Literature Learning and Thinking in High School Classrooms In some classrooms, critical and creative thinking work in tandem like two legs walking. In a dialectic mode, students and teacher(s) generate possibilities, raise questions, consider multiple perspectives, and offer various interpretations while alternately evaluating and analyzing the possibilities -- a constant interplay of the creative and critical. Literature classes, in particular, -- where students examine complex problems of meaning, ethics, and motives -- often provide the most extended opportunities in the high school curricula to acquire these skills. Suzanne Miller and a team of colleagues recently completed a series of ethnographic studies in high school classrooms that provide rich pictures of such dialogic classrooms. One study examined combined literature and history classes; from this research, several case studies document the growth and development of a variety of students as the course progresses. A second, longitudinal study followed a group of eighth- and ninth-grade students from their dialogic literature classes through their high school careers, into new literature classes as well as into math, science, and social studies, to see if and how they used any of the thinking strategies in other situations. This article provides a brief look at some of the things the observed teachers did to help students internalize a dialogic way of learning as well as some of the ways that a group of focal students applied these strategies in other classes. Teacher Methods The particular thinking strategies that students developed depended on how their teachers used language and negotiated purposeful activities and contexts for writing and talking. These teachers played active classroom roles, but not the traditional teacher roles of interpreter and explainer. In discussions and writing, they encouraged students to respond to the text and to each other; they guided attention to differences and problems; their instructional support (sometimes called scaffolding [Langer 1995]) included a variety of strategies to help students generate and evaluate ideas -- posing questions, elaborating thoughts and feelings, seeking evidence, constructing coherent interpretations or evaluations and interrogating the text to uncover its assumptions. For example, at the center of the integrated literature-history classes of teachers Sharon L. and Ron M.* were discussion and journal writing through which students used their personal and cultural knowledge to make sense of texts. Each student produced five to seven journal pages each week -- chronicling their thinking and learning as they reflected on and responded to the daily goings on of the class. Early in the year, the assignment to research, write, and share orally their own family's history/immigrant experiences not only provided first hand opportunities to hear different perspectives of the American Dream, it also enabled students to practice the listening and response strategies essential to maintaining a safe atmosphere in which to share emerging thoughts and understandings. Further emphasizing the interplay of points of view in American history, Sharon and Ron used primary source material rather than a U.S. history textbook and organized their American Dreams, Lost and Found course around four themes -- Immigrant/Native American Experiences, Justice and Oppression, Labor, and Education. The accompanying chart summarizes the key activities and texts for the Justice and Oppression theme.
Among the literature classes, Nancy A.'s students learned strategies for engaging the text by focusing on their lived experience, particularly by making personal experience connections. In contrast, Courtney C. emphasized and supported a single strategy of returning to the text for critical analysis, to find and evaluate evidence for themes. Marcy R. scaffolded strategies for actively seeking out alternative perspectives; her recurring question was, "How would this event look through another set of eyes?" She often structured this means of generating alternatives intertextually, such as looking at the lived experience of war from perspectives of different people on opposing sides. Vera K. scaffolded a number of heuristics, including various interpretive and critical perspectives -- the Freudian and Jungian psychological models as "modern myths" -- so that students could "use those tools" to generate different views of the text. Moving Into New Concepts As the students moved into their science, social studies, and mathematics classes, the nature of the instructional context in those classes generally influenced whether they used the creative and critical thinking strategies from literature learning to make and question meanings in these content-area classes. Their perceptions of whether their own meaning making was appropriate in a particular class were not related to the discipline itself but to the teaching style. The research team found creative and critical thinking strategies learned in literature discussions used in each of the subject areas. In interviews students reported how they "read" the class talk and activity as instructional texts and decided if that text were open or closed to their own thinking. Students variously found that the creative and critical thinking strategies they learned and practiced in literature discussions were sometimes useful and could overtly be applied to understanding and making meaning of subject-area content; at other times the strategies were privately useful in creating personal understanding; and in some class contexts such thinking strategies were discouraged as inappropriate to knowing. Many content-area classes emphasized learning discrete facts and were construed by students as not requiring thought. In many classes, students reported feeling little opportunity for thinking, either through talking or other activities. The major focus in classroom talk was on evaluating correct recall of facts, and students felt that their engagement or thinking was unnecessary to class activity. They interpreted the teacher's authoritative discourse to mean that meanings were fixed and not modifiable. Jake described himself in such classes as an idling "vacuum cleaner," attending just enough to "suck up facts that would be on the test." Students overtly used creative and critical thinking strategies learned in literature study in other disciplinary courses where teachers created dialogue. In classrooms where teachers invited a general speculative stance toward knowing, encouraged the consideration of alternative possibilities, or engaged in a dialogue among possible procedures, students used thinking strategies learned in literature class, both publicly and privately engaging in personal elaboration of content. For example, a math teacher gave students an answer to a problem and asked them in collaborative groups to generate as many ways of coming to that answer as they could imagine. In a global studies class students acted out simulations, dramatizing the clash of land owners and traders to create a dialogue for understanding the lived experience of those alternative perspectives. This play of perspectives helps students to understand the dynamic whole and opens up "horizons-of-possibility" (Langer 1995). In some cases students took a narrative orientation toward understanding whenever possible, as when Willy and his partner engaged in sense-making dialogues as they attempted to understand what they were seeing in their frog dissection, speculating on the meaning of specific structures in the dynamic living whole, drawing on everything they knew from reading and experience to create a coherent story. Content classes in which teachers developed a social-cognitive apprenticeship created the most encouraging context for students to use creative and critical thinking in the narrative mode. Episodes from these and many other classes revealed that when students used creative and critical thinking strategies, they felt they were in a dialogue with a human being who engaged in conversation, played with ideas, conversed with them about problems, and created an atmosphere where the recursive, dialogic process of problem solving included curiosity and visualizations, feelings and mistakes, problem posing and pursuing possible answers. Teachers in these classes seemed to be acting out disciplinary thinking, each in her or his own dialectic of creative and critical thinking. The consistent message was of an inventive, strategic and collaborative sense making that engaged students in authentic disciplinary practice and in exploring meaning as continuous with everyday knowledge -- what Brown, Collins & Duguid, (1989, p. 38) call "cognitive apprenticeship." Because of the importance of the social and relational aspects of this teaching, Miller calls it a "social-cognitive apprenticeship." All of the focal students cited the purposeful social interaction and the collaborative relational aspects of this teaching as warm invitations to their sense making and thinking. Differences in focal students' responses to class contexts suggest complex transactions of strategies from literature in other classes. Students sometimes "read" the instructional text in surprising ways. One observed lesson that the researchers considered a monologic lecture, Willy later described as the teacher engaging in "self-conversation," which drew him into a think-aloud of the teacher's internal dialogue. Willy's sensitivity to the embedded conversation of the instructional text revealed a kind of "virtual dialogue." Other students pointed to examples of teachers playing both the part of the learner, with questions, intuitions, fears, and tentative answers, and the more experienced supportive adult. Students pointed to these dialogues as invitations to question and reflect. An interesting finding is that in monologic contexts the most academically successful students consistently adapted dialogic strategies privately as tools for developing personal understanding, independent of the demands of the class. In these covert dialogues, Willy explained, "I just think to myself, explore it myself to make it interesting." These students created a more continuous experience of thinking and learning for themselves during class lessons by generating questions, multiple connections, visualizations, imagery, metaphor, and other meaning-making strategies learned in their literature study. The students teachers perceived as being at risk for failing were initially more resistant to engaging in discussions in English classes and required more instructional scaffolding of strategies; they did not frequently or covertly use the strategies as tools in new contexts. Their stance toward all school knowledge, their teachers, and the role of their own thinking was influenced by social-emotional experiences, attitudes, and beliefs -- all of which were in turn shaped by the contexts of classroom, school, home, neighborhood, and community. In one math class Val felt an embedded dialogue, whereas Desiree rejected conversation with a teacher she felt did not respect her. In a science class Matt privately elaborated the lesson, but Jake found no part for his thinking to play. In their biology class, Tom saw the teacher as lecturing monotonously, whereas Willy sensed an animated embedded dialogue. These differences among students suggest that in addition to class interaction and activity, complex personal and sociocultural issues influence students' engagement in thinking. Yet overall, all of the focal students sometimes used creative and critical thinking strategies learned in literature discussions as a means of making sense. They did so in classes where actual rather than virtual dialogue occurred; where students felt respect for themselves, their knowledge and experiences, and their exploratory thinking-in-progress; and where students felt themselves engaged in an authentic inquiry with others to generate and pursue problems of understanding. References: Langer, J.A. (1995). Envisioning Literature: Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction. New York: Teachers College Press.
* The names of all teachers and students are pseudonyms. |
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