Dialogic Pedagogy: Literature based pedagogy and purposeful teacher practices

• MAUREEN BOYD & John Gordon & Tina Høegh
  Maureen Boyd mpboyd@buffalo.edu
  Emma Janicki-Gechoff emmajani@buffalo.edu
  In this study we focus on how a second grade teacher cultivates students’ access to, ownership of, and dialogic experiences with, the poetry they read, write, and perform. We unpack repertoires of instructional purposes and practices across a poetry unit: minilessons to teach poetry mechanics through a focus on content grounded in local resources; poetry centers which emphasize multimodal and sensual knowing; and a [re]knowing of the geography in, of, and surrounding the classroom. We explicate ways these repertoires allow for different entry points into a poetic dialogic orientation to the world, accessible to a classroom of 7 and 8 year olds.
  Methods & Data sources. Data are part of a two-year ethnographic case study. In this paper we examine classroom talk practices across a month-long instructional unit on poetry in a second grade urban classroom community in USA (17 mini-lessons across 20 days in April-May, 2013). Data includes video and audio recordings (9 hours of poetry writing workshop, including 3 hours of whole group minilesson data), field notes, interviews of teacher and students, lesson plans, and student artifacts.
  Analysis & Results are presented on two levels.
  First, we profile the dimensions of repertoires across the poetry unit. We explicate the planned interplay among
  1) types of poetry (odes, autobiographical, haiku…);
  2) types/scope of talk (minilessons, 9 different poetry centers);
  3) types of activities (centers, outside time writing poetry, whole group minilesson talk).
  We show ways instructional and curricular decisions positioned these second graders as poets.
  Second, we conduct a microanalysis of three mini-lessons purposefully selected to illuminate:
  a) different sources for poetry: (published poetry, teacher personal poetry, student poetry);
  b) different ways participants wrote poetry (teacher model, collaborative, independently written);
  c) geography of place: around the classroom (rug, desks, window, library) and outside the classroom (in the hall, outside);
  d) Theme - local, personal, everyday.
  Significance. Our study shows particular ways this teacher purposefully and coherently created classroom conditions (and repertoires of instructional practices that work together) in service of dialogic meaning making.
• MAUREEN BOYD & John Gordon & Tina Høegh
  John Gordon John.Gordon@uea.ac.uk
  This study analyses teachers’ exposition to support literary study. It examines teachers’ presentation of narrative prose texts to students in primary and secondary schools. It identifies dialogic practices of teachers’ oral narration related to focal study texts, which mediate those focal texts using varied modal resources. Often exposition embeds spoken quotations drawn from the text, comprising paraphrase, analytic comment and specialist terminology. The paper describes these practices using the umbrella term Pedagogic Literary Narration.
  Research questions
  a) What forms of exposition do teachers use around narrative prose texts?
  b) How does such exposition relate to the focal narrative prose text?
  c) What are the distinctive features of such exposition?
  Methods and Data sources. Data derives from Literature’s Lasting Impression⃰ project which investigated shared novel reading in formal education. The study incorporated contextualising surveys, interviews and fieldwork. Transcripts derive from field recordings made in 6 secondary classrooms and 2 primary classrooms.
  The research method adapts Conversation Analysis in second-language learning to L1/first language literary study. The adapted method responds to traits of narrative texts, informed by Bruner’s theorisation of narrative, Narrative Analysis and narratology. Using Bakhtin’s heteroglossia concept, it examines the internal structure of teacher exposition, in particular how teachers build comment around details drawn from the text through spoken quotation.
  Analysis and Results: Discussion posits Pedagogic Literary Narration as a core pedagogic activity in literary study. It identifies teachers' subtle actions in literary narration, which are often spontaneous and intuitive. Transcripts demonstrate in-the-moment judgement as a critical feature of literary pedagogy. Significance: The study proposes Pedagogical Literary Narration as unitary paradigm for shared L1 literary reading, sufficiently versatile to apply to study around any literary text, curriculum and classroom.
  References:
  Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
  Seedhouse, P. (2004). The interactional architecture of the language classroom: A conversation analysis perspective. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
• MAUREEN BOYD & John Gordon & Tina Høegh
  Tina Høegh thoegh@sdu.dk
  The study explores and compare how students and teacher perform and engage with an e-learning portal that outlines a detailed path of inquiry based literature reading strategy with a very varied sort of texts: short stories, a short feature, a written novel, a video game, a song and a tv-series. The portal seeks to give the students a reading-, inquiry- and interpretation-strategy as a structure for engaging with these varied text-formats, and the portal supports both teacher and students through individual work as well as through dialogic interaction and the students’ analytic productions. The question in this presentation is how the teacher projects the portals’ progression in his or her enactment with the teaching material in class?
  This study is part of the qualitative phase of a large-scale intervention project named Quality in Danish and Mathematics (KiDM 2016-18). In the part concerning L1, Danish, the intention is to investigate and develop literature teaching in grade 7-8 by establishing and continuously adjusting (theory of change approach) an inquiry based literature teaching. We hope to answer how students and teachers describe, judge and realize quality in literature teaching.
  Methods & Data sources. Data are from the local classrooms settings and conducted through video and audio records of whole-class-interaction, students group dialogues, collections of student writings and other productions, ethnographic field notes by 2 researchers present, and interviews with teachers and students. These data are sampled during 9-10 visits in the classrooms while working with the materials in the portal through 3-4 months.
  Analysis. The focus of this presentation is the micro discursive events and the multimodality (cf. Maine 2015 mentioned above) of the classroom, i.e. the participants’ expressions and bodily reactions while engaged with the learning material, with the instructions in the e-learning portal, as well as the teacher’s and students’ choices while working. The micro analyses are drafted as multimodal transcriptions, Multimodal Textmaking (Fine 1994; Høegh 2017a and b).
  Significance and tentative conclusion. One contradictory (and tentative) conclusion is that the teacher’s lack of ownership to the text material and therefore lack of personal choice of text, pedagogical intention with and interpretation of the text influence and restrain his or her performance in the progression of the classroom’s inquiry. At the same time both teacher and students seem inspired by the learning material and choices of texts.
  The question this qualitative phase of the overall large scale intervention hope to answer is how students and teachers describe, judge and realize quality in literature teaching and inquiry.
  References
  Elf, N.F. & Hansen, T. I. (2017) HVAD VI VED OM UNDERSØGELSESORIENTERET UNDERVISNING I DANSK: Forundersøgelse i projekt Kvalitet i Dansk og Matematik, delrapport 2 http://laeremiddel.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Forundersøgelse-delrapport-2-dansk.pdf (What do we know about inquiry-based teaching in Danish: Preliminary study in the project Quality in Danish and Mathematic, part 2 of report.)
  Fine, E. C. (1994) The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
  Høegh, T. (2017a) “Methodological issues in analyzing human communication – the complexities of multimodality”. In Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation. Duncker, D. & Perregaard, B. (red.). Copenhagen: U Press, s. 83-127 44 s.
  Høegh, T. (2017) “Observation and analysis through textmaking”. In Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation. Duncker, D. & Perregaard, B. (red.). Copenhagen: U Press, s. 331-352 21 s.