Teaching Literature Using Dialogic Literary Argumentation

Matt Seymour, Theresa Thanos, George E. Newell, David Bloome

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000050134
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Research in Education

Introducing a new framework for teaching and learning literature in secondary schools, this book presents Dialogic Literary Argumentation as an inquiry-based approach to engage students in communicating and exploring ideas about literature. As a process of discovery, Dialogic Literary Argumentation facilitates conversation—"arguing-to-learn"—as a method to support students' diverse perspectives and engagement with one another in order to develop individual and collective understandings of literature and their place in the world. Covering both the theoretical foundation and application of this method, this book demonstrates how to apply Dialogic Literary Argumentation to teach literature in a way that foregrounds dialogue, learning through inquiry, diverse views, listening to others, and engagement with our communities. Ideal for preservice teachers in literacy methods courses and practicing teachers, it features real-world cases, discussions of the principles presented, resource lists, and conversation starters for professional learning communities, professional development, and teacher education.

1

INTRODUCTION

On the Current State of Teaching Literature in High School Classrooms and Why We Should Not Be Settling for It

English language arts teachers have many approaches to pick from when it comes to teaching literature. Each approach makes different assumptions about what literature is, how it might be read and understood, and its role in the lives of middle school and high school students. As teachers consider a range of approaches to teaching literature and have conversations with other teachers, they have an opportunity to think through their beliefs as they plan lessons, develop instructional units, and make adjustments during lessons and across the school year. English language arts teachers also need opportunities to think deeply and reflect with others on how the ways they teach literature encourage their students to think deeply about significant and important ideas regarding what it means to be human. Perhaps the biggest challenge for English language arts teachers—and the place where we start this conversation—is not having a compelling answer to the question, “Why teach literature?” For too many people, including some students and some educators, the only purpose of education is preparing students for jobs and careers. They should not be wasting time on reading literature as reading literature seems like an indulgence of relativistic reader-response or alternatively a labored and purposeless pursuit of a literary analysis in which a text is deconstructed into boredom. In this introductory chapter, we argue that Dialogic Literary Argumentation provides a compelling response to the question, “Why teach literature?”

Why Teach Literature?

Teaching literature has been ubiquitous in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education for more than a century. Arthur Applebee, a foundational scholar of English language arts education, reported that:

Literature has maintained its central place in the English curriculum, in spite of recent reforms focusing on the teaching of writing. Approximately 50 percent of high school English class time is devoted to literature; when the interrelated nature of the English language arts is taken into account, as much as 78 percent of class time may be devoted to literature-related activities.

(1993, p. 55)

Perhaps the biggest challenge for English language arts teachers is not having a compelling answer to the question, “Why teach literature?”

Assuming that the study of literature remains central to English language arts, we should look carefully at the reasons offered for such a significant expenditure of time and effort.

In the past, the justification for teaching literature reflected broad cultural forces at work in American society. In the early part of the 20th century, the teaching of literature was a rather elitist endeavor reserved for those attending private academies. The focus was on classical texts, framed as a source of “morals.” The reading of literature was viewed (and to some extent still is) as almost inevitably leading to character improvement.

As the 20th century progressed, literature study began to shift toward a wider range of genres of texts as school populations grew and became more diverse both socially and culturally. During the decades of the 1940s through 1960s, college literature instruction was organized around historical periods and instruction relied on the New Criticism. New Criticism was a widely accepted approach to reading literature in which readers studied a text to get to the meaning buried in the literary text. Good readers could get the meaning in the literary text; poor readers could not and needed instruction on how to get the right meaning from the text. Perhaps most significant, literature became a “discipline,” with its own ways of knowing and with specialized knowledge produced by scholarship, which was translated into literature anthologies as well as into the professional preparation of English teachers. Working within the perspective of New Criticism, the literary text became the primary source of knowledge, and considerations such as the reader’s experience and historical context were dismissed as irrelevant concerns.

During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, justifications for teaching literature were influenced by political and social movements. On the one hand, developing out of a social commitment to change associated with the Civil Rights Movement and resistance to the Vietnam War, literature instruction was justified as an exploration of oneself and the wider world. This movement ushered in ideas such as elective programs and the inclusion of adolescent literature and literature written by women and minorities. However, as the country shifted from political liberalism to more conservative views about the role of schooling, the teaching of literature often became incorporated in the teaching of “basic skills.” As part of that shift to a more conservative view, there was a concern that traditional cultural values were not receiving sufficient attention and this led to a more academic and canonical literature curriculum.

In a key book in the field of teaching literature titled Curriculum as Conversation, Applebee (1996) offered a vision of English language arts curriculum. Applebee argued that the literature curriculum should be a place for “culturally significant conversations,” rather than a body of skills and content to be imparted. He argued that such an approach might revitalize what takes place within literature classrooms as well as open up the curriculum to a range of texts more representative of American society as a whole. In our view, Curriculum as Conversation was a critical juncture in conceptualizing the teaching of literature as inquiry and discovery.

It seems to us that a key problem in teaching literature as inquiry and discovery has been a series of wrong answers to the question, “Why should literature be taught in schools?” Suggested in the history of literature teaching we have just recounted is a tendency for each new approach to make claims for literature’s usefulness or practical value. The teaching of literature was practical because it improved students’ reading, writing, comprehension, and analytic skills; it was practical because it prepared students for the demands of college reading and writing, and it was practical for ensuring that students knew and had access to a common core of knowledge and skills that they may rely on for communicating with one another. But such calls for the practicality of teaching literature are at best incomplete. While each justification of practicality for the role of literature in the curriculum certainly has merit—for instance, to teach analytic practices—these justifications miss the point altogether.

So, then, what is the point? We distinguish between practical usefulness and value. Consider some of the activities people often value, such as listening to music, talking with a friend, posting a note about a trip on social media, or reading a novel. Each in a unique way allows us to reflect on our ideas and experiences while we remove ourselves from routines and responsibilities of daily life. These activities allow us to reflect upon how we live and what we believe in ways that seem impossible when we are acting, that is, participating, in the world of human activity shaped by goals we—or others—have set for us. Put another way, these kinds of activities provide opportunities to consider the meaning and significance of our experiences. The teaching of literature provides an opportunity to consider larger questions of value to us, to others, and to the world at large. We value the teaching of literature because it provides the opportunity to ask, “What does it mean to be human?” and more specifically, “What does it mean to be human with others at this time in this place?” These are questions that cannot be asked in isolation of others but instead call for us to engage one another in serious conversations prompted by and enriched by reading and discussing literature together. We have named this approach to teaching literature Dialogic Literary Argumentation.

Dialogic Literary Argumentation in Brief

Dialogic Literary Argumentation views the reading of literature as a prelude to active engagement in the world, an invitation to students to ask and discuss with each other the most fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human together? How might people relate to each other and what are our obligations to one another? What constitutes justice? truth? human dignity? What are the rights that everyone should have? What is worth living for? How might pain and suffering be understood and addressed? And, how do we ask and discuss these and similar questions within the context of the time and place in which we live? There are, of course, no single correct answers to these questions; only continuous dialogue and reflection. Yet, at the same time, our reflections on these questions guide how we are with each other and how we engage with the world in which we live.

In asking questions such as those above, teachers and students need to be careful not to fall into the traps of relativism on one side or dogmatism on the other. Dialogic Literary Argumentation provides an alternative to these two traps by emphasizing claims, warrants, evidence, and backing for the ideas and perspectives we wish to advance. That is, Dialogic Literary Argumentation demands that students and teachers engage in what we call arguing-to-learn (we describe what this is more thoroughly in Chapter 2) while also emphasizing active listening to others, engagement in dialogue, and keeping an open mind so that one’s ideas can continuously evolve. Perhaps most importantly, Dialogic Literary Argumentation asks students and teachers to actively engage in the worlds in which they live. While this includes connecting the literary text to life and life to the literary text as a means of interpretation, it goes beyond this. Dialogic Literary Argumentation challenges each reader to become actively involved in the process of changing their worlds in a reflective and collective manner. As students practice an argumentative disposition that prioritizes listening, openness to diverse perspectives, embracing tension, and engaging in dialogue to deepen understandings and relationships, they are learning how to act upon the world and their communities. From the perspective of Dialogic Literary Argumentation, a reader is compelled to ask oneself and the people with whom one is reading, “What must I and we do in the world in which we live to bring about those changes that make the place we are in a more just, more caring, and more humane space that enhances human dignity?” The significance of this question is paramount to the future of our society. Our approach’s emphasis on diverse perspectives assures that no one person or group defines what the challenges are. That is, as diverse perspectives and experiences are utilized, there is an opening up and expansion of what it means to be human and what challenges exist for us together. Dialogic Literary Argumentation not only stresses action within the classroom in how we treat each other but also positions students to take this disposition to their own communities and beyond.

Applying arguing-to-learn to the teaching and learning of literature, Dialogic Literary Argumentation asks students to treat literary texts as “storied cases” about what it means to be human in conversation with others so that they may gain insight and understanding of themselves, others, and the worlds in which they live. These storied cases consist not only of the words in the literary text itself, but also in its intertextuality—the connections made to past texts and to future texts. Some of these texts are literary texts, some are other forms of written language, some are spoken texts, some are non-verbal texts (e.g., pictures, drawings, dances, etc.), and some are conversational texts. Thus, the arguments constructed about what it means to be human and the human condition derive from the exploration of the literary texts themselves, the conversational texts in which students are engaged around the literary texts, the other texts evoked explicitly or implicitly in the conversations about the literary text, the specific, situated experiences and circumstances of the students’ lives, and the students’ interactions with each other.

Abductive Learning for the Teaching of Literature

Abductive reasoning is what allows us to observe the teaching of a colleague and adapt what we like to our own practice, even though our colleague may be teaching a different subject and working with different students.

Teaching and learning with Dialogic Literary Argumentation asks that teachers and students begin to think and reason “abductively.” This contrasts with the two most prominent systems of reasoning that are discussed in schools, induction and deduction. For centuries, reasoning in the Western world relied on deduction until inductive inference became more explicitly prominent during the scientific revolution between the 13th and 14th centuries. While deductive inference allows specific principles to be derived from general truths, inductive inference allows generalizations to be derived from specific truths. Abduction differs from both deduction and induction. Historically, C. S. Peirce introduced abductive inference as a form of “synthetic reasoning,” the recognizing of meaningful underlying patterns of selected phenomena to generate hypotheses that explain a complex reality. Put another way, abduction differs from both deduction and induction in that it allows people to make more complex inferences and predictions across settings that may be dissimilar. Abductive reasoning is what allows us to observe the teaching of a colleague and adapt what we like to our own practice, even though our colleague may be teaching a different subject and working with different students.

An abductive hypothesis may come to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although the insight can be fallible. It is true that different elements of the insight were in our minds before, but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of constructing which flashes a new suggestion in our minds. For example, when George began teaching 9th grade English language arts, his initial efforts were to present to the students the “correct” interpretations of the literature they read. This was a disaster. He realized he was largely talking to himself. He decided to use some of his planning periods to observe other teachers at his high school. When he observed the 12th grade Advanced Placement English teacher discussing Joyce’s (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he considered how she asked questions at particular points in the class session. George realized that she did so to clarify a point or to dig deeper or when she herself was confused by a student’s comment. Although George’s 9th grade classroom looked quite different, he worked to engage his students with interesting questions that he himself was interested in discussing. He also “borrowed” a colleague’s approach to the research paper by using her idea of having students “prove something important to them.” As George worked his way through the early years of teaching high school, he learned a valuable lesson: that whatever new practice he brought to his classroom from an outside source, such as ideas from another teacher’s approach or an article he read in a professional publication, he had to find a way to fit it into the realities of his classroom. Put simply, George’s learning from his observations was abductive learning; he saw patterns in the teaching of his colleagues and he adapted what he noticed from another context to his own to improve his teaching and to create new learning opportunities for his students.

The Centrality of the Social—Two Classrooms

Social relationships are at the heart of teaching, learning, and reading literature.

To better illustrate the centrality of the social in Dialogic Literary Argumentation, we take a brief look at the approaches two teachers take to their teaching literature. As you work your way through these brief descriptions of these two classrooms, take note of the centrality of the social processes of teaching and learning; the work of teachers and students as they construct everyday life in classrooms. Why this emphasis on the social? Because social processes, such as teachers and students interacting with each other, shape what counts as knowledge and meaning and how ideas are to be evaluated.

Before we consider the two teachers and their classrooms, we want to emphasize that social relationships are at the heart of teaching, learning, and reading literature. Social relationships are part of the human condition and part of what it means to be human. Social relationships are inclusive of spirituality, alienation, authenticity, consciousness, labor, work, history, agency, love, voice, and much more. These are all aspects of the human condition and inseparable from human relations (both those human relationships represented in literature and those experienced by teachers and students). Sometimes it is difficult for us as teachers to see through the banality of everyday life in classrooms and in the teaching of literature. We get caught up in preparing lesson plans, addressing standards, managing student engagement, dealing with administrative responsibilities, etc. But we need to see through the banality of everyday classroom life in order to understand the possibilities for how our reading and discussing literature together can engage us in the critical quest to explore what it means to be human with others in a particular place, time, and social event.

Ms. Kennedy’s Approach to Teaching Literature—Teaching People Not Subject Matter

One of the teachers we observed, Ms. Kennedy, was concerned about the relationship between literature and life as she developed the curriculum for her 10th grade English class. ...