Teacher Students` Knowledge-in-Action of Literary History: Comparing Data from Literary Seminar Conservations (Heidelberg Model) and Think Aloud Protocols

Submitted by: Mark-Oliver Carl
Abstract: Teaching the history of literature has been challenged by the increased focus on fostering literacy. Traditional approaches of instruction which aimed at the acquisition of systematic knowledge, associated with Hirsch`s concept of “cultural literacy” (Hirsch 1983), neither represent the state of the art in literary history (Rauch/Geisenhanslücke 2012; Buschmeier et al. 2014), nor is such propositional knowledge helpful to student readers who seek to understand and interpret given literary texts (Freudenberg 2012).
Yet, literary historical knowledge has not been rendered obsolete at all. Recent critical approaches to literary history as contribution to cultural memory (Lachmann 1997; Assmann 2008; Miller 2011) or Spinner’s concept of a “literary historical consciousness” (“literaturgeschichtliches Bewusstsein”, 2006) have reconfigured the type of knowledge which is deemed desirable and call for new and more exploratory ways of teaching the historical dimension of literary texts and their understanding (Nutz 2012).
To foster such learning processes, teachers themselves must rely not only on pedagogical content knowledge, but also on profound and flexible knowledge of literary history. Teacher education is where such knowledge is, hopefully, acquired. It can be surmised that teacher students enter tertiary education with some knowledge about literary history, and that their knowledge undergoes some processes of transformation throughout the course of their studies.
But how exactly does this knowledge look? Regarding German teacher education, quantitative empirical studies like TEDS-LT have focused on propositional knowledge only (Bremerich-Vos/Dämmer 2013). How these future teachers apply their knowledge in the kind of individual confrontations with literary texts which will later mark much of their professional reading praxis of literary texts, and how they apply and co-construct it in seminar discussions, has not been researched so far.
Two empirical studies at the University of Cologne seek to close this gap. Kónya-Jobs analyses students’ contributions to seminar discussions with regards to conceptualisations of history and a literary-historical consciousness, while Carl examines knowledge structures activated during the construction of mental representations of the communicative context during individual first encounters with literary texts. While Carl uses Think-Aloud Protocols of teacher students from three German universities, Kónya-Jobs’s data stem from Literary Conversations (Steinbrenner/Wiprächtiger-Geppert 2010) with groups of Bachelor and Master students in Cologne. The latter method was chosen for the potentials of its familiarity-oriented design and of the authentic, participatory and only cautiously directive roles it assigns to the teacher (Nickel-Bacon 2011; Zabka 2015), to foster open search movements in the students’ co-operative, but not necessarily convergent process of meaning construction (Härle 2010), which means that students activate and draw on diverse types of knowledge without teacher-driven pre-selection.
Early in the process of data analysis, interesting parallels have become apparent with regards to the knowledge structures activated by the teacher students in both studies. Together, both researchers follow up on these traces, using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al. 2009) joint research design, which, although it highlights underlying common cognitive structures, also provides space to account for the differences in knowledge-activation between the individualized experimental setting and the group discussion. Transcripts from both sets of data are sequentially analysed in descriptive, then explorative steps, followed by eidetically reductive loops of comparative interpretations which aim to reconstruct the underlying cognitive frames.
In the SIG meeting, we present our preliminary findings about activated and verbalised literary historical knowledge of teacher students, illustrated by data from the transcripts, which highlight differences between M.Ed. class Literary Conversations on the one hand and introductory Bachelor seminar conversations as well as Think-Aloud Protocols on the other hand.
Apart from these preliminary results, we would also welcome a methodological discussion on the feasibility of “epoché” (Husserl 1998) and purely inductive pattern recognition in the context of phenomenological sequential analysis of verbal data about text comprehension which are situated at the fringes of conversationality and dialogicity.


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