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How High School Students Learn to Write Literary Arguments through Social Interactions: An Apprenticeship

VanDerHeide, Jennifer Lynn
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405075067

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, EDU Teaching and Learning.
Although reading and responding to literature comprises a large portion of the English Language Arts curriculum, and argumentative writing is growing in focus in secondary schools, what literary argument is and how to teach it is not well addressed in the scholarly literature or practitioner materials. This dissertation aims to address this gap by exploring what literary argument is in a particular classroom, how the teacher teaches students to write literary arguments, and how students learn to write literary arguments over time. I frame this teaching and learning of literary argument as an apprenticeship, drawing on Rogoff’s (1995) theory that learning is changing participation in the activities of a sociocultural community. Through methods of case study and interactional ethnography, I analyzed students’ participation in literary argument at Rogoff’s three analytic planes: the context and nature of the apprenticeship in literary argument, the interactional processes that guide students’ participation, and individual students’ appropriation of the interpretive, analytic, and argumentative moves that constitute literary argument in this learning community. Students were apprenticed into the ways of reading and writing about literature, which were comprised of interpretive, analytic, and argumentative moves, moves that were both constituted by the teacher and students through language-in-use while at the same time influenced by institutional and historical forces such as new critical theory and the Advanced Placement test. The students’ participation in these moves was guided by the teacher’s explicit instruction in the declarative knowledge of the discipline of literature as well as questions to prompt students to make particular moves, providing students with procedural knowledge for how to participate in the discipline. The three focal students appropriated these particular moves over time in their speaking and their writing but did so differently, showing agency in their own process of appropriation. This study offers apprenticeship as a metaphor for the teaching and learning of literary argument with implications for theory, pedagogy, and methodology in the teaching and learning of literary argument.
George Newell, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
David Bloome, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Caroline Clark, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Ian Wilkinson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
298 p.
Composition; Curriculum Development; Education; Language Arts; Literacy; Literature; Pedagogy; Secondary Education; Teaching
argumentative writing; literature; teaching; learning; Advanced Placement; apprenticeship; argument; poetry

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • VanDerHeide, J. L. (2014). How High School Students Learn to Write Literary Arguments through Social Interactions: An Apprenticeship [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405075067

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • VanDerHeide, Jennifer. How High School Students Learn to Write Literary Arguments through Social Interactions: An Apprenticeship. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405075067.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • VanDerHeide, Jennifer. "How High School Students Learn to Write Literary Arguments through Social Interactions: An Apprenticeship." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405075067

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1405075067
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.