METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM
Submitted by:
Marco Magirius
Abstract:
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Symposium and Round-table discussion: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM
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(Brief note on the format: In order to discuss the wide range of methodological approaches to literature in the classroom in an appropriate framework, we have taken the creative liberty of combining the formats of the symposium and the round table. The symposium in the following abstract therefore contains a total of four presentations. The general discussion will then take place in the format of the round table, to which further panelists have been invited.)
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SYMPOSIUM
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM
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In international research, a growing number of research projects investigate the practices, structures and effects of literature teaching from a perspective of Mother Tongue Education. The methodological premises of these studies as well as the chosen ways of data collection, processing and interpretation are diverse. While on one hand this is a sign of a lively research landscape, on the other hand it can be a challenge for the scientific dialogue across methodological boundaries. Furthermore, differences in teaching as well as research traditions in various countries can lead to a lack of comprehensibility concerning the “state of the art” in this field of research.
Due to the importance and breadth of this topic, we would like to discuss it in two related formats: A symposium and a round table discussion, that are linked together.
For the symposium, we have invited researchers who will present their current projects, representing a variety of methodical approaches:
- In the project of Louise Rosendal Bang, DEN, CONVERSATION ANALYSIS is used to reconstruct the sequential organization of literary learning processes and is combined with coding of data fragments,
- In the project of Miriam Harwart and Daniel Scherf, GER, DOCUMENTARY METHOD was chosen to reconstruct the implicit knowledge of the lessons’ participants),
- through INTERPRETATIVE CODING, used by Iris Winkler, GER, characteristics of teaching shall become visible,
- and the MIXING of different methods poses its own methodological challenges in the project TAMoLi, presented by Dominik Fässler, Steffen Siebenhüner, Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann, Irene Pieper and Katrin Böhme, CH/GER.
The presentations should provide the impetus for a discussion of overarching questions on methodological approaches in the field of literature teaching. Such questions would include:
- How do different methodological approaches affect the constitution of the research object?
- How can the different perspectives complement each other in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of literature teaching?
- What are the practical difficulties of working with (findings of) different methods?
The subsequent discussion will be expanded in a subsequent round table discussion.
CHAIR: Marco Magirius (GER), Sören Ohlhus (GER); Daniel Scherf (GER)
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PRESENTATIONS IN THE SYMPOSIUM
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Louise Rosendal Bang, Aarhus University, Denmark
IS THERE A LITERARY CONVERSATION IN THIS CLASS?
In this PhD study the method of conversation analysis is used to investigate the literary conversation as it takes place in five different Danish secondary schools, five gymnasiums and at five author schools. Each session is audio recorded and data from the recordings is transcribed in order to clarify the general character of the teachers’ verbal didactical strategies when facilitating the literary conversation. From this clarification the aim is to point out the remarkable observations and to describe them and their related implications.
A central theme of the literary classroom conversation is how the world is understood, both through the readings of fictive stories and through the dialogic conversation about the stories. The tradition of conversation analysis corresponds to this by analyzing how people understand the world, but also by analyzing how people build and maintain order and norms in their existence. In this study conversation analysis is used in an unconventional way regarding how the teachers build and maintain the norms of organizing the literary conversation. A descriptive and unprejudiced approach is a common approach in conversation analysis, but research already shows that the literary classroom conversation holds a strong tendency for teacher-driven questions. The Nordic research tradition has developed different categories of teacher questions in literary classroom conversations. The types are divided into open questions that calls for student engagement and dialogue and closed questions that requires short student answers. This way of practicing conversation analysis includes observations specifically oriented towards these types of questions. Furthermore, it focuses on teacher and student utterances that are not questions and the character of these utterances.
Conversation analysis focuses mainly on social interaction in general. It also has a solid foundation in task- and institution-centered interactions. The data of the present study explores the different norms of practicing the literary conversation in the schooled institutions and the more artistic author schools in order to develop new opportunities for school teachers to talk about literature in many different ways.
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Miriam Harwart (Goethe Universität Frankfurt), Daniel Scherf (PH Heidelberg)
TEACHING LITERATURE ON THE HORIZON OF SUBJECT AND TEXT MATTERS
In literature classrooms, texts are used as medium for realizing learning goals. One of this might be to impart orientations which ways of ‘’reading literature” are appropriate for school and/or for every day reading. Against this background, what kind of learning objectives can actually be observed in literature classroom? What are teachers and students beliefs about appropriate ways of reading literature? These are the questions pursued by the research project „Dimensions of quality in the Literature Classroom: a video based study on interactive talk in literature education (GeföLit)”.
In order to get insights into the “hidden curriculum” of literature classrooms, the “documentary method” (Mannheim 1922; Bohnsack 2003) is used to reconstruct the beliefs of all participants in the interaction of literature lessons. To this end, four lessons in grade 8 (Secondary School) including interactive talk about the exposition of the novel “Scherbenpark” by Alina Bronsky where videotaped and analyzed following a reconstructive approach.
Using the “documentary method”, researchers commit themselves to tenets of Karl Mannheim (1922), who stated that (every day) social interaction is highly automated – so the interacting subjects themselves do not even know about their utilized knowledge. Therefore, such knowledge is hard to access and need to be reconstructed by focusing the documentary level of meaning.
The documentary method, as can be shown by analyzing four videotaped literature lessons, is suitable for the scientific reconstruction of the beliefs of the participants. Actually quite varying orientations were reconstructed; as well it could be shown that “Involved Reading”, which is a highly promoted goal of literature classroom in Germany (Spinner 2006), is a category, which is suitable for describing different types of orientations in literature classroom. However, it seems to be risky to reflect on the use of certain scientific concepts for practical teaching using these findings on its own, as it is impossible to decide on the effects of the reconstructed orientations on students interaction and learning processes. For this reason, triangulation concepts can be discussed subsequently.
References
Bohnsack, Ralf (2003): Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung. Einführung in qualitative Methoden. 5. Auflage. Opladen: Leske + Budrich
Mannheim, Karl (1922): Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation. In: Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, XV, 4.
Spinner, Kaspar H. (2006): Literarisches Lernen. Praxis Deutsch 200, 6-16.
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Iris Winkler
INVESTIGATING TEACHING QUALITY VIA A HIGHLY INFERENTIAL CODING SCHEME – CHANCES AND CHALLENGES
The context of the presentation is a research project aiming to investigate the relationship between teacher beliefs, teaching characteristics and learning outcomes in German L1 literature classes. The teaching characteristic mainly focused on is the potential for cognitive activation. Cognitive activation is one of three basic dimensions of teaching quality that has proved to influence the students’ learning outcome (Praetorius et al., 2018). Cognitively activating teaching can generally be described as challenging for the students and as inspiring for them to reflect deeply on the taught content. A first step of the research project was to conceptualize and operationalize cognitive activation domain-specifically (Winkler, 2017). As an interim research result the paper presents and discusses a highly inferent coding system for the rating of cognitive activation in L1 literature classes. The coding system was developed based on the pilot data of the study (6 videotaped literature lessons on the same short story in grade 8, lower secondary, N = 6 classes, 6 teachers, 107 students). In an iterative process, a theory-based category system was restructured and adapted several times considering the pilot data. Methodologically, by analysing the videos it comes to an interplay between case observation, content analysis, defining categories and quality rating. In this way, an interpretative process leads to encodable and thus quantitatively processable information with respect to the main study. Quality criteria of the research approach were met by the control of inter-rater reliability and by validating codings communicatively. The developed coding system offers a very close description of domain-specific teaching characteristics and integrates an empirical and normative view on teaching quality. However, using a codingscheme cannot just mean counting “hits”, but is highly interpretative.
References
Praetorius, A. K., Klieme, E., Herbert, B. & Pinker, P. (2018). Generic dimensions of teaching quality: the German framework of Three Basic Dimensions. ZDM Mathematics Education, 50(3), 407-426.
Winkler, I. (2017). Potenzial zu kognitiver Aktivierung im Literaturunterricht. Fachspezifische Profilierung eines prominenten Konstrukts der Unterrichtsforschung. Didaktik Deutsch, 43, 78-97.
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Dominik Fässler, Steffen Siebenhüner, Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann, Irene Pieper & Katrin Böhme
COMBINING DIFFERENT METHODS TO ASSESS DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES:
the bi-national project TAMoLi – Texts, Activities and Motivations in Literature Education in Lower Secondary
Since the first PISA-study 2000 (OECD, 2000) a stronger focus on the notion of reading competence was implemented in the curricula for German as L1 in German speaking countries, thus potentially affecting the ways of dealing with literature. Traditionally, literature education has been oriented towards encounters with literature in the light of personal development. Supporting reading motivation has long been a priority. Are these aims loosing ground because of the current turn towards literacies? Empirical evidence on what goes on in the literature classroom is scarce.
The bi-national project TAMoLi focusses on literature- and reading education. We investigate aims and procedures of teachers in lower secondary (grades 8 and 9) in German-speaking Switzerland and Germany (Lower Saxony) and how students experience reading- and literature instruction. Besides, we assess the potential differences regarding literature education in the different school tracks and the two countries.
We chose a QUANQUAL Sequential Explanatory Design, in which a quantitative phase is followed by a qualitative (Ivankova, Creswell & Sticks, 2006). In the quantitative part we administered teacher (N = 115) and student (N = 2.173) questionnaires to investigate teachers’ orientations and aims in lower secondary as well as the perception of teaching on the part of their students and the students’ reading motivation. We also asked the teachers to record all texts, audio and visual media they used in the classroom during the period of 5 month (text and media collection). For investigating instructional goals and didactic approaches during the qualitative phase of our study, we selected a limited number of classes (CH: 9, D: 12) and videotaped at least one lesson per selected class where a literary texts (mostly a short story) was discussed. Furthermore we conducted interviews with teachers and selected students (4 of each class).
The paper explains the design and its individual components, focusing on the texts and media used for instruction. It provides insights into the integration of the different data sources in the quantitative (questionnaires, text and media collection) as well as the qualitative part (teacher interviews) and discusses challenges and opportunities of mixed methods research in educational contexts.
References
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2000). Measuring student knowledge and skills: The PISA 2000 assessment of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. Paris: OECD. [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2001). Lernen für das Leben: Erste Ergebnisse der internationalen Schulleistungsstudie PISA 2000. Paris: OECD.]
Ivankova, N. V., Creswell, J., & Stick, S. (2006). Using Mixed-Methods Sequential Explanatory Design: From Theory To Practice. Field Methods, 18, 3–20.
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ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM
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In international research, a growing number of research projects investigate the practices, structures and effects of literature teaching from a perspective of Mother Tongue Education. The methodological premises of these studies as well as the chosen ways of data collection, processing and interpretation are diverse. While on one hand this is a sign of a lively research landscape, on the other hand it can be a challenge for the scientific dialogue through across methodological boundaries. Furthermore, differences in teaching as well as research traditions in various countries can lead to a lack of comprehensibility concerning the “state of the art” in this field of research.
Due to the importance and breadth of this topic, we would like to discuss it in two related formats: A symposium and a round table discussion, that are linked together to provide a platform for the presentation and discussion of methodological approaches to research on literature education.
While the symposium “Methodological Approaches to the Literature Classroom” is intended to provide an exemplary overview of the research landscape on literature teaching, the corresponding round table discussion provides the opportunity for further discussion, informed by the presentations of the symposium and initiated by short statements of four experts with different methodological backgrounds.
In this way we want to encourage the participants to transcend methodological boundaries and ponder the benefits of different perspectives on the common research object, the literature classroom.
The following experts have confirmed their participation:
1. John Gordon, UK, Conversation Analysis
2. Ida Gabrielsen, NOR, coding/content analysis
3. Katrin Böhme/Irene Pieper/Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann, GER/CH, Mixed methods
4. Christoph Bräuer, GER, Reconstructive approaches
Each participant is offered a short 3-5 minute presentation on the topic; after the experts have made their introductory statement, all participants are asked to contribute to the discussion.
CHAIR: Marco Magirius (GER), Sören Ohlhus (GER); Daniel Scherf (GER)
- Louise Rosendal Bang
In this PhD study the method of conversation analysis is used to investigate the literary conversation as it takes place in five different Danish secondary schools, five gymnasiums and at five author schools. Each session is audio recorded and data from the recordings is transcribed in order to clarify the general character of the teachers’ verbal didactical strategies when facilitating the literary conversation. From this clarification the aim is to point out the remarkable observations and to describe them and their related implications.
A central theme of the literary classroom conversation is how the world is understood, both through the readings of fictive stories and through the dialogic conversation about the stories. The tradition of conversation analysis corresponds to this by analyzing how people understand the world, but also by analyzing how people build and maintain order and norms in their existence. In this study conversation analysis is used in an unconventional way regarding how the teachers build and maintain the norms of organizing the literary conversation. A descriptive and unprejudiced approach is a common approach in conversation analysis, but research already shows that the literary classroom conversation holds a strong tendency for teacher-driven questions. The Nordic research tradition has developed different categories of teacher questions in literary classroom conversations. The types are divided into open questions that calls for student engagement and dialogue and closed questions that requires short student answers. This way of practicing conversation analysis includes observations specifically oriented towards these types of questions. Furthermore, it focuses on teacher and student utterances that are not questions and the character of these utterances.
Conversation analysis focuses mainly on social interaction in general. It also has a solid foundation in task- and institution-centered interactions. The data of the present study explores the different norms of practicing the literary conversation in the schooled institutions and the more artistic author schools in order to develop new opportunities for school teachers to talk about literature in many different ways.
- Iris Winkler
The context of the presentation is a research project aiming to investigate the relationship between teacher beliefs, teaching characteristics and learning outcomes in German L1 literature classes. The teaching characteristic mainly focused on is the potential for cognitive activation. Cognitive activation is one of three basic dimensions of teaching quality that has proved to influence the students’ learning outcome (Praetorius et al., 2018). Cognitively activating teaching can generally be described as challenging for the students and as inspiring for them to reflect deeply on the taught content. A first step of the research project was to conceptualize and operationalize cognitive activation domain-specifically (Winkler, 2017). As an interim research result the paper presents and discusses a highly inferent coding system for the rating of cognitive activation in L1 literature classes. The coding system was developed based on the pilot data of the study (6 videotaped literature lessons on the same short story in grade 8, lower secondary, N = 6 classes, 6 teachers, 107 students). In an iterative process, a theory-based category system was restructured and adapted several times considering the pilot data. Methodologically, by analysing the videos it comes to an interplay between case observation, content analysis, defining categories and quality rating. In this way, an interpretative process leads to encodable and thus quantitatively processable information with respect to the main study. Quality criteria of the research approach were met by the control of inter-rater reliability and by validating codings communicatively. The developed coding system offers a very close description of domain-specific teaching characteristics and integrates an empirical and normative view on teaching quality. However, using a codingscheme cannot just mean counting “hits”, but is highly interpretative.
References
Praetorius, A. K., Klieme, E., Herbert, B. & Pinker, P. (2018). Generic dimensions of teaching quality: the German framework of Three Basic Dimensions. ZDM Mathematics Education, 50(3), 407-426.
Winkler, I. (2017). Potenzial zu kognitiver Aktivierung im Literaturunterricht. Fachspezifische Profilierung eines prominenten Konstrukts der Unterrichtsforschung. Didaktik Deutsch, 43, 78-97.
- Steffen Siebenhuener & Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann & Irene Pieper
Since the first PISA-study 2000 (OECD, 2000) a stronger focus on the notion of reading competence was implemented in the curricula for German as L1 in German speaking countries, thus potentially affecting the ways of dealing with literature. Traditionally, literature education has been oriented towards encounters with literature in the light of personal development. Supporting reading motivation has long been a priority. Are these aims loosing ground because of the current turn towards literacies? Empirical evidence on what goes on in the literature classroom is scarce.
The bi-national project TAMoLi focusses on literature- and reading education. We investigate aims and procedures of teachers in lower secondary (grades 8 and 9) in German-speaking Switzerland and Germany (Lower Saxony) and how students experience reading- and literature instruction. Besides, we assess the potential differences regarding literature education in the different school tracks and the two countries.
We chose a QUANQUAL Sequential Explanatory Design, in which a quantitative phase is followed by a qualitative (Ivankova, Creswell & Sticks, 2006). In the quantitative part we administered teacher (N = 115) and student (N = 2.173) questionnaires to investigate teachers’ orientations and aims in lower secondary as well as the perception of teaching on the part of their students and the students’ reading motivation. We also asked the teachers to record all texts, audio and visual media they used in the classroom during the period of 5 month (text and media collection). For investigating instructional goals and didactic approaches during the qualitative phase of our study, we selected a limited number of classes (CH: 9, D: 12) and videotaped at least one lesson per selected class where a literary texts (mostly a short story) was discussed. Furthermore we conducted interviews with teachers and selected students (4 of each class).
The paper explains the design and its individual components, focusing on the texts and media used for instruction. It provides insights into the integration of the different data sources in the quantitative (questionnaires, text and media collection) as well as the qualitative part (teacher interviews) and discusses challenges and opportunities of mixed methods research in educational contexts.
References
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2000). Measuring student knowledge and skills: The PISA 2000 assessment of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. Paris: OECD. [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2001). Lernen für das Leben: Erste Ergebnisse der internationalen Schulleistungsstudie PISA 2000. Paris: OECD.]
Ivankova, N. V., Creswell, J., & Stick, S. (2006). Using Mixed-Methods Sequential Explanatory Design: From Theory To Practice. Field Methods, 18, 3–20.
- Daniel A. Scherf
In literature classrooms, texts are used as medium for realizing learning goals. One of this might be to impart orientations which ways of ‘’reading literature” are appropriate for school and/or for every day reading. Against this background, what kind of learning objectives can actually be observed in literature classroom? What are teachers and students beliefs about appropriate ways of reading literature? These are the questions pursued by the research project „Dimensions of quality in the Literature Classroom: a video based study on interactive talk in literature education (GeföLit)”.
In order to get insights into the “hidden curriculum” of literature classrooms, the “documentary method” (Mannheim 1922; Bohnsack 2003) is used to reconstruct the beliefs of all participants in the interaction of literature lessons. To this end, four lessons in grade 8 (Secondary School) including interactive talk about the exposition of the novel “Scherbenpark” by Alina Bronsky where videotaped and analyzed following a reconstructive approach.
Using the “documentary method”, researchers commit themselves to tenets of Karl Mannheim (1922), who stated that (every day) social interaction is highly automated – so the interacting subjects themselves do not even know about their utilized knowledge. Therefore, such knowledge is hard to access and need to be reconstructed by focusing the documentary level of meaning.
The documentary method, as can be shown by analyzing four videotaped literature lessons, is suitable for the scientific reconstruction of the beliefs of the participants. Actually quite varying orientations were reconstructed; as well it could be shown that “Involved Reading”, which is a highly promoted goal of literature classroom in Germany (Spinner 2006), is a category, which is suitable for describing different types of orientations in literature classroom. However, it seems to be risky to reflect on the use of certain scientific concepts for practical teaching using these findings on its own, as it is impossible to decide on the effects of the reconstructed orientations on students interaction and learning processes. For this reason, triangulation concepts can be discussed subsequently.
References
Bohnsack, Ralf (2003): Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung. Einführung in qualitative Methoden. 5. Auflage. Opladen: Leske + Budrich
Mannheim, Karl (1922): Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation. In: Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, XV, 4.
Spinner, Kaspar H. (2006): Literarisches Lernen. Praxis Deutsch 200, 6-16.