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The Walkabout in an Alternative High School: Narrative as a Social Practice for Reflection on and Analysis of Experience

Weyand, Larkin Gene
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7981-3765
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468241129

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, EDU Teaching and Learning.
The field of English Language Arts has a long history of valuing students’ experience and placing it at the center of curriculum and instruction. However, the means of making experience educative for students has proved to be a challenging conceptualization, especially within the realities of classroom life. This dissertation addresses this issue by exploring how a particular school used an 18-week experiential program called “Walkabout” to create opportunities for students’ experiences to become educative individually and collectively through narrative performance. In Walkabout, students reflect upon the educative value of their experiences through multiple oral and written narrativizations of experiences over time. I frame the practice of making experience educative in two ways. First, I build upon Dewey’s (1938) notions of continuity and interaction. Second, I rely upon sociolinguistic scholars who conceptualize narrative according to its situated function as manifested by language-in-use. The larger ethnographic research project from which this study is taken was a two-year study tracing the writing experiences of two senior classes involving 18 case study students. This study was the focus of the second year of the larger study. I use the methods of case study and interactional ethnography to trace students’ participation with narrativizations of experience according to Rogoff’s (1995) three planes of activity—apprenticeship, guided practice, and participatory appropriation—to structure my discussion of students’ sociocultural participation with narrativizations of experience over time on institutional, interactional, and individual levels. Students were apprenticed into making experience educative over time through three primary moves: (1) making immediate evaluations tellable (2) constructing identities through narrativizations and (3) engaging in reflective meaning making on previous and ongoing narrativizations. These moves were evident in the students’ evolving language in use in how they narrativized their experiences over time in different narrative environments such as journals, class discussions, class papers, and public presentations. These moves were also influenced by the historical, institutional, and interactional forces that shaped the Walkabout program and its teachers, including an emphasis on individual and community growth and readiness to transition from adolescence to adulthood. By addressing student-generated narrativized topics over time, teachers were able to transform students’ immediate narrativized evaluations of experience into more complex topics. Three case study students demonstrated both resistance and acceptance of teachers’ attempts to engage them in reflective meaning-making but in all cases students did engage in robust dialogues where they at least considered alternate constructions of meaning regarding their narrativizations of experience. This study offers narrativizations of experience as a way to realize Dewey’s (1938) argument that experiences can be made educative through continuity and interaction and carries theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological implications for the value of using students’ experience as heuristic for teaching and learning.
George Newell (Advisor)
David Bloome (Committee Member)
Valerie Kinloch (Committee Member)
339 p.
Education; Educational Theory; Language Arts; Literacy; Secondary Education; Teaching
narrative; narrative performance; experience; Dewey; immediacy; identity-construction; reflection; language-in-use; adolescent literacies; apprenticeship; guided practice; interaction; dialogic teaching; ethnographic; social practices; literacy event

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Weyand, L. G. (2016). The Walkabout in an Alternative High School: Narrative as a Social Practice for Reflection on and Analysis of Experience [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468241129

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Weyand, Larkin. The Walkabout in an Alternative High School: Narrative as a Social Practice for Reflection on and Analysis of Experience . 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468241129.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Weyand, Larkin. "The Walkabout in an Alternative High School: Narrative as a Social Practice for Reflection on and Analysis of Experience ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468241129

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1468241129
1,241
© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.