Conceptualizing Dialogic Literary Argumentation as a Means to Engage Students in Reimagining Systems That Embrace Equity and Justice

• In Event: Writing Disciplinary Arguments: Theoretical and Instructional Considerations

Abstract

The purpose of this poster is to explicate, through empirical data, a theoretical and instructional framework for teaching literary argumentation that is in contrast to more typical methods for students reading and writing about literature in secondary classrooms: Dialogic Literary Argumentation.

Although authors often create literary texts that comment on issues of personhood and human relationships in order to name oppressive systems or reimagine systems that embrace the full complexity of human experiences, identities, and practices, the reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition or disrupting systemic inequities. We believe that the reading, dialogue, and written arguments about literature could be a key opportunity for schools to engage in curriculum and instruction that invites these multiple perspectives and ways of knowing and engages students in writing in ways that can forward arguments in the world that can work toward dismantling inequitable systems. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live.

In the poster, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical and instructional framework which situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts (Ivanic, 2004). In contrast to the typical literary focus of new critical close reading or reader response, students and teachers use literature as a prop to explore humanity and our relationships with each other, situating literature intertextually with many other types of texts and experiences. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports. Thus, a dialogic (Bakthtin, 2010) argument is a written or verbal response to multiple, ongoing conversations locally and globally

● Claims respond to ongoing conversations within the classroom and discipline and world
● Assumes literary text to be in dialogue with sociohistorical contexts and readers
● Evidence is drawn from multiple sources
● Instructional model centers on dialogue
● Assumes a response from audience

As we explicate elements in a diagram of Dialogic Literary Argumentation as an approach to teaching and learning literary arguments, we will illustrate these elements using student writing, classroom talk, and other data sources from ethnographic research we have conducted in high school language arts classrooms.

Authors

• Jennifer Lynn VanDerHeide, Michigan State University

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University