Supporting possible worlds: Transforming literature teaching and learning through conversations in the narrative mode

Concerned with literature instruction and learning, this ethnographic study investigated how a secondary-school teacher, Sharon Legge, used her turning-point literacy experience as a narrative template to guide changes in her teaching of literature. In this report, Suzanne Miller uses a framework integrated from sociocultural psychology, sociolinguistics, and narrative theory to produce a descriptive-narrative analysis of the relationships between Sharon's story of change and the changes she supported in her students' literature learning. Over the school year, Sharon scaffolded students' narrative modes of thinking in two contrasting classroom contexts - a twelfth-grade class for "at-risk" students and an eleventh-grade class for college-bound students. Particularly in whole-class and small-group text discussions and response journal activities, Sharon guided students' crossover from received to constructed conceptions of knowing, using more instructional assistance to engage students in the at-risk program than in the college-bound class. As students in both classes resisted and then took up Sharon's invitation to share their thinking and feeling responses to literature, she provided narrative strategies at points of need; students learned to notice narrative gaps, pose narrative dilemmas, and speculate on possible intentions behind human actions by drawing on their own lived experience. Over time, these ways of talking were appropriated by students, moving inward to become students' conscious strategies for narrative reflection. In both classes, ongoing intertextual conversations in the narrative mode provided the experience of a literate culture-in-practice. The study has implications for teacher change, narrative development, and teaching and learning in social constructivist literature pedagogy.