Dialogic Literary Argumentation in High School Language Arts Classrooms

A Social Perspective for Teaching, Learning, and Reading Literature

David Bloome, George Newell, Alan R Hirvela, Tzu-Jung Lin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032240343
• eBook ISBN: 9780429755736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by leaders in the field of literacy and language arts Education, this volume defines Dialogic Literary Argumentation, outlines its key principles, and provides in-depth analysis of classroom social practices and teacher-student interactions to illustrate the possibilities of a social perspective for a new vision of teaching, reading and understanding literature.

Dialogic Literary Argumentation builds on the idea of arguing to learn to engage teachers and students in using literature to explore what it means to be human situated in the world at a particular time and place. Dialogic Literary Argumentation fosters deep and complex understandings of literature by engaging students in dialogical social practices that foster dialectical spaces, intertextuality, and an unpacking of taken-for-granted assumptions about rationality and personhood. Dialogic Literary Argumentation offers new ways to engage in argumentation aligned with new ways to read literature in the high school classroom.

Offering theory and analysis to shape the future use of literature in secondary classrooms, this text will be great interest to researchers, graduate and postgraduate students, academics and libraries in the fields of English and Language Arts Education, Teacher Education, Literacy Studies, Writing and Composition.

1 Introduction to Dialogic Literary Argumentation

The primary goal of this book is to define Dialogic Literary Argumentation. For us, Dialogic Literary Argumentation is a framework for the teaching, learning, and reading of literature. We offer this framework at a time when the teaching of literature is facing a crisis of definition and purpose. There have been a series of calls from politicians, business leaders, and some educators to diminish the teaching of literature in favor of information-based texts (for discussions of this debate, see Alsup, 2015; Jago, 2013; Layton, 2012; Schmoker & Jago, 2013). Like Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), the push is for “facts, only facts.” It is also the case that too many students are bored and alienated in their secondary schools’ literature classes. They find the stories at a distance from their lives and classroom discussions circumscribed by a literary world of which they have no part.

Dialogic Literary Argumentation explicitly holds that the reading of and social interactions around literature are keys to understanding the human condition and the social, cultural, and political conditions of people’s lives. Using the construct of argumentation as inquiry and learning (cf., Newell, Bloome, & Hirvela, 2015), Dialogic Literary Argumentation asks students to read literary texts with an open mind and to engage in dialogue with others using the literature they have read to explore what it means to be human and the nature of the human condition within and across particular times, places, and social situations including and perhaps especially the times, places, and social situations in which students and teachers find themselves. The “dialogue” called for in Dialogic Literary Argumentation involves more than simply listening to others and then talking past each other: it eschews competitive argumentation in which one tries to have one’s position “win” over others, and it rejects the relativism of disengagement in which people each hold their own views without engaging dialogically and dialectically with each other in crafting either a working consensus or an evolving dialectic that continues to inform. Dialogic Literary Argumentation requires people engaged together in arguing to learn to bring to their dialogues textual evidence that includes the target literary text (the novel, short story, poem, etc.) as well as the texts of instructional conversations then and from previous classes, previously read literary works, texts expressed in other semiotic forms (e.g., paintings, music), and narratives from and about the experiences students have had and those of their communities, among others. As such, Dialogic Literary Argumentation is inherently intertextual at multiple scales and in multiple ways (cf., Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Hodges, 2018; Tannen, 2006). Metaphorically, the literary text(s) is a prop (cf., Heath & Branscombe, 1986) to foster dialogue that brings together multiple texts (literary and otherwise) and engages people (teachers and students) in ongoing dialogues and conversations about the human condition both in particular situations and beyond. It does so not to fill students’ heads with literary knowledge but to engage them in exploring in depth what it means to be human in the world with all of its complexities, contradictions, irrationalities, and incoherencies. Dialogic Literary Argumentation fosters students’ engagement in a series of social practices for reading and deliberating about literary texts with others, social practices that are continuously refracted and appropriated for use in other situations and other social contexts.

The framework and model of Dialogic Literary Argumentation evolved from our collaborations with teachers and our long-term ethnographic field work in classrooms.¹ Our ideas developed by moving back and forth between various theories and philosophies (e.g., literary theories, theories of teaching and learning as social, theories of argumentation, theories of languaging in educational settings, social constructionism) and what we were seeing and learning “hanging out” in over 60 high school English language arts classrooms over the past 12 years and from our conversations and collaborations with the teachers of those classrooms. Because what we learned from being there in classrooms is key to the epistemology and ontology of Dialogic Literary Argumentation, we ground our theorizing in the particularities of specific events from the classrooms we studied. We have organized the book to take you on a journey similar to that we took in theorizing Dialogic Literary Argumentation. We looked intensively at classroom events—at the interactions of teachers and students around a novel they were reading—and at student writing with an open mind about the theories we were bringing to our analyses and understandings of those events. We worked back and forth using the analysis of classroom events and student writing to challenge, revise, and remake the theories we had while using those remade theories to challenge the analysis we had done. Thus, throughout the book, we share analyses of classroom events and student writing not so much as illustrations of Dialogic Literary Argumentation (although they do illustrate particular dimensions of Dialogic Literary Argumentation) but rather to share and pull you into how we came to theorize Dialogic Literary Argumentation. We begin our discussion and exploration of Dialogic Literary Argumentation in this chapter, as we do each of the chapters in this book, by discussing one classroom event; for this chapter, it is the teaching, learning, and reading of Hemingway’s (1925) short story “Indian Camp” in Ms. Hill’s 11th-grade English language arts classroom.²

We note here, and throughout the book, that many of the literary texts used in the classrooms we observed concerned issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of hierarchy and oppression. And, consequentially, similarly so were many of the classroom discussions we observed. This was not a surprise to us, nor should it be to anyone familiar with the history of literature or the history of the teaching of literature in the United States. Although some scholarly discussions of literary theory and of the teaching, learning, and reading of literature in secondary schools eschew forms of oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, since these and other forms of oppression permeate and define nearly all aspects of daily life in the United States, it would be surprising if the teaching, learning, and reading of literature did not address them. In recognizing the ubiquity of these forms of oppression in the teaching, learning, and reading of literature in high school classrooms in the United States, we have been informed by and have incorporated insights from literary theorists and educational scholars who have theorized the take-up of these and other forms of oppression in high school literature education (e.g., Appleman, 2015; Blackburn, 2019; Lee, 2007; Thomas, 2015).

After discussing the teaching, learning, and reading of “Indian Camp,” we then discuss the movement from the current state of the field of teaching and learning literature in secondary classrooms to Dialogic Literary Argumentation. This is followed in this chapter by a brief discussion of key theoretical framings that have guided us in how we are defining Dialogic Literary Argumentation. In subsequent chapters, we explicate key dimensions of a model of Dialogic Literary Argumentation. We also provide a brief overview of the chapters in this book later in this chapter.

It is appropriate at this point that we make clear that we view the discussion of Dialogic Literary Argumentation in this book as a beginning. We look forward to the continuing evolution of our own and others’ theorizing (and argumentation) about the teaching, learning, and reading of literature in high school English language arts classrooms and beyond.

Teaching, Learning, and Reading “Indian Camp” in an 11th-Grade English Language Arts Classroom³

Ms. Hill told us that she had two related purposes in teaching Hemingway’s (1925) short story “Indian Camp”: to prepare the students to write a literary argument and to engage them in exploratory talk about the theme of dominance. In the short story “Indian Camp,” the first of the Nick Adams series, a country doctor has been summoned to an “Indian” camp to deliver a baby. At the camp, the doctor is forced to perform an emergency caesarean section using a jackknife, with Nick, his son, as his assistant. Afterward, the woman’s husband is discovered dead, having slit his throat during the operation. Many critics describe “Indian Camp” as a story of initiation—Nick’s father exposes his young son to childbirth and unintentionally to violent death (e.g., Defalco, 1963; Strychacz, 2003; Tanselle, 1983). Yet rather than a story of initiation, Ms. Hill frames an analysis of the story using the theme of dominance.

The lesson that day began with 20 minutes of announcements and a summary of the previous class session. Ms. Hill then asked the students to “take out your homework on ‘Indian Camp.’ ” The homework required students to list examples of dominance in “Indian Camp” and to identify evidence, warrants, and backing for each example. She then asked the students to work in groups of four to “come up with the top two examples … that you guys can agree on and then we will share out.”

The small peer group discussions focused mostly on students telling each other what they did and what examples they found. About 25 minutes into the lesson, Ms. Hill stopped the small peer groups and began a whole class discussion. The participation structure of the whole class discussion was organized by Ms. Hill asking questions or making comments and students responding to her. On occasion, she provided an evaluation—“I agree”—although mostly she repeated, revoiced, or summarized a student response and on occasion juxtaposed it with another student comment that had a different v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Members of The Ohio State University Argumentative Writing Project
• 1 Introduction to Dialogic Literary Argumentation
• 2 Toward a Model of Dialogic Literary Argumentation
• 3 Constructing Dialogue and Dialectics in Arguing to Learn in the Teaching, Learning, and Reading of Literature
• 4 Constructing Multiple Perspectives and Rationality in the Teaching, Learning, and Reading of Literature
• 5 Constructing Intertextuality and Indexicality in Dialogic Literary Argumentation
• 6 Constructing Personhood in the Teaching, Learning, and Reading of Literature
• 7 Final Comments: The Possibilities of Dialogic Literary Argumentation in English Language Arts Classrooms
• References
• Index