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

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