Theorizing Reflection and Refraction Within Dialogic Literary Argumentation in the Teaching of Sing, Unburied, Sing

Download or read book Theorizing Reflection and Refraction Within Dialogic Literary Argumentation in the Teaching of Sing, Unburied, Sing written by Matthew Seymour (Teacher of language arts) and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation theorizes reflection and refraction as it relates to Dialogic Literary Argumentation (Bloome, Newell, Hirvela, & Lin, 2019) in the teaching of Jesmyn Ward’s (2017) Sing, Unburied, Sing. This research examines how teachers and students reflect and refract frames for teaching and learning, multiple source use, and personhood as they are taken up and constructed by participants in an accelerated 10th grade English language arts classroom. This study occurred over the 2018-2019 school year in an English language arts class located in a linguistically, ethnically and racially diverse and under-resourced area of a major metropolitan Midwestern city. The participants included: the teacher, a pre-service teacher and 28 students (12 boys and 16 girls). This research employed ethnographic methods (Heath & Street, 2008) and data collection included digital video and audio recording, participant observation, interviews and artifact collection such as assignments, worksheets and student writing. In alignment with its data collection and methods, this dissertation employs academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998, 2006) as its theoretical frame and takes an interactional and situated view of language grounded in the scholarship of the Bakhtin circle (Bakhtin, 1981; Volosinov, 1973). Following this conception of language, this dissertation uses microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, & Shuart-Faris, 2005) to generate grounded theoretical constructs through analysis of how students used language and other semiotic systems to act and react to one another as they engaged in instructional conversations and composed literature related arguments about Sing, Unburied, Sing. Through this analysis, my research produced several findings. First, the teacher refracted a frame for literature learning through her construction of intercontextuality and positioned students through her use of pronominalization into more agentive roles. Second, students took up this frame and engaged in arguments about texts in which they explored definitions of personhood and their implications for marginalizing and oppressing people of color. Third, students took up the teacher’s frame for learning, arguing and discussing and used argumentation about literature to resist assumptions of privilege. Fourth, students used multiple sources to make analogic inferences toward warranting their claims about the novel and made intertextual connections to create backing for their arguments’ warrants. Fifth, students explored definitions of personhood and used argumentation and composed literature based argumentative writing to resist and push back against marginalizing narratives and definitions of personhood. Finally, contextualized analysis of student writing revealed that it was shaped by the frame articulated and proposed by the teacher and was responsive to the social context of the classroom and refracted classroom conversations, other texts, argumentative moves and content from the book to explore personhood and resist oppressive narratives. Contextualized analysis revealed more depth and complexity in student writing that would be otherwise opaque to outside readers. The implications of this research support further theorizing Dialogic Literary Argumentation regarding reflection and refraction.