McDonald 2004 Critical Reading 10-11 year olds.pdf - Oncourse

Literacy April 2004 17
Moving from reader response to critical
reading: developing 10–11-year-olds’ ability
as analytical readers of literary texts
Lorraine McDonald
Abstract
This article presents aspects of a research study into how
a group of ten- and eleven-year-old students (in 5th
Grade in Sydney, Australia) were apprenticed to view a
literary text from critical reading positions. These ways of
reading were an alternative to their more typical reader
response interpretations of texts. The article contrasts
‘non-critical’ and ‘critical’ classroom talk through a close
examination of transcript excerpts, and compares these
kinds of talk as discrete ways of thinking and speaking.
The article argues for a response-analytical continuum
which may support young readers in moving towards
critical reading practices.
Introduction
Over the past few decades there have been radical
shifts in the way that readers have been asked to
respond to literary texts in schools. When I was reading
novels as a school and university student I was taught
to search for the author’s meaning, which was a kind of
‘pre-determined’ entity I needed to seek out (Kempe,
1993, p. 307). A decade later, when I was first reading
children’s literature with primary-age students in
Sydney, Australia, the relationship between the literary
text and my students’ life experiences was the focus for
reading and for teaching (Luke and Freebody, 1997, p.
189). I suggest that this ‘reader response’ view of
reading stories remains a dominant way of working
with stories in classrooms today. More recently, reading
pedagogy has drawn on a poststructuralist theory
of texts in order to construct analytical, or critical,
reading practices. To highlight the distinctions between
reader response practices and critical reading
practices, a brief summary of these different discursive
positions is outlined.
Reader response practices
Reader response views of reading assert that readers
utilise their lived social, political and economic reality,
their knowledge of their own culture and their knowledge
of other cultures to make meaning from texts.
These experiences are all regarded as part of the
‘repertoire’ readers bring to an interpretation of
literature (Iser, 1978). Thus, the subjectivity of the
interpretative act is acknowledged and encouraged. In
general, reader response practices promote the alignment
of readers with the literary text through readers’
emotional participation with characters and analogising
of experiences.
In the reader response classroom, readers are expected
to be active participants in constructing meaning from
the text. Students’ interpretations of stories are
encouraged and these interpretations are perceived
to be ‘individual’, the product of an autonomous and
conscious ‘self’. While readers are free to disagree with
the meanings in the text, they do so from a subjective
position. Baker (1992, 1997) argues that these responses
and interpretations are constituted in the students’
cultural knowledge. In summary, reader response
discourse has informed classroom practice in English-speaking
countries for the past two decades.
Critique of reader response
Critical reading practices have developed within a
poststructuralist view of reading, and offer a critique of
‘reader response’. From a poststructuralist view, when
the personal experiences of the reader are integrated
with the experiences of the characters, the subjectivity
of the reader melds with the text. Arguably, when the
reader’s stance is at one with the reader position
constructed by the literary text, the ‘ways of thinking
or being’ promoted by the text, that is, the text’s
‘discourses’ (Gee, 1996), remain hidden, and a truly
‘critical’ perspective is difficult to attain. Furthermore,
despite emphases in reader response on the freedom of
the reader, Winser (1993, p. 114) notes that students
‘‘are vulnerable’’ because of implicit ‘‘pressure to come
up with a canonical reading, one that is socially
approved in the school context’’. This is a hidden
expectation of the practice of reader response, as
Freebody (1991) noted in his study of examiners’
remarks on Australian high-school students’ responses
to literature examination questions.
Critical reading practices
Critical reading models assert that texts position
readers in certain ways. In this approach to reading,
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18 Moving from reader response to critical reading
students investigate how this positioning occurs, and
they may offer resistant readings to ‘mainstream’ ways
of thinking articulated in the story. In this article, the
term ‘mainstream’ signifies an assumption of ‘normal’,
‘typical’ and ‘universal’ for dominant social and
cultural practices (Baynham, 1995, p. 43). Critical/
analytical practices have been seen, therefore, to
propose an alternative to dominant reader-response
interpretations of texts. The research presented here
suggests, however, that a reader response stance can
contribute to the formation of a critical reading
position. The article concludes with the notion of a
response-critical continuum which may be a useful
concept for introducing young readers to alternative
ways of thinking about literary texts.
The term ‘critical reading’ here encapsulates alternative
ways of reading which go beyond typical
approaches to reading as word recognition, information
processing, and personal response. Today, critical
ways of reading are intended to construct readers who,
for example, can identify texts as crafted objects, who
are alert to the values and interests espoused by the
text, who recognise their position as compliant or
resistant readers. When readers perceive texts as
motivated, rather than innocent, they position themselves
within an alternative discourse of reading,
participating in a critical literacy. Current Australian
English syllabi require teachers to employ pedagogies
that enable students to take up a position within such
an alternative reading discourse.
Educational issues in literature for primaryage
students
When children’s literature is presented in a classroom
it gains authenticity and authority from its educational
setting. Stories have the ability to ‘naturalise’ their
ideological positions and they ‘subject’ readers to
become their ‘ideal’ readers, that is, to produce
readings that align with the views of the text. As
Candlin states, ‘‘children’s fictional texts are engaged
in a struggle for young people’s minds’’ (Candlin,
1992, p. ix; see also Stephens, 1992).
Furthermore, current reading approaches do not
position teachers to challenge the ways of thinking
and being (the discourses) that stories portray in
classroom texts. The discourses stories present are
perceived as unproblematically ‘neutral’ by these
reading approaches, and by teachers. As discursive
practices, however, all stories constitute, and are
constituted by, ways of thinking which typically
present mainstream views on gender, ethnicity and
social groups. Recently, literary texts which challenge
these mainstream views have been published, and rereadings
of older texts problematise previous interpretations
(for example, The True Story of the Three Little
Pigs, Scieszka, J. (1989), Snow White in New York, French,
F. (1986); see also Bradford, 1996).
The role of the teacher in reading practices
In any classroom, the teacher is the interpretative
authority on the text for the students. The narrative is
filtered through the teacher’s talk about the text, that is,
the teacher mediates the text to the students. As Luke
and Luke (1989, p. 252) note, ‘‘[t]acitly and intentionally,
teachers will emphasize and de-emphasize, select
and exclude’’. The text becomes remade through this
‘‘running metatextual commentary’’ (Luke, de Castell
and Luke, 1983, p. 118). Baker’s research on talk in
reading lessons (1991a, 1991b, 1992; and Baker and
Freebody, 1989a, 1989b) highlights how, in the metatextual
commentary, students are ‘‘asked to look
through the text into the story, and through talk into
the world. The text and the talk remain transparent and
unread’’ (Baker, 1991b, p. 176). Together, Baker argues,
the text, and the teacher’s talk about the text,
‘naturally’ construct a subject position within dominant
ways of thinking for the student.
The study
The research discussed in this article was a case study
of how one teacher sought to introduce her students to
critical ways of reading that were distinct from the
interpretative responsive readings employed by the
class and herself in other lessons in the study. The
reading programme took place with students aged ten
to eleven years, in a Year 5 classroom in Sydney,
Australia. The text was a children’s novel which the
teacher read aloud to the class on a daily basis over a
period of a school term (ten weeks). Information about
the study-class cohort is summarised in Table 1.
As can be seen from Table 1, the class contained a
balance of ESB and NESB students, and gender, and
had a wide range of reading abilities. It was important
for the effectiveness of the study that the students not
be categorised as high ability. The teacher and I wanted
to ensure that any critical ways of reading achieved in
the classroom dialogue could be attributed more to the
kinds of talk about literature promoted in the classroom
interaction, rather than to general high reading
ability or a well-established English-speaking background.
The text selected for the study was I am Susannah
(1987), an Australian novel by a multi-award winning
Australian author, Libby Gleeson. The major characterisation
in the novel presents three generations of
women, the protagonist, 12-year-old Susie, her mother
Martha, and an elderly neighbour, Jess, known as the
Blue Lady. Each of these characters is ‘matched’ by
another female character who represents more traditional
ways of being for women.
The students responded to the novel through discussion
of various features, events and characters at a
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Table 1: Summary of information about study class cohort
Number of students 30
Chronological ages
10.4 to 11.6 years
Reading ages n
7.3 to 11.9 years
Gender balance
17 girls, 13 boys
Language background 46% English Speaking Background (ESB)
54% Non-English Speaking Background (NESB)
[Lebanese 5 Italian 1
Chinese 3 Egyptian 1
Armenian 2 Korean 1
Sri Lankan 2 Portuguese 1]
Total no. of students classified as
learners of English as an
additional language
11
(Source: Class teacher)
n
Reading ages as per the Progressive Achievement Test (A) in Reading Comprehension (ACER, 1986)
whole-class level. These lessons took place at different
times before lunch (1pm) and ranged from between 40
and 70 minutes in length. The reading of the novel was
considered a part of the ‘shared reading’ aspect of the
literacy programme and the teacher placed importance
on developing a community of readers (Fish, 1979)
who talk about a good book together (personal
communication). Some students obtained a copy of
the novel and followed the teacher’s reading.
A non-critical pedagogy: students’ stories
In the study the teacher wanted to develop classroom
talk which could be seen to construct moves towards
critical reading. To achieve this, she not only paid
attention to grammatical, narrative and gender perspectives
in the novel (‘critical talk’) but also encouraged
students’ personal stories as responses to the
novel, which I have called ‘noncritical’ talk. In each of
these lessons this ‘story-telling’ positioned the students
to empathise with the novel’s events and the
characters’ actions and reactions in relation to those
events. Table 2 below presents examples of the
relationship between text stimuli and the students’
stories. Lessons 1 and 7 will be discussed as exemplars
of a non-critical pedagogy.
As Table 2 shows, the students were encouraged to
align their experiences with those attributed to the
characters in the novel. This deliberate foregrounding
of the students’ repertoire was particularly important
in Lesson 1, when the teacher (T) drew on the students’
experiences of friendship to introduce the novel, as can
be seen in the excerpt below. In each excerpt that
follows the numbers indicate the turns taken and their
place in the lesson sequence. For example, 1 T indicates
that this excerpt is part of the teacher’s opening
monologue:
1T
Now what I want you to do is think about the
friends you have had since you’ve first started being
conscious of the importance of a friend in your life.
Let’s do a little bit of thinking. Who are the friends
who have been special to you . . . Now hands up
those of you who have had or have a special friend
that has been part of your life for a lot of that time,
lot of those years. Yeh, many of you, ok. Could we
just talk about those friends for a moment. The
long-term friends, people who’ve been part of your
Table 2: Examples of the relationship between the study lessons, text stimuli and students’ stories
Lesson Text stimulus Story topics
Lesson 1 Susie’s best friend announces she is leaving Leaving friends, or being ‘left’ when
friends leave: friendship stories
Lesson 7 Susie uses her mother as an ‘excuse’ to her peer Times when students have made
‘excuses’ to avoid doing something
Lesson 10 Susie’s mother takes her shopping for party clothes Improvisations of scenes based on
experiences of going shopping for
clothes with mum
Lesson 15 The activities of the Blue Lady as artist Grandparent stories, their activities and
relationships with the students
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20 Moving from reader response to critical reading
life for quite some time, let’s just talk about them. I
don’t want you to name names, but what are the
qualities in those friends that you enjoy? What’s
kept you friends over this period of time? Yes?
(Lesson 1)
96S
102S
Her mind is really confused because if she does
go, she might forget about Kim. If she doesn’t go
she’ll lose more friends.
If she’d stop lying, she wouldn’t be in all this
trouble. (Lesson 7)
In this monologue the teacher deliberately invited
discussion from the students’ lived experiences. She
asked them to think about ‘friendship’ in a particular
way: friends were ‘important’, ‘special’, ‘long-term’
and have ‘qualities . . . you enjoy’. For these students
the concept of friendship was constructed as enduring,
rather than ephemeral, and this was perfectly aligned
with the opening paragraph of the novel to be read
aloud further into the lesson.
Students’ stories were elicited when the teacher asked
about friends who ‘‘had to leave for some reason. Or
you had to leave . . . ’’ (50 T, Lesson 1). For example:
67S
73S
Before when I lived in Turkey, my best friend,
she, her dad got transferred to Canada and my
dad got transferred to Turkey and then my dad
got transferred to here and we haven’t stopped
writing and we still keep in touch
When my friend moved, I haven’t seen her for a
couple of years and when I did we had nothing to
talk about
80T . . . Now everyone, the class novel we are
starting today, is in fact a story of a great
friendship and a friendship which actually starts
at the beginning of the story with an announcement
by one of the main characters that she is
leaving, that she is going (Lesson 1)
The public space of the classroom reconstrued the
experiences of individual students, when shared, as
community experiences. Here the teacher constructed
a group experience which aligned with the experiences
of the protagonist: she positioned her students to read
from ‘within’ the text. What counted as reading here
was perceiving characters as ‘humans’ whose ‘life’
experiences reflected those of the readers. The students’
stories contributed to the development of a
reader response discourse.
In Lesson 7, the teacher promoted the students’
empathy for the protagonist Susie by asking for
inferences about Susie’s ‘excuse’ that her mother may
not let her attend the planned party, as can be seen in
the following excerpt:
85T
88S
90S
92S
94S
. . . What is really at stake for Susie in all of this
party stuff? What is really there for her?
She could lose her self-confidence after if the boy
said something like you are disgusting.
Like if she has a good time and forgets about
Kim.
She could be humiliated at the party.
If she goes and she doesn’t play the game, she
will lose her friends.
In this excerpt the students inferred a variety of
reasons for Susie’s excuses to her friends. These
reasons were constructed from the students’ cultural
logic and made Susie’s words plausible. Evidence for
this claim lies in the language of the students:
inferences are apparent in the students’ consistent
use of the conditional conjunction ‘if’ (88S, 90S, 94S,
96S, 102S) and the modal language of probability
‘could’ (88S, 92S) and ‘might’ (96S). Furthermore, the
kind of information they gave concerned the character’s
feelings and behaviours, and this is evident in
the students’ use of such ‘mental’ and ‘behavioural’
types of verb as ‘forget/s’ (90S, 96S), ‘humiliated’ (92S),
‘confused’ (96S), ‘lying’ (102S), and such metaphorical
constructions as ‘lose her self-confidence’ (88S) and
‘lose her friends/lose more friends’ (94S/96S). What
counts as reading here is the ability to project possible
feelings and behaviours onto a character and to make
deductions from the character’s thoughts. In this part
of Lesson 7, this kind of classroom talk could be seen as
an instance of ‘reader response’ theory applied in
classroom practice.
The teacher’s commentary on each response (not
included in the example above) indicated her agreement
with both the content of the students’ replies and
the strategy they used to arrive at their answers. Such
comments as ‘‘I have not thought of that’’ (91 T), and
her sharing ‘‘I have had a few [embarrassing experiences]
that are unbelievable’’ (97 T) gave authority to
the use of this strategy of projection into a fictional text.
The students’ projection of real-world cultural/social
knowledge of how friendships ‘work’ was continued
in line 102S: ‘If she’d stop lying, she wouldn’t be in all
this trouble’’, where a student challenged the empathetic
stance of the group’s responses.
When this student resisted the reading position
constructed by the teacher, she took up a critical
stance. The student’s comment offered the possibility
of an analytical reading: the teacher could have
examined the potentiality of different reader positions,
for example, are readers meant to agree with Susie’s
‘excuses’ and reticence, or disagree? Arguably, the
teacher deliberately remained within the reader
response discourse, ignoring the challenge and using
the comment as a springboard for more personal
stories, as can be seen in the excerpt following:
102S
103T
If she’d stop lying, she wouldn’t be in all this
trouble.
Yeh, let’s, yeh good. Let’s talk about that. You are
right spot on that is where I want to be. Have
you ever made up an excuse before, to cover
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Literacy April 2004 21
104S
128S
130S
yourself for something you either didn’t want to
do or felt uncomfortable about or . . . you felt
that you couldn’t tell the truth. You had to make
up an excuse. . . . Anybody want to talk about
when they did something like that?
Well, one day I was at Corey’s house and I was
sick and her dad got really angry and he was
calling me sook for being sick and so a few weeks
later, Corey asked me to stay the night and I said
Oh sorry we’re going out.
When Jim was here . . . I slept over at his place
twice and the first time Kieran his friend lived
like two roads across, he kept asking if he could
come over in front of everyone, and we said that
we were going out, and once he came over and we
were there. And we had to say we were just
leaving.
One time I went out to my auntie’s and she said
something bad about my mother and then I went
home. A couple of weeks later she asked me to go
up there again and I said no I’m going away.
(Lesson 7)
In this excerpt the teacher did not take up the
possibility of an analytical reading. Instead the
relationship of the character’s life to human experiences
was foregrounded as the students were encouraged
to position themselves in similar ways to Susie,
this time through their personal stories. Here the
role of the students’ stories moved beyond establishing
repertoire for the events of the novel: the stories
themselves became integral to the making of
inferences, the reasoning about the character’s motivations.
A critical pedagogy: orienting students
towards analytical talk
One way ‘critical’ talk was introduced was through
particular attention to specific gender perspectives
presented in the novel. The characterisation of the
novel’s three female generations permitted class
discussion about alternative possibilities available to
women of different ages. In these lessons the characters
were ‘appraised’ in the light of how they lived their
lives in the novel. Segments from two lessons, Lessons
11 and 15, will be discussed to demonstrate this focus.
Appraising characterisation from a
‘difference’ perspective
The teacher encouraged appraisal by framing the
classroom talk with a question which asked the
students to consider ‘‘what makes the women in this
story different . . . from typical female characters . . .
that you have encountered’’ (Lesson 11). The teacher’s
question offered a subject position of critic: the
students may situate themselves as analysts of
characterisation, from a perspective which recognises
that characters are ‘constructed’ by authors, rather
than as responders to characterisation, from a perspective
which perceives characters’ activities and
qualities as representations of life.
The students’ responses indicated their attempts to
take up the position of analysts who can make
generalisations about ‘typical’ female characterisation.
They did this in several ways, as can be seen in the brief
examples following, taken from different points in the
talk:
85S
126S
143S
147S
Sometimes – like she [Susie] hates people, other
characters like people
Usually the main character in the book – they are
not as quiet – more open
It is a writing technique
She gets away – some other books are not very
detailed. The girls normally just take one second
in the shop but in this book it’s like a big thing,
going to the shops (Lesson 11)
The teacher’s question had reframed the alreadyestablished
qualities of some of the novel’s characters
as atypical qualities of fictional female characters.
Some student responses constructed a ‘typical’ characterisation
as simply the opposite of the character’s
known qualities (for example, 85S, while others drew
on the verisimilitude of realistic fiction as in 126S). Two
other students, however, perceived a deliberate construction
of the ‘difference’ perspective: one student
named it ‘a writing technique’ (143S) and a second
student elaborated on this with a recognition of how
the novel privileges female preoccupations. In the
comment ‘‘in this book, it’s like a big thing, going to the
shops’’ (147S) the student noted the narrative space
and detail given to ‘going shopping’ and observed how
‘other’ books do not chronicle this kind of event. These
two students’ comments appear to recognise how
‘different’ characterisation of females must be deliberately
constructed as an alternative to ‘typical’ female
mainstream characterisation, that is, ‘different’ (gendered)
characters are constructed through the ‘different’
(gendered) events in which they participate.
Contrasting gendered characterisation
To differentiate between the ‘ways of being’ represented
by the two elderly women in the novel, the
mysterious ‘Blue Lady’ and Mrs Watson, the teacher
used contrasting language ‘balance-counterbalanceopposite-contrast’
(1 T). A number of perspectives on
elderly women were identified by the students in the
classroom talk, as the excerpts below indicate.
1T
Which woman in the story is an interesting
balance, counterbalance maybe would even be a
better word, to describe the Blue Lady? Who
would you name? . . . Who is the woman in the
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22 Moving from reader response to critical reading
2S
4T
5S
6S
7S
9S
17S
18T
19S
20T
26T
27S
31S
39S
45S
story who we would describe as being quite
opposite to the Blue Lady, a contrast to her . . .
Mrs Watson
. . . What do we know about Mrs Watson so
far? . . . How would you describe Mrs Watson
to me?
She knows quite a lot about the street, she knows
quite a lot about everyone
Nosey
Stickybeak
Gossip lady, hot gossip lady. There’s two people
in our street like that. . . .
She’s got to look after her husband and son.
Excellent, well done Nadine . . . what is really
important to Mrs. Watson is that she has a
husband, and a son, who require her to look after
them . . .
Make dinner
Yes, she needed to go and do dinner . . . She’s
got to go and make dinner and serve it up to
them, look after them, this is what is important
to her. Her husband and her son are her priority
....
What are other contrasts?
She doesn’t have enough time, like the Blue
Lady, to like do what she wants and stuff
A family woman
Mrs Watson probably cares about how she
dresses while the Blue Lady doesn’t care
Libby Gleeson has done this purposely
(Lesson 15)
The students’ cultural logic constructed a set of
characteristics that coheres in the context of the talk.
On the one hand, elderly women look after their
husbands and children (17S), ‘make dinner’ (19S), be a
‘family woman’ (31S), do not have time of their own
(27S), and care about their appearance (39S). Alternatively,
elderly women have time to do what they
want to (27S) and be unconcerned about how they
dress (39S). The teacher listed Mrs Watson’s and the
Blue Lady’s attributes and behaviours on charts as the
students offered them: effectively she was recording a
set of elements that contribute to mainstream and
alternative discourses around elderly women.
To this point in the lesson the teacher treated these
elements as individual and discrete. Visually, these
charts were placed alongside each other. Then one of
the male students proposed that these contrasts had
been deliberately constructed, ‘‘Libby Gleeson has
done this purposely’’ (45S). It appears that the simple
naming of these contrasts constructed a context which
made this proposition, foregrounded in earlier classroom
talk, possible.
This statement shifted the basis for the classroom talk.
The student’s assertion noted explicitly the constructed
quality of the characterisation: there is an
analytical awareness of the text as object. The observation
(45S) also indicated that this student at least was
able to position himself reflectively: while fellow
students responded to the characters’ attributes and
behaviours as presented ‘within’ the novel, this
student was able to draw on knowledge from ‘outside’
the story. Furthermore, having heard this observation,
the rest of the class was able to consider its import. In
her monologue which followed, the teacher reinforced
the student’s thinking and elaborated on a number of
points for the class. To facilitate the following discussion
excerpt is presented in three sections 46 T i, ii, iii:
45S
46T
i
ii
iii
Libby Gleeson has done this purposely
. . . There is no doubt that Libby Gleeson has
done this purposely. We are beginning to realise
what an incredible master she is with the
construction of this story. She is setting up
these two women as opposites, as a counterbalance
for each other.
. . . We’ve got a very traditional sort of woman
here in Mrs Watson, very traditional. The
family woman dedicated to the service of her
husband and child when her whole life revolves
around making sure the cleaning and the
washing and the cooking is done.
. . . But Mrs Watson represents for us a very
traditional sort of older woman in the story.
What about the Blue Lady. Let’s come back to her
in this conversation called ‘‘What makes the
Blue Lady in this story different from the typical
female characters we encounter’’? (Lesson 15)
The teacher asserted a number of propositions in this
talk. First (in 46Ti), she strongly reinforced the
contention ‘‘Libby Gleeson has done this purposely’’
(45S) with such phrases as ‘‘there is no doubt’’, ‘‘an
incredible master’’. These statements did emphasise
the continuing focus on the constructedness of text.
They did not, however, draw attention to the implication
that the class-as-readers were being positioned by
these oppositions.
Second, the teacher identified (in 46T ii) the activities
which, she asserted, situate Mrs Watson within the
subject position ‘traditional’. The teacher would have
been aware of the students’ familiarity with the
activities and attributes that construct Mrs Watson’s
role. These activities and attributes had been presented
by the students as individual traits; now they were
reinterpreted by the teacher as forming a cohesive
pattern, a ‘traditional’ role. Thus a version of a traditional
subject position for women was articulated for
the students in the teacher’s metatextual commentary.
Third, the notion of ‘difference’ was now defined as
‘not traditional’ and in the ensuing discussion the Blue
Lady was characterised as taking up a ‘different’ (nontraditional/feminist)
discourse. As her activities were
surveyed in this light, the teacher developed the
students’ responses to articulate how ‘different’ ways
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Literacy April 2004 23
of being for women might be realised. As the next part
of Lesson 15 proceeded, however, the students
struggled to come to terms with their own views of
what alternatives ‘old ladies’ may take. This discussion
is analysed next.
Presenting an alternative (feminist)
discourse
In the final section of Lesson 15, the teacher drew
attention to the ‘difference’ that the Blue Lady is, in
contrast to the ‘traditional’ Mrs Watson. One student’s
response, ‘‘She’s got no time for anything else, but for
her art’’ (47S), stated a direct contrast to how Mrs
Watson’s time is spent. This response was used by the
teacher to initiate a lengthy discussion on the possibilities
of a non-traditional and alternative lifestyle for
women. The excerpts below record the essence of the
discussion:
46T . . . What about the Blue Lady, let’s come back
to her in this conversation called ‘What makes
the Blue Lady in this story different from the
typical female characters we encounter?’ Sam?
47S She’s got no time for anything else, but for her
art.
50T So her art occupies her whole life. Her art is her
priority.
...
55S A hobby?
56T Yeh but isn’t a definition of a hobby something
that you do as a pleasure activity outside of
work?
57S Yeh, but she doesn’t have any work to do.
...
59S Well, dyeing her wool is the work she does, and
the drawing is the hobby.
60T Ok, let’s just talk about this aspect of ‘work’ at
the moment. What are you going to say Jerry?
61S What is dyeing if it’s not her work?
62T . . . What else do you have to say about this?
Nadine said ‘‘Well, it’s like her hobby cause she
really hasn’t got a job’’. And yet, we’ve said that
this occupies a huge percentage of her life. Jerry
has said ‘‘Well if it is not her work, what is it?’’
Hobbies and leisure pursuits are those things
that we do in addition to work. They are little
sidelines that give us pleasure. How would you
describe what the Blue Lady does?
63S It’s her work. (Lesson 15)
In this classroom talk the teacher presented cultural
and feminist positions. She attempted to establish the
concepts that art is ‘work’, and that ‘art-as-work’ was
an alternative to the domesticity of Mrs Watson. One
interpretation of the teacher’s talk across 56T-62T is
that she wanted the students to consider the Blue
Lady’s occupations as serious, rather than trivial or
marginal. This is evident in her comment ‘‘occupies a
huge percentage of her life’’ (62T). The marginalised
position of ‘art’, in the students’ view, is apparent in the
definition of art as ‘a hobby’ (55S) and the comment
‘‘but she doesn’t have any work to do’’ (57S) with the
adversative ‘but’, used by both teacher and students to
indicate the debate.
The concept of art-as-work appears particularly to
have challenged the students’ knowledge of ‘work’ as a
money-earning occupation and the students’ comments
now attempted to reconcile their understanding
of work with the Blue Lady’s activities. This can be
seen in the excerpt following:
67S Probably, the art is like a job, she wants to be in
the art gallery or like that?
69S She might be getting an award cause then she
can sell it and then she will have money.
73S She’s talented in what she does. (Lesson 15)
The tentativeness of the students’ acceptance of the
teacher’s suggestion is evident in their use of modality
‘probably’ (67S) and ‘might’ (69S) as they tried to
explain to themselves, in practical ways, how art may
equal work. This tentativeness was articulated as a
frame clash for one student (indicated by a bold S in
the following excerpt), who openly contested the
‘truth’ of this premise. This resistance to a compliant
reading of the alternative way of being put forward by
the teacher, offered the other students the possibility of
re-examining their experience of elderly women:
79S
80T
81S
94S
98S
117S
135S
136SS
138S
140S
I disagree with everyone – she doesn’t have any
major priorities, but I just think it is something
that she does just to fill up her time.
Why would you say that?
How do you know if she really enjoys it, how do
you know that she doesn’t do it just cause she is
bored?. . . .
I don’t know . . . usually old ladies are sort of
in the middle – some are secretive and some talk
– usually most of them are in between, like they
really talk and sometimes they are quiet cause
my grandma sits for two hours and goes to sleep
– but she also draws. . . .
I don’t know if this is right – the Blue Lady is
sort of like a younger person – she likes to draw
and everything. My grandma is 90 and she is
like Mrs. Watson, I don’t really know. . . .
My grandma is exactly the same as the Blue
Lady. She is 90 years old, her husband’s dead,
she’s an artist and she really likes children.
...
Again I disagree with everyone. Old individuals,
they usually get shipped off to the old
folk’s home.
Objection! Objection! [general loud reaction]
My grandmother was living in a flat by herself
and she was crippled.
Old people don’t live with anyone because
sometimes they’re a bit bitter
r UKLA 2003

24 Moving from reader response to critical reading
141T
Sonya, I want to ask – do you have grandparents
who are like that? Is that your experience?
[S nods assent].Yeh. They are actually,
they are not all like that, it is unfortunate that
you have had that experience. (Lesson 15)
In this talk the students reflected on how their own
experience of the elderly aligns itself with what the
novel offered. The students’ talk blurred lived experience
and textual experience and implied a recognition
that multiple positions were available for elderly
women. The students were able to consider the ways
of being taken up by their own female relatives and to
recognise the shifting roles that this may entail. Thus
Sonya’s resistance revealed the dynamic quality of
knowledge in constructing the potential for alternative
subject positions. Here, in effect, the student moved
towards a critical reading, which questioned the reader
and subject positions offered in the teacher’s metatextual
talk. What is apparent in these exchanges is that by
making an alternative discourse available for debate
the teacher positioned the students to examine their
experiences in the light of that alternative.
Conclusion
This article has presented an analysis of aspects of four
different lessons that utilised features of narrative and
feminist qualities of the study text to move students
towards critical reading. The lesson analysis elaborated
on how an analytical/critical reading contrasted
with a response reading developed through students’
stories. Reading positions alternative to those established
in non-critical talk emerged as the students
began to observe the construction of characterisation
and aspects of different gender discourses.
The power of the novel to ‘pull’ a reader into alignment
with its characters and ideology is important to note.
Deliberately developing this alignment also appears to
be essential for students’ motivation and interest. What
is also apparent from the transcripts is the contribution
that deliberation on points-of-view, the conflation of
personal understandings with narrative analysis, and
involvement in ‘debates’ makes to readers’ enjoyment
and enthusiasm. The potential to utilise a response
reading position in order to develop a critical reading
position with literary texts is implied.
The selection of the novel is crucial to supporting
moves towards critical reading. The features of the
novel’s construction offered the teacher a resource to
introduce her readers to the possibility of alternative
ways of being. The students’ interpretative responses
to a gender discourse were deliberately positioned
within a focus question ‘frame’, which both structured
a comparison of characteristics and constructed a
move towards a recognition of a particular gendered
position. Thus the focus question could be seen to mark
a point on a response-critical continuum, where it
invited responses to character analysis and also highlighted
alternative ways of being for females.
Lastly, it is interesting to observe that the authorised
classroom talk promoted a reading position which
complied with the novel’s ideology. Nevertheless,
debates emerged when one student engaged in a
critique of the discourse position presented in the
novel and in the metatextual talk. Thus the literary text
offered the possibility of an inspection of certain ways
of being and thinking, where lived experience could be
examined and tested in the light of vicarious fictional
experience. Furthermore, perhaps for the participants,
and certainly for such analysis as this, the student
challenge revealed the process by which critical reading
may be attained.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Lorraine McDonald, School of Education, ACU
National, Locked Bag 2002, Strathfield, NSW
2135 AUSTRALIA.
e-mail: L.mcdonald@mary.acu.edu.au
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