways of reading. Grounded in understandings of literacy as a social practice (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984), this study draws on a dataset (fieldnotes, audio of class sessions, all student writing, interviews, and focus groups) from a larger social design experiment which focused on just such a re-envisioning of an ELA classroom. This report investigates how, through text-based classroom talk, students collaboratively draw on discourses and practices from multiple socially-indexed traditions to construct a hybridized interpretive community. We asked:
1) In a course redesigned to center the social nature of literary literacies, what practices and discourses do youth draw on in whole-class literary discussions?
2) How are these practices and discourses indexically linked to interpretive communities that shape the classroom community?

Methods:
We analyzed audio recordings of whole-class discussions (198 pages of transcription) of focal texts over a semester-long course in a diverse public school in the Northeast USA. Youth selected texts for class discussion; texts comprised a wide range of genres/modalities: television clips, movie trailers, poetry, street art, and poetry. To answer RQ1 we used descriptive and structural codes (Saldaña, 2017) applied at the level of the conversational turn. For RQ2 we employed discourse analytic techniques (Wortham and Reyes, 2015) to trace markers of indexicality (i.e., deictics and reported speech). Deictics are words that need socially contextual information in order to be fully understood such as pronouns (she, they, it, this, that), temporal words (now, later, then, tomorrow), and spatial words (here, there). Reported speech refers to language that directly or indirectly quotes or paraphrases real or imagined people or groups.

Results:
Structural and descriptive codes revealed that youth drew on literary, critical, and fandom discourses and practices in whole-class text-based classroom talk. These discourses and practices included literary terminology (e.g., mood, tone, metaphor), language of social justice movements (e.g., feminism, toxicity, triggering), and language of fandom discourses including affect words (e.g., love, hate, gets me hype) and participation structures (fans, fanfiction, geek/nerd). Indexical tracings of deictics and reported speech revealed that youth established, maintained, navigated between, remixed, contrasted, and critically critiqued the interpretive communities that these discourses and practices indexed.
Thus, youth drew on diverse discourse and practices rooted in multiple communities including youth-based fandom communities focused on responding to and re-storying texts, disciplinary communities of literary scholars focused on close reading of aesthetics/form, and critical communities focused on social justice/activism. Through indexical traces, youth navigated between, remixed, and playfully critiqued all of these communities to create new hybridized ways of reading.

Significance:
This research augments understandings of: the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk, and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse high school classrooms.

Authors

• Scott Storm, New York University

• Karis Michelle Jones, Empire State College - SUNY

• Sarah W. Beck, New York University