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

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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 r UKLA 2003
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 r UKLA 2003
Page 1 and 2: Literacy April 2004 17 Moving from
Page 3: Literacy April 2004 19 Table 1: Sum
Page 7 and 8: Literacy April 2004 23 of being for
Page 9: Literacy April 2004 25 Constructing

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

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