Using Supplementary Texts As Critical Companions to Enhance Adolescents’ Critical Literacy Practices in Book Club Discussions

Using Supplementary Texts as Critical Companions to Enhance Adolescents’ Critical Literacy Practices in Book Club Discussions

DISSERTATION

Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

Sarah Campbell Lightner, M.Ed.

Graduate Program in Education: Teaching & Learning

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Ian Wilkinson, Chair

Dr. Michelle Abate

Dr. Mollie Blackburn

Dr. Caroline Clark

Sarah Campbell Lightner

2017

Abstract

This study explored the ways in which seventh and eighth grade students in three small-group book discussions used and responded to Critical Companions, texts used to supplement and support students’ critical reading of young adult novels. The Critical

Companions were written from the perspective of a variety of critical literary theories with the intention of raising questions around dominant ideologies and hegemonic beliefs relevant to the novels they accompanied (the focal texts). In order to examine how participants used the Critical Companions in conjunction with the focal texts, this study foregrounded the role of intertextuality in the social construction of knowledge. This study examined the cultural resources participants brought to the discussion as intertexts and how those various intertexts were highlighted or ignored during discussion. A major premise underlying this research was that intertextuality is socially constructed and that, by privileging or ignoring certain references, participants in the discussions established the cultural ideology of the book clubs.

Data were collected using ethnographic methods. Participant observation, field notes, and video recordings of book discussions were collected in each of the three discussion groups one day a week for four months. Additional data included: semi- structured interviews with participating students; artifacts from the teachers, the school, and the book club discussions; questionnaires about the characters, setting, plot, and

ii theme of the focal texts; and questionnaires about the social issues relevant to the focal texts and Critical Companions. Data analysis involved transcribing key moments during discussions with the focal texts, all discussions with the Critical Companions, and all student interviews. Transcripts, artifacts, and questionnaires were coded using thematic analysis, with a specific focus on identifying instances of intertextuality. Data analysis led to the development of an ‘Intertextual Take Up Model’ that depicted both the intertextual substance and the intertextual processes of the book club discussions.

Findings revealed that students consistently responded to specific textual features of the Critical Companions when connecting the Critical Companions to the focal texts and their cultural resources. These textual features included the theory, factual information, stated stereotypes and common (mis)understandings, quotes from the author, confusing passages, and questions that were embedded in the Critical Companions.

Students responded to these features of the Critical Companions expressively, by asking questions, and by making intertextual connections. Students’ expressive responses and questions were frequently followed by intertextual connections. Intertextual connections included references to the characters, settings, plots, themes, and authors of the focal texts as well as to knowledge the students had gained through written texts, media, impersonal generalized texts, folk texts, previous discussions, hypotheticals, personal generalized events, personal or personally-related events, and hearsay. Intertextual connections were taken up if they were perceived as true and on topic. However, connections to events that were experienced by a student or someone close to the student were taken up even if they were off topic. Additionally, knowledge that was acquired

iii from personal experience was perceived as true even when it was of questionable validity.

While enacting critical literacy practices, students often used intertextual references to critique hegemonic norms. Over time, during discussions on similar topics, the students’ understanding of dominant ideologies became more nuanced. These findings suggest that students’ cultural resources were valuable tools for enabling critical literacy practices. As students shared their knowledge during discussions, they were able to critique their experiences, making the personal political.

Acknowledgments

Research develops as a product of collaborative and individual efforts, and this dissertation is no exception. Rather, this work is the result of “interthinking” (Mercer,

2000) and collective thinking. Although my personal think tank has consisted primarily of my committee members and my writing group, it has also included my husband, my family, former colleagues, and coffee shop patrons.

I have been privileged to work with a group of scholars who have tirelessly and unselfishly helped me to think through my research. For two years I have been spending the majority of my working days with members of my writing group: Dr. Ashley

Dallacqua, Dr. Sara Kersten, Eileen Buescher, Karly Grice, Ryan Schey, and Caitlin

Murphy. These individuals have always been willing to let me interrupt their work with questions about my own writing and research. They have pushed me and buoyed me. I consider this research to be a reflection of their collective brainpower.

I am thankful to my committee members for their encouragement, and fruitful suggestions: Dr. Ian Wilkinson, Dr. Michelle Abate, Dr. Mollie Blackburn, and Dr.

Caroline Clark. You were unfailingly generous with your time, experience, and feedback.

You have all forever impacted how I conceptualize research, teaching, learning, and advising.

This research is also indebted to the participating students and their teachers. The teachers were kind enough to loan me their students, let me interrupt their classroom, and

v share their insight with me. The students were not only sources of data, but they were sources of laughter and encouragement. They made transcription less tedious by constantly generating insightful dialogue, and occasionally whispering random food items into the audio recorders to make me laugh. Furthermore, they responded to young adult literature and the Critical Companions in this research with narratives of persistence that awed and inspired me.

My family deserves applause for tolerating me as I stressed over my research, data collection, and writing. No one works harder or expects more of himself than my father, and his example has guided me and pushed me in my own pursuit of excellence.

My mother is almost singlehandedly responsible for my love of learning and reading.

Throughout my childhood, I spent innumerable hours on her lap with a book or next to her studying as supported my learning. She has cheered me through all of my successes and inspired me through every difficulty. Furthermore, I owe special thanks to my mother, my sister, and my Aunt Renee who made numerous trips to Columbus so that they could watch my baby while I wrote. There is nothing that could replace their love and encouragement. My Oliver, and his little brother have helped me to prioritize my time, reminded me what was important, and provided me with stress relief through laughter.

Finally, this research would not exist without my husband who sacrificed more than I can fathom so I could pursue my work. I am one of those fortunate people who spend their days on their favorite pursuits: working with students, writing on patios and in coffee shops, and reading. Chris, your support has made that possible. To quote Ben

Folds (2001) in one of my favorite songs, this network of collaborators and supporters has led me to the conclusion that I am, unquestionably, “the luckiest.”

vii

Vita

B.S.Ed., Kindergarten and Elementary Education, Pennsylvania State University…..2004

M.Ed., Reading Education, University of Pittsburgh…………………………………2007

Reading Specialist Intern, Highlands School District, Natrona Heights, PA …..2005-2006

6th, 7th, 8th Grade Reading Teacher, Burrell School District, Burrell, PA………2006-2012

6th Grade Reading Teacher, Columbus Collegiate Academy, Columbus, OH…2012-2013

Publications

Buescher, E.M., Lightner, S.C., Kelly, R. (2016). Diversity of authors and illustrators in first grade core reading series. Multicultural Education, 23(2), 32-37.

Lightner, S.C., & Wilkinson, I.A.G. (2017). Instructional frameworks for quality talk about text: Choosing the best approach. The Reading Teacher, 70(4), 435-444.

Wilkinson, I.A.G., Soter, A.O., Murphy, P.K., & Lightner, S.C. (in preparation). Making sense of classroom discussion about text (tentative title).

Fields of Study

Major Field: Education, Teaching and Learning

viii

Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgments ...... v Vita ...... viii List of Tables ...... xii List of Figures ...... xiii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Key Terms ...... 13 CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE ...... 18 Theoretical Frameworks ...... 19 Sociocultural Theory ...... 19 Intertextuality ...... 21 Critical Literacy ...... 24 Critical Literary Theories Used in the Critical Companions ...... 28 Reader Response Theory ...... 37 Marxist Theory ...... 38 Deconstruction ...... 40 Feminist Theory ...... 41 Gender Studies and Queer Theory ...... 41 Critical Race Theory ...... 43 New Historicism ...... 44 Postcolonial Theory ...... 45 Pedagogy of Critical Literacy ...... 46 Using Discussion to Promote Critical Literacy ...... 49 Supplementing Young Adult Literature to Promote Critical Literacy ...... 59 Role of Context and Community ...... 64 Present Study ...... 67 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ...... 71 Setting ...... 71 Gaining Entry to the Research Site ...... 74 Participants ...... 77 Group A ...... 78 Group B ...... 83 Group C ...... 88 Researcher’s Role ...... 91 Focal Texts and Critical Companions ...... 93

Data Sources ...... 99 Participant Observation and Field Notes ...... 99 Video Recordings of Book Club Discussions ...... 99 Semi-structured Interviews with Participating Students ...... 100 Artifacts from the Teacher and School ...... 101 Artifacts from Book Club Discussions ...... 101 Questionnaires About the Characters, Plot, Setting and Theme...... 102 Questionnaires About the Social Justice Issues in the Focal Text and Critical Companion...... 103 Data Analysis ...... 104 Ethical Considerations ...... 109 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS ...... 110 Intertextual Take Up Model ...... 115 Responses to Specific Aspects of the Critical Companions ...... 120 Theory ...... 123 Facts ...... 124 Stereotypes and Common (Mis)understandings About People and Society ...... 126 Author Quote ...... 128 Confusing Passage ...... 130 Questions Embedded in the Critical Companions ...... 131 How Students Responded to the Text ...... 133 Marking Text for Discussion and Responding Expressively ...... 135 Using Cultural Resources to Make an Intertextual Reference ...... 136 Filtering Topics and References ...... 152 Perceived Truthfulness as a Filter ...... 155 Topic as a Filter ...... 160 Privileging of the Personal ...... 174 Discussions of the Focal Text and Critical Companions ...... 185 Discussing Narrative Features of the Focal Text ...... 189 Discussing Social Issues ...... 199 Moving Towards a Critical Perspective Without the Critical Companion ...... 214 How Discussions Impacted Students’ Views ...... 224 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION ...... 233 Review of the Research Questions ...... 233 Limitations ...... 245 Implications ...... 247 Implications for Practice ...... 247 Implications for Research ...... 255 Conclusion ...... 256 References ...... 258 Appendix A: Example Critical Companion ...... 274 Appendix B: Description of the Data ...... 285 Appendix C: Student Interview Protocol ...... 289 Appendix D: Prompts for Book Club Journal Reflections ...... 291

Appendix E: Questionnaires About the Characters, Plot, Setting and Theme 295 Appendix F: Questionnaires About the Social Justice Issues in the Focal Text and Critical Companion ...... 301 Appendix G: Transcription Markers ...... 307 Appendix H: Coding for Intertextual Substance ...... 308

List of Tables

Table 1. Critical Theories Used in the Critical Companions……..……………………32

Table 2. Group A Students……………….………………….…………………………82

Table 3. Group B Students.………………………………….…………………………87

Table 4. Group C Students …………………………………….………………………90

Table 5. Intertextual References and Topicality in American Born Chinese Discussion...... 162

xii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Book club discussions………………………………….……………………74

Figure 2. Analysis sequence……………………………………………………………105

Figure 3. Intertextual Take Up Model ………………...…………………………….…117

Figure 4. Aspects of the CC to which Students Responded……………………...…….120

Figure 5. How Students Respond to the Text……………..……………………………134

Figure 6. Intertextual Filters……………………..……………………….…….………153

Figure 7. How Accepted Intertexts Function During Discussion ………………..……187

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List of Transcripts

Transcript 1. Group A Students’ Discussion of Chin-Kee without the Critical Companion……………………………………………………………………….……..190

Transcript 2. Group A Students’ Discussion of Chin-Kee with the Critical Companion………………………………………………………………………….…..192

Transcript 3. Group B Students’ Discussion of Rape without the Critical Companion…………………………………………………………………….………..201

Transcript 4. Group B Students’ First Discussion of Rape with the Critical Companion……………………………………………………………………….……..203

Transcript 5. Group B Students’ Second Discussion of Rape with the Critical Companion…………………………………………………………………...…………209

Transcript 6. Group A Students’ Discussion of Social Issues in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian without the Critical Companion…………...……………..215

xiv

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I came to the proposed research after years of working as a middle school reading teacher and struggling to hold respectful conversations about race, gender, sexuality, social class, and other issues of social and political power with my adolescent students.

Often I found myself without the vocabulary, background knowledge, or comfort level to discuss the difficult social issues that were so prevalent in the texts my students were reading.

While working as a graduate student, I observed that my young adult (YA) literature professor often assigned a YA novel in conjunction with several articles from professional journals or chapters from scholarly books that pertained to the YA text (I refer to these types of supplemental readings as ‘scholarly critiques'). Additionally, the professor asked the graduate students to come to class prepared with several questions for discussion about the assigned readings. The scholarly critiques provoked me to think deeply about the YA novel and were often the source of my questions. Further, the scholarly critiques gave the class a common language to use during discussions about the text and served as a buffer during discussions by allowing my fellow graduate students and I to critique the text instead of critiquing each other.

On one particular day, we were assigned the YA novel Aristotle and Dante

Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Saenz, 2014), a novel about two adolescent boys

1 who develop a friendship and then realize that their feelings for each other go beyond friendship, in conjunction with an article by Blackburn and Clark (2010) about how readers and texts are defined in school, in out of school contexts that support LGBTQ people, and in a group of LGBTQ and allied adults and adolescents. The scholarly critique gave me the vocabulary to discuss comfortably the character’s understanding of his sexuality and it caused me to ask questions about the way in which school curriculums address sexuality – questions I would have never asked without having read the scholarly critique. When I realized how much the scholarly critique had increased my comfort level with the topic as well as broadened my understanding of the social issues related to the text, I wondered if such articles existed on a level suitable for adolescents.

Although several texts exist that are intended to provide teachers with the tools to interrogate YA novels using critical literary theories (e.g., Moore, 1997; Soter, 1999), an extensive search of the literature yielded no evidence that such scholarly critiques exist on a level that is appropriate for middle or high school students.

Therefore, I began writing these texts for an adolescent audience. I refer to these texts as Critical Companions (CCs). I composed the CCs with the belief that literature has great potential to challenge the silences that exist in schools around controversial issues as it can facilitate interactions where students reflect and think critically about ideologies

(Glazier & Seo, 2005; Malo-Juvera, 2014). And yet, reading literature by itself does not create respect for other cultures or lifestyles. The text does not stand-alone. Rather, in order to facilitate critical literacy in the classroom, texts must be interrogated from multiple perspectives.

Classrooms are complex places for engaging students in discussions of controversial issues. Many teachers avoid discussing issues of social, economic, and political power in middle and high school classrooms; Glazier and Seo (2005) call them

“hot lava topics” (p. 687) because of their perceived danger in the classroom. Yet, considering that the advantages of being White are still evident in every social indicator from salary to life expectancy (Tatum, 1999) and considering recent acts of aggression and violence against minority populations (e.g., the mass shooting at a gay nightclub, the killing of numerous Black males at the hands of police, and the widespread phobia towards immigrant populations), not discussing these topics could be even more dangerous. As noted by Luke (2004), “Despite the claims of globalization advocates and critics, we live in a non-synchronous political and cultural universe – where archetypal and longstanding modes of exclusion and oppression sit alongside new ones…” (p. 150).

These issues of social, economic, and political power are usually discussed in spaces reserved for adult intellectuals who are, presumably, sophisticated enough to navigate these complex topics (Brooks & Hampton, 2005). However, ignoring issues of power in schools in no way eliminates them (Flynn, 2010).

A substantial body of work, including the work of Freire (1970), McLaren (1998),

Delpit (1995) and many others, speaks to the need to spend time on the critical examination of social and economic systems of power in the classroom. Freire and

Macedo (1987) argued that “reading a text as pure description of an object (like a syntactical rule), and undertaken to memorize the description, is neither real reading nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers” (p. 33); instead,

“reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (p. 35). From this perspective, reading and generating meaning from texts is the student’s creative responsibility and “reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting what is read” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p.

36). In reading and English classrooms, this type of reading can be accomplished by approaching literature from a critical literacy perspective. Classrooms are settings laden with ideologies, and classroom interactions and activities communicate to students what it means to read and interpret text (Freebody, Luke, & Gilbert, 1991). As noted by

Freebody, Luke and Gilbert (1991), in classrooms “not only is a possible world of the text selected – a version of the social world – but a particular schema for reading is built, confirmed, and valorized” (p. 448). Students learn to define reading based on the practices that are rewarded and valued in their classrooms.

When approaching literature from a critical literacy perspective, the goal is to challenge unequal power relations. Larson and Marsh (2005) outline six key tenets of critical literacy:

1. Literacy is not a neutral technology, it is always ideologically situated. It is

shaped by power and, in turn, shapes subjects and discourses (Freebody & Luke,

1990).

2. Learners are differently positioned in relation to access to dominant literacy

discourses through aspects such as race, class culture, gender, language, sexual

orientation and physical abilities (Meacham, 2003; Vicars, forthcoming).

3. Critical literacy practices can foster political awareness and social change

(Freebody & Luke, 1990; Freire & Macedo, 1987).

4. Critical literacy involves any or all of the following: having a critical perspective

on language and literacy itself, on particular texts, and on wider social practices

(Lankshear et al., 1997).

5. Learners’ own cultural semiotic resources should be utilized within classrooms

and their critical stances towards these resources recognized and extended

(Comber, 2001a; Comber & Simpson, 2001; Dyson, 2001a; 2002; Vasquez, 2001;

2004a; 2004b).

6. Text design and production can provide opportunities for critique and potential

transformation of discourses of power (Janks, 200; Vasquez, 2001; 2004a;

2004b).

(Larson & Marsh, 2005, p. 45)

Operating from this perspective, texts, learners, and teaching practices are never perceived as neutral or ideologically barren. Rather, texts are ideologically situated, students respond to texts with their own valuable perspectives, and pedagogy that acknowledges the situatedness of both the texts and the learner can lead to the emergence of critical perspectives, political awareness, and social change.

However, because a critical literacy approach “places in the foreground issues of power and explicitly attends to differences across race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on” (Cervetti, Pardales, & Damico, 2001, p. 9), issues that invoke lively and sometimes heated discussion, and issues that are frequently censored by parents and school boards, teachers often feel unable and unprepared to implement critical pedagogy

5 in their classrooms (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1993). Furthermore, helping students to interrogate ideologies is challenging. Students may find it difficult to move beyond their views of the world and may resist reading and discussing texts that challenge their ideas

(Chaisson, 2004; Glazier & Seo, 2005; Hall & Piazza, 2008). Additionally, students often do not perceive discussions as open spaces for exploring multiple viewpoints, but instead believe that the purpose of discussion is to advocate for their own perspective (Trosset,

1998).

The role of the CCs is to assist teachers and students in navigating some of these difficulties by challenging the ideologies of the readers, the classroom, and the YA novels that the CCs are written about in order to provoke and facilitate dialogue about controversial issues. The CCs are short texts (7-15 pages) about social issues that pertain to specific YA novels (focal texts) (see Appendix A for an example). The process of creating CCs involved analyzing several popularly taught focal texts from a critical literacy perspective. In doing so, I used a variety of critical literary theories to examine the ideological assumptions that underwrite the focal texts. I used critical literary theories because, in agreement with Soter (1999), “I see the act of interpreting literary texts from any critical perspective as raising more questions than answers about those texts…” (p.

14, emphasis in original). I used these literary theories to provoke questions about the focal text with the intention of helping students to investigate issues of representation and power in young adult literature. In order to examine the ways that literature preserves certain social, economic, and political interests, the CCs were designed to address the following critical literacy propositions adapted from Morgan (1998):

• All texts are informed by the ideologies and the discourses of the context

in which they are written. Therefore, texts present a partial version of

reality.

• Texts say certain things in certain ways and do not speak of others.

Readers are encouraged to fill in textual gaps with ‘commonsense’

assumptions, or assumptions that are unconsciously ideological.

• There is no single meaning to a text. Instead, readings produce meanings

and readings informed by different historical, cultural and discursive

contexts can result in divergent, and even opposed readings.

My own epistemology shaped the creation of the CCs and their intended instructional use. Though the CCs provide students with background information about social issues that are relevant to the focal text, in writing the CCs, I attempted to acknowledge that students were “holders and creators of knowledge” (Bernal, 2002, p.

105) and come to each reading with their own knowledge and experiences. I did this by asking questions throughout the CC that are intended to encourage students to bring their own knowledge and opinions to the reading. In this way, the CCs were designed with the aim of raising questions rather than answering them, and of inviting students to bring their own knowledge to the reading and subsequent discussion.

However, it is important to acknowledge that “critical pedagogy is itself inseparable from the exercise of pastoral power” (Mellor & Patterson, 2001, p.147).

Although I argue for the need for reading the focal texts from multiple perspectives, I acknowledge that I hoped to teach a specific liberatory reading over others. My

7 motivation for writing and using the CCs as a springboard for discussion was founded on my belief that students would benefit from critiquing the dominant reading of the focal texts. In other words, although CCs were written to provide the students’ space for interpretation, they are not ideologically neutral; they were written with the intent of provoking students to push back against dominant and oppressive ideologies. In this sense, they may be perceived as an authoritative source.

The CCs were intended to provide a springboard for discussion, a reference point for arguments around “hot lava topics” (Glazier & Seo, 2005, p. 687) and a guidepost to facilitate conversations that break down stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. Used successfully, they have the potential to enhance the way teachers approach controversial topics in adolescent literature courses.

In this research, the students and the teacher read the same focal text and the

Critical Companion that accompanied it and held dialogic discussions to explore social issues surrounding the focal text. According to Beach, Parks, Thein and Lensmire

(2007),

Changes in value stance are unlikely to occur merely from responding to

multicultural literature alone, or only from discussion with diverse peers, or only

in responding to challenges from a teacher or peer, but rather from a combination

of all three factors. (p. 19)

It was thought, therefore, that simply reading the focal text and the CC would not be enough to disrupt the hegemonic beliefs some students may possess; I assumed dialogic discussion would also be necessary to provide multiple perspectives through which to

8 examine text.

Although the term dialogic has been used in a variety of ways, I use the term according to Bakhtin (1981, 1986) who stated that meaning is made through a dynamic and interactive process (Nystrand, 1997). Bakhtin (1981) argued that all discourse is inherently dialogic because speakers and writers are continuously responding to previous utterances and anticipating future utterances. However, in recitation, and in other speech or writing formats, discourse can be treated as monologic if the discourse is authoritative and seeks to extinguish competing voices (Nystrand, 1997). In dialogic discussion, all members of a group exchange ideas freely with each other so the group can explore various perspectives and understandings and can collectively make decisions about what counts as important (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002). Dialogic discussion involves fewer teacher questions and more conversational turns involving both the teacher and the students as the group members share their ideas and contribute to discussion in a way that allows students understanding to collectively evolve (Nystrand, 1997). Because the scope and direction of the discussion depend on the interactions and contributions of the students and the teacher, dialogic discussion acknowledges that students bring their own knowledge and experiences to their reading and does not treat students as if they are empty vessels to be filled (Freire, 1970).

Because in this research the students engaged with the focal texts and the CCs in dialogic discussions, this research foregrounds the concept of intertextuality. In accord with Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), I view intertextuality as a social construction that occurs in specific contexts when participants make connections between texts.

People create texts when they “textualize experience” or “make the phenomena of their lived experiences part of the language system” (Shuart-Faris, 2004, p. 68) and treat their experiences and the world as a text. Under this definition, texts are defined by language- in-use and can include conversations, utterances, pictures, written texts, media, and graphics. Texts are given significance by how they are used and received in certain contexts as participants build meaning in social settings.

In the present study, the texts the participants introduced to the discussions were considered to be products of their cultural resources, or the culturally developed bodies of knowledge that people come to possess through their histories and experiences (Luke &

Freebody, 1997). Because critical literacy involves “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations” (Anderson & Irvine, 1993, p. 82), the way that participants treated and valued certain intertextual connections over others played an important role in the enactment of critical literacy practices. As the participants acted and reacted in response to the texts that were shared, they shaped the cultural ideology of the discussions and determined the potential meanings that could be socially constructed from the various texts that were juxtaposed (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993).

In this research, discussions took place in a book club setting. I use the term

‘book club’ because the students in this research referred to the meetings as ‘book club meetings.’ The discussion format used in this research was influenced by the work of previous researchers who used discussions with young adults to critically examine texts

(e.g., Alvermann & Commeyras, 1994; Blackburn & Clark, 2011; Commeyras, 1993;

Lloyd, 2006). The students and I met in small groups of four to five students once a week to engage in in-depth discussions about the focal texts and the CCs. At the beginning of the book club meetings, I provided the students with a list of books to choose from and asked the students to vote on their selection. Not only did the students have some choice in selecting the focal text, but they also had autonomy in selecting topics for discussion.

As such, discussions in this research were guided by students’ responses to what they had read and students had considerable control over the dialogue.

I served as the teacher during the discussions and played an important role in facilitating the productive interrogation of dominant ideologies. In numerous studies where critical literacy practices have been successfully enacted, the teacher was present and played an active role during the discussions (e.g., Athanases, 1996; Beach, Parks,

Thein, & Lensmire, 2003; Glazier & Seo, 2005). By contrast, in other studies where the teacher was not present, the students often responded to texts in ways that reinforced social norms instead of challenging them (e.g., Thein, Guise, Sloan, 2011). Based on her research findings, Parks (2012) argued that students could not be expected to take up critical stances or perspectives towards text without teacher guidance.

Davila (2011) suggested that in order to support students in transcending stereotypes about race, class, gender, and other social and human differences, teachers should perform the role of a critical guide. She noted that:

As critical guides, teachers need to make calculated decisions regarding how and

when to critically explore the comments and stories that students generate in

response to the text. They need to have the skills necessary to ‘push and deepen

students’ thinking’ (Noordhoff & Kleinfeld, 1993, p. 33) and to enact

‘spontaneous scaffolding’ (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003, p.

722). (p. 17)

Furthermore, the critical guide should acknowledge that discussion that disrupts hegemonic norms is often uncomfortable. As a critical guide, I also attempted to share control of the discussions with the students by inviting them to come prepared for discussions by writing their own questions and responses to the reading. Inviting students to share control of the discussions facilitated dialogue that was respectful of their interest and concerns—an important component of critical literacy instruction (Simpson, 1996).

In taking up a critical literacy perspective when writing and discussing CCs, I hoped that the CCs would enable students to critically read both the focal texts (the word) and the social framework in which the focal texts exist (the world). Additionally, I hoped that reading and discussing the CCs would change the social practices of reading employed in the book club settings by encouraging critical literacy practices. Therefore, in the present study, I used the CCs as a means of initiating and maintaining conversations around controversial issues with adolescent students. This study aimed to use CCs in combination with focal texts and small-group discussion to challenge students’ perspectives on a variety of social, economic, and political issues of power and equality that appear in YA literature.

The following questions guided the research:

1. What aspects of the CC do seventh and eighth grade students from high-level

classes in an urban charter school respond to when they talk about the focal

text and the social issues that are relevant to the focal text?

2. How do seventh and eighth grade students from high-level classes in an urban

charter school respond to the CCs when they talk about the focal text and the

social issues relevant to the focal?

3. What cultural resources are highlighted and supported during discussions?

And how are the book club participants’ cultural resources highlighted and

supported?

4. Do students’ views of the focal text and the relevant social issue change in

discussions with the CC?

In order to address these questions, I employed an ethnographic perspective because ethnography enables researchers to focus on the unique configuration of a cultural setting (Anderson & Irvine, 1993). I focused specifically on how the participants in the study co-constructed meaning through dialogue with an understanding that language is how we organize and represent our social world (Bloome & Green, 2015). By adopting an ethnographic perspective, I hoped to learn how the participants co- constructed intertextuality in the book club setting.

Key Terms

The following are definitions of key terms used in this research:

• Scholarly critiques – Scholarly critiques is my own term for texts written and

published in journals and books with a readership of professors and post-

secondary students interested in literary critique.

• Critical Companions – Critical Companions (CCs) is my own term for texts that

are written to accompany a young adult novel and that serve to facilitate

discussion around “hot lava” or controversial topics in classrooms. The CCs are

based on a variety of critical literary theories in order to help students consider

multiple perspectives on YA literature and to raise questions around dominant

ideologies and hegemonic beliefs.

• Focal Text – I use the term focal text to refer to the young adult novels about

which the CCs were written.

• Critical literary theories – I use the term critical literary theories as an umbrella

term to denote the range of theories I used to approach the focal texts when

composing the CCs. Critical theories critique issues of power in political, social,

and cultural institutions (Cuddon, 2013). They often question the literary canon,

textuality, culture, identity and representation.

• Controversial topics – These are topics that “have a political, social or personal

impact, and arouse feeling and/or deal with questions of value or belief” (Oxfam

Development Education, 2006, p. 2). By using the term controversial topics, I

refer to matters that center on social and human differences, such as issues of

race, class, age, gender, sex, and class. My understanding of the term

controversial topics overlaps with what some scholars refer to as

multiculturalism. However, in my own writing, I have chosen to avoid using the

term multiculturalism because the CCs are written about wide and varied topics,

some which address multiculturalism and some that extend beyond

multiculturalism to include issues such as rape or the way YA literature is used to

acculturate adolescence.

• Book club – I have used the term book club because it was the term that the

students and I used to refer to our meetings. However, it should be noted that my

use of the term does not align with use of the term in other research (e.g.,

Raphael, 2001). The way in which I conducted book clubs in the present study

research was influenced by the work of previous researchers who used

discussions with young adults to critically examine texts (e.g., Alvermann &

Commeyras, 1994; Blackburn & Clark, 2011; Commeyras, 1993; Lloyd, 2006).

Students participating in book clubs during my research met weekly in small

groups of four to five students to discuss a text that they selected from a list of

texts that I wrote CCs for. With my help, the students set a schedule for reading

the novel. They were asked to come to each meeting having already read and

prepared to discuss the assigned section of the focal text. I served as the teacher

during the discussions and worked to facilitate dialogue. Students were invited to

speak without raising their hands and had control over the conversational turn

taking.

• Critical literacy – I use the term critical literacy according to Lankshear and

McLaren (1993) who use it to describe literacy studies that concern the politics of

literacy. Luke (2013) argued that all models of literacy education are bids to

construct a specific kind of cultural and political subject, and critical literacy is no

exception. Models of critical literacy are based upon the idea that particular

approaches to reading and writing can produce effects in individuals and groups.

In the case of critical literacy, the approaches to reading involve identifying social

class ideologies that underlie text, and appraising authors’ political or economic

motives.

• Cultural resources – According to Luke and Freebody (1997) “Psychological

models of reading define readers background in terms of an individual’s cognitive

schema and background knowledge” whereas “sociological models emphasize the

cultural resources, discourses, and practices children acquire in community

language socialization” (p. 208). Cultural resources are shaped by the community

environment and texts that students have access to. Cultural resources are

different from schema because “They are integrated with moral, ideological,

ethical, and attitudinal orientations that we have developed through the interaction

with our own individual interests and capabilities and those of the culture that has

nurtured us” (Freebody, personal communication, September 24, 2016).

Therefore, I use the term cultural resources to refer to the texts that students bring

to bear in the book club discussions with an understanding that these texts are

shaped by the students’ community environment and culture.

• Intertextuality – Intertextuality is a social construction that occurs in specific

contexts when participants juxtapose texts (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993;

Pappas, Varelas, Barry, & Rife, 2003). According to Bloome and Egan-

Robertson (1993), in order for intertextuality to be established, a proposed

intertextual reference must be recognized, acknowledged, and have social

significance.

• Text – The term text has been used in a variety of ways. For the purposes of this

research, I borrow Wells (1990) definition of text as: “any artifact that is

constructed as a representation of meaning using a conventional symbolic system

since, by virtue of its permanence and the symbolic mode in which it is created,

such an artifact performs the essential function of allowing us to create an

external, fixed representation of the sense we make of our experience so that we

may reflect upon and manipulate it” (p. 378). Therefore, text includes more than

just books, but also oral texts, multimedia, diagrams, charts, and illustrations.

• Narrative features – I use the term narrative features as short hand to describe the

characters, setting, plot, and theme of the focal text (Hühn et al., n.d.).

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Critical literacy is education for social change (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993). It involves concerted efforts to understand and practice reading and writing in ways that strive for the empowerment of the subordinated and marginalized. In critical literacy approaches, students are involved in analyzing the impact of capitalism, colonialism, and inequitable economic relations (Luke, 2012). A foundational principle of critical literacy is perceiving of “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations”

(Anderson & Irvine, 1993, p. 82).

Teachers operating from a critical literacy perspective encourage students to use dialogue to question class, race, gender, and other social and human differences. These discussions require a shift in traditional classroom authority so that learners become teachers of their understandings and experiences, and teachers learn about students’ experiences. My research involved discussion focused on YA literature and the CC, where multiple viewpoints met to create genuine dialogue around topics that are often ignored in schools. As such, this research was informed by a broad spectrum of theory and research: sociocultural theories of learning, intertextuality, critical literacy, and theories of literary criticism.

This chapter is organized as follows. First, I explore how various tenets of sociocultural theory, intertextuality, and critical literacy informed my research. Next I examine the critical literary theories that informed the creation of the CCs. I then explore the pedagogy of critical literacy. I conclude by explaining how, by juxtaposing the focal texts in this research with the CCs that were written to accompany them in book club settings, this study foregrounded the socially constructed nature of intertextuality and enabled me to examine the affordances and limitations of intertextuality for the enactment of critical literacy pedagogy.

Theoretical Frameworks

Sociocultural Theory

The overarching theoretical framework for this research is sociocultural theory derived from Vygotsky (1978). From this perspective, “human action is situated in cultural, historical, and institutional settings” (Wertsch, 1991, p.119). As learners work together, they encounter and acquire new learning and thinking strategies as well as knowledge of the world and culture (Palincsar, 1998). Language plays a central role in this process of learning (Mercer, 2000). It functions as a cultural tool to share and jointly develop knowledge, and as a psychological tool to organize individual thoughts so that learners can reason, plan, and review their actions. According to Mercer (2000),

…language provides us with a means for thinking together, for jointly creating

knowledge and understanding… [language] is not simply a system for

transmitting information, it is a system for thinking collectively. Language

enables us to set up intellectual networks for making sense of experience and

solving problems. We use it as a tool for creating knowledge, so that language and

the knowledge we create with it are resources for individuals and communities.

(p. 15, emphasis original).

Sociocultural theory assumes that reasoning is dialogical and that this reasoning encourages growth and development (Murphy, Wilkinson & Soter, 2011).

Based on the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1986), a philosopher and literary theorist, dialogism focuses on how dialogue shapes both language and thought (Nystrand, 1997).

Like Vygotsky (1978), Bakhtin believed that individual mental functioning has its origins in human communicative practices (Wertsch, 1991). Bakhtin asserted that speakers and writers are always responding to previous utterances and anticipating future responses.

Importantly, Nystrand (1997) noted that:

discourse is dialogic not because the speakers take turns, but because it is

continually structured by tension, even conflict, between the conversants, between

self and other, as one voice ‘refracts’ another. It is precisely this tension – this

relationship between self and other, this juxtaposition of relative perspectives and

struggle among competing voices – that for Bakhtin gives shape to all discourse

and hence lies at the heart of understanding as a dynamic, sociocognitive event.

(p.8)

In short, from a dialogic perspective, it is believed that during discussion about a text, the juxtaposition of different perspectives and competing voices facilitates what Mercer

(2000) calls interthinking, or co-ordinated intellectual activity. Instruction that is dialogic in nature enables “the joint construction of a new sociocultural terrain, creating spaces for

20 shifts in what counts as knowledge and knowledge representation” (Gutierrez, Rymes, &

Larson, 1995, p. 445).

Closely related to the notion of dialogism is the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is:

… the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is

that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time in any

given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological,

psychological – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time

will have a different meaning than it would have under any other conditions; all

utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically

impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 428)

Put simply, the term heteroglossia describes the presence of diverse voices and styles in communication. Dialogic discussions are heteroglossic because they invite multiple voices and perspectives (Nystrand, 1997).

Intertextuality

Discussion participants’ intertextual contributions contribute to the heteroglossic and dialogic nature of an interaction (Varelas & Pappas, 2006). Intertextuality is an important component of how a group of learners construct meaning, and students’ connections between their in and out of school experiences play an important role in enhancing learning and recall (Langer, 2001). Intertextuality is a social construction that has to do with the juxtaposing of texts (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Kim, 2012;

Pappas, Varelas, Barry, & Rife, 2003). Undergirding this view of intertextuality is the

21 understanding that individuals act and react to each other. Learners’ sociopolitical and cultural histories always influence their connections and stories as do the particular contexts within which the connections occur, meaning that intertextuality is always socially constructed (Short, 1992). Therefore, according to Bloome and Egan-Robertson

(1993), in order for intertextuality to be established, a proposed intertextual reference must be recognized, acknowledged, and have social significance.

Various researchers have conceived of the term text differently. As mentioned in

Chapter One, for the purposes of this research I use Wells (1990) definition of text. Wells defined text as:

any artifact that is constructed as a representation of meaning using a

conventional symbolic system since, by virtue of its permanence and the symbolic

mode in which it is created, such an artifact performs the essential function of

allowing us to create an external, fixed representation of the sense we make of our

experience so that we may reflect upon and manipulate it. (p. 378)

Building on this definition, Luke (1995) explained:

Texts are moments when language connected to other semiotic systems is used for

symbolic exchange. All texts are located in key social institutions: families,

schools, churches, workplaces, mass media, government, and so on. Human

subjects use texts to make sense of their world and to construct social actions and

relations required in the labor of every day life. At the same time, texts position

and construct individuals, making available various meanings, ideas, and versions

of the world. (p. 13)

Operating from this definition, text includes books, oral texts, multimedia, diagrams, charts, and illustrations. Texts that are germane to one another’s interpretation are called intertexts (Lemke, 1992, p. 259).

Students’ cultural resources are texts that students bring to bear on their understanding of the world. According to Luke and Freebody (1997), cultural resources include the students’ background knowledge as it is shaped by the community environment and texts that they have access to. Cultural resources are “not just about the organisation of so factual knowledge: They are integrated with moral, ideological, ethical, and attitudinal orientations that we have developed through the interaction with our own individual interests and capabilities and those of the culture that has nurtured us”

(P. Freebody, personal communication, September 24, 2016). Students use their cultural resources to produce and express knowledge, making their cultural resources a critical part of their learning (Moll, 1992; Varelas & Pappas, 2006). However, in social contexts, there are boundaries to what texts can be positioned as intertexts (Bloome & Egan-

Robertson, 1993; Kim, 2012). Available texts are socially negotiated, as are the ways in which those texts can be related to one another. Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) referred to those texts that are allowed to be related to each other as intertextual substance (p. 312), and used the term intertextual processes to describe the ways in which intertextual meanings can be constructed.

As Pappas, Varelas, Barry and Rife (2003) note, the intertextual links that students contribute to discussion can cause classroom discussions to be what Bakhtin

(1981) called hybrids. Bakhtin defined a hybrid construction as “an utterance that

23 belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems” (pp. 304-305). When students’ cultural resources are welcomed into the classroom dialogue as intertextual references, the classroom discourse becomes a hybrid; a mix of students’ discourse and school discourses (Pappas et al., 2003).

Studying intertextuality enables researchers to connect the ways that students connect their mainstream literacy practices, or those valued by dominant culture, with those practices that are marginalized. Macken-Horarik (1998) noted that “intertextuality thus faces two ways: towards the reader and his/her experiences and towards the text itself and all the other text it implicates” (p. 77). It is not just the social contexts, but also the texts themselves that constrain the relevant intertexts. Therefore, research on intertextuality must examine the social constraints on intertextuality as well as the ways in which texts work to facilitate or restrict meaning making practices.

Critical Literacy

Freebody, Luke and Gilbert (1991) proposed that the intentional juxtaposition of text can be a powerful tool for critical literacy. I use the term critical literacy according to Lankshear and McLaren (1993) who use it to connote literacy studies that concern the politics of literacy, although there is no singular, normative version of critical literacy.

Comber and Simpson (2001) reiterated this point by stating, “there is no one generic critical literacy, in theory or in practice. Rather there is a range of theories that are productive starting points for educators working on social justice agendas through the

24 literacy curriculum” (p. x).

Critical literacy is based on the ideological model of literacy that conceives of literacy as a social practice and not an autonomous, technical, neutral, or universal skill

(Street, 1984). The ideological model of literacy is more culturally sensitive to literacy practices as they vary across contexts. Literacies are ideological because they are constructed within contexts where access to economic, cultural, political, and institutional power are structured unequally, and therefore literacies reflect the different power structures available to the members of various social contexts (Lankshear & McLaren,

1993). Lankshear and McLaren explain that:

In addressing critical literacy we are concerned with the extent to which, and the

ways in which, actual and possible social practices and conceptions of reading

and writing enable human subjects to understand and engage in politics of daily

life in the quest for a more truly democratic social order. (p. xviii, emphasis

original)

Critical literacies involve the classroom exploration of the ways in which language is used to exercise power with a particular focus on the ideological assumptions that underwrite texts (Cervetti, Pardales, & Damico, 2001; Comber, 2001). It is essential to note that critical literacy is a theory with implications for practice and not a distinctive instructional method (Behrman, 2006). Comber and Simpson (2001) note that “there are no generic universal critical or empowering literacies or pedagogies” (p. ix). However, despite a variety of methods for implementation, Luke (2012) contends that all approaches to critical literacy attempt to bring together two distinct philosophies of text

25 and representation; a historical materialistic critique of the state and political economy, and poststructuralist and postmodern theories of discourse. That is that critical literacy is concerned with whom has access to materials and power, with the destabilization of meaning, and the questioning of hegemonic ideologies.

The banking concept of education prevails in many schools/ classrooms and is a pedagogical approach where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge by the teacher (Freire, 1970). This form of education is oppressive because it positions the teacher as the source of knowledge while the students are positioned as lacking knowledge. This type of teaching requires that students fit into the world as it is and fosters passive acceptance of the way things are. On the other hand, teachers in libertarian education, of which critical literacy is a part, treat students as conscious beings who are capable of engaging with the problems of being human (Freire, 1970). Critical literacy makes it possible to read the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 35) in a way that enables readers to rewrite the world more equally.

Even though Freebody, Luke and Gilbert (1991) suggest that a key strategy for critical literacy is “to engage in lessons that actively juxtapose more than a single text, to provide multiple texts (print, audio, visual, computer, popular, literary, scholarly) for comparison and analysis” (p. 452), much of the research on intertextuality focuses on comprehension and critical thinking (e.g., Cairney, 1990; Goldman, 2004; Hartman,

1991; Pappas et al., 2003; VanSledright & Kelly, 1998). The concepts of critical literacy and critical thinking are often confused, but critical literacy and critical thinking are not the same (Lee, 2011). In the field of education, critical thinking can be thought of in

26 terms of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of information processing (Lai, 2011). Bloom’s taxonomy represents thinking skills on a hierarchy with “comprehension” at the bottom and “evaluation” at the top. Critical thinking is typically said to occur at the highest levels of the taxonomy (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). Therefore, critical thinking applies to the higher levels of logic and comprehension, whereas critical literacy practices focus on identifying social practices that maintain unequal power relationships (Lee, 2011).

Although critical literacy practices may engender critical thinking (Oxfam, 2006), they are different in that critical literacy foregrounds the sociopolitical contexts of an educational activity.

All models of literacy education are bids to construct a specific kind of cultural and political subject, and critical literacy is no exception (Luke, 2013). Models of critical literacy are based upon the idea that particular approaches to reading and writing can produce effects in individuals and groups. In the case of critical literacy, the approaches to reading involve identifying social class ideologies that underlie text, and appraising authors’ political or economic motives.

Even though my own research does not employ critical discourse analysis, it should be noted that critical literacy scholars often use critical discourse analysis as a tool for encouraging critical literacy practices and analyzing research in critical literacy (e.g.

Bean & Moni, 2003; Freebody, Luke, & Gilbert, et al., 1991). Critical discourse analysis is used by researchers to analyze language in order to explain how discourse “constructs versions of social and natural worlds and positions subjects in relations to power” (Luke,

1995, p. 8), and has also been proposed as a method to explore intertextuality

(Fairclough, 1992). The overlap between critical discourse analysis, power relationships, intertextuality, and the suggestion of numerous researchers that critical discourse analysis is a useful tool for critical literacy suggests that their may already a be body of research that explores the overlap between intertextuality and critical literacy. However the only research I could locate where critical discourse analysis was used to study intertextuality was the research of Egan-Robertson (1998) who used critical discourse analysis to investigate intertextuality and the concept of personhood. A review of the research on critical discourse analysis by Rogers and Schaenen (2013) confirmed that intertextuality has not been used as a key analytical construct by researchers doing critical discourse analysis in education.

Critical Literary Theories Used in the Critical Companions

Since its origins, YA literature has given voice to previously silenced and overlooked topics. From racism and violence to substance abuse and sexual assault, the genre is rooted in spotlighting topics that are difficult, controversial, and even taboo. YA literature's history of addressing controversial subjects makes it an appropriate springboard for critical literacy practices. However, simply reading a work of YA literature about a controversial topic does not necessarily invite students to critically read the world. Engaging in a critical analysis of YA literature is one way to introduce these subjects, and to ensure that the discussion of them serves to disrupt hegemonic norms.

I use the term critical theory to denote a range of literary theories that enable readers to adopt critical lenses and critique political, social and cultural institutions

(Cuddon, 2013). Literary theory provides a tool readers can use to read the world and the

28 word and to interpret texts critically. The term theory indicates works that disrupt and reorient thinking in fields other than the field from which the theory emerged (Culler,

2000). If theory is conceived of as something that changes people’s views and causes them to think differently, then studying literary theory is valuable because it helps readers to evaluate their automatic assumptions about texts. Culler suggests that:

Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an

attempt to show that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is in fact an

historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us

that we don’t even see it as theory. (p. 4)

Studying literary theory allows readers to see texts as sites of inquiry with which to question their common sense assumptions about texts and the world and to explore alternative ways of thinking (Appleman, 2015b).

Appleman (2015b) referred to contemporary theoretical perspectives that allow readers to interpret texts and contexts as critical lenses (p. 177). These critical lenses can be used to cultivate habits of mind that enable students to consider concepts, events, cultural phenomena, and texts from multiple points of view. Critical lenses can also help readers to examine their ideology as well as the ideology of the author. Bertens (2014) asserted that “ideology distorts our view of our true ‘conditions of existence’” (p.72) and therefore is able to hide authentic reality from us. Ideologies are not always benign, they need to be questioned and sometimes resisted. The critical lenses that literary theory provides help students to learn to read and resist ideology.

Hollindale (1988) noted that “by teaching children how to develop an alert

29 enjoyment of stories, we are also equipping them to meet linguistic malpractices of more consequential kinds” (p. 14) and that the teacher’s task “is to teach children how to read, so that to the limits of each child’s capacity that child will not be at the mercy of what she reads” (p. 19). Ultimately, the goal of using theory to explore literature is to empower students to take up multiple points of view, and use those perspectives to understand the perspectives of people who are different from them. Literary theory is a tool intended to help students be critically literate, or read both the word and the world.

As I will describe in more detail in Chapter 3, I began writing the CCs by identifying novels that were often taught to adolescents and that might generate discussion around controversial topics. I then conducted a content analysis of the text by examining the three components of a narrative in which ideology operates: the discourse, or the linguistic and narrative structures of the story; the story, or the plot, the characters and their actions; and the significance, or the social attitudes and values that the text puts forward (McCallum & Stephens, 2011). When I wrote the CCs, I attempted to problematize the ideology of the focal text, and/or the ideology of people who may challenge the focal text in order to raise questions and generate topics for conversation by challenging commonly held attitudes. Literary theories employed by each CC were chosen because they matched the rhetorical objectives or the ideological messages within the text. My hope was that using theories that paralleled these elements of the focal texts would assist novice critical readers in coming to a deeper understanding of how the focal texts worked.

Reader-response, Marxist, deconstructive, new historicism, post-colonial,

30 feminist, queer studies, and critical race theories are all critical theories which I employed when composing the CCs used in the present research. Below I have described each of the theories in detail. I present reader response theory first because it is a theory that permeated the construction of all of the CCs, after that I have presented the theories in an order that is intended to assist in an understanding of the theories; that is, the theory that is presented first (for example feminism) will ease an understanding of the later (for example gender and queer studies). Table 1 contains a brief description of each of the theories, the CCs that they were used in, and the function that theory played in the CCs.

Table 1

Critical Theories Used in the Critical Companions

Critical Theory Tenets CCs that Used the Questions Raised Theory by Theory: Reader Response The text interacts - Esperanza Rising - What literary with the reader who - Monster conventions does engages with the - Absolutely True the text employ to text by bringing Diary of a Part affect a reader? their experiences to Time Indian their interpretation - Speak - How do readers of the text. - American Born make meaning as Chinese they read a text? What is the relationship between this meaning and the text? - What expectations does the text create? What happens when these expectations are denied, confirmed, etc.?

Continued

Table 1 continued

Marxist Our socioeconomic - Esperanza - Which system is the root Rising socioeconomic class of our experiences does the narrative and economics benefit? drives everything. - Which class does the work claim to represent? Whose values are being reinforced, justified, or accounted for in the text? - How do characters from different socioeconomic classes interact with each other? - Is there economic diversity in the text?

Deconstruction Truth is - Esperanza - How does the text indeterminate and Rising undermine truths there is no neutral - Monster that are generally or objective truth. - Absolutely accepted? True Diary of a - How does the work Part Time fit within established Indian genre conventions? - Does the work separate the writer, the text, and the reader? - How does the author (or character) omit, change or reconstruct memory and identity? Continued

Table 1 continued

Feminist The nature and - Speak - How is the function of women relationship between is socially and men and women culturally situated. portrayed, specifically relating to power? - What constitutes masculinity and femininity? - Do characters take on traits of opposite gender and how? Are they punished or championed? What are other characters’ reactions to this?

Gender Studies and Informed by - Speak - What elements are Queer Theory feminist theory, but perceived as being asserts that masculine and male/female feminine? binaries are too limiting. Gender is - How is gender fluid and not identity policed or extreme. punished? Is it taboo?

Continued

Table 1 continued

Critical Race Theory The dominant - American Born - What does it mean discourse about Chinese to represent ones culture and race - Monster culture? needs to be - Absolutely - How does a text questioned. Culture True Diary creates and transmit and transforms transform ideas that experiences support and/or undermine the sociopolitical power structure at the time that it was produced? - How do texts maintain the status quo by reinforcing existing hierarchies or by being an opiate for the masses (something to distract readers from paying attention to the big issues)?

Continued

Table 1 continued

New Historicism Text is not an - Esperanza - How does the text object of history. Rising participate in the Rather, we read interpretation and texts from our presentation of present values and attitudes. All texts history? Does this are products of presentation support social and cultural or condemn systems. whatever is being talked about? Or both? - How does this portrayal criticize or support leading figures of that day? - Which populations held power in relation to the time period and how are they represented in the texts?

Continued

Table 1 continued

Postcolonial Traditional ideas - Absolutely - How do texts about the cannon True Diary of a explicitly or should be Part Time allegorically challenged. Works Indian represent aspects of that represent other - American Born cultures must be Chinese colonial oppression? culturally situated. - What does the text reveal about the problems of postcolonial identity, including the relationship between personal and cultural identity, or belonging to more than one? - Who are “strangers” or “others” and how are they described or treated in a text?

Note. Adapted from Young Adult Literature & the New Literary Theories, by A. Soter, 1999, p. 8 as well as Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism, by A. Brizzee, J. C. Tompkins, L. Chernouski, and E. Boyle, 2002.

Reader Response Theory

At its foundation, reader response theory asserts that a text has no meaning until it

is read (Cuddon, 2013). Reader response theorists contend that readers do not passively

consume texts, but rather readers actively create the meaning they find in literature. The

reader makes meaning from the text by bringing his or her own social, historical and

cultural norms to the reading experience. Reader response theorists believe that a text is

37 filled with gaps and that the reader fills in those gaps while reading (Moore, 1997).

During reading, the reader responds to the text by filling in the gaps and through this process they build an interpretation of the text.

Moore (1997) explains that there are a variety of reader response approaches that have been categorized differently by several theorists (e.g. Mailloux, 1982; Suleiman &

Crossman, 1980). Despite the range in reader response approaches to text, all variations make a wide range of text interpretations possible. Reader response is a valuable critical tool for reading adolescent literature because the wide range of interpretations that reader response makes possible enables readers to bring their own experiences to the text.

When readers share their process of responding to a text, the different respondents interpretations of the text can enhance one another’s experience.

All of the CCs are written with an understanding that readers actively create meaning when they examine texts, but other critical literary perspectives also shaped the

CCs. Other literary theories are useful when implementing critical literacy pedagogy because “critical literacy takes the reader beyond the bounds of reader response” (Bean &

Moni, 2003, p. 643). In the remainder of this section I describe the other critical literary theories that I used when crafting the CCs that were used in this research.

Marxist Theory

Social class and class relations are the central instruments for analysis in Marxist criticism (Bertens, 2014). Marxist literary theory is based on the theories of Karl Marx and also influenced by Georg Wilhelm Fridrich Hegel and Frederich Engels (Cuddon,

2013). From this perspective, human experiences are primarily a result of our

38 socioeconomic system. In literature, Marxist critics are concerned with whom the text benefits and how the lower or working classes are oppressed.

An important feature of Marxist theory is a process of thinking called the material dialectic (Bertens, 2014). This belief system maintains that the economic situation of the working class drives historical change. The economic situation of the working class is more important than politics, law, philosophy, religion, or art. In this sense, material circumstances fuel ideology.

Marxist interpretations of young adult literature can offer adolescent readers ways of critiquing the way that characters from different social classes interact. According to

Bertens (2014),

Marxism as an intellectual perspective still provides a useful counterbalance to

our propensity to see ourselves and the writers whom we read as completely

divorced from socio-economic circumstances. It also counterbalances the related

tendency to view the books and poems we read as originating in an autonomous

mental realm, as the free products of free and independent minds. (p. 69)

Not only does Marxist theory allow readers to critique the way that readers view the characters in stories, but it also allows adolescents a lens to examine the ways that they are portrayed in text.

Trites (2000) asserted that “the Young Adult novel, then, came into being as a genre precisely because it is a genre predicated on demonstrating characters’ ability to grow into an acceptance of their environment. That is the YA novel teaches adolescents how to exist within the (capitalistically bound) institutions that necessarily define

39 teenagers’ existence” (p. 19). If YA literature is intended to indoctrinate adolescents into society, then Marxist theory is a tool for readers to think critically about those institutions. Marxist theory makes visible the idea that literature is a representation of ideology and helps adolescent readers to raise political questions that enable them to reframe how they approach and read texts.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is founded in the theories of the French philosopher Jacques

Derrida (Cuddon, 2013). From this perspective, the nature of language is arbitrary and so there are always gaps in texts and a language system cannot produce unity. Rather than each text being a unified whole, texts are compilations of many texts, or intertexts, and meaning comes from the way that intertexts are related to one another (Moore, 1997).

Derrida demonstrated how multiple meanings emerge from texts as the reader examines the ways in which the language of the text contradicts itself. A text can produce so many different readings that it be interpreted as not having a meaning (Cuddon, 2013).

Therefore, language is incapable of producing truth and there can be no true meaning behind any text.

To read deconstructively, readers begin with the notion that text is logical and coherent and then divide and dispel that coherency (Moore, 1997). Every reader produces a different reading of a text because each reader interprets the language relationships in a text differently. Moore explains that deconstruction “does not aim to obliterate the meaning of a text but to open up a text so that meaning multiplies indefinitely through a process in which we resist complacency in our readings” (p. 75).

Deconstruction is a useful theory for exploring controversial issues in YA literature because resisting complacent readings of texts enables readers to liberate their thinking about reading and about the ways in which the view the world as it is constructed in language.

Feminist Theory

Although feminist criticism is diverse, in all of its forms the central instrument for analysis is gender (Bertens, 2014). Feminist critics attempt to describe and interpret how women’s experience is depicted in a wide variety of literature (Cuddon, 2013). In order to question dominant male ideologies, patriarchal attitudes, and male interpretations in literature, feminist literary analysis employs tools from a broad spectrum of literary theories (Cuddon, 2013; Moore, 1997). This perspective also challenges the notion that writing is either male or female in language and style (Cuddon, 2013).

For adolescents exploring the feminist literary perspective offers opportunities for them to: consider the relationship between women’s writing and the traditional male cannon; to reconsider how women are represented in literature, the media, visual arts; understand the traditions and culture of lesbians; question gender differences; explore the possibility of a female epistemology; and debate the construct of gender (Moore, 1997).

Thinking about text from a feminist perspective enables adolescents to consider gender in ways that they may have never have previously considered, and their thinking can enable them to be critical of how gender is constructed in new texts they encounter.

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Although gender studies is influence by feminism, gender studies differs from

41 feminist theory in that it does not see biological sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation as separate things (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004). Gender studies focuses on both heterosexual and homosexual gender formations and perceives gender and sexuality as variable and indeterminate. Gender studies is often seen as supporting queer theory.

According to Rivkin and Ryan (2004) queer theory is a way of providing gays and lesbians with a common term to unite around. There are numerous forms of queer theory, and many scholars assert that all modes of queer theory are indebted to Foucault’s (1976

- 84) History of Sexuality and his argument that “deviant” forms of sexuality significantly impact the organization of Western culture (Berten, 2014). Because “perversion” is actively policed through a discourse on sexuality that consistently frames it negatively, it is always at the center of attention. From this perspective, “Western culture has turned sexuality into a discourse that enables it to monitor us constantly and to exercise power: if we do not internalize its sexual rules and police ourselves, then it can step in and force us to conform” (p. 200). Critiquing and extending such scholarship, queer of color theorists would also point to the importance of women of color feminism in the lineage of queer theories (e.g. Johnson & Henderson, 2005; Muñoz, 1999)

Foucault noted that before the 1870s participating in homosexual acts was perceived as a temporary deviation, but after the 1870s the term homosexual was used to describe a person’s essential nature (Berten, 2014). In this sense, homosexuality was produced by nineteenth-century discourse. This production is intimately linked with power and for this reason power is at the heart of queer theory.

Queer theory asserts that there is no “natural” sexuality and that there is no

42 constant relationship between biological sex, gender, and sexual desire (Berten, 2014).

Queer theory does not advocate for the inclusion of excluded groups into the mainstream notions of normality, but rather attempts to understand and challenge what is perceived as normal (Cuddon, 2014). Theorists approaching literature from this perspective are interested in destabilizing sexual categories. Reading from a queer perspective involves identifying queer elements in texts that are seemingly straight. According to Berten

(2014), “queer theory questions traditional constructions of sexuality and sees non- heterosexual forms of sexuality as sites where hegemonic power can be undermined”

(203).

Kidd (1998) asserts that because coming out is perceived as paralleling adolescents in the sense that both are supposed to be times of sexual attraction, social rebellion, and personal growth, the YA novel has been extremely receptive to lesbian/gay themes. Students who learn to approach literature from a queer theory perspective develop the ability to denaturalize and destabilize sexual categories. This ability enables them to dislodge heterosexuality of its supposed “naturalness.” Many students may find this perspective helpful in developing an understanding of their own sexuality.

Critical Race Theory

Critical race theorists examine the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004). They examine the ways in which victims of systematic racism are impacted by cultural perceptions of race, and how victims are able to present themselves to counter prejudice. Critical race theory draws from fields such as philosophy, history, sociology, and the law and explores racism

43 throughout history as well as in recent events. Racism is viewed as being a pervasive element of everyday American life.

With an emphasis on how race is normalized in the culture of the United States, critical race theorists question the idea that social racism can be eliminated by a colorblind conception of equality (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004). For this reason, critical race scholars explore ways for diverse individuals to share their experiences. An individual’s identity is not defined by their race alone, but is rather shaped by numerous other factors such as their class, gender, and sexual orientation.

According to Chaisson (2004), “critical race theory allows for the critical examination and challenging of traditional epistemologies of race” (p. 345). Adolescents who understand critical race theory are able to explore the pervasiveness of racism in literature and in their world. Appleman (2015a) argues that “the increasing diversity of our students, even in primarily White suburban school districts, underscores our need to integrate cultural criticism into our literary study” (p. 55). The changing population of the student body has made it imperative that teachers attend to the various cultural backgrounds of their students and consider how those different backgrounds impact the texts they choose to teach.

New Historicism

Historicism assumes that every work is the product of the historical context in which it was produced (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004). But critics operating from this perspective are only interested in the historical backdrop of the piece of literature. On the other hand, new historicists are interested in the historical background and are also interested in

44 whose story is being told, whose story is not being told, and whose facts are being considered by the text and how are specific events being interpreted. New historicists constantly interrogate the relationship between history and literature (Cuddon, 2013).

Because new historicism asks us to look critically at how our culture influences how we read texts it is often perceived as having Marxist and poststructuralist sympathies

(Cuddon, 2013). From this perspective, history is not an accurate historical record, but rather is composed of historians’ impressions. Since people’s prior understanding, their cultural values, their ways of thinking, political theories, and their ideals influence impressions, the accuracy of historical accounts should be questioned (Appleman,

2015a). As literature can impact our ways of thinking about the world, literature has a role in shaping history. New historicism offers adolescents new ways to consider the construction of cultural meaning where literature and history are seen as part of a larger cultural context (Appleman, 2015a).

Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial critics examine literature that is produced by colonial powers and literature that is produced by those who were colonized (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004). The theory looks at the impact of European colonialism on the society, culture, history, and politics of those who were colonized (Cuddon, 2013). According to Cuddon,

Postcolonial critics are concerned with the impact of colonialism generally,

including its relationship with issues such as gender and class; they challenge how

colonialists constructed colonized regions and people as inferior, and also

examine how colonialism affects the colonizing nations. (p. 551)

As perceived by postcolonial critics, the Western literary canon and Western history are questionable forms of knowledge making (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004).

Postcolonialism also calls into question Western practices of privileging science over custom, the imposition of the Western economic system onto societies where there was already a successful system in place, and Western narratives that are used to explain why Western institutions became powerful while others became powerless (Appleman,

2015a). From this perspective, readers are invited to question cultural supremacy and the literature it favors. A postcolonial lens allows readers to think about texts in a way that restores the history, dignity, and validity of those who have been colonized.

Appleman (2015a) asserts that post-colonial theory can help students who have been traditionally marginalized to see themselves as part of the American mainstream and to see that alternative ideologies belong within the American imagination. However, mainstream students also benefit from postcolonial perspectives because it enables them to read the world through a variety of perspectives. Students raised in the United States often have traditional Western values and beliefs. Post-colonial theory enables students to critique those beliefs and consider which values may provide advantage to us but adversity to others.

Pedagogy of Critical Literacy

Researchers operating under the ideological model of literacy view people and the communities in which they live as already having literacy practices (Bloome & Green,

2015). Literacy education from this perspective allows people to question cultural and institutional practices while still maintaining respect for their own cultures, histories, and

46 cultural identities. According to Bloome & Green (2015), “Such a literacy education may also involve teaching and learning a set of literacy practices that foreground the use of written language to critically interrogate the world in which people live in order to make visible, and act on, oppressive power relations” (p. 21). In my research I used YA literature, along with CCs, and discussion in order to provide students with opportunities to critically read the word and the world so that they could recognize and act on oppressive power relations.

Nieto (1994) used interviews to conduct case studies of ten students from diverse backgrounds to determine what characteristics of the students’ experiences helped them to be successful in school. Her data led her to conclude that much of the curriculum in schools is not in line with students’ experiences, backgrounds, hopes and wishes. School curriculums communicate to students what is important in society and often the curriculum tells students that their values are not important. Nieto noted that “two topics in particular that appear to have great saliency for many students, regardless of their backgrounds, are bias and discrimination, yet these are among the issues most avoided in classrooms” (p. 403). The CCs that were part of my research were designed to address issues of bias and discrimination. It is my hope that they will facilitate dialogue and help to create a space for exploration of these often-neglected topics.

In this section, I review empirical research that has informed my research and my perspective of critical literacy practices. When selecting exemplar research, I considered articles that were written for practitioners and those that were written for researchers in order to gain a more complete understanding of classroom practices and research

47 methodologies that are appropriate when operating from a critical literacy perspective.

Luke (2012) explained that:

How educators shape and deploy the tools, attitudes, and philosophies of critical

literacy is utterly contingent: It depends upon students’ and teachers’ everyday

relations of power, their lived problems and struggles, and … on educators’

professional ingenuity in navigating the enabling and disenabling local contexts of

policy. (p. 9)

As such, the researchers in this section approached their research from a broad range of theories illustrating Comber and Simpson’s (2001) point that “there is a range of theories that are productive starting points for educators working on social justice agendas through the literacy curriculum” (p. x). Despite the variety of theories employed by these researchers, they all enacted critical literacy as I have conceptualized it - literacy studies that concern the politics of literacy. Although there is no specific formula for critical literacy in theory or practice, because of my own research interests, in this section I have focused specifically on critical literacy research that involves critical analysis of texts through discussion with adolescents, which I have defined as students in grades 6-12.

This structure of this section is as follows. First, I assess the role of discussion in critical literacy. Second, I explore how other researchers have supplemented young adult literature to foster critical literacy. Third, I consider research on the affordances and limitations of the contexts and communities in which critical literacy practices have been employed.

Using Discussion to Promote Critical Literacy

In conjunction with reading YA literature and a CC that accompanies that piece of literature, the participants in my research met to discuss the book and the ideas in the CC.

Discussion is an important part of a critical literacy curriculum involving text, because critical literacy “melds social, political, and cultural debate and discussion with the analysis of how texts and discourses work, where, with what consequences, and in whose interests” (Luke, 2012, p. 5).

Freire (1970) described dialogue as:

…the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are

addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue

cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can

it become a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the discussants. (p. 89)

Dialogic teaching requires interaction between all of the members of a classroom. A dialogic approach to instruction provides a public space for students to respond to texts and accommodates and promotes the joining of voices that represent different values, beliefs, and perspectives (Christoph & Nystrand, 2001). Therefore, dialogic discussions are always heteroglossic in nature (Nystrand, 1997).

As critical literacy is aimed at promoting social justice and democracy, classroom structures used to implement critical literacy should reflect those goals (Appleman,

2015b; Behrman, 2006). Dialogic instruction is appropriate when implementing critical literacy practices because using critical theory as a framework calls the role of the

49 instructor into question, and dislocates the sources of textual authority in the classroom

(Nystrand, 1997). There is considerable agreement among researchers as to the features of discourse that promote these types of interactions among students. They include: authentic questions, elaborated explanations, questions of a high cognitive level, and questions that elicit extratextual connections (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1990; Wilkinson,

Murphy, & Binici, 2015).

Authentic questions are questions asked by either the teacher or the students for which the asker has no pre-specified answer (Applebee et al., 2003; Nystrand, 1997).

During discussion, these types of questions help students to explore different understandings of the text because they allow for a range of responses. When the teacher poses authentic questions, it signals to the students that the teacher is interested in what they think and know (Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003). In contrast, test questions, or questions with only one right answer, give complete control of the classroom talk to the teacher and do not allow students to influence the shape or character of the discourse.

Because authentic questions allow for numerous acceptable answers, give students a way to contribute to classroom interactions, and increase the possibility that students’ contributions will shape the trajectory of the discussion, authentic questions also encourage longer incidence of student talk resulting in greater elaboration of utterances by students (Soter et al., 2008). When students explain their thinking in detailed form to one another, they are using an elaborated explanation (Wilkinson,

Reninger, & Soter, 2010b). Typically, elaborated explanations take place over a single

50 conversational turn in which the student explains the steps they took to reach a certain conclusion. Elaborated explanations include details of how to think about a topic and the logic behind thinking that way.

Questions of a high cognitive level also foster students’ participation. High cognitive level questions elicit student responses that involve analysis, generalization, and speculation and therefore also encourage the incorporation of the speakers’ perspective into the dialogue (Nystrand et al., 2003). High cognitive demand questions cannot be answered by simply recalling information from a reading or a previous discussion.

Another way in which teachers can validate students’ contributions to discussions is through uptake. Uptake is a term that describes a conversational move where one conversant (often the teacher) builds on what was said previously by “taking up” an earlier student comment (Applebee et al., 2003; Nystrand, 1997). Through the use of uptake, student comments become the momentary topic of discourse and, as such, uptake encourages students to listen to and respond to one another (Nystrand et al., 2003). The use of uptake also establishes continuity in the discourse because it establishes intertextual links among speakers.

Furthermore, although to a lesser extent, productive discussions are characterized by questions that elicit intertextual connections (Wilkinson et al., 2015). The relationship between dialogic discussions and intertextual references is reciprocal; just as intertextual connections support the dialogic nature of a discussion, dialogic and collaborative environments support the making, recognition, and exploration of a wider variety of

51 intertextual connections (Short, 1992). Because the present research focuses on how the participants used the CC to co-construct an understanding of the narrative features of the focal text as well as the social issues that are relevant to the focal text, the intertextual references participants contributed during discussions are particularly relevant.

Despite the empirical and theoretical support behind the role of the previously mentioned features of classroom dialogue in supporting reading comprehension,

Nystrand (1997) cautions that “A key instructional issue is whether teachers treat source texts, students’ utterances, and their own statements as either ‘thinking devices’ or a means for transmitting information” (p. 9). Therefore, simply using the features outlined above to identify high quality dialogue will not provide an adequate understanding of the effectiveness of instruction. Rather, it is necessary to look at the entire context in which interactions take place. Nystrand notes that “Ultimately the effectiveness of instructional discourse is a matter of the quality of teacher student interactions and the extent to which students are assigned challenging and serious epistemic roles requiring them to think, interpret, and generate new understandings” (p.7).

Therefore, a final and important feature of high quality discussions is the presence of what Nystrand (1997) called dialogic talk and what Mercer (2000) called exploratory talk (Wilkinson et al., 2010b). According to Nystrand (1997), discourse is dialogic when it “provides a public space for student responses, accommodating and frequently intermingling teacher-student voices representing differing values, beliefs, and perspectives, and ideally including the voices of different classes, races, ages, and genders” (p. 18).

Freire (1970) argued that the dialogic approach to literacy would critique and transform dualistic relationships of oppressed and oppressor and teacher and learner, and

Nystrand (1997) asserted that for genuine dialogue to occur, the students’ voices must be considered as valid as the teacher’s. Yet teachers find holding discussions to be challenging because there is no right way to conduct them and teachers have to make their own decisions about how to best approach each new text and each new classroom situation (Wilkinson & Nelson, 2013).

Furthermore, teachers tend to avoid discussing difficult topics because helping students to interrogate ideologies is challenging. Students may find it difficult to move beyond their views of the world and may resist reading and discussing texts that challenge their ideas (Chaisson, 2004; Glazier & Seo, 2005; Hall & Piazza, 2008).

Additionally, students often do not perceive discussions as open spaces for exploring multiple viewpoints, but instead believe that the purpose of discussion is to advocate for their own perspective. Trosset (1998) used ethnographic interviewing techniques in a study with 200 college students to identify students’ perceptions of discussions. She found that the majority of students did not think it was possible to have a discussion of diversity related issues in which more than one perspective is heard and valued and in which people are civil to each other. When asked why they would want to participate in such discussions, many students responded that their desire to participate arose from their strong opinions on the subject and their hope to convince others that their opinion was correct. In fact, only five of the 200 students in the study offered a more exploratory view of discussion. Students’ beliefs about discussion affect how they participate in

53 discussions, and thus impact the effectiveness of dialogue as a means for enacting critical pedagogy.

Despite potential barriers to classroom discussion of controversial issues, exploration of topics that create tension in the classroom can lead to opportunities for deep learning, making it necessary that teachers learn to view these discussions as teaching opportunities. In fact, theories of cognitive and social development suggest that conflict is essential to promoting change, adaptation, and development (Shantz, 1987).

For instance, Piaget ‘s (1928) theory of sociocognitive conflict suggests that when children grapple with differences between their understanding and another person’s understanding, this interpersonal conflict creates intrapsychic conflict that result in a change in ability. As Shantz (1987) notes, “moments of conflict can be viewed as dynamic, critical episodes of adapting or not adapting, progressing or regressing” (p.

283). Therefore, moments of classroom conflict should not be things that teachers avoid, but rather should be viewed as opportunities for deep exploration of ideas that hold tremendous potential for growth.

The assertion that discussion can play an influential role in critical literacy practices is supported by empirical evidence. In one example, during a unit on multicultural literature, Johnson (2010) and a group of twelve eighth and ninth grade students in a remedial reading classroom used discussion around issues of race, poverty, gender, and size discrimination to facilitate a critical understanding of the ideologies at play in the social and political world around them. Johnson used ethnographic methods and analyzed her field notes, charts of classroom brainstorms, student journals, and

54 classroom conversations to conclude that one of the most meaningful things teachers can do for students is to help them discuss difficult life topics. Johnson’s research includes many examples of students bringing their cultural knowledge to bear upon the readings and discussions and connecting their knowledge to the world outside the classroom.

In other research, Athanases (1996) used ethnographic methods to examine one tenth grade teacher’s attempts to integrate a gay themed lesson into a curriculum of diverse literary works and found that during whole class discussions students genuinely attempted to work through some of the major themes of the text. The students reported that after the lesson they had an emerging empathy for gays and lesbians, a more clear understanding of the rights of gays and lesbians to be who they are, and that they no longer believed some of the myths about homosexuality.

Of particular relevance to my research is Athanases’ (1996) exploration of the dialogue within the lesson. Athanases was explicit in describing how the teacher and the students co-constructed their interpretation of the text. The teacher often asked questions, and then gave the students space to respond to, challenge, and build on each other’s ideas.

Students held the floor for extended periods of time and took numerous turns without intervention from the teacher. When the teacher did intervene, she did so to ask questions, to provide context for the story in order to clarify meaning, and to challenge students to elaborate their claims. Athanases’ exploration of dialogue and the ability of the students in the research setting to discuss issues of sexual orientation with candor, curiosity, and maturity, demonstrated what can be accomplished through dialogue in a respectful and structured environment.

Also relevant to the present research is a study conducted by Beach, Parks, Thein, and Lensmire (2003) who employed ethnographic research in an eleventh and twelfth grade college prep multicultural literature classroom to determine how students’ discussion of and writing about multicultural literature worked to challenge student discourse related to race, class, and gender. Overtime, through engaging in challenges to their status-quo ideologies of race, class and gender with the teacher and the other students, some students were able to embrace a critical multicultural approach and to change their value stances related to race, class and gender. These students were able to recognize how attitudes about race, class, and gender are present in literature and in their everyday lives. As the results of this study point to the value of encouraging students to engage with alternative, conflicting value stances in literature discussions, this study provides an empirical foundation for my hope that introducing students to multiple critical literary lenses will facilitate their ability to examine power relationships within text.

In a quantitative study of the Word Generation program, a program that is designed to help students learn academic words that are embedded in a variety of passages covering controversial issues, Lin, Lawrence and Snow (2015) found that controversial issues motivated classroom discussion. Furthermore, through analysis of students’ self reported civic engagement, the authors found that learning about and discussing controversial issues positively impacted students’ civic engagement. The results of this study are important as they suggest that not only can controversial topics promote discussion, but also that discussion of those topics increased students’ desire to

56 be civically involved, which is a desired outcome of critical literacy practices.

In another quantitative study Malo-Juvera (2014) examined the effectiveness of dialogically organized instruction on eighth grade students’ rape myth acceptance. Using an experimental design, students in seven English language arts classes were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Students in the experimental group received five weeks of instruction involving small-group and whole class discussion about the novel Speak

(Anderson, 1999), a novel in which the main character is recovering from a rape.

Students in the control group received similar instruction on Shakespeare’s Julius

Caesar. The results of the study revealed that the intervention significantly lowered the participants’ rape myth acceptance and showed that it is possible to effectively address controversial topics, such as rape, with adolescents.

Through ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods, Glazier and Seo (2005) collected data on students and their teacher as they read and participated in discussions about materials related to a piece of multicultural literature by N. Scott Momaday, titled

The Way to Rainy Mountain. The researchers employed conversational analysis to examine one class session. Although the authors did not describe their data analysis or coding procedures with much depth, they did provide strong evidence that minority students were able to share personal narratives and make more text-to-self connections than the European American students. In conjunction with conversational analysis,

Glazier and Seo conducted case studies with one European American student and one minority student from Central America. The case study results led the authors to conclude that the European American student was unable to bring himself to the text

57 because he viewed the text as removed from himself. Glazier and Seo (2005) concluded that if multicultural literature is to be truly beneficial in the classroom, then teachers must include talk about Whiteness in their discussions.

Blackburn and Clark (2011) examined the nature of talk about LGBTQ-themed texts in a queer-friendly context. The authors employed discourse analysis, in combination with information that they collected ethnographically, to identify what

LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses made possible. They approached their study using queer theory and new literacy studies. Even though all of the members of the group were “striving to work within and against the heterosexual matrix,” (p. 245) sometimes the groups talk reinforced heteronormativity. The results of the study indicated that neither the LGBT-inclusive or queer discourses were entirely liberatory or oppressive. However, opportunities for conflicts and potential for change were created by the complementary and competing discourses around diverse texts and in complex contexts.

The results of Glazier and Seo (2005) and Blackburn and Clark (2011) have implications for the content of the CCs and for my analysis of discussions. In relation to the CCs, the results of the Glazier and Seo (2005) article suggest that the topic of

Whiteness should not be excluded from a critical analysis of young adult literature. The results of Blackburn and Clark’s (2011) study add credence to my assertion that queer theory is a useful theoretical lens through which to explore young adult literature.

Additionally, both studies draw attention to the limitations of discussion; sometimes students may not see critical lenses as useful to them and, even when they do, they may

58 employ the lens in a way that is not liberatory.

In my review of research I found only one study that examined intertextuality in an instructional conversation where the students and teacher took up a critical perspective on language use. Shuart-Faris (2004) looked at the role of textualizing and intertextuality in a seventh grade language arts classroom during a discussion in which dominant views on language and race were being problematized. Shuart-Faris found that the teacher in the discussion was able to draw on a range of intertextual connections in order to create meaning. These juxtaposed texts allowed the discussants to understand language in new ways and to challenge dominant ideologies about race. This finding is particularly relevant to my research as the CCs were intended for juxtaposition with young adult literature for the purpose of prompting connections between texts and facilitating critical practices.

Supplementing Young Adult Literature to Promote Critical Literacy

Teachers operating from a critical literacy perspective often view the controversial topics in young adult literature as doors to dialogue that encourage students to explore language and ideological assumptions (Behrman, 2006). And yet reading literature by itself does not necessarily enable students to see oppressive power relations within the text or the real world. The purpose of the CCs used in my research was to examine YA literature from a critical literary perspective in a way that made it accessible to adolescent readers. In line with Freebody, Luke, and Gilbert’s (1991) assertion that

“the juxtaposition of contesting texts in the classroom offers and makes visible to students contrasting reading positions and portrayals of subjectivity and reality” (p. 453),

59 the CCs were read alongside YA literature in order to make that literature a site for critique, contestation, and dispute. In this section I examine other research where supplemental texts or literary theory were used to promote critical literacy pedagogy.

In a yearlong qualitative study, Park (2012) used a specific critical literary theory to supplement text discussions. Park examined how urban middle school girls participated in an after-school book club in order to consider how reading is a critical and communal practice. Although the students in the book club operated from a reader response perspective (making connections to themselves, to the world, and to other texts), they did not take up a critical reading of the text. Park suggested that teachers need to teach adolescent readers how to situate characters’ actions culturally and ideologically.

Johnson and Ciancio (2003) used supplemental materials and activities to foster critical literacy practices and discussions. In their research, Johnson and Ciancio wanted the ninth-grade at-risk students that they were working with to build confidence and critical literacy skills by reading YA literature. The students and the researchers read aloud Julius Lester’s adaptation of Othello as a class and responded to their reading through art, music and poetry. The authors concluded that:

Though as teachers we can’t change our students’ home lives or protect them

from prejudice or poverty, through YA literature, artistic response, and exploring

serious issues, we can teach all students critical literacy skills necessary to read

through injustices and to question societal assumptions. (p. 46)

This article is written for an audience of teachers and as such it does not explain the methods of data collection or analysis. Although this study is relevant to my research in

60 that it addresses critical literacy through text analysis with adolescent students, it is also relevant because Johnson and Ciancio supplemented readings of the YA novel with videos, music, and poetry. Notably, even though these researchers used supplemental resources to encourage critical literacy, and their work could certainly be considered to foreground intertextuality because the students were asked to make connections across multiple texts, Johnson and Ciancio did not analyze intertextuality in the classroom discourse.

Rogers (2002) worked with a group of African-American adolescents in a two- year out-of-school literature study group. The students chose the texts that they wanted to read, and Rogers used the selected books to invite students to critique their social worlds.

The research led Rogers to conclude that “it may be that it is easier for adolescents to read critically (even in the face of less than liberating local institutional interactions) when they are exposed to books with built-in critique” (p. 786). This conclusion has implications for the present research as the critical literary theories that inform the CCs infuse the CCs with built in critique. Furthermore, Rogers noted that while the adolescents began to critically read the various texts and their own lives, they rarely made connections between oppression in larger social institutions and their everyday experiences. Rogers suggested that asking students to critique their own experiences may serve to distance them from literate conversations and that “it may be useful to ask students to critique images, examples, and texts that connect to issues that are close to their immediate lives but that do not include their own lives” (p. 786).

This finding implies that asking students to draw on cultural resources that stem from

61 their personal experiences may constrain students’ ability to make meaning about broader social institutions.

Bean and Moni (2003) posed critical discussion prompts with a group of adolescent students discussing Fighting Ruben Wolfe (Zusak, 2000). The authors suggested that students could be empowered to make connections between the discourses of their worlds and those of literature if teachers supplemented the reading of the novel with excerpts from popular movies that the students could use as analysis tools. Although

Bean and Moni suggested that intertextual connections may be powerful tools for understanding the social issues in text, they did not explore intertextuality empirically.

Mellor and Patterson (2000) conducted research in which students read

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and then were presented with a critical assessment of Ophelia and a feminist interpretation of Ophelia. The researchers argued that this pairing of text enabled readers to rethink how the concept of character is not neutral, but is a product of social and cultural formations. While the authors briefly explained how students responded to the activity, the authors’ focused on describing the lesson design rather than providing an analysis of students’ responses. The lesson that Mellor and Patterson described is based on The Chalkface Series, an instructional resource designed for students in grades nine through twelve and published by the National Council of

Teachers of English (NCTE). Many of The Chalkface Series books provide sets of texts that teachers can use to implement critical pedagogy in their classrooms. For instance, one of the books, Gendered Fictions (Martino & Mellor, 2000), is described on the

NCTE (2017) website as inviting students to use “text-based discussions and activities to

62 consider such factors as generic characters and intertextuality in order to assess the readings they (or others) produce, as well as to generate resistant or alternative readings when they choose so” (para. 1). While The Chalkface Series is designed to encourage intertextuality, Mellor and Patterson (2000) did not examine the intertextual processes that students use to co-construct meaning while reading and discussing multiple texts.

Mellor and Patterson (2004) also used multiple texts to prompt critical discussion about several different stories. In both studies, Mellor and Patterson intentionally juxtaposed texts in order to support critical analysis and mention the role that intertextual relationships play in fostering students’ critical readings, but the researchers do not explore the ways students take up theories or make connections across texts in either of the pieces of research.

Although numerous studies have been conducted using young adult literature to facilitate students’ connections between literature, their lives, and the broader social world as a means of enacting critical literacy pedagogy (e.g., Bean & Moni, 2003;

Houser, 2001; Mellor & Patterson, 2004; Tyson, 1999), I was able to locate only one study exploring the use of supplementary texts for the purposes of invoking intertextual connections and critical literacy practices. Macken-Horarik (1998) conducted research in which two high-school teachers provided students with explicit instruction in genres, or text types, in order to help students discern which intertexts were relevant in different contexts. The teachers then exposed the students to a variety of texts within these genres for critical analysis. Macken-Horarik argued that these different intertexts gave students different contextual frames to use when interpreting the issues that were relevant to the

63 class discussions.

Role of Context and Community

Discussions do not happen in social vacuums, instead they are shaped by a variety of factors that may facilitate or impede their ability to foster counter-hegemonic dialogue.

Park (2012) noted that “The nature and quality of literary conversations depend on what text, under what conditions and circumstances, with whom, and where one reads” (p.

206).

Hedley and Markowitz (2001) argued that students who resist discussions that critically examine social life do so because they have reduced complex concepts like race, class, gender, and sexuality, to small sets of discrete categories. This reduction causes them to treat one category as the norm against which they judge all other categories. For instance, texts often assume a White readership and therefore establish the

White race as the “norm” which causes non-White races to be perceived as “other.”

Hedley and Markowitz refer to this way of thinking as “norm/other logic” (p. 195).

Because our culture portrays one group as “norm,” it fosters a hegemony that denies the existence of social inequality, which causes many students to have difficulty engaging in discussions because they do not believe that oppression occurs.

Blackburn and Clark (2010) examined how literature with LGBT themes are read in three different contexts: in school, in out of school contexts that support LGBTQ people, and in a group of LGBTQ and allied adults and adolescents. Within each of these contexts they defined the texts by examining how the texts were selected, what was done with the texts, and what the texts were ask to do. They then provided the consequences

64 of how the texts were used in the three different contexts. Their review of the literature of research done in school contexts led them to conclude that these contexts were limited and limiting because students were frequently positioned as straight and even homophobic. This positioning did not challenge students’ beliefs but rather served to promote heterosexism and homophobia in schools. They concluded by noting how only the out of school LGBTQ youth communities and the out of school queer friendly contexts allowed for a variety of reading positions to be taken up by the participants. The out of school contexts made space for a variety of reading positions to be taken up so that diverse readers were able to enter the discussions, which allowed for the work that could be done with and through the texts to be expanded. Therefore, while constructing and discussing the CCs, I attempted to offer the students a variety of positions to assume

(gay, straight, homophobe, ally, Black, White, religious, etc.).

Thein, Guise, and Sloan (2011) examined student engagement in critical analysis of multicultural and political texts, and the capabilities and limitations of literature circles. The data in their research was collected through a larger ethnographic study of tenth grade students. For this study the authors used two analyses of a focal group to determine the overall productivity and examine the content of the literature circle discussions. In their data analysis, Thein, Guise and Sloan found that even though the students in the focal group had a successful literature circle (i.e. the discussions were dialogic, interpretive, and engaged), they did not take up critical perspectives on social class but rather interpreted the texts in ways that reinforced social norms instead of challenging them. The researchers concluded that “if teachers choose to enact literature

65 circles in their purest form – with no teacher interference and free choice of topics for discussion – then students cannot be expected to take up any specific stances or perspectives toward texts” (p. 22). Park (2012) also suggested that student-centered book groups should be continually monitored by teachers so that they do not become an

“anything goes” space. In consideration of these observations, in my own research I choose to participate in the book clubs as a teacher so that I could attempt to foster students’ abilities to take up critical stances during discussion.

In 1991, in the midst of dramatic transformation occurring in South Africa, Janks

(2001) conducted research in an independent South African secondary school using workbooks titled, Critical Language Awareness Series, that she created to help students develop Critical Language Awareness. Critical Language Awareness is a term that refers to the same theoretical underpinnings as critical literacy. Janks selected her research site because it was racially integrated before racial integration was legal. Additionally the school’s philosophies seemed to be in line with Janks’ research. However, Janks found that instead of the racial differences in the school creating pathways for dialogue, students were heavily invested in their own meanings and were not able to value the meanings of others. Janks (2001) concluded that “it is not enough for teachers to create secure contexts in their own classes. The environment of the school also needs to support communicative openness and transformative exploration” (p. 149). Janks’ findings point to the importance of an ethnographic perspective in critical literacy research. It is not enough to consider just the events of the book club, but rather the larger contexts of the school and community also need to be considered, as they are likely to impact the

66 students’ interactions within the book group.

Although educators often assume that critical literacy will be fostered when socially heterogeneous groups are encouraged to discuss how texts have a range of meanings, the research reviewed in this section suggests that this assumption may not be well grounded. Instead, Janks (2001) argued that “What is needed is openness that goes beyond the opening of doors; an understanding that meaning itself is open, and that attempts to close it are attempts to disempower other meanings” (p. 149). For this reason, my hope was that, in my own research, approaching YA literature from a variety of critical literary theories would teach students that meaning is plural and that different interpretations of texts are tied to different social and historical conditions of possibility.

The aim is that this understanding will help students to perceive the invested nature of all discourse and all interpretations of texts, including their own.

Present Study

Freebody and Luke (1990) suggested that “literacy is a multifaceted set of social practices with a material technology, entailing code breaking, participation with the knowledge of the text, social uses of text, and analysis/ critique of the text” (p. 15).

Therefore, a successful reader needs to adopt four related roles: code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst. All four of these roles are necessary because learners need to be able to decide where/when/how they want to implement the material technology and they need to be able to employ a range of strategies in order to use print.

Being a successful code breaker requires productively decoding the written script

(Freebody & Luke, 1990). Although code-breaking skills were addressed in the book

67 club meetings when the need arose, these practices were not foregrounded in this research. Rather this research focused on the need for readers to act as text participants and “draw inferences connecting textual elements and background knowledge required to fill out the unexplicated aspects of the texts” (Freebody & Luke, 1990, p. 9). Successful text participants examine how the ideas in a text are strung together, bring their cultural resources to bear on the text, and consider the variety of meanings that can be constructed from a text (Luke & Freebody, 1997). Not only does one of my research questions highlight the role of students’ cultural resources in the meaning making processes of the book clubs, but the background information and critical lenses that the CCs provided were also intended to help students make connections between the CCs, the focal texts, and the broader social world. Although other researchers have explored intertextual processes (e.g., Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Kim, 2012; Kim & Covino, 2015;

Many, 1996; Pappas, Varelas, & Rife, 2003), and others have noted the potential of intertextual connections to enhance enactment of critical literacy practices (e.g., Bean &

Moni, 2003; Houser, 2001; Mellor & Patterson, 2004; Tyson, 1999), I was unable to locate any research that explored the intertextual processes used by students in enacting critical literacy practices. The centrality of intertextuality in the present research enabled me to conceptualize the role of critical literacy practices in linking students lived experiences with larger social institutions and structures.

Readers also need to be text users (Freebody and Luke, 1990). Text users question how the uses of texts shape its composition, reflect on how the text should be used by themselves and others, and discuss their opinions of the text while also considering

68 alternative opinions. Through social experiences, readers learn what counts as reading in specific social contexts. According to Luke and Freebody (1997):

Readers are active social ‘participants’ in the building of cultural meanings. To

the extent that readers are able to draw upon and use relevant resources, they are

able to construct a relationship with the available statements and discourses of the

text, and they are able to construct and reconstruct these statements and

discourses in different inflections and patterns. (p. 213)

What counts as reading is displayed during discussions about texts. My discussion moves and the CCs served to confirm critical literacy practices and encouraged the making of intertextual connections in the book club setting. When, in my analysis of the data, I studied the intertextual processes of the book club discussions, I examined the socially constructed nature of the students’ literacy practices and looked for ways in which those practices were critical.

The final component of Freebody and Luke’s (1990) resource model is the reader’s role as a text analyst. Successful readers are aware that texts are crafted by authors with particular ideological orientations and dispositions, and that texts are not neutral (Luke & Freebody, 1997). Readers need to be aware of the way that language and idea systems operate in texts and ask, “What does this text do to me?” (Freebody & Luke,

1990, p. 14). The CCs in my research were intended to offer students critical literary lenses through which they could explore the language and idea systems that make texts operate. They were designed to invite students into dialogues where they could transform the focal text, the CC, and their cultural resources by critiquing how the texts work to

69 endorse some points of view and silence others.

The four roles that characterize successful reading unite the perspectives of critical literary theory used to inform the CCs, the sociocultural orientation towards dialogue that is an important part of this research, my analytical focus on intertextuality as a social construct, as well as the critical literacy perspective that shaped both my research interests and methods. By juxtaposing the focal texts in this research with the

CCs that were written to accompany them, this study examined the affordances and limitations of intertextuality for the enactment of critical literacy pedagogy.

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

My research questions derive from an understanding that “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word of language; rather it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world” (Friere & Macedo, 1987, p. 29). Because I am operating from a critical literacy perspective, and because critical literacy rejects the autonomous model of literacy and embraces the ideological model (Bloome & Green,

2015), my research examines literacy in social contexts. This approach requires looking at literacy events and practices from an ethnographic perspective (Barton, 2007; Street,

2001).

Setting

The research was conducted at an urban charter school in the Midwestern United

States. The charter school enrolled approximately 218 students in grades six through eight. The students at the school were from neighborhoods with predominantly low- income families. According to the state Department of Education (2015-2017), the school’s poverty status was “high” with 100% of the students at the school receiving free lunches. The school was also racially diverse; 45% of the students identified as Black,

10% identified as multiracial, 10% identified as Hispanic, and 33% identified as White.

Students at the school consistently outperformed the average proficiency rates for all students in the state. In 2016, 85% of the students were proficient in eighth grade reading, a percentage that is 17 points above the state average. In the city school that serves the neighborhood from which the charter draws its enrollment, only 21% of the eighth grade students were proficient in reading. These results have earned the charter attention from local newspapers and several articles have been published boasting the school’s accomplishments.

Behavior at the school was managed through a paycheck system. Every week the students received a paycheck for their behavior and their paychecks were sent home to be signed by a parent or guardian. The paychecks were used to determine which students were eligible to attend field trips and weekly school celebrations. At the end of every trimester, students could use their final paychecks to purchase items at a school auction.

Every adult in the building had the ability to assign students deductions for improper behavior and to award dollars for good behavior.

Students in each classroom were tracked by achievement based on their scores on a reading entrance exam administered during the first week of school. However, class sizes ranged from 25 to 30 students, and these large class sizes meant that there was still a lot of variation in achievement within each classroom. During the pilot study, I worked with students who were repeating the sixth grade and observed that it took those students

14 weeks to complete reading and discussing one book. Therefore, when I contacted the school director about the present research, I requested to work with the higher level students in the hopes that they would be able to read and discuss two books during that

same 14 week period to enable me to document any evidence of change over the duration of the project. Because of my desire to work with students from the higher-level reading class, the range of student ability within the book clubs was somewhat restricted.

The charter school was located in an unused city school that was over 100 years old. Even though the charter had recently received a large grant to improve the school grounds, those improvements had not begun to take place at the time of data collection.

The building was often cold and drafty. The students at the school wore uniforms, but they were frequently allowed to wear their coats on top of their uniforms because of the temperatures in their classrooms.

On the top floor of the school there was a large unused classroom that the school staff used for meetings. In the center of the room there were several tables arranged in a large rectangle surrounded by numerous office chairs that rolled and spun. Figure 1 is a depiction of the classroom. As this room was empty at the time of the students’ advisory period, the morning period during which the students and I met, the students and I held our book club discussions around the large rectangular table while sitting and lounging comfortably in the chairs.

Windows

Video camera set up on tripod

Tabl e

Bulletin Board

Door

Figure 1. Book club classroom.

Gaining Entry to the Research Site

I taught sixth grade reading at the research site during the 2012 - 2013 school

year. When I last taught there, the school contained only sixth grade students. At that

time, the staff was composed of five individuals: three teachers (including me); the

school director, Mrs. Ademo1; and the assistant school director, Mr. Lukehart. When the

study took place, only Mr. Lukehart was still employed at the school; Mrs. Ademo had

moved to a position in administration and the other teachers I worked with no longer

1 All names are pseudonyms. 74

taught there. Additionally, the school had grown to include both seventh and eighth grade students and employed over 10 new teachers. To accommodate this growth, the school had moved to a new and larger location.

I began my pilot study in 2014-2015 by contacting Mrs. Ademo, explaining my research, and asking for permission to work with students at the school in book clubs.

Mrs. Ademo put me in contact with a sixth grade reading teacher who had not worked at the school when I was employed there and who was already running book clubs. The sixth grade teacher consented to open up her book clubs to my research. I joined one of her book club groups for 14 weeks during the spring of 2015.

For the present study, I contacted Mrs. Ademo in the spring of 2016, explained again my research, and asked if the school would be interested in accommodating my book clubs. Mrs. Ademo informed me that she had received a new position in the school’s administration, but that she would put me in contact with the new school director as soon as he or she was hired. In July of 2016, I was able to contact the new school director, Mr. Paterson, and received consent for conducting my research at the school.

As mentioned previously, during the pilot study in 2014-2015, one of the sixth grade reading teachers at the school allowed me to join a book club that she had already established with her students. Though the teacher was very generous with her time and open to sharing her classroom, I found that she often controlled the book club discussions. Furthermore, her control of the discussions curtailed my participation and stymied my role as a participant observer. In ethnographically informed research, the

researchers’ role as a participant observer is particularly important as ethnography “refers to the investigation of culture(s) using a particular methodology, that of participant observation” (Cameron, 2001, p. 53). Because participant observation was instrumental to my methodology, and because I was primarily interested in seeing how the students used the CCs during discussions, I requested to work by myself with a group of students in the fall of 2016.

I also requested to work with three different small groups of four to five students from the seventh and eighth grade classrooms in order to ensure that I was able to observe and participate in a wide range of book discussions with a variety of books and

CCs. The school director, Mr. Patterson, put me in touch with both the seventh and eighth grade reading teachers. Mr. Patterson suggested that I could work with the students during morning advisory because that was a time of the day when the students could be pulled without disrupting their academic schedule. Advisory was an hour-long period that took place every Monday through Thursday from 9:00 AM until 10:10 AM.

Inspired by Paris (2011), my intent was to conduct humanizing research, “a methodological stance which requires that our inquiries involve dialogic consciousness- raising and the building of relationships of care and dignity for both researchers and participants” (pp. 139-140). According to Paris, although such a stance is always important in research, “it is particularly important when researchers are working with communities who are oppressed and marginalized by systems of inequality based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other social and cultural categories” (p. 140). As the participants in my research were from predominantly racially diverse, low-income

families, my research methods required a humanizing stance. Therefore, it was important to me that the participant selection for the research was dialogic (Paris, 2011), meaning that the participants chose to work with me and were chosen by me. Once I made contact with the seventh and eighth grade reading teachers, Mrs. Halloway and Mrs. Fearnow, I negotiated student recruitment with them in order to be respectful of their needs and time.

Participants

After I explained my project to the seventh grade reading teacher, Mrs. Halloway, she and I scheduled a date for me to recruit students from her classroom and begin data collection. When I went to Mrs. Halloway’s classroom, I explained my research to the students, conducted a book talk to show the students the book choices, distributed and read the assent form, and distributed the recruitment letter and consent form for students to share with their parents. The parental permission and assent forms served to make the parents and the students aware of the potentially controversial content of the focal texts and the CCs.

Nine students in Mrs. Halloway’s classroom volunteered to participate. These students comprised Group A and Group B for my study. I gave each of the nine students a questionnaire asking them to indicate which of the focal texts they would most like to read and then I formed the students into two book club groups based on the books they selected. I shared the book groups with Mrs. Halloway to get her feedback on the groups compositions and then she and I established a schedule for when I would work with each of the two groups. During morning advisory, the students in Mrs. Halloway’s advisory either read silently, engaged in round robin read with the teacher, or worked on a

computer program called i-Ready Reading (Curriculum Associates, 2016) that was designed to improve student performance on state standardized tests. She had her students on a rotating schedule so I pulled each group on the day they were scheduled to participate in silent reading.

Communication with Mrs. Fearnow was more difficult so I did not try to negotiate recruitment of her students according to my initial plan; instead, I worked with a group of students she suggested. Mrs. Fearnow gave me a list of four students whom she thought

“wouldn’t give [me] any problems and would complete things [I] ask[ed] of them”

(personal communication, 1/18/2017). These students comprised Group C for my study.

Together, Mrs. Fearnow and I decided that I would meet with the students once a week during advisory as that was a time that would not be disruptive to the students’ academic schedule. During advisory, Mrs. Fearnow’s students read silently or caught up on their missing work.

The first time I met with Mrs. Fearnow’s students, I let them look through the book options and did a book talk for each of the books. Just as with Mrs. Halloway’s students, I gave Mrs. Fearnow’s students a questionnaire asking which book they would like to read in order to determine their first book. Additionally, I read the assent form to them, and gave them the recruitment letter and consent form for students to share with their parents. Because I was not been able to recruit the students in the manor I had planed, I took special care to reiterate to Mrs. Fearnow’s students that they had the choice to participate and had the option to withdraw their participation at any time.

Group A

The students in Group A, from Mrs. Halloway’s class, were placed into this group because they had chosen to read American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) as either their first or second book choice. They read American Born Chinese quickly and requested to read another graphic novel. I did not have a CC for another graphic novel, but as it happens

Monster is available as both a graphic novel (Myers & Sims, 2015) and in its original prose (Myers, 1999). As their second novel, students in Group A chose to read both the original prose version of Monster and the graphic novel. They finished American Born

Chinese and both versions of Monster while Group B students were still reading their first novel choice; and so I was able to read a fourth novel with them. For their fourth novel, they elected to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie,

2007).

Group A consisted of four students: Trent, Mya, A.J., and Maria. These students were good friends outside of the book club. A.J. once told me, “I know Maria, I know

Mya, and I know Trent more than probably everyone at our school because I would say

Trent, Mya, we was in class and Maria we was in mock trial” (interview, 12/1/2016).

They teased each other frequently and often teased me as well. For instance, the students in Group A thought it was a good joke to steal the microphone for my audio recorder and whisper food items in order to make me laugh when I was doing transcription and logging data.

Trent. Although each member of Group A had a sense of humor, Trent was regarded as the group comedian. On the two days when he was not in attendance for our discussions the other students lamented his absence. Mrs. Halloway informed me that

Trent was “well-like [sic] by his peers, which can sometimes get him into trouble” and that he was “very verbal and like[d] to chat with the people around him” (personal communication, 1/20/2017). On the reading interest questionnaire I gave the students to ascertain their interest in the book club Trent wrote, “I am not a reading person, but I like to read sometimes” (questionnaire, 9/12/2016). Offering a contradictory perception of

Trent’s reading habits, Maria, one of the other students once informed me that “whenever

I look at him [Trent], he’s always reading a book or something” (interview, 10/4/2016).

He particularly enjoyed reading the graphic novels that were part of our book club discussions. After we read American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), he went to the library and checked out Boxers, another graphic novel by Gene Yang, and brought it to our book club meeting to discuss.

Mya. Mya was articulate and thoughtful. She was an avid researcher and informed me once “I am like the leader of the google mafia… I basically search everything. Like, if I don’t know a word, I search it” (transcript, 10/31/2016). She was also an enthusiastic reader, though she particularly loved science fiction. Mrs. Halloway described Mya as “a strong reader who can pull understanding from a text very quickly”

(personal communication, 1/20/2017). Mya had a consistently high paycheck, although she was social and that sometimes earned her deductions.

A.J. A.J was playful and passionate about life. When I asked him why he joined our book club he explained, “I just signed up to sign up and then I got interested”

(interview, 12/1/2016). He did not always keep up with the readings, but when he was behind he was apologetic. Mrs. Halloway noted that although reading “may not be his

strongest subject, he will often try his hardest” (personal communication, 1/20/2017).

A.J. and Trent sat near each other in classes and advisory and frequently earned each other paycheck deductions by making one another laugh.

Maria. Maria was a voracious reader. Every time I gave the students a book,

Maria had it read within a week. In an interview she told me that she considered herself to be an above average reader because “I just like go to the library and like read for six hours straight and I could just finish a book there and if I was below average, that would be really hard so I can like focus on the book very easily” (interview, 10/4/2016). Mrs.

Halloway agreed with Maria’s description of herself as a reader, noting that “she [wa]s an above average student who [wa]s excellent at reading and comprehending a text”

(personal communication, 1/20/2017). During our discussions she asked thoughtful and thought provoking questions. The other students in the group saw her as knowledgeable and she handled their perception of her with humility.

Table 2.

Group A Students

Student Gender Ethnicity Reading Reading Use of Novels participants interesta abilityb book club read in journal groupc Trent Male Multiracial “Reading is “average Medium - American okay. student who Low Born Chinese Sometimes I really (Yang, 2006) pick up enjoys – All things to reading” Monster read.” (Myers & & Sims, 2015) - “I like to All read but Monster have a hard (Myers, 1999) time with - All it.” The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) – All Mya Female Black “I really “strong Low American enjoy reader who Born Chinese reading and can pull (Yang, 2006) often read understandi – All when I have ng from a Monster free time.” text very (Myers & quickly” Sims, 2015) - All Monster (Myers, 1999) - All The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) – All Continued

Table 2 continued

A.J. Male Black “Reading is “average Low American okay. student who Born Chinese Sometimes I enjoys (Yang, 2006) pick up reading” – All things to Monster read.” (Myers & Sims, 2015) - All Monster (Myers, 1999) - All The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) – All Maria Female Mexican “I really “above Medium American enjoy average Born Chinese reading and student who (Yang, 2006) often read is excellent – All when I have at reading Monster free time.” and (Myers & comprehend Sims, 2015) - ing a text” All Monster (Myers, 1999) - All The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) – Some aAs indicated by the reading interest questionnaire. bAs indicated by reading teacher. cAs reported by the student.

Group B

The students in Group B, also from Mrs. Halloway’s class, were placed into this group because on the reading interest questionnaire they indicated that the novel Speak

(Anderson, 1999) was either their first or second book choice. After students in Group B finished reading Speak, they indicated that they wanted to read a graphic novel and, when

I presented them with the choices of either American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) or

Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015), they chose to read the graphic novel version of Monster.

Devine. Mrs. Hathaway often asked Devine for assistance collecting, organizing, and distributing class materials during advisory. In her 13 years, Devine has persevered through numerous difficulties. She is liked and respected by her peers. She told me that

“I’m like not too fast at reading, but then again I’m not really slow at reading” (interview,

12/13/2016), but she believes that she understands books well. Even though during an interview Devine described herself to me as an average reader, the other students in the group perceived of her as a good reader because she asked good questions. Mrs.

Halloway shared that Devine was “very quiet in class, but her homework and test grades show me that she comprehends the material” (personal communication, 1/20/2017).

Aesha. During an interview Aesha told me that she saw herself as an average reader and that she joined the book club because “One I like to read, and two like I just,

I’m just interested in books a lot” (interview, 12/13/2016). Aesha came to each book club meeting with a list of questions to ask and answers for each of her questions. She occasionally fell behind on the readings, but was always willing to read extra in order to get caught up. Mrs. Halloway informed me that “school is hard for her, but she gives it her all and is not very easily discouraged” (personal communication, 1/20/2017). When I observed Mrs. Halloway’s advisory I noticed that Aesha was good at being covertly social; she was always talking to the peers around her but was rarely ever caught or

received a deduction. Aesha’s paychecks were consistently high.

Rhiannon. Rhiannon was absent on the day that I visited Mrs. Halloway’s class to inform the students about my research and distribute assent and consent forms, but when I visited class the following week she asked if she could participate and requested to read Speak (Anderson, 1999). Initially Rhiannon had a hard time keeping up with the readings and wrote me a note saying, “I am sorry But I can’t stay in this group I too much extra work I need To get done and I don’t have time to read the books [sic].” However the next week when I returned to work with Group B, Rhiannon said she had finished reading Speak over the weekend and wanted to stay in the book club. Rhiannon lost the first book club journal that I had given her and only used the second journal that I gave her a few times before she lost it again. Throughout the course of our discussions she indicated several times that she had been bullied in her previous school and I perceived her and her book club participation as very self conscious. Confirming my observations of Rhiannon, Mrs. Halloway noted, “sometimes her behavior is attention-seeking, which can cause her to get into minor trouble” (personal communication, 1/20/2017).

Ashlee. Ashlee read our book club books quickly and then read them again in order to prepare for discussion. On her response to the reading interest questionnaire she wrote “I have to like the book I’m really picky so I dont read it iF I dont like it [sic]”

(questionnaire, 9/12/2016). Mrs. Halloway described Ashlee as an average reader, who did not often volunteer her answers in class, but in the book club she participated frequently and demonstrated a good understanding of the different novels. While we discussed the books she liked to spin around on the rolling chairs in the room and walk

around, but she was always listening and ready to chime in to discussions. Ashlee is the only participant who was put on In-Class-Suspension (ICS) during the course of my research. Students at the research site were put on ICS when the assistant school director felt that their repercussions for their misbehavior warranted more than a paycheck deduction. Students on ICS were not allowed to talk during lunch, and were not allowed to participate in recess or any of the school’s weekly social activities.

Tiffany. Tiffany was a self-proclaimed reader and often received paycheck deductions for reading during inappropriate times in her academic classes. In one of our discussions she shared that she is shy and does not talk much, but the other students in the group disagreed with her perception of herself and argued that she is in fact very talkative. Tiffany missed our first book club discussion because she had been in a fight on the bus (field notes, 9/22/2016). Unfortunately, Tiffany transferred to a different school midway through the research and so she did not participate in all of Group B’s discussions.

Table 3.

Group B Students

Student Gender Ethnicity Reading Reading Use of Novels participants interesta abilityb book read in club groupc journal Devine Female Black “Reading is “she High Speak okay. comprehends (Anderson, Sometimes I the material” 1999) – All pick up Monster things to (Myers & read.” Sims, 2015) - All

Aesha Female Black “I really “likes reading, High Speak enjoy even though it (Anderson, reading and does not come 1999) – All often read that easily to Monster when I have her” (Myers & free time.” Sims, 2015) - All

Rhiannon Female White Absent – Did “does fairly Low Speak not complete well with (Anderson, reading reading aloud 1999) – All interest and Monster questionnaire comprehension” (Myers & Sims, 2015) - Some

Ashlee Female White “Reading is “average Low Speak okay. reader” (Anderson, Sometimes I 1999) – All pick up Monster things to (Myers & read.” Sims, 2015) - All

Tiffany Female White “I really Due to Low Speak enjoy Tiffany’s (Anderson, reading and withdraw, the 1999) – All often read teacher did not when I have get enough free time.” reading data aAs indicated by the reading interest questionnaire. bAs indicated by reading teacher. cAs reported by the student.

Group C

The students in Group C were from Mrs. Fearnow’s class. Most of the students in this group took their reading journals seriously. Without prompting, they wrote extensive summaries in their journals, used them to track unfamiliar words, and drew pictures in response to their reading. They elected to read American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) as their first book and when we completed that book, they chose to read Esperanza Rising

(Ryan, 2000).

Alessandra. According to Mrs. Fearnow Alessandra was a “clear leader in the classroom” who “worked extremely hard and efficiently” (personal communication,

1/18/2017). Mrs. Fearnow reported that Alessandra was not a naturally strong reader, but that her work ethic enabled her to be a stronger reader than most of her peers. On the reading interest questionnaire Alessandra wrote, “When I have a book that I really enjoy and I am deep into I like reading it a lot, although, for me to read a lot of the book it has to be interesting” (questionnaire, 9/19/2016). Unfortunately, Alessandra withdrew from the school in the middle of the research and so she did not attend all of the book club sessions.

Maryan. Even though Maryan shared that “some books are hard to read because they are confusing” (questionnaire, 9/19/2016), Mrs. Fearnow reported that Maryan had a high reading level and was a leader in the classroom (personal communication,

9/18/2017). Like Alessandra, Maryan was an extremely hard worker and performed well in school. During our discussions she asked thoughtful questions and participated

frequently. Maryan was sweet and considerate.

Sahra. Sahra performed exceptionally well in school and was consistently on task. When I had the chance to observe Mrs. Fearnow’s advisory, I noticed Sahra rolling her eyes at students who were being disruptive. Mrs. Fearnow reported that Sahra was very popular among her classmates, very mature, and at a high reading level. Sahra was initially quiet during our book club discussions, but after our first few meetings she began participating more frequently. She often shared funny asides about her family and was good at laughing at herself.

Ezekial. Mrs. Fearnow wanted Ezekial to participate in the book club in order to

“push him to have more responsibility” (personal communication, 1/18/2017). While he always appeared engaged during our book club meetings, he was quiet and participated infrequently. According to Mrs. Fearnow, this behavior was consistent with his participation during his academic classes where he was compliant, kind, and eager to please, but did not often participate.

Table 4.

Group C Students

Student Gender Ethnicity Reading Reading Use of Novels participants interesta abilityb book club read in journal groupc Alessandra Female Puerto Rican “I enjoy “Not a High American reading and naturally Born Chinese often read strong (Yang, 2006) when I have reader, but – All free time.” works to Esperanza full Rising (Ryan, potential 2000) - Some and therefore reads stronger than most peers” Maryan Female Somali “Reading is “High High American okay. reading Born Chinese Sometimes I level” (Yang, 2006) pick things – All up to read.” Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) - All Sahra Female Somali “Reading is “High High American okay. reading Born Chinese Sometimes I level” (Yang, 2006) pick things – All up to read.” Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) - All Ezekial Male Cambodian “I really “grades are Low American enjoy dropping Born Chinese reading and significantly (Yang, 2006) often read in ELA” – All when I have Esperanza free time.” Rising (Ryan, 2000) - All aAs indicated by the reading interest questionnaire. bAs indicated by reading teacher. cAs reported by the student.

Researcher’s Role

As mentioned previously, I worked at the charter school for one year before beginning my work as a student at the Ohio State University. When I began collecting data for the present research, it had been three years since I taught at the research site.

According to Heath and Street (2008), “Ethnography has come to mean ‘making the familiar strange’” (p.32), and for me working at the research site was both familiar and strange from the outset. Because I taught at the school, I was very familiar with the school’s behavioral policy, expectations, dress code, and mission. However, because the school staff, student body, and curriculum had changed, there were many aspects of the school culture with which I needed to become familiar. As noted by Bloomaert and Jie

(2010), being familiar with the research site has both disadvantages and advantages for a researcher. During my research, I attempted to be cognizant of the importance of approaching the school classrooms and community as new and unfamiliar.

These circumstances meant that I was negotiating a complex position as I entered the research site. It is my epistemological stance that a researcher can never be an objective, neutral observer. I also believe that, in order to understand something, the researcher needs to become a part of it. As Purcell-Gates (2011) noted, when approaching research ethnographically, “participation to the fullest extent possible is often the best way to begin to see and understand a different cultural context” (p. 144). Therefore, I worked as a participant observer by both observing and facilitating the book club discussions. According to Joan Cassell (as cited in Crang & Cook, 2012, p. 42), the researcher:

… should adopt a role or identity that meshes with the values and behaviour of

the group being studied, without seriously compromising the researcher’s own

values and behavior… [and] not… inventing an identity; we all have several, …

but … the most appropriate one can be stressed.

I had several identities in the conduct of this research: I was a former teacher at the research site; I gathered data in the book clubs in the role of the researcher; and I participated in the discussions in the role of a facilitator. Furthermore, my identity and relationship with the students extended beyond the book club meetings as I occasionally spent time with the students’ during period transitions and lunch. Paris (2011) noted when describing humanizing research:

Learning about cultural and linguistic worlds from participants means being a

participant observer at times, an observer at other times, and a participant at still

other times. That is, although we often pass all ethnographic work off as

‘participant observation,’ the fact is that such a research activity falls along a

continuum. (p. 144)

When researchers participate along this continuum, their research creates authentic places and activities that allow the researcher to see glimpses of language they might not have otherwise been able to see.

Because I participated in the book club discussions, and the students and I discussed issues of social and economic power related to race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and age, it is important to position myself within these categories. I identify as a

White, middle class, straight female, who is in her mid-thirties. My identity within these

categories, as well as my authorship of the CCs that were the focus of some discussions, was important, as it undoubtedly impacted the trajectory of these conversations and my participation within them.

Focal Texts and Critical Companions

I created the CCs by identifying novels that were often taught in middle schools and that might generate conversation around controversial topics. To identify these books, I relied on my personal experiences as a middle school teacher, the knowledge of my colleagues, Internet resources (e.g. Beers, 2014), and the American Library

Association’s list of “Frequently challenged books of the 21st century” (2015). Once I determined that a novel was a potential focal text, I began a content analysis of the text by examining the three components of a narrative in which ideology operates: the discourse, or the linguistic and narrative structures of the story; the story, or the plot, the characters and their actions; and the significance, or the social attitudes and values that the text puts forward (McCallum & Stephens, 2011). When I wrote the CCs, I attempted to problematize the ideology of the focal text, and/or the ideology of people who may challenge the focal text in order to raise questions and generate topics for conversation by challenging commonly held attitudes. I did so by employing one or several of the critical literary theories that I identified in Chapter two.

In this research, I used CCs for the following focal texts:

• Monster (Myers, 1999) is a novel about a young African American boy who is on

trial for felony murder. The CC focuses on the main character’s race and age in

relationship with the biases of the United States legal system. The novel is also

available in graphic novel form (Myers & Sims, 2015).

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) is referred to as a

“memoir” by the author. In the CC, I attempted to provoke students to ask

questions about why the author’s life story has been so highly censored

(American Library Association, 2015).

• Speak (Anderson, 1999) is a novel about a young girl who becomes a selective

mute after being raped at a party. In the CC I focused on the topics of rape and

sexual bullying and wrote a text that would raise questions around why rape

happens and why so many victims of rape do not speak.

• Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) is a novel about a young girl who is forced to

emigrate from Mexico into the U.S. after tragedy strikes her family. She finds

herself working in a migrant labor camp and so the CC for this novel focuses on

similarities between migrant camps in the novel and in the U.S. today.

• American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) is a graphic novel about an Asian American

boy interwoven with the Chinese fable of the Monkey King. The CC focuses on

the social and historical background of the novel in relation to the events of the

novel and the experiences of the main character.

The CCs ranged between seven and 15 pages in length. They were written specifically for adolescent readers and, as such, I attempted to avoid overuse of complicated sentences. When I included challenging vocabulary, I wrote an in-text definition of the vocabulary word to assist students in understanding. The CCs had an average grade level of between 8 -13 according to a Flesch Kincaid Grade Level analysis,

and should be easily understood by 13 to 18 year olds (Online-Utility.org, 2017). The

CCs were each written from the perspective of several critical literary theories: reader response, Marxist, deconstruction, feminist, gender studies and queer theory, critical race, new historicism, and postcolonial. They employed statistics, author interviews, and an analysis of the focal text in order to engage students in a critical reading of the novel.

Because I wrote the CCs with the hope of provoking conversations, the CCs included numerous questions aimed at problematizing hegemonic assumptions around the social issues in the text. I attempted to write the CCs in a way that would raise rather than answer questions for students so the CCs did not become another authoritative classroom voice. Nevertheless, the CCs were not free of bias and were written in pursuit of encouraging critical pedagogy. An example CC is included in Appendix A.

Data Collection

Book club discussions. To begin the book clubs, I spent one session with each group discussing our expectations for participation and creating a schedule for reading the focal text and CC. During this first meeting, I told the students that I was interested in observing how they discussed text. I did not tell the students that I was the author of the

CCs as I did not want them to see me as an authority on the topics of the CCs, and because I worried that knowing the author of the CCs was a book club participant would shape students’ responses to them.

Although it may seem as if providing students with rules for talk is restrictive,

Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, and Sams (2004) suggest that “for children who agree to some ground rules and then try to implement them, [rules] can represent a kind of freedom” (p.

375). Rules encourage a more equitable environment and can promote the idea that challenging other participants’ remarks is conversationally productive. According to

Mercer et al., “if teachers provide children with an explicit, practical introduction to the use of language for collective reasoning, then children learn better ways of thinking collectively and better ways of thinking alone” (p. 375). Therefore, after our first discussion, I asked the students in each group to reflect on the conversation and suggested participation rules for the future. While they were discussing rules, I periodically interjected with my own observations and suggested rules such as:

- Do not talk when others are talking.

- Make sure everyone has a chance to participate.

- Respond to the idea and not the person.

- Provide reasons and evidence from the text to support your argument.

- Consider multiple sides of an issue.

- Challenge other’s ideas.

(Clark et al., 2003; Mercer et al., 2004)

I wrote each group’s rules on a poster and the students and I revisited and revised them occasionally throughout the book club meetings.

At the end of each session, the students and I decided on a reading goal for the next week and most of the students were able to adhere to that goal and came to the book club meeting having read the designated section of the focal text. The students and I read and discussed the focal texts before reading and discussing the CC. I organized the discussions in this way because the CCs were designed to be read after the focal text and

some of the CCs reveal the ending of the focal text. For instance, in the novel Speak

(Myers, 1999), the main character does not reveal that she was raped until later in the book, but the CC focuses on the topic of rape. If students had read the CC first, it would have alerted the students to this crucial plot event before they read it.

In my proposal for this research, I indicated that the students would read both the focal text and the CC independently and then discuss these texts in the book club.

However, Group A was the first group to read a CC and, when I asked them to read it independently, only two of the students (Trent and Maria) did so. Group C was also asked to read independently the CC for Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), However, although all members claimed to have read the CC, they had little to say when I prompted them to discuss the text after reading it independently. Because discussion of the CCs was at the center of my research interests and questions, for the continuation of the research, the students and I read the CCs out loud and together during our meetings so I could ensure they had read the CCs. Reading the CCs out loud also enabled the students and me to support each other in our understanding of the CC. They supported my understanding with their connections, and I provided decoding assistance and background information when necessary.

The questions that students wrote in preparation for the meetings and the questions that they asked while we were reading and discussing the text drove the discussions. My role during the discussions was to act as a “critical guide” (Davila, 2011) by deciding when and how to employ critical literacy pedagogy with the students. As such, I managed the discussions, encouraged student participation, asked questions to

clarify understanding or probe for deeper thinking, and provided contextual information when necessary. However, it is important to note that the students often shared these responsibilities with me by managing the discussion, encouraging their peers participation, asking question and pushing for deeper understanding, building on each other’s prior comments, rejecting and authorizing certain ideas, and providing context so that all of the members of the group could understand the discussion better.

Timeline. I began collecting data on September 12, 2016 and stopped collecting data on December 19th, 2016, a period of 15 weeks. On most weeks I was able to meet once with each group. However, my schedule varied due to other obligations and the students could not always meet on the scheduled days because of holidays and other events on the school calendar. Furthermore, each groups’ timeline for reading the focal text varied depending on the length of the focal text and the speed with which the students read.

As I mentioned previously, every classroom at the charter school was assigned a morning advisory period from 9:00 AM – 10:10 AM Monday through Thursday. I met with each book club group during this time so that the book clubs would not interfere with the students’ regular class periods. However, Mrs. Halloway and Mrs. Fearnow conducted their advisory periods differently. Mrs. Halloway used advisory to discuss school events and classroom behavior, and to collect the students’ homework assignments for all of their classes while the students watched the CNN Student News.

Even though the advisory period began at 9:00 AM every day, I was rarely able to take

Mrs. Halloway’s students for book club until 9:30 AM, meaning that discussions in

Groups A and B typically lasted 40 minutes.

Mrs. Fearnow ran her advisory period differently. Whenever I entered her room at

9:00 AM, her students were reading silently and ready for book club immediately and I was often able to spend over an hour discussing the novels with them. Therefore, the time

I was able to work with each group varied depending on the school schedule and the structure of the advisory period. Appendix B contains a description of the data collected for each group.

Data Sources

Participant Observation and Field Notes

During the book club meetings, I took ethnographic field notes to document my observations about students’ use of and responses to the focal texts and the CCs. My field notes included the date, time, setting, what was observed, summaries of discussions with the teachers, and my comments about emerging patterns in the data. After each meeting, I reviewed the field notes and added details and insights about methodological and theoretical issues.

Video Recordings of Book Club Discussions

To document the book club discussions, I placed a video recorder on a tripod outside the small group so that all students were in view (see Figure 1). Additionally, I placed a wireless microphone in the center of the table where the book club met in order to capture accurate audio recordings of the meetings. This audio was fed to the video recorder. As a back up, I recorded the book club meetings using an audio recorder that I placed in the middle of the book club table.

Semi-structured Interviews with Participating Students

I conducted interviews with at least two students from each book club as soon as possible after reading and discussing the CCs. However, in some of the groups, additional students requested to be interviewed and, because I was interested in their input, I decided to comply with their request. I used the students’ advisory time to conduct these interviews so as not to conflict with their academic responsibilities. The students were selected for interviews based on their willingness to participate, their availability, and their ability to contribute to my understanding of how they were using the CCs. These individual interviews were audio recorded and transcribed.

The purpose of these interviews was to understand how students were integrating information from the focal texts and CCs, and to understand how students were conceiving of their own reading and discussion practices. Because I was interested in gathering information about students’ experiences, the interviews were semi-structured and some questions were pre-defined. As noted by Briggs (1986), “each interview is a unique social interaction that involves a negotiation of social roles and frames of reference” (p. 24). The interviews involved joint construction of meaning with the students, and it was necessary for me to provide space for the interviewees to introduce relevant issues and topics to the dialogue. Sample interview questions are provided in

Appendix C.

In addition to the pre-defined interview questions, I also asked students questions that were relevant to how I saw them interacting in the group and responding in their journals. I read and re-read the data I was collecting constantly and used the interviews as

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an opportunity to ask students about trends that I saw emerging from the data. Often I showed them excerpts of transcripts in order to ask them what had motivated them to make certain discussion moves, or showed them their journal entries as a springboard for questions around why they had used their journals in specific ways.

Artifacts from the Teacher and School

Throughout the research I frequently communicated with Mrs. Halloway and Mrs.

Fearnow, and the school director through e-mail. E-mail communication was used to establish meeting schedules, to discuss the students’ book club participation, to discuss the teachers’ observations, and to share concerns about the students’ wellbeing. These e- mails were part of the data for this research and often served as the springboard for other informal discussions with teachers when I interacted with them in the hallways or during advisory. Notes from the informal discussions were recorded as field notes.

Artifacts from Book Club Discussions

At the first meeting with each group, I gave each of the students his or her own book club journal. I asked students to use the journals while they were reading so that they could come prepared to meetings with questions that they would like to discuss. To assist students in asking questions that provoked discussion, I spent time during the first meetings discussing how to write good questions for initiating dialogue. The students’ questions were used to facilitate discussion of the focal text and the CC.

I also invited the students to use their journals to take brief notes to keep track of their thoughts as needed (for example, they might write “California?” if we were reading

Esperanza Rising and they wanted to remind themselves to ask the group if the setting of

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the story was important). The journals were also used at the end of meetings to reflect upon the discussion and to respond to specific prompts. Example prompts are included in

Appendix D. Some of the students also chose to write summaries of the readings and personal stories in their journals.

Interestingly, the journals seemed to serve a different purpose in each group. As described in Tables 2, 3 and 4, most of the students in Mrs. Halloway’s Group A rarely used their journals. In contrast, two students in Mrs. Halloway’s Group B frequently requested journal prompts (see Appendix D), wrote numerous questions and answers, and used their journals to share personal stories. Three of the students in Mrs. Fearnow’s group used their journals extensively to draw pictures in response to their reading, to summarize their reading, to track difficult vocabulary, and to mark sections of text that they felt were interesting. Because I wanted the students to have a lot of control over what happened during our discussions, and because I thought our discussions were productive regardless of how students were using their journals, I did not push the students to use their journals in specific way; instead, I let students use their journals as they wished. I considered this flexibility to be part of my dialogic stance towards participants (Paris, 2011); students were volunteering to read and discuss books with me and I wanted them to continue to want to work with me.

After each meeting, I collected the students’ journals and documented their entries by photographing them. I immediately returned the journals to the students so that they could use them to take notes in preparation for the next meeting.

Questionnaires About the Characters, Plot, Setting and Theme.

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I asked the students to complete a written questionnaire soliciting their opinions about the characters, setting, plot and theme of the focal text after they finished reading and discussing the focal text but before they read the CC. After the students read and discussed the CCs, I asked them to complete a similar questionnaire. My intention was to use the students’ responses to ascertain whether their opinions of the focal texts, characters, and social justice issues changed after reading the CC. A sample questionnaire for each focal text is provided in Appendix E.

Questionnaires About the Social Justice Issues in the Focal Text and Critical

Companion.

I asked the participants to complete a questionnaire prior to reading and discussing the focal text and again after reading and discussing the CC. The purpose of these questionnaires was to solicit the participants’ opinions on the social issues that were relevant to both the CC and the focal text. A sample questionnaire for each focal text is provided in Appendix F.

As with the book club journals, each group responded to both the social justice questionnaires and the character, setting, plot and theme questionnaires differently. When

I distributed the questionnaires to Group A, the students in the group tended to discuss their responses rather than write them down. As a result, I did not collect many written questionnaires from Mrs. Halloway’s Group A, but I did collect several transcripts of them discussing their responses. Group B worked on their questionnaires silently when I distributed them during our meetings, but they did not finish the questionnaires by the end of our book club meetings; they would take their questionnaires back to advisory but

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then did not return with them. Because of the difficulty I had collecting the questionnaires from Group B. I began asking them questions from the questionnaires during discussions and interviews. In contrast to Groups A and B, most of the students in

Group C responded to the questionnaires thoroughly and completely.

Data Analysis

Data collection spanned four months and I began data analysis immediately, so data collection and analysis occurred synchronously. After data collection was completed, I continued to analyze my data. As Purcell-Gates (2011) noted, “analysis of ethnographic data begins in the field and continues past the time the researcher has left it”

(p. 147).

To analyze these data, I used the analysis sequence depicted in Figure 2. I began by collecting the data and then reviewing and logging all videos immediately after recording them. Following the advice of Heath and Street (2008), I logged the time, place, key speakers, and the primary artifacts collected each day. I used these logs to note what seemed ordinary and nonordinary in the participants’ language, and behaviors, as well as in the book club context. I then used these logs to identify events that required transcription. Events that warranted transcription were those that related to the character, setting, plot, theme, author, or social issue relevant to the focal text. Although I transcribed only key moments from discussions of the focal texts, I transcribed all of the discussions that involved the use of the CCs because discussions around the CCs were the focus of my research. Transcripts were annotated and time stamped and I used these transcripts to conduct an analysis of the discourse.

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Member Checking (Iterate)

Coding & Field Notes & Analytic Peer Review Data Displays Conclusions Outline Report Transcription Memos

(Iterate)

Figure 2. Analysis sequence.

Because my research questions focused on how students integrated information from the CCs with information from the focal texts and the social issues addressed by the focal texts, I analyzed the discourse, interviews, questionnaires and artifacts by looking for places where students responded to the characters, setting, plot, theme and social issues of the focal text with specific attention to those places where students made intertextual connections between the focal texts, the CCs, the students’ experiences with social issues, and other texts (e.g. news, books, YouTube videos, etc.). This process required me to reflect on how I was defining the larger theme of intertextuality.

Additionally, because of my interest in students’ literacy practices, I analyzed the discourse, interviews, and artifacts with a focus on how students’ read and what they did with the texts in their reading, writing, and discussion. Saldana (2013) refers to this type of analysis as thematic coding. In thematic coding the researcher analyzes the data to

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generate themes, or “an extended phrase or sentence that identifies what a unit of data is about and/or what it means [emphasis in original]” (Saldana, 2013, p. 175). Then the researcher analyzes the themes for similarities, differences, and relationships in order to reflect on the themes, categorize them, and weave the thematic elements together. My analysis of the data was informed by Luke and Freebody’s (1990, 1997) four-resources model as well as by Keene and Zimmerman’s (1997) and Wilkinson, Reninger, and

Soter’s (2010a) categories of response and Davila’s (2011) categories of talk. However, these heuristics were only a starting point for my analysis as my coding had a

“reverberative nature” (Saldana, 2013, p. 58) where I compared “data to data, data to code, code to code, code to category, category to category, category back to data, etc.” (p.

58).

My continued review of the research led me to the work of Bloome and Egan-

Robertson (1993) who specified that “text is the product of textualization” (p. 311), meaning that whether or not something is a text depends on how it is treated by members of a group. Because whether or not something can be considered a text has to do with how it is treated in a social context; juxtaposing text does not by itself constitute intertextuality. Therefore, when looking for instances of intertextuality in the data, I referred to Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s specification that intertextual relationships must be proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and have social significance. Though discourse and genres can be conceived of as texts (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993;

Luke, 1995) for the purposes of this analysis I have not examined these language conventions. Instead I focused on the intertextual dimensions that were explicitly present

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in the text under analysis. Furthermore, although I began conducting data analysis of intertextuality without an a priori framework for coding references, in the recursive process of data analysis and review of relevant literature (Heath & Street, 2008) I located research conducted by Pappas et al. (2001) that was relevant to my analysis. The codes in the Pappas et al. research were used to reflect on and refine the coding in the present research.

The process of iterative coding that I employed throughout data analysis involved the weekly writing of analytic memos (Saldana, 2013) that were used to document my reflections and thinking processes about the data. The analytic memos were used to synthesize my data into higher analytic meanings. In them I reflected on the study’s research questions, explored emergent patterns and themes, attempted to operationally define the coding categories, considered future directions for the study, reflected on ethical dilemmas I encountered, and considered possible connections between the codes

(Heath & Street, 2008). As I wrote these memos, I revisited the interview questions I had for participants and took notes on topics that I wanted to discuss with the students at subsequent book clubs in order to verify my analysis with the participants through member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). The process of reflecting on my findings, data, and theoretical constructs to create the agenda for future book club discussions and inform interview questions enabled me to ensure empirical validity, through the employment of a constant comparative perspective (Heath & Street, 2008).

Additionally, I met weekly with another doctoral student to discuss my analysis memos and review my coding. This process of peer review (Johnson, 1997) was

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instrumental in facilitating critical self-reflection of my data analysis, and caused me to refine how I was conceptualizing coding categories. In this way, my understanding that social interaction plays a central role in meaning making (Vygotsky, 1978) impacted not just the organization of the book clubs that were used to discuss the focal texts and critical companions, but also my approach to data analysis.

Through the process of writing analytic memos and discussing findings with a peer, I created several different matrix displays (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana 2013) to explore my data. In the matrix displays, I organized my data by code and explored the patterns that emerged where the data intersected or diverged. The matrix displays enabled me to ensure that I did not draw inappropriate conclusions from my analysis. While examining the displays, I paid special attention to disconfirming evidence within my data

(Purcell-Gates, 2011). Purcell-Gates (2011) noted that “this procedure is intended to prevent the researcher from accepting early, or sometimes favorite, interpretations that arise from data analysis without double-checking that evidence may exist to disconfirm these perhaps biased findings” (p. 148). By looking for negative evidence, I was able to discover nuances and discrepancies that led to the unveiling of new patterns or categories of interest. An example of a matrix display I used to analyze what types of intertextual references were on topic or off topic is depicted in Table 5 in Chapter 4.

Analysis of the matrix displays led to the development of a network display

(Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) that helped me to condense my data and reflect on my research questions. According to Miles, Huberman, and Saldana (2013) network display

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requires you [the researcher] to think about your research questions and what

portions of your data are needed to answer them; it requires you to make full

analyses, ignoring no relevant information; and it focuses and organizes your

information coherently. (p. 108)

As I continued collecting and analyzing data I repeatedly revisited and revised the network display. As analysis of the data continued throughout my writing process, the network display evolves. The final product of this analysis is titled “Intertextual Take Up

Model” and is displayed in Figure 3 in Chapter 4 of this dissertation.

Ethical Considerations

Risks to participants were minimal. However, because the novels and the CCs centered on topics that were often difficult to discuss in the classroom, I ensured that the participants and their parents were fully aware of the novels and topics that were discussed before the book clubs began. Participants were repeatedly assured and reminded that they may choose to withdraw from the study at any time. Additionally, participants might have experienced social risk for participation or non-participation in the study as their personal objections to participating may have had social consequences in the social network of the book club or the school. To manage this risk, in addition to repeatedly assuring the participants that participation or non-participation was a personal decision, I did my best to ensure that the identity of those students who chose to participate was confidential and was not revealed to the other students in the school.

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CHAPTER 4

FINDINGS

November 1st, 2016

The students in Mrs. Halloway’s Group A have finished reading the graphic novel (Myers & Sims, 2015) and the prose novel (Myers, 1999) for Monster and are reading and discussing the CC. Monster is about Steve, a young black boy on trial for felony murder after his participation as a lookout in a robbery gone awry. While we are reading the CC, Trent stops the discussion. He wants to know why the CC says that felony murder is one of the most severe crimes a person can be tried for when he believes serial killers commit crimes that are far more severe. I prompt him to look up felony murder on my phone and he reads the definition to the group. After he has read the definition the following conversation ensues (transcript conventions are explained in Appendix G):

TRENT: I don't know because um, I watched some crime movies like Law and Order or whatever MYA: Justice League, no? TRENT: And I hear people who are serial killers and that's only for killing one person and some people kill multiple people, which= SARAH: I don't know Trent, that's a good question. I don't know. MYA: Um, first they um, someone commits a crime= TRENT: Out of context MYA: No, it's not out of context, I'm just saying. A.J.: He said out of context. (transcript, 11/1/2016)

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~~~~~

December 5th, 2016

The students in Mrs. Halloway’s Group B have also finished reading the graphic novel for Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) and are reading and discussing the

CC. Ashlee is reading a section in the CC about James King, a character in Monster who robbed a convenience store and killed the store owner with the help of another character, Bobo Evans. The sentence in the CC reads “James’ older appearance is incriminating and makes it difficult for both the reader and the jury to see him as innocent of the crime of which he’s been accused.” When Ashlee finishes reading

Aesha responds by exclaiming “I think that’s really dumb!” and when I ask her to explain, the following conversation takes place:

ASHLEE: Because they look older they get more accused of doing something worse? AESHA: That makes no sense. ASHLEE: And like= AESHA: If they, if they're older, just because he's older than 23, he got his older appearance makes him guilty? ASHLEE: Paul [a student in Mrs. Halloway’s class] looks older so if he does something bad is that gonna happen to him? SARAH: Yeah, that's a really good question. Cause he does, I know exactly who you are talking about, and he does look older. So like if he= ASHLEE: He's only 12 SARAH: So if he for instance, like, if he and somebody else were to go to, like be on trial for the same thing would uh the jury think that one looks older and so therefore they're more likely to be guilty? ASHLEE: He looks younger, is he going to be accused of being less likely to go to prison? SARAH: Yeah. ASHLEE: Than Paul? That's not fair in my opinion because like, just because they look older or look younger it doesn't= AESHA: Exactly. 111

SARAH: Do you think it doesn't, are you saying you don't think this happens when you go to trial, or are you saying you just don't think it's fair that it happens? AESHA: I don't think it's fair. ASHLEE: I don't think it's fair that it happens. AESHA: Because like, OK honestly in the book he [James King, a minor character in Monster who was responsible for shooting the store owner] did look older than 23, but like they made, but I think they shouldn't take it off of his appearance, I think they should take it off of what he did. ASHLEE: His mind and what he's done. AESHA: What he did, what the crime actually was. ASHLEE: What he thinks is right from wrong and what he did if he thinks it's right or wrong, which I'm pretty sure= AESHA: But they're taking it by his appearance by how old he is, like what does that matter? What does that have to do with any of this? Like he's in like why they're basically, they're not there to say like “Oh since he's older since he looks older then he's guilty” but what if, I think they should just take it off about what they're actually here for and like see if he's guilty or not like not to see if how just because he's old doesn't mean= SARAH: But you're, are you saying his age doesn't matter at all then? Because the question of then like= ASHLEE: #The age does matter.# SARAH: #What's the difference# between a seven year old and a twenty-three year old? AESHA: I mean it does matter but like, I don't think they should take it off by what= ASHLEE: They look like. SARAH: It's just kind of hard right? Because we can all say there's a clear difference between a seven year old and a twenty-three year old, but is there a big difference between a fifteen year old and a sixteen year old? Or like even fifteen and seventeen, is there that much of a difference in your maturity and behavior and that one is like “Oh we should give him a second chance,” while the other one you don't? AESHA: Honestly, I think the age. ASHLEE: Well if they've been in trouble before and that's like one of the person's first time doing it I would only put them in there for a little bit because like, they are gonna learn right from wrong but they're not gonna be punished for something that they shouldn't be punished for. It's not like he [Steve] murdered anyone, and he didn't know anyone was gonna

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get murdered, but he knew that stuff was gonna get stolen. SARAH: Um hm AESHA: Honestly, I think James King is, I think Bobo and James King are the most guilty ones in this whole situation, and not because they're older appearances. Is because first Bobo stole something from the store. ASHLEE: And threatened someone. AESHA: Yeah and threatened someone. And James King, on the other hand he shot and killed somebody, so I think like= ASHLEE: James King should get the most. AESHA: Yeah, I think he should get most. Like Bobo should only get a couple months because all he did was steal, but like James King actually got a gun and and like shot somebody. (transcript, 12/5/2016) ~~~~~

The two examples of dialogue above are representative of the ways that participants constructed intertextuality during book club discussions. Notice how, in the discussion that took place on November 1st, 2016, Mya made an intertextual connection about Justice League that did not get taken up. On the other hand, in the discussion that took place on December 5th, 2016, the students and I made a long chain of intertextual connections between the CC, a student in their classroom (Paul), the focal text, and two different hypothetical situations (the difference between a child or someone who is a teenager, and the difference between someone who has a criminal record versus someone who is a first time offender). The intertextual connections that the students made during the discussion stemmed from their cultural resources. Through these references, the participants critically reflected on the plot of the focal text and the social issue, leading Aesha and Ashley to consider who should be in trouble for the crime Steve, the main character of Monster (Myers & Sims,

2015), helped to commit. When the participants took up connections, these

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connections led to a dialogically and socially constructed understanding of the focal text, the social issues that the CC addressed, and what counted as a book discussion in our group.

In this chapter, I argue that the students in the three book clubs used their cultural resources as texts and proposed intertextual references between their cultural resources, the focal texts, and the CCs. By examining the intertextuality in the book club discussions, I was able to appreciate the cultural resources that the urban seventh and eighth graders brought to the dialogue. Through using these resources as the foundation for knowledge building about the focal text and the relevant social issues, the participants legitimized their cultural resources as appropriate sources of knowledge. In doing so, they often enacted critical literacy practices, questioning their position as socially constructed beings.

I began this research with the following research questions:

1. What aspects of the CC do seventh and eighth grade students from high-

level classes in an urban charter school respond to when they talk about

the focal text and the social issues that are relevant to the focal text?

2. How do seventh and eighth grade students from high-level classes in an

urban charter school respond to the CCs when they talk about the focal

text and the social issues relevant to the focal?

3. What cultural resources are highlighted and supported during discussions?

And how are the book club participants’ cultural resources highlighted and

supported?

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4. Do students’ views of the focal text and the relevant social issue change in

discussions with the CC?

To address these questions, I have organized this chapter using an Intertextual

Take Up Model that is described in the following section. I use this model as a heuristic to illustrate the ways in which intertextual references were either taken up or dropped during discussions as well as to point out the consequences these references had on book club members’ joint construction of knowledge. Following the description of this model, I examine what aspects of the CC the students responded to during discussions. Next, I describe how students responded to the specific features of the CC while paying specific attention to the cultural resources that students employed to make intertextual references during discussions. I then describe how truth and topicality served as filters regulating whether intertextual references were appropriate or inappropriate. Subsequently, I analyze discourse in several representative cases (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) to illustrate how students employed critical literacy practices differently over the course of the discussions, leading them to sometimes challenge and sometimes reinforce hegemonic norms.

Finally, I explore how the juxtaposition of multiple texts led students to revise their thinking about the focal text and the relevant social issues.

Intertextual Take Up Model

Intertextuality was foregrounded during discussions of the CCs because the

CCs were intentionally juxtaposed with the focal text. Lemke (1985) used the term register to describe “how a community differentiates among the texts it produces

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according to how it defines the situational context and how it uses language in various types of situations” (p.276, emphasis in original). The concept of register includes which texts go together and are relevant for each other’s interpretation, which

Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) call intertextual substance (p. 312), and how the texts go together, which Bloome and Egan-Robertson refer to as intertextual processes, or the ways that intertextual meanings can be built. The intertextual system of language in a community is defined by the kinds of relationships that are made between the intertextual substance and intertextual processes (Lemke, 1985).

The book club participants made discursive moves that served to establish relationships between the CC, the focal text, and their cultural resources, but not all texts were treated as acceptable contributions to discussion. According to Lemke

(1985), the discourse practices of communities build related systems of texts and establish the kinds of relationships that can be recognized between texts (Lemke,

1985). Discourse practices can also ensure that some kinds of texts cannot be related to one another. These practices can provide “a powerful means for the maintenance of ideologies that serve wider social functions” (Lemke, 1985, p. 276). The way that various texts were taken up or dropped from the book club discussions served to either promote critical literacy practices, or discourage them.

The Intertextual Take Up Model depicted in Figure 3 illustrates the ways in which participants established relationships among texts and delineates the social consequences of the intertextual connections had on the enactment of critical literacy practices.

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Figure 3. Intertextual Take Up Model describing discussions with the Critical

Companions.

I explore the details of this model more thoroughly throughout this chapter, but, in brief, the black box describes those aspects of the CCs to which the students responded. The grey box describes how students responded to the various aspects of the CCs (by marking text for discussion, responding expressively, or using their cultural resources to make intertextual references). Not all intertextual references were taken up during the discussions. Rather, in order to be taken up, references needed to be both perceived as true and on topic (i.e., related to the focal text or the

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relevant social issue). Intertextual references that were taken up became an important part of how participants confirmed, contradicted, or questioned hegemonic norms.

The Intertextual Take Up Model represents the register system of the book club discussions in that it illustrates both the intertextual substance and the intertextual processes of the dialogue. Register can be regarded as “a restriction of the total meaning potential of a language” (Lemke, 1985, p. 277), because texts in the same register make only certain kinds of meaning with language. As students in the book clubs acted and reacted to particular cultural resources that were shared when participants made intertextual references, they shaped the register system of the discussions, reflecting the cultural ideology of the book clubs. Through the take up of students’ cultural resources in juxtaposition with the focal texts and the CCs, the students engaged with the concepts of social, economic, and political power. Often, that engagement resulted in students enacting critical literacy practices.

With a few small differences that I delineate throughout this chapter, intertextual references made during discussion of the focal text were taken up or dropped in much the same way as they were during discussion of the CCs. However, in all of the discussions involving the CCs, the students considered critical theory in their evaluation of the focal text and of the social issues relevant to the focal text.

Notably, Group A read and discussed three different CCs all of which were written for books in which racism and stereotypes were prominent social issues. By the reading of the final focal texts, the students in Group A began applying critical theory to their understanding of the novel prior to reading the CC. I explore this

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phenomenon later in this chapter.

I have attempted to present the analysis in this chapter in an uncomplicated fashion, and yet, it is important to note that people respond to each other in ways that are often messy; they “…may act and react to each other through a sequence of actions and not just through a single act” (Bloome & Egan- Robertson, 1993, p. 309).

They act on current situations by reacting to actions that may have occurred immediately preceding their response, actions that may have occurred much earlier than their response, or future actions. While I recognize that describing my findings using the Intertextual Take Up Model as a heuristic may result in a simplification of the concepts I am representing, my intention is to clearly delineate how intertextuality was constructed during the book club discussions rather than to simplify the results of my analysis. In later sections of this chapter I provide a detailed analysis of lengthier transcripts to better depict the nuances of intertextuality in the book club context.

As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the students in Mrs. Halloway’s class and Mrs.

Fearnow’s class had different relationships to school, with Mrs. Fearnow’s students being generally more compliant than the students in Mrs. Halloway’s class. Yet the students in all three of the groups brought their cultural resources to bear on their understanding of the text in remarkably similar ways. Throughout this chapter, to demonstrate this consistency, I have tried to provide examples of how the register system was enacted by students in all three of the book club groups. I argue that the similarity with which the different groups responded to the texts that were introduced during the discussions speaks to the stability of the Intertextual Take Up Model.

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Responses to Specific Aspects of the Critical Companions

The intertextual substance of an interactional context is an important component of the register system. In Rowe’s (1986) ethnographic research on intertextuality with four-year-olds, she found that the structural aspects of texts were a component of the shared register system that the students and teacher developed for literacy events. Based on the conclusions from Rowe’s research, when I analyzed the book club discussions involving the CCs, I attended to the design features of the CCs to which the students responded. In the following section I address research question one by focusing on the component of the Intertextual Take Up Model that is highlighted in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4. Aspects of the Critical Companions to which students responded.

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The design features of the CCs that the students responded to indicate the components of the CC that were relevant when participants were making sense of the texts. Considering the consistency with which students responded to specific aspects of the CCs in particular ways, the design features I delineate in this section appear to have impacted the types of connections that were possible and treated as valid during discussions and therefore the way the intertextual references were used for making collective meaning.

The focal texts and the CCs were different types of text in several important ways. First, the focal texts were all fictional. Additionally, some of the focal texts were written as traditional prose novels, whereas others such as Monster (Myers &

Sims, 2015) and American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), were graphic novels. On the other hand, all CCs were non-fiction. They contained facts, quotes from the authors of the focal texts, and embedded questions that were intended to foster thinking about the information presented in the CCs. Importantly, as I described in Chapter 2, the

CCs were written from a critical perspective.

Because the CCs were written from various critical perspectives, and because the critical theory pervaded the various features of the CCs, students’ response to the

CCs were nearly always a response to the critical nature of the text. During discussions of the CCs the students responded to the theory that undergirded the CCs, facts in the CCs, stereotypes and common (mis)understandings that were described in the CCs, confusing passages, and questions embedded in the CCs. As students responded to the critical nature of the CCs, their discussions often enacted critical

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literacy practices.

Notably, neither the CCs nor the students ever explicitly named the critical literary theory they were utilizing, but they invoked them nonetheless. The critical literary theories that I used to write the CCs, and that I outlined in Chapter 2, were all lenses through which readers could question the nature of an objective reality. My ultimate goal was not to enable students to name various literary theories, but rather,

“to help create a generation of young people who can inhabit multiple points of view” and “recognize that circumstances create collective perspectives influenced by a variety of factors including class, gender, race, and nationality” (Appleman, 2015b, p.

179). Whether or not readers could name various critical literary perspectives was not considered important in this analysis. What was important was that students were able to employ these lenses in order to examine ideologies.

My analysis of discussions that were about only the focal texts revealed that students responded to the focal texts by commenting on the characters, setting, plot, theme, points of confusion, and allusions in the texts. I chose not to describe example responses to these features of the focal texts because my research questions focused on students’ responses to the CCs.

I was an active participant in the book club discussions. Like the students, I often asked questions and contributed intertextual references during discussions. In the following section, I chose not to include examples of my contributions to the discussions because, as the author of the CCs with an agenda of disrupting hegemonic norms and problematizing complacent readings of text, I felt my own responses to the

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text might obfuscate the data. My intention is not to imply that my participation did not contribute to the establishment of group norms, but rather to focus on the ways in which the students responded to the various texts.

Theory

Each CC was written from at least one critical literary perspective. The students sometimes drew on aspects of the CC that addressed the theory in order to introduce topics to our discussion. For instance, the CC for American Born Chinese

(Yang, 2006) concludes with:

Sometimes a stereotype needs to be dressed up in bright yellow skin and a

queue in order for folks to recognize its severity” (“Doodles and Dailies” par.

9). Not everyone agrees with Yang, ultimately, Chin-Kee’s success at

challenging stereotypes lies in how each reader responds to his story.

This section of the CC is written from a reader response perspective (Moore, 1997).

After reading this passage Maria wrote in her journal, “How do the readers respond to the stereotypes” (journal, 9/27/2016, emphasis original) and then raised this question during discussion saying, “It’s like the last sentence, it says stereotypes, like how each reader responds to the stereotypes… I understand the sentence, like how you can perceive like the message and in the story how people do, so it’s like really different

…“ (transcript, 9/27/2016). Notice that Maria’s question from her journal and her introduction of this question to the group acknowledges the reader response perspective — that different readers make different meanings from a text. Maria’s statement brought reader response theory to the explicit attention of the group as they

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discussed whether or not they had each interpreted the focal text differently.

While reading a part of the CC for Speak (Anderson, 1999) that describes a theory of rape, which suggests gender is a social construct and that rape is used to enforce gender norms, the students in Group B responded to the norms by sometimes sharing stories that supported them, and at other times questioning the norms that the

CC described. For instance, in response to a description of how males are expected to hide their emotions, Devine shared a story about her mother’s ex-husband who had held in his emotions for too long, which according to her, resulted in him abusing her mother (transcript, 11/14/2016). This same section caused Aesha to wonder “who started teaching boys that and girls that first? Because now girls and boys are just gonna keep teaching their daughters and sons that and it’s just gonna keep going on forever” (transcript, 11/14/2016). Devine’s connection and Aesha’s statement acknowledge the social construction of hegemonic norms. Their responses endorsed the idea that these behaviors are learned and not natural, a feminist perspective.

In both of these examples the critical literary theory that students responded to enabled them to recognize that there are alternative ways to conceptualize texts and reality. These two examples of the students responding to and taking up critical theories were fairly overt, but as I explain in the rest of this chapter, there were numerous instances where the critical theory of the CCs operated more covertly in the students’ responses to the text.

Facts

Sometimes, while reading the CC the students, would stop the conversation to

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respond to a fact or statistic that was in the CC. For instance, during a discussion in

Group B we read a passage from the CC for Speak (Anderson, 1999) that described who rapists are likely to be and who is likely to be raped. The passage contains a statistic explaining that spouses commit 34% of rapes. Devine responded to this statistic by asking “How would you be raped by a, like it said you could be raped by a spouse. Like if you’re married, then how is that rape?” (transcript, 11/10/2016). The issue of whether or not rape can occur between spouses is not a simple one. Rather,

Devine’s question is, and has been, widely debated across cultures. In the United

States prohibitions against marital rape were not enacted until the 1970s and spousal rape did not become illegal in all 50 states until the early 1990s (Basu, 2015).

Because the CC was written from a feminist perspective, the statistic presented in the

CC assumes that spouses can rape each other. Devine’s question posed a challenge to that perspective. In critiquing and questioning the statistic in the text, she engaged with the feminist perspective.

Similarly, while reading and discussing the CC for Esperanza Rising (Ryan,

2000), Ezekial responded to a statistic about the number of people who die while trying to immigrate to the United States by wondering “So they would risk their lives trying to cross the border to get a better life?” (transcript, 11/30/2016). This comment brought the risk that immigrants take when traveling into the United States to the focus of the discussion and provided entry into a conversation about why immigrants would take such serious risks. The critical perspective in the CC for Esperanza

Rising (Ryan, 2000) is influenced by the theory of new historicism, meaning that the

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CC explores the historical background of the story, questions whose story is being told and whose story is not being told through the text, and inspects how specific events in the story get interpreted (Cuddon, 2013). Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) depicts the main character’s immigration to the United States, and although the main character, Esperanza, is under some threat from her uncles in Mexico, her immigration process is not depicted as life threatening. When Ezekial questioned the desperation of immigrants who would risk dying to cross the border, his question served to problematize the topic of immigration in a way that the focal text did not.

Stereotypes and Common (Mis)understandings About People and Society

While reading the CC, students often agreed or disagreed with parts of the text that referenced other people’s opinions. For example, while Group B was reading the

CC for Speak (Anderson, 1999), Aesha read a passage about rape myths, persistent beliefs about rape that are often untrue.The passage explained, “Myths such as ‘only bad girls get raped’ serve to shame and degrade rape victims because people believe that if you get raped, then you must be a ‘bad girl’ (Malo-Juevera 16).” Devine responded to this statement by saying “That makes no sense. Why are they foreshadowing people by their behavior?” (transcript, 11/10/2016) and Aesha built off Devine’s response by remarking that, “Why, why, it says if you get raped then you must be a bad girl. No, that’s not true.” The term rape myths stems from a feminist perspective, a perspective that questions why rape occurs (Anderson &

Swainson, 2001). Devine’s use of the word “they” to reference those people who believe that only bad girls get raped and her question of why they are “foreshadowing

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people by their behavior” aligned her in this moment with the feminist perspective that rape can happen to anyone. Aesha also offered an outright rejection of the rape myth. In this instance, the feminist perspective operated covertly, traveling from the

CC into the book club discussion through the students’ responses.

In another example, during a discussion with Group A about the CC for

American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), Trent referenced a political cartoon that is in the CC because Yang made an allusion to the cartoon in the graphic novel. The cartoon was authored by Pat Oliphant and depicts Uncle Sam sitting at a restaurant when a highly stereotyped Asian man drops crispy fried cat gizzards on him. Trent was confused by the stereotyped Asian character in the cartoon, and said that he thought the cartoon was alluded to in American Born Chinese:

to show characteristics of Chinese people or something like that, and I never

met one but I don’t think they would act like that, and how these, and oh it

said in there that he was messing with the R’s and H, H’s or something… L’s

and I don’t think Chinese people would do that cause it kind of sounds like

dyslexia or something like that. (transcript, 10/6/2016)

The critical race perspective that influenced the CC for American Born Chinese critiques the pervasiveness of racism in everyday life (Rivkin & Ryan, 2004).

Although Trent misunderstood that Yang’s allusion to the cartoon was intended to draw readers’ attention to modern incidents of mocking Asian Americans, Trent’s comment was a reaction to the stereotypes that he perceived in the text, and offered a critical evaluation of these stereotypes. His response illustrated his reflection on the

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author’s purpose for alluding to the Pat Oliphant cartoon, his rejection of the stereotypes that characterize Chin-Kee, who resembles the Chinese character in the cartoon, as well as his rejection of general stereotypes about Asian Americans.

Author Quote

Authorship of a text can be an important aspect of how a text is ideologically situated. According to Freebody and Luke’s (1990) Four Resources Model, a text analyst needs to have “an awareness of the fact that all texts are crafted objects, written by persons with particular dispositions or orientations to the information, regardless of how factual or neutral the products may attempt to be” (p. 13).

Considering author intent requires students to be aware of how authors intentionally construct texts to achieve certain purposes. Three of the CC’s used in this research included quotations from the author of the focal text: the CCs for Monster (Myers,

1999), American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), and The Absolutely True Diary of a

Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007). The author quotes from Myers, Yang, and Alexie all reflected the authors’ intentions to problematize stereotypes or to highlight social inequities.

When the authors’ quotes were present in the CC, they often sparked discussion among the students. For example, while reading a section in the CC for

Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) that contained a quote from Walter Dean Myers explaining that African American people on trial have a lot to overcome, Aesha responded by saying “That’s another thing… why, why, see no, now it’s just, they

[the jury] basically are being racist” (transcript, 12/19/2016). The CC for Monster

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employed a critical race perspective to examine the prevalence of racial biases against young Black males in the criminal justice system. Aesha’s response took up this perspective in that it critiqued the racial biases that are often present in juries.

In another example, the CC for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time

Indian contained a quote from Sherman Alexie (2007) about culturally authentic books, or books that are written by cultural insiders, in comparison to culturally inauthentic books, or books written by cultural outsiders. Alexie’s novel has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes about Native Americans because it contains numerous Native American characters who struggle with alcohol addiction. Alexie argues that because his book is largely autobiographical, he is not representing stereotypes; he is representing reality. In the following example, Maria begins by reading Alexie’s quote:

So what, the part that sort of got my attention is uh well what

really want to say is that we should be talking about books about Indians

written by non-Indians honestly and accurately R>… Well so when we first

started this I thought it meant like a non- I thought it meant like a non-Indian

writing about Indian people but it's actually the other way around and then

like I think that that would be a good book if they did that but um, yeah he

wrote about stereotypes but he's Indian so I guess if you write about

stereotypes and you're that um race or something, then you can say that I

guess if it's true… But I think if you're not that race and you say something

about that race and stereotype I think you sort of can't do that cause you don't

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know how it actually is for that race so I think it actually wouldn't be a good

book because then it’d just be having false accusations where it would just be

biased or something.

(transcript, 12/13/2016)

Notice how, in this example, Maria considered the representation of Native American characters in light of Alexie’s cultural membership; he could portray stereotypes because his experiences are authentic. According to Maria, writers who are cultural outsiders cannot authentically write about characters of other races without their writing “having false accusations.” Maria’s consideration of whose stories get to be told and who gets to tell stories reflected her awareness of how texts are ideologically situated and was an enactment of critical literacy practices. I note that there was only one incident where the students considered the author while discussing the focal text and in this instance I introduced the topic of author intent.

Confusing Passage

Students sometimes responded to aspects of the CC that they thought were confusing and brought these confusing parts up as topics for discussion. Recall that I had asked the students in Group A to read the CC for American Born Chinese (Yang,

2006) independently the first time I assigned a CC to any group, and only two of the members of Group A (Trent and Maria) read the CC. While reading the CC, Trent underlined several parts of the CC that he found confusing. When I asked him what he wanted to talk about from the text he said, “It says, um,

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desirable, or less correct) R> I don’t know what that means” (transcript, 9/27/2016).

Notice that the text Trent highlighted as confusing offered a general critique of texts based on a critical race perspective. As the students and I co-constructed an understanding of this statement, their responses and intertextual references were in part responses to this perspective. Trent’s confusion became a doorway through which critical literacy practices entered the discussion.

Similarly, when Group C was reading and discussing a section of the CC for

American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) that discussed the danger of positive stereotypes when Alessandra responded to a quote from a journalist named Haley

Yook by exclaiming “She confused me! Is she trying to say they’re smart cause they’re Asian or smart because they study?” (transcript, 10/12/2016). Alessandra’s comment brought her confusion to the focus of the discussion and enabled the group members to interpret Haley Yook’s stance on positive stereotypes. Furthermore, it introduced positive stereotypes as a topic for discussion and gave the students an opportunity to explore their understanding of this topic together.

Questions Embedded in the CCs

While writing the CCs I embedded questions throughout them in an attempt to make the CCs read less like an authoritative text, and to invite readers to interpret the content presented in the CCs for themselves. During discussions, the students frequently borrowed the questions from the CCs to generate talk. For instance, while reading the CC for Speak (Anderson, 1999) that described how the pervasiveness of rape myths might be one factor that keeps rape victims from speaking out, Ashlee

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directed the group back to a question in the text that problematized the assumption that rape myths silence victims by saying, “… but like in the last sentence it says why, or Like why would they not speak out? That's a question” (transcript, 11/14/2016). Here the question in the CC stemmed from a feminist perspective. When Ashlee uses this question as an opening to discussion, she is asking the group to engage with the feminist perspective on rape.

In another example, while Group C was reading the CC for Esperanza Rising

(Ryan, 2000), Maryan asked if the group could talk about some of the questions in the text and then said, “I don't know how to answer the question that says But I have the same question as ” (transcript, 12/7/2016). The questions in the CC were intended to provoke readers to reflect on the (dis)connections between the way that immigration is presented in Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) and the experiences of immigrants in the past and present. Consequently, when Maryan asked to talk about these questions and shared her own answer to them, she was also asking the other participants to orient themselves in response to new historicism —the predominant perspective of the CC — and to take a stance on the issue of immigration.

The CCs were written from critical literary perspectives with the hope of prompting critical literacy practices by encouraging students to see texts as sites of

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inquiry with which to question their common sense assumptions about the world.

Looking back at the Intertextual Take Up Model for the CCs, introduced at the beginning of this chapter, what is important to note is that often the students’ very first responses to the various features of the CC were a direct or indirect response to the theoretical perspective employed by the CC.

Research suggests that teachers frequently resist the idea that adolescent students can engage in discussions around issues of social, economic, and political power (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Ngo, 2003; Swartz, 2003; Thein, 2013). Yet students responses to the CCs indicated that they were capable of using the critical lenses of literary theory to examine their ideology, hegemonic norms, and the ideology of the author. Examining the aspects of the CCs that the students responded to has enabled me to theorize about the types of textual features that might be useful to teachers when they are attempting to cultivate critical literacy practices in their classroom.

Furthermore, the components of the CCs that the students responded to were an important part of the intertextual substance that the book club groups co-constructed as they developed relationships between and among texts.

How Students Responded to the Text

In the previous section, I addressed research question one by examining what components of the CCs the students responded to. In this section, I address research question two and explore how students responded to the CCs when they talked about the focal text and relevant social issues. During discussions of the focal texts and during discussions with the CCs, the participants responded to the CCs in three

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different ways: 1) by marking the text as a topic for discussion, 2) by responding expressively to the text, and 3) by making an intertextual connection to the text.

Responses in the first two categories often led other participants to react to the initial response by making an intertextual reference using their cultural resources.

In this section, I elaborate upon the part of the Intertextual Take Up Model highlighted in Figure 5.

Figure 5. How students responded to the text.

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Marking Text for Discussion and Responding Expressively

The students’ methods of signaling intertextuality were part of the intertextual processes of the book club conversations. Although students occasionally responded to the CCs by simply making an intertextual connection, at other times they marked a section of the CC for discussion or responded expressively to the CC. These types of responses seemed to signal opportunities for intertextuality as they were often accompanied by an intertextual reference or elicited intertextual references from other students.

Students marked sections of text as topics of interest and discussion by making statements such as “I think we should talk about this…,” or by asking questions. In an example I referenced previously, Trent read a confusing passage in a

CC, and brought it to the group’s attention because he wanted clarification.

Sometimes students had marked sections of text that they wanted to discuss in their journals and would ask the group to examine these passages together. As students dialogued, they frequently responded to questions by making references to their cultural resources.

Like Soter, Wilkinson, Connors, Murphy, and Fu-Yuan Shen (2010), I use

Jacobson’s (1987) term expressive to refer to students’ affective and experiential responses to texts. Jacobson defined the expressive function of language as language that is focused on the speaker, in which the speaker offers “direct expression of his or her attitude toward what he or she is speaking about. It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned” (as cited in Soter et al.,

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2010, p. 210). Whereas Rosenblatt (1994) explained that with the aesthetic response to literature the reader “decipher[s] the images or concepts or assertions that the words point to, he also pays attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him” (p. 25). Jacobson’s (1987) term is more appropriate for how students tend to respond in discussions of texts because, although many students may respond emotionally to text, students often do not know or are not able to describe what element of the text was responsible for eliciting a particular emotion from them (Soter et al., 2010). Therefore, student responses to text often do not reflect the level of sophistication that Rosenblatt (1994) had in mind when she described an aesthetic response to literature. On the other hand, the term expressive validates and includes a range of students’ responses that using the term aesthetic might otherwise exclude.

In the opening vignette with the students in Group B from 12/5/2016 (p.104),

Aesha’s exclamation of “I think that’s really dumb!” in response to the CC is an illustration of an expressive response. Notice how Aesha’s exclamation directed the current of the conversation and led Ashlee to connect the content of the CC to a student in their class. My analysis of the data revealed that students’ expressive responses often provoked intertextual references from the discussants as they worked together to co-construct an understanding of the text that had been expressively responded to.

Using Cultural Resources to Make an Intertextual Reference

In order to make intertextual connections, students drew on their cultural

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resources, making their cultural resources appropriate intertexts for constructing relationships between texts. Intertexts are texts that are relevant to one another’s interpretation (Lemke, 1992). Recall that I have defined cultural resources as the students’ background knowledge as shaped by their lived experiences, as well as their cultural, moral, ideological, and ethical orientations (P. Freebody, personal communication, September 24, 2016). As I mentioned previously, Bloome and Egan-

Robertson (1993) refer to the intertexts that can be related to each other in a local event as the intertextual substance. During the book club discussions the intertextual substance was composed of references to the focal text, the CC, and participants’ relevant cultural resources.

In this section, I have focused on the intertextual substance of the book club discussions by concentrating on the cultural resources that students brought to bear when constructing an understanding of the text. I consider the various resources students utilized when making meaning from the text to be important components of the intertextual substance when implementing critical literacy pedagogy for two reasons. First, students brought a range of resources to the discussions of the CCs, and the range is important because it extended beyond the texts that I introduced to include texts that the students felt were meaningful and productive for understanding, thus honoring the students’ resources and creating a more dialogic discussion. Second critical literacy approaches emphasize the understanding that “learners are differently positioned in relation to access to dominant literacy discourses through aspects such as race, class culture, gender, language, sexual orientation, and physical abilities”

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(Larson & Marsh, 2005, p. 45). As learners’ cultural resources are shaped by these same factors, using cultural resources as knowledge sources enabled the critical exploration of students’ prior knowledge and experiences; making the personal political.

In this section, I address research question two by looking at the ways that students responded to the CC when they talk about the focal text and relevant social issues, and I begin to address question three by giving examples of the types of cultural resources that were highlighted during discussion. I have used shorter transcripts and brief descriptions of the data in order to address these questions succinctly. The short descriptions limit my ability to demonstrate the social nature of intertextuality in accordance with the criteria established by Bloome and Egan-

Robertson (1993). However, later in this chapter I analyze several extended transcripts in order to explore the intertextual processes that were in place during the book club discussions in a more detailed manor. Appendix H contains the definitions that I used to code and categorize the intertextual substance of the book club discussions.

References to the Focal Text. I consider references to the focal text to be those references that were about the character, setting, plot, theme or author of the focal text; for the sake of brevity I refer to these components as narrative features

(Hühn, n.d.). When students were discussing the focal text, I considered the focal text to be the topic of discussion, and therefore I did not code statements about the focal text as intertextual references. However, when the students were discussing the CC,

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they frequently made intertextual references to the focal text. I found that discussions of the narrative features were often conflated in the sense that the students rarely talked about one narrative feature in isolation. For example discussions about a novel’s character often overlapped with discussions of the plot. Furthermore, because

I examined examples of students’ response to the focal text when they were reading the CC, and the CC was about the social issue in the focal text, discussions of the narrative features were often mixed with discussions of the social issues.

Character. References to character include comments about a character’s looks, personality, and motivation including comments about things that the character said, did, or thought. In the following example, Group A was reading a section of the

CC for Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) which discussed how Black children are perceived as looking older and are therefore often perceived as looking more guilty than White children. This section of the CC sparked a conversation about

Steve, the main character in the novel, who Trent asserted looked “Guilty innocent, I mean guilty guilty” based on the image on the front cover of the novel (transcript,

10/31/2016). A.J. agreed that Steve appeared guilty because “I feel like since he lives in the hood he could be one of those gangsters, so he looks that way.” A.J. followed up this statement by pointing to images of Steve’s neighborhood from the graphic novel. In this instance the intertextual reference provided an opportunity to examine the character from the focal text critically as the students discussed why they thought

Steve looked guilty and considered such factors as how the neighborhood where

Steve is from impacted how they read his appearance. In this way, the students

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considered how the images in the focal text acted on them as they read, a critical literacy practice.

Setting. References to the time and place in which the focal text took place were coded as setting. In an example from a discussion of the CC in Group C,

Maryan suggested that the group discuss a section of the CC that addressed the living conditions in migrant farm camps, the setting of Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000):

MARYAN: Let's talk about where it says SARAH: What do you want to talk about about that? MARYAN: Um, I don't know how to, OK, even Esperanza was shocked about the conditions in the farm workers camp and then when she finds her new home she says it's too small. Is it because it is too small or it is, it's because she still thinks that she's all rich like how the rich people call small? SARAH: Oh, that's a good question. What do you guys think? SAHRA: It was small because of how she described it like how it looked. All the paint coming the off, like it was small, but in both ways compared to her own house and XXX. MARYAN: So it was small? SARAH: That's a good question cause she was rich before, and had a big house so- EZEKIAL: I think it's like both. SARAH: Yeah, cause if you came from a really nice place living in a place that wasn't nice would be hard. But it's probably double hard because she was- lived in a really nice place SAHRA: I have a question, is it like where she used to live is it like how it's like it's like big and like in Mexico it was big and like to people in Mexico it was big but then like it was not really big it was just, I don't know. SARAH: What do you mean? MARYAN: That was kind of my question. SAHRA: Like um OK, so in Africa like the houses are like, they're like different they're like like some like, it's really hard to explain, like big like it would, there's in different places big and small might be different so like if it might be wealthy in Mexico but not wealthy there and like it 140

might not be XX. SARAH: So what different people consider big is varies depending on where you are? I think Esperanza lives, so you want to know whether or not Esperanza would have lived in a big house, or we would think she lives in a big house? (transcript, 11/30/2016)

This particular section of the CC caused Maryan to wonder whether the conditions in the migrant farm camp where Esperanza was forced to move were really bad or if

Esperanza perceived them as really bad because Esperanza was previously very wealthy. While the students and I were thinking through our responses to Maryan’s question, Sahra shared her personal experiences with houses in Africa, noting that not everyone understands big houses in the same way. This response to the content of the

CC provoked a conversation in which the participants reflected on their understanding of the novel, and the multiple meanings that words can evoke when people are bringing their diverse experiences to bear on interpreting the world. Here the students brought their cultural resources to bear on their understanding of the setting of the focal text, acknowledging that from different perspectives words carry different meanings, and considering how multiple meanings can be constructed from the text.

Plot. References to specific events or the sequences of events in the focal text were categorized as plot. The students in Group C discussed the plot of Monster

(Myers & Sims, 2015) in response to a section of the CC that discussed the concept of childhood in relationship to the criminal justice system. The students discussed the plot of the novel while considering what consequences Steve should face for his

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involvement in the felony murder:

AESHA: Yeah, I honestly think like, he shouldn't like go to jail cause he didn't really do anything. ASHLEE: Go to like= AESHA: I mean like= ASHLEE: He should be in jail for like, at least, not a long time but like= AESHA: Like a year, I wouldn't even give him a year. I'd give him like a couple months. ASHLEE: Yeah. SARAH: Even though he was still involved in the robbery? AESHA: Yeah, even though. ASHLEE: But he was only the lookout, and he didn't know they were gonna kill the guy. AESHA: But like the, I think the reason, I think the real criminal here is the person that like= ASHLEE: Killed him. AESHA: Grabbed the gun and killed him. SARAH: King? Steven or James King? ASHLEE: And the person that stole stuff, right? SARAH: Yeah Bobo DEVINE: Because Steve, I'm not saying that Steve isn't involved with the whole crime, he's the lookout so basically he's involved with it, but I think the people, I think that James King should go to jail cause he's the one who picked up the gun and shot him (transcript, 12/12/2016)

In this discussion, the content of the CC caused the students to reflect on the plot of the CC, and the actions of the main character that make him either deserving or undeserving of punishment within the criminal justice system.

Theme. The category of theme refers to comments about the underlying message of the focal text. For example, the following conversation took place while

Group A was reading the CC for Monster (Anderson, 1999) and was sparked by an entry that Maria made in her journal in response to the CC. Mya read Maria’s entry to

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the group:

that clouded people's judgment of who would be convicted guilty or innocent.

In my opinion this book relates very closely to the book American Born

Chinese because stereotypes portrayed in each literature. R> (transcript,

10/27/2016)

I responded to the reading of Maria’s journal entry by asking her to explain how she saw American Born Chinese (Yang, 2005) and Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers &

Sims, 2015) as similar:

MARIA: Because um like, it was either like one of the guards or one of the people talking and they were like, "Well, when you're young and black and you're convicted of this you're, you're usually convicted of murder," so I thought that would be like stereotype type. And then in American Born Chinese they had his cousin Chin-Kee and they like, everybody, no let me rephrase that, him, like the, I forget his name, like the main character SARAH: In American Born Chinese? A.J.: Where's that book at? SARAH: It's in my bag, the blue one. MARIA: Like Jin Yang or something. I forget his name. And then like, he's Asian so everyone was expecting him to like be smart and like- A.J.: You talking about him [showing Maria the front of the novel where the main character is depicted]? SARAH: Jin MARIA: Yeah him, he's Asian so everybody was expecting him to be smart and like eat, cat gizzards and everything, but he actually doesn't. And he's [Steve’s] not actually guilty. (transcript, 10/27/2016)

This example actually includes several texts: Maria’s journal, American Born Chinese

(Yang, 2005), and Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015). The various

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intertexts Maria linked through her journal entry enabled her to explicitly connect the theme of the two focal texts based on their depiction of the main characters’ race and the impact that stereotypes had on the ways that the characters were treated. In this discussion, Maria shared her connection with the group, enabling the other members to consider the way the focal texts are constructed to convey a certain meaning

Author. The category of author refers to comments about the focal texts’ author’s motivation for writing, or the author’s intended message. In the following example Group C was reading the CC for American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) when

Maryan underlined a passage in the CC about both the character, Chin-Kee, and the author’s motivation for putting the character in the graphic novel:

MARYAN: I have to underline some stuff. SARAH: What are you underlining? MARYAN: Where it says from [hands Sarah paper and points to underlined section] SARAH: [Reading where Maryan pointed] What made you underline that? MARYAN: Because um, he said that he meant for Chin-Kee to be like that character that you shouldn't laugh at. ALESSAN.: I think that it's because he wants people to like realize that's what the book is showing you like the theme and it kind of makes it more like the book is in the, forget that I don't understand nothing but um = SARAH: No I think you do, you said a lot of intelligent things. ALESSAN.: But I like, you know where the book is actually showing you what the theme is like what's taking place or like the book of the message? I think that's like in Chin-Kee's part because it was like to realize that how people view Asians. (transcript, 10/12/2016)

In this example, the passage that Maryan highlighted about the author caused Maryan to reflect on the character of Chin-Kee, and consider how the author wanted the

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character to act on the reader. The CC also caused Alessandra to think about the ideational content of the book and wonder why the author included the character of

Chin-Kee. She concluded that Chin-Kee is in the book to emphasize the theme, which she says is “to realize that how people view Asians.”

Other texts. I differentiate among five types of intertextual links in this category: written, media, and impersonal generalized texts, previous discussion, and folk texts. Though certainly there are other types of texts — for example Pappas et al.

(2001) described references made to charts and boards in the classroom — I have only described the types of intertextual references to text that were present in the book club discussions.

Because I explore the ways that the book club participants supported various intertextual references later in this chapter, in this section I have focused on conveying the range of cultural resources students used to make meaning from the text. Therefore, I have provided only short descriptions of examples in each category of intertextual references. Because I did not consider connections between the same text as intertextual references, in the section above, titled “references to the focal text,” I used only examples from discussions with the CCs . However, in the examples below I have included examples from discussions of the focal text and discussions of the CCs to illustrate how the same forms of intertextual substance were recognized in both types of discussions.

Written. The category of written texts includes printed texts that take on a material form such as books, articles, or student writing. For example, prior to a

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discussion of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007), Trent had marked in his journal a section of the novel where the main character described how the dentist on the reservation used less Novocain on Native Americans. When he read this section to the group, he commented that “that’s kind of racist” (field notes, 11/15/2016). In response A.J shared that “that's what they did in the Watson's go to Birmingham” and then connected the two books further by remarking that both novels were half true. Maria and Mya contributed to A.J.’s connection by explaining that in The Watsons Go To Birmingham (Curtis, 1995) the “White folks also give the

Black folks their left over stuff just like the dentist only giving them half.”

Media. References to TV/radio/ internet shows or movies were categorized as media connections. As an example, while discussing Speak (Anderson, 1999), several students shared stories they had heard on the news or from friends about rape when

Tiffany said that, “I watched a documentary and it was like a real story, but like they acted it out, about how this guy took all three girls, you know that big story?”

(transcript, 10/20/2016).

Impersonal generalized text. The category refers to intertextual references to generalized knowledge. When speakers shared impersonal generalized texts they often did so without reporting the source of their knowledge. Therefore, references in this category may have been based on the speaker’s lived experiences, or they may have stemmed from hegemonic or stereotypical beliefs. For instance, in one discussion about the cover of the graphic novel Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) the students in Group A noted that Steve looked like a thug because he was “mean

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mugging” like people do in mug shots (transcript, 10/18/2016). As the students did not identify how they knew the types of faces people usually make in mug shots, it is impossible to categorize this information any more specifically than “impersonal generalized text.”

Personal generalized text. Texts in this category were those that reference knowledge acquired from habitual experience. As an example during discussion of

American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), Alessondra questioned why Chinese people would get married at the age of 13 and Ezekial responded that “That’s what they do in

Japan” (transcript, 9/21/2016). He explained that he knew this information because his father is Japanese.

Previous discussion. This type of intertextuality involved connections to previous book club discussions. For example, in response to a section of the CC for

Speak (Anderson, 1999) that discussed how rape can happen between spouses,

Rhiannon referenced a previous discussion by asking Ashlee about an autobiography

Ashlee’s great aunt wrote in which a member of Ashlee’s family was raped by her husband (transcript, 11/10/2016). Ashlee had shared the novel with us in a prior discussion and suggested we read it as our next book club book.

Folk texts. The category of folk texts refers to idioms, poems, sayings, rhymes, aphorism, and expressions that are commonly known and were introduced to the discussions. For instance, during discussion of the CC for American Born Chinese

(Yang, 2006) Maria clarified a passage in the CC for Trent by explaining that it meant

“If you ain’t White, you ain’t right” (transctipt, 9/27/2016) a phrase she had heard her

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mother use to describe how non-White people are often treated in literature and media.

Hypotheticals. In this category are things that the speaker thought could potentially happen, or “what ifs.” As an example from a discussion of the CC for

Speak (Anderson, 1999) in Group B:

ASHLEE: Not really. AESHA: I got a question about that. ASHLEE: Because like they were just flirting with them, but like if it was like sexually flirting then that makes sense. AESHA: Exactly. ASHLEE: But if it wasn't sexually flirting. SARAH: Is there a difference between sexually flirting and=? ASHLEE: Like if they were showing themselves more. AESHA: Yeah, then it would make more sense but they've, if the girls just like flirting with the guy then= (transcript, 11/10/2016)

This conversation continued with the participants discussing the difference between sexually flirting and “just flirting” while I tried to problematize the distinction. As in the case above, connections to hypothetical events were often used to offer push back against a claim that was made by the CC or by another classmate.

Recounted Events. Recounted events are examples of narrative (Pappas et al., 2003) and include those events that the participants have experienced, or heard about. Through sharing autobiographical events, “the narrator constructs and represents the self by selecting particular episodes, or in the case of generalized events, sets of episodes, from among the many events from his or her life” (Pappas et al., 2003, p. 460). As in the case with “other texts,” recounted events, participants

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needed to perceive recounted events as true in order for them to be taken up.

Generalized event. This category refers to hearsay, or events that were neither experienced by the speaker or by someone the speaker knew first-hand. As an example, when discussing Speak (Anderson, 1999) Rhiannon once told a detailed story about a young child that had been raped in a garage in her neighborhood (field notes, 10/20/2016). As the story did not happen to Rhiannon or to someone that she knew, the narrative was categorized as a generalized event.

Personal generalized events. The events in this category were not retellings of specific occurrences, but were references to events that had been experienced habitually. As an example, while describing the character of Chin-Kee from

American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), who the students in Group A labeled as weird,

Mya noted that “When some people call me weird I take that as a compliment, but no, he’s just weird” (transcript, 9/27/2016).

Personal and personally- related events. The category of personal and personally-related events includes intertextual connections to events that happened to the speaker or to someone the speaker knows. This category could be further divided into two sub-categories because sometimes personal and personally-related connections were simply retellings of the students typical lived experiences, whereas at other times these narratives were related to trauma and were emotional in nature.

Students in Group B tended to share personal events that were not emotional. For instance, while discussing the experiences of migrant farm workers during a conversation about Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), Ezekial shared a story about

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helping his father garden (field notes, 11/30/2016). Ezekial’s story was about an event that had happened specifically to him, but it was not emotional in nature.

The students in Groups A and B tended to share personal stories that were related to trauma and more emotional in nature. These emotional stories were shared both during discussions of the focal text and during discussions of the CC. For instance, during a discussion of Speak (Anderson, 1999) and the seriousness of rape,

Devine shared:

DEVINE: I got a story, I got a story, I got a story, it's sad but it's like, it's like= DARLISHA: Does it relate to the book? DEVINE: So when I was two and a half my mom's ex-husband tried to like, molest me [laughs and covers her mouth] it's not funny. AESHA: It's not funny. DEVINE: But I didn't come out until I was ten. I came out and told my mom when I was ten. SARAH: Oh, cause it takes a, that takes a whole lot of courage to say something about it. AESHA: Why are you laughing? RHIANNON: Cause she's unhappy. DEVINE: I don't know. ASHLEE: Cause serious situations make some people laugh. (transcript, 10/20/2016)

Devine’s personal connection about the trauma that she experienced directly related to the trauma experienced by the main character in Speak (Anderson, 1999).

In another example, while Group A was reading the CC for Monster (Myers,

1999; Myers & Sims, 2015), A.J. shared a deeply personal story in response to statistics about the percentage of African American males in jail:

A.J.: Time out time out, I've got to say something. My uncle, he's on trial right now. He didn't really do nothing wrong, but they think he did because my foster cousin, OK, he died because he fell, like he hit his head when he was running and they think that um, they think that my uncle killed him and now like he's not on trial but they keep on pushing. Like we supposed to have my cousin right now but they 150

don't, they did not let us get him because we're his family. And they keep on pushing the date back and back and it's a jail where he's in and they don't let him, like they don't let him out to go outside. And like when my mom said that he told her that when he was asking the nurse for something nicely she just starts screaming and cussing him out and the guards, like nobody did nothing and I think about it, so he had to go back to his cell. He didn't have no freedom, no nothing SARAH: This is your uncle? A.J.: Huh? SARAH: Your uncle? A.J.: Yeah, he's from [nearby city]. Do do did you hear the news about um, it's all over [nearby city] news that my uncle killed the little boy, which he didn't. So they took my, my real cousin, and the other foster boy and they took them somewhere else and we don't know where he's at. SARAH: That has to be really hard on your family. A.J.: It is, cause my mom, my mom, like my cousin he's supposed to be going to [nearby school] right now, because he was gone come to our house and stay at our house until the trial was over and they my mom, she did everything they, she got the background checked she went to the XX and did everything they told her to do and my mom she got the safety stuff and they didn't give it to her SARAH: Oh A.J., that makes my heart hurt. A.J.: Yeah like, our whole families like we just waitin to see. Like my mom, it's just sad. SARAH: Yeah, very stressful for all of you. A.J.: Cause my uncle he's a pastor and right now they trying to raise the money for him to get out because they made sure that that um bail was high. It's like thousands of dollars. MYA: Fifteen thousand is usually the bail, twenty thousand if it was serious. A.J.: It was somewhere over there. MYA: Honestly, it's not really that much. A.J.: So they tried to raise the money, but they didn't get enough money so= SARAH: I'm really sorry to hear that. MYA: It's a very sad story. A.J.: Because, I'm thinking, is it because he's black? Because they do have like an outside where they can go= MARIA: A courtyard. A.J.: Yeah, like a courtyard but he's not been allow- they won't let him go. I don't know. SARAH: I don't either. Does make you think. A.J.: Yeah. SARAH: Oh, I don't want to keep reading after that, that's heavy. Do you want to continue Maria? Oh no actually, I have to send you back. We didn't get very far. 151

MYA: Noooo A.J.: Sorry, I just had to share that. SARAH: Don't be sorry that's relevant and probably more important than this MARIA: Why do you think Juan and his cousins live with us? SARAH: Um MARIA: My cousins live with us cause their mom's in jail. A.J.: It's just really sad for my family. Like all our events that we had, like he usually come and do the barbeque, like right, like when we had our picnic like, it wasn't the same. (transcript, 10/31/2016)

This connection was deeply personal to A.J.. It was directly connected to both the experiences of the main character in Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) and the social issue that was the topic of the CC (race and the criminal justice system). Notice how A.J.’s narrative prompted Maria to share that her cousins lived with her because her aunt was also in jail. Often, when students shared a sensitive personal or personally-related event, other students responded by sharing their own narratives of trauma. Because the sensitive personal and personally-related events students shared were always taken up during discussions, I revisit them later when I discuss how references were filtered by the book club participants.

Filtering Topics and References

In the previous section, I began to answer research question three by examining what cultural resources the students drew on in order to make intertextual connections during the book club discussions. The second part of research question three asks how students highlighted different cultural resources. This is addressed in the component of the Intertextual Take Up Model that represents the intertextual processes operating in the book club setting during discussions of the CCs (see Figure

6). The discussion participants did not treat all resources as equal. In this section, I

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explain how students highlighted some resources while discounting others. Those resources that were highlighted or discounted are important because they contributed to the ways in which the students were able to use their cultural resources to make meaning during discussions.

Figure 6. Intertextual filters in the Intertextual Take Up Model.

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As noted by Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), students can propose intertextual references that are inappropriate for a setting. When these references are dropped or contested, the intertextual substance of the reference is marked as having violated the social and cultural rules for constructing intertextuality. Bloome and

Egan-Robertson noted that students can propose intertextual references and

…the teacher and perhaps other students may not like either the way the story

was told or the meaning established through the intertextuality. They may take

subsequent actions to contest the legitimacy of the intertextuality. If the

contesting is successful, then the original intertextuality (both the intertextual

substance and the intertextual process) is reframed as inappropriate and is

deniable even though at the time it was constructed it was appropriate and

interactionally accepted. (p. 312)

Importantly, contested intertextual references are still proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and of social significance because contesting references enables the participants to make the rules of participation in the speech event recognizable to each other.

Book club participants consistently challenged or ignored those references that they perceived as off topic or those that were untrue. The contesting of these references set boundaries and limits regarding the types of intertextual references that were appropriate and also restricted the potential meaning that could be made from intertexts. Contested intertextual references constituted missing registers and

“missing registers correspond to kinds of meaning that are simply not made, or at

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least not made with language” (Lemke, 1985, p. 277).

In contrast to those references that were off topic or perceived as untrue, personal and personally-related events that were perceived as true were consistently privileged during discussions. Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) wrote that “the cultural norms related to intertextual substance, intertextual processes, and entitlement rights constrain the knowledge base of a lesson, how that knowledge base is distributed in a lesson, and what might happen within a lesson” (p. 330). By consistently taking up references to personal and personally-related events, the participants shaped the book club setting as one where their personal experiences were valued as meaningful semiotic mediums.

Perceived Truthfulness as a Filter

Consistent across discussions of the focal texts and discussions with the CCs was the importance of perceived truthfulness. When book club participants perceived an intertextual reference to be a fabrication or inaccurate, they either called that connection into question or ignored it entirely. For example, in a discussion that occurred while Group A was responding to a passage in the CC for Monster (Myers,

1999) that read:

In adult court, the average sentence length is 64 months; this is a longer

sentence than most youth can even face in juvenile court. If these children are

sentenced as adults and sent to juvenile facilities, they are ‘twice as likely to

be assaulted by a correctional officer, five times as likely to be sexually

assaulted, and eight times as likely to commit suicide.’ (Goff 526)

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Maria responded by making an intertextual reference to the reality T.V. show, Sixty

Days In. In an earlier conversation Mya had explained to the group what the typical daily schedule of an inmate looks like and informed us that she knew this information because her brother had been to jail twice (transcript, 10/11/2016). When Maria shared her connection to the reality T.V. show, the following conversation took place:

MARIA: I think the uh, the second and the third are based on like, sexually assaulted like many times I think that's the officers fault because they don't really care what you do in jail. I've seen Sixty Days In jail so they don't really care A.J.: They let you fight, like= MARIA: Yeah, they don't even stop, like they know there's like pods and everything in jail. MYA: Yes. MARIA: Like, there's not even an officer, there's like maybe one officer and nobody watches anything so people could be doing drugs in the other room some how and people aren't even watching the officers just aren't paying attention to it. SARAH: So is this based off your under- where are you getting this information from? MARIA: Sixty days In. SARAH: What is Sixty Days In? MARIA: It's like a, um it's like a show and then like people= A.J.: Volunteer MYA: Yeah, but that's a show. MARIA: People volunteer and go into like prisons. MYA: That's not really reality unless it's a reality T.V. show. SARAH: But even then reality T.V. shows= A.J.: XX SARAH: Are manipulated. MYA: Yes, cause they crack down on security officers and um yeah, that. SARAH: Well, I think they fake a lot of reality T.V. shows. MYA: They do, they do. (transcript, 10/31/2016)

On Sixty Days In, volunteers infiltrate Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail to unveil the difficulties that plague the inmates. In this discussion, Maria’s intertextual connection to a T.V. show is taken up but devalued because it is perceived as “not

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reality.” The message here is that Mya’s knowledge of incarceration trumps Maria’s reference to a fictionalized representations of reality. Importantly, when the reference to Sixty Days In is dropped, it is no longer available as a reference with which students can collaboratively make meaning. Had Mya and I not shut down the reference, perhaps the group may have been able to compare Mya’s brother’s incarceration experience with the representation of incarceration from the reality T.V. show. It is possible that comparing these two texts may have deepened the groups understanding of the inmate experience.

In another example that occurred while Group C was discussing American

Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), the students referenced a section of the novel where the main character’s classmates teased him and a female Chinese classmate by saying that the two were arranged to be married at the age of 13. When Maryan questioned whether or not Chinese people really get married at 13, Ezekial confirmed that they do in Japan and Alessandra suggested that “he’d probably know” (transcript,

9/21/2016) because Ezekial’s dad was Japanese. No one in the group questioned this conflation of Chinese and Japanese cultures or the accuracy of Ezekial’s assertion.

Later, while reading the CC and discussing stereotypes, I referred back to the question of whether Chinese people get married at age 13 and again Ezekial confirmed that this was true in Japan. I was not convinced so I suggested that we

“Look it up and see” (transcript, 10/19/2016) and Sahra supported my questioning saying “Yeah, let’s get the facts.” We used my phone to conduct an Internet search and found that Japanese people cannot legally get married until they are 20 years old.

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This revelation prompted Alessondra to share that Amish people can get married before they are 18 years old and when I asked where she got this information from, she shared that she had driven through Amish country with her family. Maryan supported Alessandra’s assertion by sharing that she also knew because she had taken a field trip to Amish country. Despite my repeated attempts to problematize their understanding of Asian and Amish cultural norms, the students continued to assert that their knowledge based on personally acquired knowledge or experiences was accurate.

In both of the previous examples, knowledge acquired from personal or personally-related events or experiences was considered to be of greater authority than knowledge from other sources. Maria’s reality T.V. show reference was not as

“real” as Mya’s knowledge of her brother’s incarceration and my Internet search to prove that Japanese people do not get married at 13 served only to shift the stereotype to focus on Amish people.

These findings have parallels in prior research. Kahne and Bowyer’s (2017) used data collected from a nationally representative survey, the Youth Participatory

Politics (YPP). The YPP contained an experiment designed to resemble the types of political content that is prevalent on social media. The 15 to 27 year old research participants were randomly assigned to read a post about economic inequality and tax policy that was either liberal or conservative and contained accurate or inaccurate information. The participants were asked to rate the accuracy of the post. Regardless of the post’s accuracy, the youth tended to rate the posts as accurate when the post

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was consistent with their prior beliefs.

Many (1996) and VanSledright and Kelly’s (1998) research on intertextuality showed that students do not have well developed capabilities for evaluating the quality of information in texts. Many (1996) studied intertextuality in diverse classroom literacy events with 11 and 12 year old students and found that students often shared inaccurate historical information and that other students rarely noted the inaccuracies. Many of the students believed that their discussions were accurate.

VanSledright and Kelly (1998) studied fifth grade students’ use of a variety of resource materials while the students worked on a social studies project. Even though students were collecting research from multiple sources, dissonance between the sources did not cause the students to question the reliability or validity of the sources.

When students were asked to identify more accurate sources, they did so based on the quantity of facts and details presented in the text.

Taken together, the findings from the present research, as well of the research by Kahne and Bowyer (2017), Many (1996), and VanSledright and Kelly (1998) indicate that challenging students’ conceptualization of truth is not an easy task. And yet, the question of truth is a classical question of critical literacy (Luke, 2012).

Students’ reticence to problematize what counted as truth is particularly interesting given the broader political context in which the discussions that were part of this present research took place. As the discussions took place during the fall of

2016, the students were immersed in news from a political campaign in which both the democratic and republican presidential candidates were deemed so mistrustful that

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online news sources fact checked and tallied the mistruths told by each candidate during presidential debates (Bendery, 2016). Additionally, at the time of data collection several search engines (such as Google) and social media websites (such as

Facebook and Twitter) were being criticized for displaying fake news stories (Hern,

2017). The Pew Research Center (2008) reported that “the public continues to express skepticism about what they see, hear and read in the media. No major news outlet – whether broadcast or cable, print or online – stands out as particularly credible” (p. 56).

Because of the proliferation of information and misinformation in the digital age, students are exposed to inaccurate information more frequently (Kahne &

Bowyer, 2017). Goldman (2004) claimed that evaluating the quality of information is an important literacy skill for students in a knowledge society that demands the integration of information across multiple sources. Similarly, the Common Core State

Standards (CCSS) assert that evidence-based reasoning is “essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a democratic republic” (National

Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School

Officers, 2010, p. 3). Students reliance on their personal generalized knowledge and personal or personally related experiences to decide what counts as truth, as evidenced in the present study, may limit their ability to achieve the standard set by the CCSS as well as their enactment of critical literacy practices.

Topic as a Filter

According to Lemke (1992), “A moment’s consideration will suggest that we

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tend to connect texts that we see as being ‘on the same topic’ or ‘about the same thing’” (p. 258). Indeed, in the book club discussions, relevance was a filter through which all intertextual references passed. Sometimes, as in the example from

November 1st at the beginning of this chapter where Mya’s connection to Justice

League was shut down, the students were very vocal about labeling certain contributions as “off-topic;” at other times, proposed off-topic references were not acknowledged or were taken up only briefly until one of the participants re-directed the group back to the relevant topic.

Looking across dialogues that contained intertextual references that were dropped from the discussion allowed me to conceptualize what was on topic. My analysis led me to an understanding that on-topic intertextual references were those that related to the social issues relevant to the CCs and focal texts, or those connections that related directly to the CCs or focal texts. In order to verify my understanding, I created data displays (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2013) by going through intertextual references in my data and marking their topic. These data displays confirmed my understanding that the references that were taken up and maintained during discussions related to either the social issue relevant to the CC and focal text or to the CC and focal text itself. References that did not relate to the focal texts, the CCs, or the social issues addressed by these texts were acknowledged briefly and then dropped, or not taken up at all. Table 5 is an example of a data display I created for Group A’s discussion of American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006).

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Table 5

Intertextual References and Topicality in American Born Chinese Discussion

Type of Connections Connections Connections Connections Intertextual to the Focal Mediated by Mediated that Were References Text Social Issue by Critical Off topic from CC to Race Stereotypes Literary Theory Used in CC Focal Text Character X X X Setting Plot X X Theme X Author X Other Texts Written Media X X Impersonal X generalized text Folk text X Previous X discussion Hypotheticals X X Recounted Events Personal X generalized event Personal and X Personally- related event Hearsay X X X

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As is evident in Table 5, in the discussion of American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) students made only one intertextual reference that was not relevant to the social issues in the CC (race and stereotypes) or to the content of the focal text and CC and this reference was not taken up by the other participants.

BecauseTrent (Group A) was particularly vocal about labeling things as “off topic” during discussions, I asked him during an interview how he knew what was

“on topic” or “off topic.” When I asked this question we were reading Monster

(Myers, 1999). The CC for Monster focused on the criminal justice system and race.

Trent responded, “…OK, so like if they’re saying something about a Black person in jail and stuff that would be contributing to like what we’re talking about, and like if they’re talking about like a book or something other than what we’re talking about, like the topic that we’re talking about, then that would be off topic (interview,

12/1/2016). Maria also answered this question by commenting:

Like when we’re like discussing stereotypes and stuff then like, it could be

like, let’s say A.J. isn’t listening, and then he just brings up something about

football and then it’s just like we’re talking about football – I don’t even like

football – but we’re all talking about football and then so like you would hear

Mya say ‘we’re off topic A.J.’ and then we just snap back to what we’re

doing… what we’re talking about, like if you say like um, this one time, like

J.T. or T.J. [a well-known football player], whatever his name is, wasn’t liked

in society cause he’s Black or something that might be on topic, if cause he’s

a football player, and then that was related to football, yeah that would be on

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topic, but if you were just talking about the game last week then that’s not

really on topic. (interview, 12/6/2016)

According to the students, when reading and discussing the CC for Monster (Myers,

1999) if participants were not discussing race, jail, or Monster, then they were not on topic. Their understanding of “off-topic” and “on-topic” contributions to discussion was consistent with my analysis.

The participants in Groups B and C did not often label things as “off topic,” however they did exhibit the same type of topic maintenance as the students in Group

A. For example, while the students in Group B were discussing the topic of consent

Rhiannon shared a connection to a YouTuber who is known by jacksepticeye. Her connection was a little confusing, but appeared to be on topic; she seemed to be wondering if Melinda, the main character in Speak (Anderson, 1999), thought she was dreaming when she was raped.

RHIANNON: I just watched a video like jacksepticeye talking about like "Oh I'm in a dream this you can do whatever you want" but actually maybe she was like, was dreaming and she was= ASHLEE: Who is Jack Septica? RHIANNON: He's an Irish OK? He= ASHLEE: @@ You said Jack something and I was like "What is that?" RHIANNON: Um no, but he was talking about this thing that says um I mean “am I dreaming? I guess I am” because he like, he can actually do things that you actually can do. Maybe she was like, like that but she like felt the things that was happening. ASHLEE: Isn't he gay? RHIANNON: No. AESHA: Oh my god. SARAH: Who? RHIANNON: jacksepticeye. He has a girlfriend that lives in= ASHLEE: Japan.

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RHIANNON: Korea. SARAH: I don't know who Jack Septica is? ASHLEE: He's a YouTuber. RHIANNON: He's cute. ASHLEE: He’s not cute, he looks gay. RHIANNON: He kind of does but= ASHLEE: Nevermind, let's just get back to the conversation. (transcript, 11/10/2016)

In this example, Rhiannon made an intertextual connection that was initially on topic since it related to rape and consent, but the conversation veered off track when Ashlee wondered if jacksepticeye was gay. The topic of jacksepticeye’s sexuality and attractiveness was taken up briefly, but the discussion was redirected by Ashlee, who suggested that we “get back to the conversation.”

Also illuminating what it meant to be on topic were moments where the topicality of a connection was contested. For instance in a conversation that followed

Trent’s (Group A) questioning of the term felony murder, I brought up the CNN student news, a news show that the students watched every morning while Mrs.

Halloway took attendance. That morning on the CNN student news there had been a segment about driving while distracted and I reminded the group that people can go to jail for accidentally killing someone and that just because Steve, the main character in

Monster (Myers, 1999), did not intend for Mr. Nesbitt to die, did not mean he was not legally responsible for the death of the store owner. This connection prompted Maria to recall a specific part of the news story where a woman was sent to jail for killing a man while she was texting and driving. Then A.J. responded with a connection to a personally-related event:

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A.J.: Ok, the sad story that happened [pulls microphone towards himself] my mom witnessed this um, it was my mom, my aunt Tracey, and someone else I don't know who was in the car, um it was my mom friend dad who was testing out a motorcycle and when he was testing it out he was going like the wrong, he was driving on the wrong side so he ran into my, my aunt Tracey car, and he, he, like it hit and he flipped and he died and so who would get in trouble for that? That's my question because I know it wasn't my aunt Tracey fault because she was driving on the right lane so if he would have like survived, would he get in trouble or? SARAH: I don't know A.J., I would think his insurance would pay for it if he would have survived? TRENT: I don't think his aunt Tracy would get in trouble because she wasn't, I don't think, driving in the right lane, so. MYA: Oh. SARAH: She wouldn't be negligent. MYA: I have a comparison. TRENT: This is what we are supposed to be reading [pointing to CC]. MYA: Yesterday, it, it's a comparison to A.J.'s story, actually Trent, it's not off topic. Yesterday I watched a TV show and it was about a little girl who was spoiled by her father but then her father got hit by a car and turns out he had thousands, millions of dollars in debt and they stole, they didn't steal. The bank took her whole house and they took everything that she owned to pay for her father's debt. SARAH: How does that connect to A.J.'s story? MYA: He asked, "Would he have to pay for the car?" SARAH: Oh. MYA: Cause the XX that he took his stuff. TRENT: Not really relevant, off topic. SARAH: @@@ TRENT: Let's continue reading now. A.J.: It's alright, you tried. SARAH: It was good, it was good. I can see it in your head that it made sense, I do that all the time. Okay so, O'Brien… (transcript, 11/1/2016)

In this particular excerpt, Trent attempted to shut down Mya’s connection before she had even started sharing, telling her that it was “off topic,” but Mya persisted insisting that her connection was not off topic. After she finished sharing the story she heard on T.V., I questioned her story’s topicality by asking “How does that

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connect to A.J.’s story?” and Trent repeated that it was “not really” connected and was “off topic.” A.J. and I made it clear that we agreed with Trent when we both tried to console Mya for her off-topic contribution. This moment where the topicality of

Mya’s contribution was contested was particularly interesting because it highlighted the socially constructed nature of what was and was not “on topic” in our book discussions. As noted by Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), “Cultural ideologies are not static, but are themselves constituted in part through social interactions that maintain or contest existing rules and norms; and part of these social interactions involves the social construction of intertextuality” (p. 330). The relevance of A.J.’s intertextual reference was questionable, as it deviated from the discussion of felony murder to a slightly tangential personally-related event. However, as I explain next personal and personally related events were always affirmed within the group discussions, regardless of topicality. The divergent nature of A.J.’s connection may have caused Trent to stifle Mya’s intertextual reference before it was even made.

When Mya continued with a story that was not personal and that was not directly related to the focal text, the CC. or the relevant social issues, her reference was questioned and Trent directed the group back to reading the CC.

When groups establish and contest rules for intertextuality, restrictions on potential registers result in limitations to the types of meanings that can be made

(Lemke, 1985). Although limiting connections to those that are on topic may have served to keep the discussions focused on the CCs, these boundaries still constrained the meaning potential of the discussions. Reflecting on the conversation between the

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members of Group A, it is possible to see how Mya’s connection to a T.V. show had potential to contribute to an understanding of A.J.’s story because her connection explained how relatives of the dead are often held accountable for the debts of the dead. Because Mya’s reference was deemed “off topic” the connections between the two intertexts was never co-constructed in the group.

In research on intertextuality in classroom literacy events, Many (1996) found that students often made intertextual connections that were tangential to the focus of the conversation. Many concluded that even though these associations were generally connected to the topic of discussion, they led students away from the specific focus of the dialogue until the teacher intervened to refocus the discussion. Notably, as can be seen by many of the examples provided in this chapter, in the present research it was the students who most frequently redirected the conversation when they perceived connections were off topic.

This type of topic maintenance behavior occurred both when the students were reading the CCs (as in the examples above) and when the students were reading the focal text. When I asked Maria what she thought was making the students in the group police the topic of the conversation, she explained:

I think we get back on track because we want to know more about the subject

and we want to just actually figure out what's going on with it, because

sometimes I get lost a lot. So we wouldn't really know like what's going on

and like facts about this and stuff. It's very interesting. So I think we want to

all just know what's like really going on in like the Critical Companion and

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the book and everything, and understand what the book’s about and then get

sidetracked, and then we just, and then one person just pulls it back together,

and then we keep going like this little flow that's going on about learning

about the book and the Critical Companion. Like we want to know more…

Like we, we need to stay on topic cause we need to like learn it. We need to

know. We need to like know what we're actually doing, and we need to like,

we need to just stay on topic, and we need to just keep going and stop thinking

about something else we just got to keep going. We got to learn more and it's

interesting.

(interview, 12/6/2016)

This declaration of interest and needing to know was common across the students’ responses to my queries on this topic. In an interview, Mya noted that she shared

Maria’s interest in the book club topics and explained that she really enjoyed the books we were reading and wanted to talk about them (field notes, 10/4/2016). Also, during discussions, she shared her enthusiasm for the books. For instance, when I handed her a copy of the graphic novel for Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) she said,

"This looks very interesting. I will be very glad to read this book" (transcript,

10/4/2016).

Other students also demonstrated their interest in the focal texts, the CCs, and the topics during discussions. While I was passing out the CCs for Absolutely True

Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007), A.J. remarked “Yes! Another Critical

Companion!” (transcript, 12/13/2016). During a discussion of Speak (Anderson,

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1999) Aesha commented “this is interesting!” and also noted that she was enjoying reading Speak (transcript, 9/22/2016). Mrs. Fearnow sent an e-mail to me to say that she had had to go to the library and check out multiple copies of American Born

Chinese (Yang, 2006) because so many of the other students in her class had requested to read it after they saw the students in Group C reading the graphic novel

(personal communication, 12/16/2016). Similarly, Mrs. Halloway shared that she

“notice[d] that students who [we]re in the book club [we]re happy to pick up their books when we ha[d] independent reading time. They really seem[ed] to enjoy what they [we]re reading!” (personal communication, 11/30/2016). This level of interest seems to have contributed to the students’ desire to stay on task.

Although students’ level of interest appeared to be a contributing factor in keeping the students on topic during the discussions, there may have been other contributing factors. Because the students were volunteering to participate in the discussions with me, I wanted to ensure that they enjoyed coming to the book club discussions. I chose not to use the school’s paycheck system of rewarding and punishing students because I thought the behavior system would conflict with my goal of conducting humanizing research.

Beyond choosing not to use the paycheck system to manage behavior, I made other choices that resulted in the book clubs operating differently than activities in the students’ academic classes. In the students’ academic classes, the desks were arranged in rows, students received paycheck deductions for putting their head down, and they were not allowed to get out of their seat without asking permission. The

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system for paycheck deductions and classroom management was consistent across classrooms and was rigorously maintained by the school’s teachers and administrators. In contrast, during the book club discussions, the students

(particularly those in Groups A and B) sometimes laid down across the chairs, spun or rolled in the chairs, and got up to walk around the room. Although the students occasionally told each other to sit up or stop spinning, I did not comment on this behavior unless it was disruptive or distracting. Despite the rolling, spinning, and walking around, the discussions rarely deviated from the topic of the focal texts, the

CCs, or the social issues relevant to both texts.

I was reluctant to comment on students’ behavior because I was worried that doing so would decrease their desire to participate, and the students seemed to sense my reluctance. When I asked the students in Group A why they assumed responsibility for managing discussion, Trent said “I think you’re a little shy about that” (transcript, 12/6/2016). Similarly, when I asked Aesha what motivated her to redirect the conversation any time it deviated from the topic of the focal texts or CCs, she said “Cause like I, I think like I see you getting over there aggravated about like, like about, like when they start to like, when they start to get off task. So I try and

…” (interview, 12/13/2016). When the students believed that I was hesitant to manage behavior, they stepped in and took on the responsibility themselves.

Interestingly, the students chose to stay on topic when they could have chosen to take advantage or my reluctance to strictly control their behavior. I argued previously that part of the motivation behind this choice was that the students were

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interested in the topics introduced by the focal texts and the CCs. Additionally, the students chose to participate in the book clubs with me and were given the option of dropping out of the research at any time. They demonstrated a level of pride in their participation. As part of Mya’s response when I asked why the group worked to stay on topic, she said, “because we earned this” (transcript, 10/4/2016). When I told

Group A that one of my friends was reading Monster with the students in her multicultural literature class at the nearby university, Trent responded “We’re college ready” (transcript, 10/4/2016). I assert that the students’ pride in our discussions contributed to the desire to hold each other accountable.

Intertextual relationships are constrained in all contexts (Bloome & Egan-

Robertson, 1993; Lemke, 1985) and, although boundaries to intertextual references always limit potential meaning making opportunities, these restrictions can be productive in classrooms where students share authority. Luke and Freebody (1990) describe how reading entails “enculturation into the procedures of omission – knowing what to pursue empirically, inferentially, and evaluatively” (p. 215). When the book club participants and I shared control of the topic, the students policed connections based on what they saw as relevant and were therefore enabled to pursue their own interests so no one voice dominated.

Nonetheless, sometimes when intertextual references were dropped, the limitations on topicality constrained the groups’ ability to discuss other topics critically. For instance, in the example where Group B discussed jacksepticeye’s sexuality, the reference could have led to a critical discussion of sexuality, but

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because the conversation was re-directed as off topic, the constraint resulted in a missed opportunity.

Furthermore, some students’ references were shut down more frequently than other students. Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) used the term entitlement rights to describe “who gets to make what intertextual relationships and how” (p. 312). In my analysis of the transcripts, I observed that Mya and Rhiannon’s connections were dropped more frequently than those of other students. Interestingly, during interviews, the other students vocalized respect for both Mya and Rhiannon as students and friends. When asked to identify good readers they often named these two students and shared stories about their friendships with these students outside of book clubs. The students in Group A frequently complimented Mya on her insight and vocabulary. Once, after Mya shared a well-articulated response to a focal text, Maria told her “It sounds like you got that from a dictionary” (transcript, 10/18/2016). On another occasion after Mya explained her thinking behind a debate the students were having, A.J. commented, “Mya, you’re really smart. I didn’t know that” (transcript,

10/31/2016). Perhaps Mya and Rhiannon’s references were frequently dropped because they were divergent thinkers. As in the examples above, where Mya shared the story of the girl who owed the bank for her father’s debts and Rhiannon made connections to jacksepticeye, these students frequently shared connections that were difficult to follow. Often it was only after transcribing and reviewing the data that I was able to discern the connections that Mya and Rhiannon had been trying to make.

Perhaps it was the seeming irrelevance of these students’ contributions that led their

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references to be frequently deemed off topic.

Navigating students’ intertextual references can be challenging for educators who have set lesson objectives and who are required to respond in the moment to students’ connections. And yet students varying entitlement rights can have a large impact on the meaning making potential of a discussion. Shor (1999) noted that

“students’ varying ages, genders, races, classes, ethnicities, etc. equally affect their authority as well as that of the teacher. Students who develop socially subordinate identities can possess too little authority for them to feel secure in joining an unfamiliar critical process” (p. 10). Constraints on who has entitlement rights may limit potential meaning making opportunities for those students whose references are consistently ignored and for their peers who do not get the opportunity to critically consider those references.

Privileging of the Personal

Personal and personally-related stories received special treatment in the book club discussions. As noted previously, knowledge gained from personal experiences was conceived of as more accurate than knowledge gained from other sources.

Furthermore, deeply personal and personally related events were always taken up even when they were off topic. I use the term off topic here with an understanding that “it is not possible in the day to day life of English classrooms to predict what texts will provoke testimony of trauma in readers” (Dutro, 2008, p. 428). Even though the logic behind certain intertextual connections was not always clear to me, that did not mean that the connections were tangential for students. When off-topic personal

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or personally-related events were shared they were always affirmed. For instance, while reading and discussing a section of the CC for Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) about what it means to be a child the following discussion took place:

DEVINE: Oh yeah, I have something to say it's sad. OK so yesterday= AESHA: Oh you told me DEVINE: No I didn't, oh yes I did. Ssshh. Yesterday my mom, yesterday my mom pulled me downstairs and she was like "I got something to tell you once I figure out how to tell you" and then I, and then she was like, I was like “What is it about?” She was like “It's about your grandpa,” and I was like "He died?" and she was like um, she was like "No" and I was like "Just tell me" and she was like "He has cancer" SARAH: Oh no sweetheart, that's horrible news. DEVINE: And I feel so bad because I can't talk to him because I don't live with him no more, and my mom and her side of the family aren't getting along, and the last words I ever thought about him was that I hate him. SARAH: Well, he's not, there's still time to talk to him. ASHLEE: When my grandma, my grandma got cancer but she never told anyone so we got to her too late and we couldn't cure her. She called me a- she called me Cierra, she called me a bunch of different names because she didn't know who everybody was. SARAH: It gets hard, I mean old people I think- DEVINE: He has knots all over his neck, and they said that if you don't go through chemo, if he like, he is like stubborn, if he don't, if he does, if he denies to go to chemo, he's going to die. And if one of his, the one of the knots in his head bust, gone go to his brain and gone kill him. SARAH: Mmmm ASHLEE: My grandma had to get brain surgery cause she had tumors, a tumor that was the size of a baseball in her brain. SARAH: That's very scary. DEVINE: That's just like my dog, a couple weeks ago we had to put him down because he had this big old tumor and he couldn't walk. He's had that tumor for like three years. ASHLEE: There's this, my cousin, she has a dog and he has a tumor or she has a tumor and it's on her leg and it's gonna fall off soon cause it's getting so big. SARAH: It's always hard to watch people you love and things you love be sick. DEVINE: OK, can I read next?

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(transcript, 12/12/2016)

Devine’s intertextual reference about her grandfather is tangential to the topics directly relevant to Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) —the topics of race, childhood, and the criminal justice system—and yet it is acknowledged with empathy, and additional intertextual connections. Witnessing students’ testimony to trauma is important and necessary to the maintenance of dialogue and the establishment of a respectful environment:

…if a student chooses to take the risk of testifying to trauma, it seems

incumbent on teachers to risk the role of witness, to refrain from steering

response to safer ground and to allow a student’s testimony to speak to our

own wounds…But whether it is attended to, taken up or taken in by her

teacher, the student’s testimony will remain in the room, like an empty chair.

(Dutro, 2008, p. 431)

By consistently affirming personal and personally-related references and by often responding with stories of their own personal experiences, the discussion participants

“co-constructed their stories of grief and trauma” and “testified to what we had suffered and witnessed the testimony of others” (Dutro, 2008, p. 429). The participants’ honoring of sensitive personal and personally-related events during book club meetings served to make emotion part of our discussions.

Not only were personal and personally-related events accepted even when they were off topic, but they were also able to push boundaries on the filter of truthfulness. For instance, while responding to Speak, Aesha shared a story about her

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mother’s death. Aesha opened the story by explaining that “Somehow, I guess, I don’t know, my dad knows…” (transcript, 10/27/2016). She proceeded by telling the story of her family’s visit to the county fair where, while at the chicken coop, her mother became very sick and had to be rushed to the hospital. According to Aesha “she got sick from the, I don’t want to say the word, but poop.” The other students in the group were incredulous and resisted the idea that Aesha’s mother died from chicken poop, but Aesha defended her story and said, “I’m being dead serious. I’m not even lying.”

Ashlee questioned Aesha again asking, “You’re telling a true story?” and Aesha responded, “That’s a true story… My dad knows exactly what um, the sickness she got from um.” Aesha’s framing seems to suggest that her father was an unquestionable authority. The other students accepted her narrative, and acknowledged that Aesha’s story was very sad.

Interestingly, later in this same conversation after the members of Group B had exchanged several traumatic stories related to the rape of the main character in

Speak (Anderson, 1999), Rhiannon shared an implausible personal event:

There was a guy that was driving down, a bag, he was like, you knew he was

in the neighborhood for one reason. He had a bag and there was blood coming

out of the bag, so me and my mom went out to see him, talk to him for a

minute, and then he dropped the bag. He opened it and showed us what it was.

It was a dead girl, chopped up, and then, my mom called the police and he

took me. I was like so scared. So I kicked him right there, and then I ran back

home. (transcript, 10/27/2016)

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No one in the group responded directly to Rhiannon’s story, but after a moment of silence Ashlee said, “Yeah. I know what book we should read next though,” and then suggested her great aunt’s autobiography. As if by way of rebuking Rhiannon’s inconceivable story, Ashlee suggested reading a non-fiction text. Importantly, Ashlee was also personally connected to the biography because it featured members of her own family. Her suggestion for our next book served to censure Rhiannon’s story; recounted events had value, but only if they were authentic.

As illustrated by Aesha and Rhainnon’s stories, for a connection to be taken up it was not enough for it to be personal; the story had to also be perceived as true.

But there are numerous factors that impact the perception of truth. First, Aesha framed the narrative of her mother’s death by articulating that she did not exactly understand her mother’s illness, but her father did. It was as if her father was an unquestionable authority. The position of a family member as authority is consistent with the earlier examples I shared where Mya’s brother’s experiences in jail trumped the depiction of jail on a reality T.V. show and where Ezekial knew about Chinese culture because his father was Japanese. It is as if knowledge gained from family members was not to be questioned. Rhiannon did not frame her story in any way that suggested an authority other than her, and her authority was questionable. As I explained earlier, Rhiannon had limited entitlement rights. Her intertextual references were frequently perceived as off topic and dropped from the dialogue. On the other hand, Aesha had extensive entitlement rights. Her connections were always on topic and rarely ever dropped from dialogue. In relationship to Speak (Anderson, 1999),

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Aesha’s story seemed to be tangential, but she shared that she saw her experience as connected to the experience of the main character in Speak because neither she nor

Melinda had a close relationship with their mother. Therefore, Aesha’s story was connected to the focal text in a way that she was able to articulate and the connection at the heart of it — that her mother had died—was unquestionably true.

Importantly, there were numerous instances during the book club discussions where students shared personal narratives that were on topic and perceived as true.

Dutro (2008) explained how students often respond to literature with stories of trauma noting that trauma “lurks in the everyday lives of children and youth who suffer from private, personal difficulties such as the loss of grandparents, parents or siblings, family members in prison, placement in foster homes, family, and community violence, eviction from their homes or testifying against molesters” (p. 424). In several of the focal texts that the book club participants chose to read the main character experienced trauma and it is possible that these trauma narratives provoked the students to share their own stories of trauma. For instance, as I have described previously, in response to the CC for Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015)

A.J. shared a narrative about his uncle’s incarceration. Also, in response to Speak

(Anderson, 1999) Devine told the group that she had been molested.

Emotional responses to the text are often steeped with issues of social, economic, and political power (Dutro, 2011). Therefore, when students responded to the CCs and focal texts with stories of trauma, their responses often became entry points to discussions about oppression and power. As Larson and Marsh (2005)

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noted, in critical literacy pedagogy “learners’ own cultural semiotic resources should be utilized within classrooms and their critical stances towards these resources recognized and extended” (p. 45). The emotional connections that the students shared in response to the focal texts and the CCs enabled the participants to apply critical literary theories to their cultural resources and lived experiences. As an example, the students in Group B were reading a section of the CC for Speak (Anderson, 1999) that described a theory about rape that assumes all rapists have mental health problems, and therefore rape is rare and random. In response to this section Devine shared a personal story, “So my cousin is like I don't know, I don't know how I want to say this, but he's like, slow. He's 21, he's like really slow, and he used to watch like uh, that website” (transcript, 11/14/2016). The group spent several conversational turns trying to figure out what “that website” contained until someone suggested pornography and Devine confirmed that that was the type of website he had shown her:

SARAH: Did you, like in a way that, did he do that in a way that was like threatening or he just didn't know any better? DEVINE: I don't know, it was weird. RHIANNON: Hey kids, look at this! SARAH: Yeah, I don't know, sometimes people don't really know what they're= RHIANNON: Maybe he wanted to teach you and decided to teach you. SARAH: Yeah, but you're his cousin so it's not really a comfortable thing. Well it wouldn't be comfortable if you were not his cousin. But= RHIANNON: Yeah. AESHA: Yeah. RHIANNON: Like a stranger just randomly comes at you, and is like "Hey, look at this." SARAH: Were you OK with that honey? DEVINE: No

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SARAH: Did you talk to your mom about it? DEVINE: Um hm, she knows. SARAH: Ok, so somebody knows. (transcript, 11/14/2017)

I felt self-conscious about my own participation in this conversation, but despite my ineptitude at responding to this story, the other group members and I met Devine’s story with empathy and concern. Anderson and Irvine (1993) explain that in critical literacy pedagogy:

Exploring personal experience is the first step in countering the idea that

meanings exist only in structures external to the individual. It also brings into

the classroom the culture of the community, not just that of the institution. But

the process cannot stop there. A critical approach requires that students

connect their experiences to larger, oppressive social patterns. (p. 92-93)

Although Devine’s story corroborated the idea that people who were responsible for sexual assault may not be mentally stable, it supported the statistics in the CC that suggested rape and sexual assault were neither rare nor random, and that family members were often perpetrators. Thus her connection had the potential to deepen the discussants understanding of the social issue.

In previous conversations about Speak (Anderson, 1999), Devine had shared several other deeply personal experiences from her childhood that related to the topics of rape, violence, and male dominance over women. In a subsequent conversation, in which Group B was reading and discussing a section of the CC for Speak that talked about how embarrassment might prevent rape victims from reporting their assault to

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the police, Devine made an intertextual reference to a previous conversation when she shared: “Something like that happened to me, because you know how I told you about how my mom’s ex-husband tried to molest me, yeah and my mom took me to the doctors to see if he had, I don’t know the word for it… the sperm stuff” (transcript,

11/14/2016). In reader reviews of Speak (Anderson, 1999), readers often question why Melinda, the main character in Speak, did not just tell someone what had been done to her (GoodReads, 2017). This bewilderment over the silence of so many rape victims is a common reaction from people who have not been victims of sexual assault. Dutro (2011) explained that because stories of trauma are saturated with issues of social, economic, and political power, sharing these stories in classroom spaces “…might foster the kinds of relationships and stances necessary to challenge entrenched inequities and privileged assumptions about Others’ lives…” (p. 194).

Devine’s story helped illustrate the point that when victims do want to prove they have been raped, the process is violating and adds further embarrassment to an experience that most victims are already embarrassed to share.

In Groups A and B, every participant shared at least one extremely sensitive personal or personally-related event. Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993) noted

“Differences in entitlement rights may reflect insitu cultural ideologies for defining social relationships, assigning social status and social identities, defining low- and high-achieving students, and ascribing gender, class and ethnicity/race” (p. 213).

Often, as when A.J. shared the story about his uncle’s incarceration and Maria responded that her aunt was also incarcerated, deeply emotional stories were shared

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in response to other stories. Responding with self-disclosure enabled the participants to support each other’s intertextual links (Beach & Anson, 1992). In all instances in which sensitive personal or personally-related events were proposed, these events were acknowledged and ratified by the other participants as long as they were perceived as true. That is to say, Groups A and B, all students were entitled to share these sensitive texts. This finding is in line with Dutro’s (2011) notion of the circular and cyclical nature of testimony and witness in classrooms. She notes that “faced with such testimony [of trauma] and in acting as witness, the listener may respond with personal testimony that, in turn, must be witnessed and, again, may prompt testimony from her witnesses” (p. 198). Dutro’s research suggests that once a story of trauma has been shared, the witnesses are compelled to share their own stories. It is perhaps this compulsion that entitled all students in Groups A and B to share their own deeply personal or personally-related events.

The sensitive personal and personally-related connections that students offered during discussions, and the affirmation these stories received when they were shared, made the emotions of pain, anger, and guilt valid contributions to the learning process. The stories students shared created bridges, not just between the focal texts and the students, but also between the personal and the political. Referencing Freire’s

(1970) concept of generative words or themes—words that enable readers to face the social, cultural, and political reality in which they live —Barnett (2006) noted how narrating personal stories allows story tellers to examine the core themes of their lives from a distance. He argued that the distance “is crucial to the possibility of naming

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those things that limit us, of understanding their social as well as personal nature, of analyzing them and making them concrete problems to be solved rather than crippling, and vaguely held, thoughts and feelings” (p. 361).

Shor (1999) explained that “Critical literacy is language use that questions the social construction of the self. When we are critically literate, we examine our ongoing development, to reveal the subjective positions from which we make sense of the world and act in it” (par. 4). Barnett (2006) noted that if educators are to take

Shor’s definition of critical literacy seriously then “one of our primary goals would be to use personal writing to help students explore the ways in which individuals emotions and identities are constructed (and, therefore, at least at times directed) through social and linguistic norms” (p. 357). I extend Barnett’s assertion and argue that, by orally sharing personal stories, students can also challenge the status quo and

“discover alternative paths for self and social development” (Shor, 1999, par. 2) by orally sharing personal stories. In the present study, the personal and personally- related stories the students shared enabled them to see the personal as political and moved them towards more critical positions.

Narrating stories does not just benefit the teller. Short (1992) argued that once stories have been shared:

the text becomes a source of further dialogue. Everyone involved in that

dialogue can use their constructions of the story as they approach new

experiences and evolving texts, and these new evolving texts allow them to

reconsider old stories – a process of endless intertextuality. (p. 316)

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The experiences that the students brought to the book club discussions enabled critical literacy practices as the narratives empowered all of the participants to think about how issues of oppression operate within their own lives.

Discussions of the Focal Texts and CCs

In the previous sections I focused on the texts that were proposed during book club discussions with the focal text and the CC. I also explored the boundaries that participants placed on the types of intertextual references that were acceptable during discussions, which constrained the possible meanings that could be co-constructed within the cultural context of the book clubs. In this section, I provide a more extended analysis of the discourse in several transcripts to illustrate the impact that the intertextual references had on the discourse of the book club discussions.

Discussions about the focal text and discussions about the CCs had some notable differences. First, in discussions of the focal texts the students tended to focus on the narrative features of the text (e.g., character, setting, plot, theme, and author intent), often engaging with the text as a text participant (Luke & Freebody, 1990), with a focus on exploring the text world through words. In contrast, discussions of the

CCs tended to focus on the relevant social issue with students engaging with multiple texts as text analysts and text users, with the participants treating the meaning of the various texts as tentative and open to alternative interpretations. It seems logical that the students would approach discussions of the focal texts and CCs differently as the

CCs were designed to focus students’ attention on the social issues and to provoke questions and discussion around these issues. The fact that the students talked more

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about social issues during discussion of the CCs simply means that the CCs succeeded in achieving their purpose.

Nonetheless, during discussions of the CCs the students did talk about all of the same narrative features that they discussed when they collectively examined the focal texts. However, the features of character, plot, theme, and author intent were frequently raised as topics of discussion during discussions of the CCs, whereas setting was raised as a topic less frequently. Conversely, during discussions of some of the focal texts, the relevant social issues never were raised as discussion topics. For instance, students in Group B never mentioned race or stereotypes during their discussion of Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) and students in Group C never brought up immigration during their discussion of Esperanza Rising other than to discuss the main character’s immigration to the United States as an element of the plot (Ryan,

2000).

In this section, I elaborate upon the part of the Intertextual Take Up Model highlighted in Figure 7.

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Figure 7. How accepted intertexts function during discussion.

In the following analysis, I have present excerpts of “extended stretches”

(Sipe, 2001) of conversational turns by different discussion participants with a consistent focus on the same topic or issue. Chunking the data in this way allows me to demonstrate how the book club participants treated each topic. Some of these extended stretches are long, but the length is necessary to display the variation in the depth with which different topics were explored in the discussions with the focal text in comparison to discussions with the CCs. I use ellipses only to eliminate disruptions in the conversation (e.g., announcements, audio interruptions) and sections of the

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discussion where nothing new or interesting was happening.

I used Moje and Lewis’s (2007) definition of an utterance as “every turn of speech, even if one person’s turn interrupts another” (p. 26), and segmented each transcript by utterance. I then coded each utterance by marking if it contained an intertextual reference that was proposed for the first time, and what type of reference was made. Note that in marking intertextual references, if the discussion focused on the focal text, then I did not count references to the focal text as intertextual.

Similarly, if the discussion focused on the CC then I did not count references to the

CC as intertextual. Sometimes it was difficult to make this distinction because the focal texts contained allusions to other texts, and the CCs referenced other sources including the author of the focal text, making the references layered and difficult to tease apart.

I have organized the next section by first contrasting the discourse in two discussions about the narrative features of the focal text. The first conversation took place during a discussion of the focal text and the second took place during a discussion of the CC. In the discussion of the CC, the group dialogue pushed back against hegemonic norms. Next, in this section I compare the discourse in a discussion of the focal text where the social issue was the focus of the conversation with a discussion about the same social issue where the CC, confirmed hegemonic norms, and a discussion where the group questioned hegemonic norms. I analyze the discourse in these five different discussions to illustrate two main differences between the discussions about the focal text and discussions about the CC: 1) the students’

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application of critical theory, and 2) the dominant literacy practices students used during discussions. In the final part of this section I examine a discussion of the focal text for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) that stands as unique among other discussions because it possesses the features of a discussion with a CC.

Discussing Narrative Features of the Focal Text

I selected the transcripts in this section to demonstrate the differences between the ways that students engaged with the same topic when having a discussion that focused on the focal text in comparison with when they were discussing the CC. The two transcripts in this section both focus on characterization in American Born

Chinese (Yang, 2006). The transcripts I selected are typical and represent the recurrent ways with which students drew on intertexts and enacted critical literacy practices during the book club discussions.

In the examples in the sections below, all intertextual references that are proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and have social consequence are bolded. Those that are proposed but not recognized or acknowledged are underlined. However, as mentioned previously, discourse is not linear and sometimes the topic of the discussion was diverted briefly and then returned to. Because I have presented the transcripts by selecting segments on the same topic, it may occasionally appear that a particular intertextual reference did not meet the criteria proposed by Bloome and

Egan-Robertson (1993) even though a longer segment of transcript would have illustrated that the reference did meet the standards. I have marked these instances

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with footnotes.

The following discussion occurred during one of the first meetings with

Group A. In the transcript the students and I were discussing the character of Chin-

Kee in American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006). Chin-Kee is the cousin of the book’s main character, Jin. He comes to visit Jin every year and always embarrasses him because of his outrageous behavior. Chin-Kee has buckteeth, wears a queue in his hair, and speaks with a heavy accent—consistently mispronouncing his Rs and Ls. In the following discussion, I asked the students what they thought of Chin-Kee.

Transcript 1.

Group A Students’ Discussion of Chin-Kee without the Critical Companion

Discussion Intertext proposed for the first time

MARIA: He's funny A.J.: Which one? MARIA: #The one that's like really# TRENT: #He's kinda weird#. Kinda weird and funny at the same time. MARIA: The one that's actually from Asia. A.J.: The boy? MARIA: The one that wears purple and he like, the way he acts and everything. A.J.: Oh that one. TRENT: Danny's cousin. SARAH: Yeah, Danny's cousin, Chin-Kee. Continued 190

Transcript 1 continued

A.J.: He's funny. "I'm Chinese, I play joke, I go pee pee in your coke"2 MYA: When some people call me weird I take that as a Personal compliment, but no, he's just weird generalized event SARAH: He is weird in a way you would not want to be. TRENT: Weird and funny. (transcript, 9/27/2016)

This discussion is typical of the way that students talked about the narrative features of the focal texts prior to the introduction of the CC. The students acted in this discussion as text participants, they considered Chin-Kee to be weird and funny, but they never vocalize any recognition of his hyper-stereotypical portrayal nor did they consider the way he functions in the novel to convey an intentional message from the author.

In a later discussion, after students in Group A had read the CC, they discussed the character of Chin-Kee again. The conversation began with Trent asking for clarification on a section of the CC that he thought was confusing:

2 Although this could be considered to be an intertextual reference to a folk text, I did not code it as such because, in this instance, A.J. is quoting a phrase that Chin-Kee says in the novel after he pees in another character’s coke. 191

Transcript 2.

Group A Students’ Discussion of Chin-Kee with the Critical Companion

Text Text proposed for the first time

TRENT: SARAH: Ok, so let's unpack this sentence. What's it mean? TRENT: I think it means like racist, like people who are not white are like different and weird. MARIA: If you ain't white, you ain't right. Folk Text

SARAH: Yeah. TRENT: I think that's what that means. SARAH: If you ain't white you ain't right? Is that the-? MARIA: Um hm SARAH: Where did you hear that from? MARIA: My mom, and pretty much what Donald Trump3 is Impersonal generalized text SARAH: I've never heard that sentence before but I think Character in Focal that's basically the same thing. So where in this Text book are people not white weird? A.J.: Can you say that one more time please? SARAH: Where in American Born Chinese are people who aren't White depicted as weird or foreign? TRENT: Oh, Chin-Kee SARAH: Chin-Kee. TRENT: And um [pointing to an image of Wei-Chen]

Continued

3 This intertextual reference gets recognized, acknowledged, and has social consequences at a later point in the discussion that is not represented within this transcript. 192

Transcript 2 continued

MYA: The girl [referring to Suzy, a character in American Born Chinese] SARAH: Oh, Wei-Chen. How is Wei-Chen weird?

TRENT: Because like, um= MYA: He= TRENT: It's kinda weird cause like=

MYA: He compares American lifestyle to Chinese lifestyle and says that "We don't do this here in China," and um and then the main character says, "Well this isn't China" SARAH: Ok, so he's very like uh= MYA: Formal to his own religion. TRENT: I don't know how he's weird. MYA: Depict that as weird. MARIA: Ah SARAH: You what? MARIA: Remember how I said my mom, I didn't mean it like my mom's racist, that's what she- SARAH: Yeah MARIA: She's not racist, but that's what other white people think. SARAH: No, that's how I interpreted what you said, not that Written texts she was racist but that she was saying that. Um so, can you think of other places in literature where a person who isn't white is depicted as strange? MYA: Uhh

A.J.: In America or? SARAH: Yeah TRENT: In school? MYA: Like in different books? Continued

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Transcript 2 continued

SARAH: You could probably think of it in life too.

A.J.: Like the monkeys [referring to the monkeys in American Born Chinese].

TRENT: College, high school. MYA: I saw that, a few years back there was a family of Hearsay African Americans and there whole family like stayed on this one block and this little girl she has never seen a White person before so one day they go out of town or something and then she points at her mom she points at a White lady she says, "Mom, what is that?"

***I interrupted this conversation to check the time and then I asked why they thought Yang had included Chin-Kee in the book.

TRENT: I would think to like how it [the CC] said to exaggerate to get your point MARIA: Yeah. SARAH: So is he successful? TRENT: No. MYA: Maria? SARAH: Thank you [thanking Mya for acknowledging Maria’s attempt to participate]. A.J.: I think, it might be supposed to laugh because of how, how he said it and how he was drawn, like how he looked it was like he was smiling when he said it. Like the character was laughing so I think it might was supposed to be to laugh. SARAH: Uh huh TRENT: I think it took it to a release. SARAH: You think what? Continued

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Transcript 2 continued

TRENT: I think the character Chicken-Kee, Chin- I said Chicken, I mean Chin-Kee, took it like too literally, like it [referring to the rhyme “Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your coke”] is supposed to be something that you like just say but he took it literally, and actually peed in his coke and then he drunk it. MARIA: It even says that. There's a quote in here [pointing to CC] that says sometimes you have to exaggerate your point to get it across, and that's like what. Like, I didn't get it at first until I read this I thought it was just supposed to laugh until I actually read about the stereotypes and how he had to like exaggerate to get it across. SARAH: So do you think Yang was successful then at like, so you're saying if you had read this book by yourself you might have laughed at Chin-Kee thinking he's actually funny but now that you've read that [the CC] you think differently? TRENT: Yeah. SARAH: You agree? TRENT: Cause I kinda think that it wasn't supposed to meant to laugh or something. SARAH: @ Go ahead, tell me more about that, you're acting like you, like you aren't sure about what you're saying or you're, we want to know. TRENT: I mean like it sounds like it's not even supposed to be not meant- MARIA: This is a microphone [miming holding a microphone in her hands] keep speaking. TRENT: It sounds like it is not supposed to be meant as a joke, cause like this stuff right here is like serious, and and and more serious and stuff. MYA: Um, when he made the joke, I didn't really laugh, I just thought it was well he said he tried, he said he wanted to exaggerate but I think it was just rude how he said that and um it. Continued

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Transcript 2 continued

SARAH: Who? Who was being rude? MYA: Chicken-Kee. (transcript, 9/27/2016)

In the first excerpt, the students’ analysis of Chin-Kee was fairly simple; the students operated solely as text participants to decide that Chin-Kee was funny and weird. In the second excerpt, Trent asked for clarification about a section of the CC that confused him. Since the CC offered a critical reading of literature in general —in which characters who are not White are often depicted as weird — when Trent interpreted this statement he echoed the CCs critical stance “people who are not white are like different and weird.” Maria extended Trent’s interpretation of the CC by connecting it to a folk text: “If you ain’t white, you ain’t right.” She added to this connection by adding a second connection, noting that this statement seemed to represent presidential candidate Donald Trump’s beliefs. Her connection demonstrated political awareness and a critique of the then republican presidential candidate’s rhetoric.

I prompted the students to connect the CC with characters in the focal text and when they did, they decided that Chin-Kee was an example of a character that was not White and depicted as weird. Even though I prompted for this connection, the students’ connection between the text of the CC, the folk text that Maria shared, and the characters in the focal text demonstrated that the students recognized and

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extended the critical race theory that pervaded the CC to texts outside the CC.

Specifically, they understood Chin-Kee as a character who (to paraphrase) “ain’t right because he ain’t White.” The students’ reading of Chin-Kee and the other characters that they recognized as being depicted as strange in American Born Chinese (Yang,

2006) illustrated their critical literacy practices in that the students recognized that the book was constructed to play into dominant stereotypes.

Importantly, “Classroom discussion about texts can be seen as displays of how students ought to have read a particular text” (Freebody & Luke, 1990, p. 11). As such, the teacher plays an important role in the co-construction of how text is to be read and talked about. In the transcript from 9/27/2016, I prompted the students three times to make connections between the focal text, their cultural resources, and the

CC. Although my prompting certainly guided the way that students jointly talked about what was read, it did not diminish the value of the connections that the students made.

Freebody and Luke (1990) wrote that successful reading in our culture requires that “we view the particular options exercised by the writer … as covertly positioning us as readers into ordering our sense-making procedures within an ideological perspective” (p. 14). With the intent of prompting the students to think about how the author intentionally constructed American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006),

I asked the students why they thought Yang included Chin-Kee in the novel. The students used the CC to answer the question and explained that Chin-Kee is in the book to help the author exaggerate and illustrate harmful stereotypes. However, they

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did not just repeat what the CC said; they extended it by adding their own re- interpretation of the novel. In contrast to how the students described Chin-Kee in the first discussion, in the second discussion they no longer saw him as just a funny character. Rather, as Trent stated, “it is not supposed to be meant as a joke, cause like this stuff right here is like serious...” Mya added that Chin-Kee was not funny because he was rude. Maria explained that she understood the character of Chin-Kee differently after reading the CC because the CC pointed out that Yang intentionally used stereotypes in the character of Chin-Kee to illustrate how old school racist imagery targeting Asian Americans is still prevalent today.

Interestingly, during the discussion, Mya shared a story about an African

American child who had never seen White people before. Her story challenged the folk text (“if you ain’t White you ain’t right”) that Maria shared because in Mya’s story it was the White lady who was perceived as “not right” by the little Black girl.

According to Behrnman (2006), a countertext is a “student created text that presents a topic from a nonmainstream perspective” (p. 494). Countertexts can provide legitimacy to marginalized groups by giving voice to previously silenced perspectives and they can help students to develop an understanding that text does not contain a single correct meaning, but is given meaning through interpretation. Mya’s story offered a countertext that introduced a new meaning to the discussion; what is normal is a matter of what a person has been exposed to, and White people can be perceived as abnormal and foreign too. Unfortunately, after Mya proposed this countertext, I interrupted the discussion, possibly preventing the group from taking up her

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reference.

When the students’ used their cultural resources as intertexts they often extended their critical evaluation of the focal text to include a broader range of texts.

As the students’ cultural resources were introduced and taken up during discussion, their connections were marked as valuable contributions to the learning process.

Critical practices:

…include an awareness of how, why, and in whose interests particular texts

might work. To teach critical literacy thus encourages the development of

alternative reading positions and practices for questioning and critiquing texts

and their affiliated social formations and cultural assumptions. It also entails

developing strategies for talking about, rewriting, and contesting the texts of

everyday life. (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 218)

When the students made connections between the CCs, the focal texts, and their own cultural resources, and evaluated those resources from critical perspectives they considered alternative interpretations and asked whether or not the text aligned with their own experiences.

Discussing Social Issues

Although all of the discussions with the CCs required the students to engage with the critical perspective of the CCs, not all of the discussions resulted in the students taking up the critical perspective. Morgan (1997) explained that “Critical literacy teaching begins by problematizing the cultures and knowledges of the text – putting them up for grabs, for critical debate, for weighing, judging, critiquing” (p.

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157). In some of the transcripts below the students interacted with the critical theory in the CCs in a way that did not problematize hegemonic norms, but instead served to reinforce dominant ideologies and reject the critical theory.

Below I have analyzed three conversations from Group B about the issue of rape and consent in the novel Speak (Anderson, 1999). In the first conversation the students were discussing the focal text without the CC; in the second, they were discussing the focal text with the CC but did not take up the critical perspective; and in the third they began to take up the critical perspective. The result is a more nuanced discussion of hegemonic norms, but not necessarily one that contradicts hegemonic norms.

It should be noted that the CC for Speak (Anderson, 2000) never mentions the novel. Instead it was written more generally so it could be used with a variety of young adult novels about rape and sexual assault. Though the students did discuss the narrative features of Speak while we were reading the CC, the focal text was not brought up frequently. It is possible that the lack of explicit references to the focal text in the CC was a contributing factor in the lack of intertextual references made to the novel during discussion of the CC.

Preceding the following conversations, the students were discussing why

Melinda, the main character in Speak (Anderson, 2000), did not fight back when she was raped. They argued that Melinda’s attacker only had two hands and so he could not cover her mouth and hold down both of her arms and both of her legs. All four of the participants commented that, if they had been in Melinda’s shoes they would have

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fought back. I asked why the students thought Melinda had not told anyone she was raped; Ashlee speculated that it was because Melinda was embarrassed that she had not fought back against her attacker.

Transcript 3.

Group B Students’ Discussion of Rape without the Critical Companion

Text Intertext proposed for the first time SARAH: If women can fight back so easily, why does this happen to so many of them? DEVINE: Maybe he was like stronger. AESHA: Because the men= RHIANNON: Oh the= ASHLEE: Multiple men when you're kidnapped, it's got to Impersonal be multiple men like if it's just one then it's generalized text not= AESHA: It's not that hard to get away RHIANNON: Like in a van, like in a white= SARAH: Well Melinda didn't get away and it was just one high school kid, it's not even like he had her tied up or anything he just= AESHA: But like if it's, like it's different if you have multiple men, if you have two men it's going to be like harder to get away because= ASHLEE: She was also drunk too so she didn't know what she was doing. AESHA: Yeah so= Continued

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Transcript 3 continued

RHIANNON: I want to tell a story that came to me4. Proposed ASHLEE: Like in her head she wanted to do something about it, but like she just couldn't do it. SARAH: So is it women's responsibility to not be drunk and to defend themselves? Or men's responsibility to not do it? ASHLEE: It's men's responsibility [to not-] AESHA: [It's men's] responsibility DEVINE: It was both their responsibilities. (transcript, 10/27/2016)

The students in this discussion about the focal text were arguing that it is women’s responsibility to defend themselves and men’s responsibility not to attack women. The message in this discussion about the focal text was that Melinda was complicit in her own rape because she did not fight back and because she was drunk.

Although I introduced a critical stance into the discussion, and the students engaged with the critical stance by responding to it, they never took up the critical stance themselves by pushing back against hegemonic norms.

To demonstrate how the CC and the critical theory sometimes functioned in conversations that confirmed hegemonic norms, I include a discussion that took place while reading the CC where the students continued to argue that rape victims have the

4 Rhiannon does attempt to introduce a new text into the conversation but her story is not shared within this excerpt. I described the story she eventually shared earlier when I explained how perceived truthfulness filtered intertextual references. Her story was about meeting a man who had a chopped up body in a bag. 202

responsibility of protecting themselves and are partly to blame if they did not take necessary precautions (e.g., by not getting drunk or “sexually flirting”). In this discussion their cultural resources are used to push back against the critical reading of the CC.

Transcript 4.

Group B Students’ First Discussion of Rape with the Critical Companion

Text Intertext proposed for the first time ASHLEE: Not really. AESHA: I got a question about that. ASHLEE: Because like they were just flirting with them, but Hypothetical event like if it was like sexually flirting, then that makes sense AESHA: Exactly. ASHLEE: But if it wasn't sexually flirting. SARAH: Is there a difference between sexually flirting and- ? ASHLEE: Like if they were showing themselves more. AESHA: Yeah, then it would make more sense but they've, if the girls just like flirting with the guy then= Continued

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Transcript 4 continued

SARAH: Wait you still, the girl is to blame even if she flirts with him? See, I really think that it's like, well still we're saying girl but we've all said the victim. DEVINE: I still don't understand why a girl would flirt with a guy she don't know? RHIANNON: Yeah. ASHLEE: Right. RHIANNON: Can't speak with strangers. Folk text SARAH: If you met somebody out, like when you're Hypothetical event older and you go out with your friends and you’re dating, you might meet a guy out that you think is attractive. AESHA: True, but like= DEVINE: Yeah, but you should like get to know him before you start= SARAH: But how do you get to know them without-? DEVINE: Like you can exchange numbers SARAH: But isn't that flirting? DEVINE: Yeah, but it's not like= AESHA: Like if you flirt you get to know that person more. RHIANNON: Yeah. AESHA: Like if you take them out on a date or something. RHIANNON: Hey this party's awesome! DEVINE: Yeah but I don't think it's sexual flirting because it's not like- SARAH: But what are you calling sexual flirting? Cause I just think that any kind of flirting is usually sexual if you like somebody. You don't flirt with someone you're not attracted to. AESHA: Like different types of flirting, there can like sexually, sexually, honestly I think sexually flirting is like you're like trying to show yourself like more. RHIANNON: Going up close to the guy. Continued

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Transcript 4 continued

SARAH: But even if I expose myself to some guy at a bar, just cause I've exposed myself that means I'm inviting him to rape me? ASHLEE: No but like, that just gets into his head. AESHA: Makes him think that. SARAH: But isn't it still his fault, shouldn't he have the self- control to not do that to me? ASHLEE: Exactly. DEVINE: I think like= ASHLEE: But the woman should be conscious. DEVINE: Yeah like, maybe like not hinting at something, hinting at it. RHIANNON: Even going close to the guy like "hi." (transcript 11/10/2016)

The students in this conversation used Ashlee’s intertextual reference to

“sexually flirting” to co-construct an understanding that there are different types of flirting. Sexually flirting, by their definition, includes exposing yourself, going up close to a guy, hinting at wanting sex, and consorting with strangers. Ashlee began the conversation by pushing back against the rape myth, arguing that rape victims did not necessarily flirt with their attackers before they were raped. However, she then offered a hypothetical event that she used to argue that a victim who sexually flirted with her attacker may have been putting ideas into their attacker’s head. Her intertextual connection was therefore used to confirm the rape myth she had initially been arguing against when she stated “Not really” in response to the CC.

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Rhiannon also proposed an intertextual connection to folk text, in this case a common moral from children’s stories, “can’t speak to strangers.” Again, Rhiannon’s intertextual reference served to support the rape myth; people become rape victims when they do not heed safety warnings. I proposed an intertextual reference to a hypothetical event in which the students might eventually flirt with a stranger that is attractive, but the students continued to assert that it is important to know someone before flirting with them. Other than Ashlee’s initial statement, I am the only participant who took on a critical perspective during this discussion.

From my review of the literature, I was aware that students often resist taking up critical perspectives (e.g., Chaisson, 2004; Glazier & Seo, 2005; Hall & Piazza,

2008; Lloyd, 2006). In their analysis of a small student led discussion group with tenth graders Thein, Guise, and Sloan (2011) found that, even though the students’ discussions were dialogic, interpretive, and engaged, the students did not take up critical perspectives, but rather interpreted the texts in ways that reinforced social norms instead of challenging them. The findings from Thein, Guise, and Sloan’s study appropriately describe the interaction among students in Group B on

11/10/2016. The students were engaged and the discussion appeared to be dialogic, but the students did not take up the critical perspective.

It is notable that, across all the discussions, Group B’s discussions about rape were the only discussions where students consistently resisted the critical perspective proposed by the CC. This resistance may have occurred for numerous reasons.

Perhaps the three racially heterogeneous groups that participated in this study were

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more aware of racial inequalities because of recent events in the news (e.g., the Black

Lives Matter Movement, the 2016 presidential election) and were therefore more willing to accept the perspectives of critical race theory and new historicism that were the dominant perspectives of the other CCs. It is also possible that the young women in Group B resisted the feminist perspective on rape because rape myths are extremely pervasive and socially ingrained (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994).

Park (2012) also conducted discussions with a group of seventh grade females about Speak and witnessed the students responding similarly to the rape of the main character. As in the discussions with Group B in the present research, the students in

Park’s study asserted that they would have fought back or not been drunk if they were in the main character’s position. In both Park’s research and my own, the participants response to the novel seemed to suggest that if the main character of Speak had taken better care of herself, she would have not been raped.

Rape myths often function by providing evidence that a victim deserved their misfortune (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994). In the first discussion above, the students in Group B argued that Melinda’s drunkenness brought on her rape and that victims should fight back. In the second discussion, the students argued that women who sexually flirt are asking for rape. According to Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994) this type of victim blaming serves to “reaffirm an individual’s false sense of security that they are somehow immune to rape” (p. 137). Even though one of the students in

Group B had disclosed in a prior conversation that she was sexually assaulted, in the conversation without the CC and the conversation with the CC the students persisted

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in arguing that victims were partially to blame for being assaulted. Perhaps blaming rape victims functioned to make the students in Group B feel safer.

Park (2012) argued that even though the seventh graders in her research did not question the structural and ideological forces that shaped their realities, they did work toward a critical reading of the text by grappling with difficult question of who is responsible in instances of sexual violence. The same could be said for Group B’s discussion about rape and responsibility; even though the students did not take up the critical perspective of the CC, they did engage with the perspective and entered into a discussion about a topic that is often considered too challenging for adolescent students.

Despite the resistance that the students in Group B offered against the feminist theory that pervaded the CC, their discussions did begin to alter their original understanding of the concepts of rape and consent. In a subsequent conversation while reading the CC, the students were again discussed the topic of consent and the reason why rape victims often do not tell others that they have been raped. The students’ construction of consent was more nuanced in this third discussion.

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Transcript 5.

Group B Students’ Second Discussion of Rape with the Critical Companion

Text Intertext proposed for the first time ASHLEE: No, but like in the last sentence it says why, or Like why would they not speak out? That's a question. AESHA: Cause sometimes like people don't like it says cause maybe like, they're scared, like maybe or frightened. RHIANNON: Is rape even illegal? Maybe they don't want to Impersonal speak out "Oh I just raped someone" and the generalized text police come. AESHA: Yes it's illegal. SARAH: Did you just, did you just see that news story Media about there was a, it's a really horrible news story in um, oh I can't even remember the university. Some guy that was on the college swim team at one of the universities, I want to say it was Connecticut, was caught, caught, he was raping a girl outside a bar um, and two guys came past and saw him doing it and so there is no question as to whether or not he raped her. She was passed out when he was raping her, and two guys walked up and saw them and he went to trial and got one month in jail, or something ridiculous. ASHLEE: One month AESHA: [One month] RHIANNON: [One month] AESHA: He should have got like, not life. RHIANNON: A year AESHA: Not life but= ASHLEE: a little awhile Continued

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Transcript 5 continued

SARAH: Well especially when you think that you can rob a Impersonal store and steal like something and get- generalized text DEVINE: XX she's unconscious. RHIANNON: She was drunk sooo. AESHA: The crazy thing is that the two guys walked past and said nothing SARAH: No, they stopped it, they stopped it AESHA: Oh RHIANNON: Good job for them. AESHA: You didn't tell me about them. SARAH: Yes, no the two guys walked past and saw it and stopped it, but the p- I was saying, like there's no question that happened. AESHA: That's he only got one month, I would have Hypothetical event gave him like= RHIANNON: Two or three. ASHLEE: A year. AESHA: I would have gave him like four. SARAH : I need to look up the story so I can give you the specifics of it but it's like= RHIANNON: She was drunk soooo AESHA: That still doesn't give him the right SARAH: The point is that what happens to this girl? She's got to go home and tell her parents that this happened DEVINE: She's just sitting at her parents. RHIANNON: She probably had too much alcohol. SARAH: Well, she did, she was passed out drunk, but I still, it's still like= ASHLEE: Shouldn't have happened. AESHA: It shouldn't have happened. RHIANNON: This is why alcohol should be illegal. Continued

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Transcript 5 continued

SARAH: But the point is that she has to go home and tell her parents that she, that this happened to her while she was passed out, like that, that would be embarrassing, that would be really embarrassing, and your friends to tell them that that happened and then the court system basically says it doesn't matter like, cause he's a star athlete. DEVINE: Something like that happened to me, because Personal or you know how I told you about how my mom's personally-related ex-husband tried to molest me3, yeah and my event and Previous mom took me to the doctors to see if he had, I discussion don't know the word of it. SARAH: An STD? Generalized knowledge DEVINE: No, he like something in me, I don't know how to say it, what's that word? AESHA: AIDS? Generalized knowledge SARAH: Like a disease? RHIANNON: P? @@@ DEVINE: Yeah something in me and then= RHIANNON: Pregnant? Generalized knowledge DEVINE: Like, no. SARAH: Go ahead DEVINE: They went and tested him and asked him questions and they didn't charge him with nothing. SARAH: So similar thing where he did something really horrible, you told, you said about it and then nothing, he had no consequences for it. Which is why I, partly why I think, that would keep me from wanting to say something, cause what's the point of saying something I have to go through all that embarrassment and then he's not going to get any consequences of it? AESHA: Yeah basically, that story you just told. RHIANNON: Yeah I would have smacked him after and been Hypothetical event like [punches air], “I'm calling the police!” Continued 211

Transcript 5 continued

ASHLEE: That's why threaten when like before she started, some whoever started reading, I said threaten because of after you read that sentence because they might have been threatened. SARAH: Threatened? ASHLEE: To not say anything about it. (transcript, 11/14/2016)

In this discussion about rape, the participants not only engaged with the critical perspective offered by the CC, but also took it up in a way that modified their understanding of why rape victims do not always speak out. Ashlee began the conversation by asking why rape victims do not speak out and Aesha responded by making a connection to an impersonal generalized text claiming that victims might be scared. Rhiannon then offered a connection to another impersonal generalized text claiming that rapists may not want to tell the police, and I shared a connection to a media text about the story of a swimmer who raped an unconscious woman on a college campus. My connection suggested that rape victims do not speak out because their attackers are not given adequate punishment. Rhiannon, Aesha, and Ashlee extended this connection by suggesting different sentences that the swimmer should have received.

In contrast to the discussions described earlier, in this discussion, when

Rhiannon repeatedly pointed out that the victim from the news story I shared was

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drunk, Ashlee, Aesha and I all remarked that the rape still should not have happened.

This resulted in Rhiannon making a slight shift in her stance, asserting that alcohol should be illegal, suggesting that alcohol abuse was a societal problem and not something for which the rape victim was entirely responsible.

When I note that the woman who was raped by the Stanford swimmer

(FoxNews.com, 2016) was subjected to a lot of embarrassment and trauma and the rapist received only a short sentence, Devine reminded the group that she had been sexually assaulted. She remarked that after being assaulted she was subjected to testing but her stepfather did not receive any consequences for assaulting her.

Devine’s personal connection extended the news story. Furthermore, while attempting to help Devine figure out the name for what her stepfather had done, the group lists potential consequences for rape victims (e.g., STDs, AIDS, diseases, pregnancy), constructing an understanding that rape victims suffer consequences beyond the emotional trauma they experience during rape.

This conversation is more reflective of the feminist perspective, and the intertextual connections students offered contributed to an understanding of rape that was more nuanced than the prior two discussions; it is not right to rape an unconscious girl, and rape victims are kept silent by a system that punishes them for speaking out. It is noteworthy that the students built upon each other’s intertextual references to create an understanding of rape trauma. In this discussion, the students considered the references critically and co-constructed an understanding of a criminal justice system that does not deliver justice for rape victims.

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The subtle shifts in students’ thinking about rape and the sometimes contradictory attitudes they expressed during discussion are in line with the research of Thein, Beach, and Parks (2007) who conducted research with eleventh and twelfth grade students in a diverse urban high school. Thein, Beach, and Parks concluded that changes in students’ beliefs and attitudes may happen slowly, over the course of many years. However, they argued that students often experience changes that are

“subtle, usually transitory, and frequently contradictory, that increase their understandings of how their beliefs and values are formed and why other people think differently” (p. 55). In Group B, the students understanding of rape and consent evolved slowly over time.

Moving Towards a Critical Perspective Without the Critical Companion

During our book club meetings, Group A chose to read American Born

Chinese (Yang, 2005), the graphic novel version of Monster (Myers & Sims, 1999), the screenplay of Monster (Myers, 1999) and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part

Time Indian (Alexie, 2007). The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian was the fourth and final novel they decided to read. The CCs for these texts are cothematic

(Lemke, 1992) because they deal with the experiences of different minority groups.

Group A’s discussion of their final focal text without the CC demonstrated some of the characteristics of their earlier discussions with the CCs. The co-thematic nature of the focal texts and the CCs read by the students in Group A may have contributed to the students’ application of the critical theory from the CCs to their discussion of the focal text. Sipe (2001) used numerous variants of Rapunzel in read alouds with first

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and second grade students and found that “a series of variants of the same story seems to be a powerful way of encouraging intertextual connections” (p. 349). It is not entirely surprising, then, that reading a series of co-thematic texts might also have produced more intertextual connections.

The following discussion with Group A occurred after I asked the students for their impressions of the reservation that Junior, the main character, in The Absolutely

True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007), lived on. Trent shared that the reservation was poor and gloomy and A.J. added “depressed”:

Transcript 6.

Group A Students’ Discussion of Social Issues in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part

Time Indian without the Critical Companion

Text Intertext proposed for the first time

MARIA: It's not what society would think... like usually Impersonal society thinks people on an Indian reservation generalized text have like feathers in their hair and like dance around do animal stuff, but they're just mostly alcoholics. SARAH: Why do you think that there's so many alcoholics on the Indian reservation? MYA: Because they're all really depressed, and they're trying to like cancel that out. SARAH: So they drink? MYA: Yes. SARAH: Why are they all depressed? MYA: Because they're poor. Continued 215

Transcript 6 continued

SARAH: Why are they poor then? … MYA: The fact that they're poor, I think they tried to Impersonal cancel out everything that they had and so they generalized text had nothing then they had no choice but to follow the Christian religion but that didn't work so they used up everything they had um with the invading and stuff and tried, and they used up everything they had and that's why they're poor. So that's why. Tried to make, they tried to make a new life for themselves after all that happened and they don't have much so that's why they're poor I'm guessing A.J.: You know how on CNN they, this is on topic, Media they was talking about that dude who played football I forgot which team, but he didn't stand for the flag. TRENT: Oh yeah cause he was trying to support um Black Impersonal Lives so he kneeled down on one knee. generalized text A.J.: He did that because he know that that way back in what United States stands for wasn't always good like, um, like equal rights, it wasn't like Impersonal that back then like for like Indians too, like generalized text others like like White people in America were treated better than every than every different culture and that's why he didn't stand cause he knew that they was, that they was um, that America was never great. And I got something I gotta say about Donald Trump, he said he gonna Impersonal make America great again. America was never generalized text that great as he thinks, MYA: TRENT: That wasn't off topic. A.J.: That wasn't really off topic. SARAH: So tell me, did you hear him say that, or are you inferring that the football player thinks? A.J.: I'm inferring. TRENT: He said it. Continued

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Transcript 6 continued

SARAH: He did say it? I know it was for the Black Lives Matter, I just wasn't sure if he said it was because of stuff that had happened. TRENT: Oh he said it was because of Black Lives Matter, I don't know about the other stuff. SARAH: So you think America has never really been equal? You think it's equal? We've, everybody's got equal rights now? Or you think it just, we never- MYA: It's still not fair, they just found a new way to cope with that problem. SARAH: Who did? MYA: America, like we can respect each other at our own basis. SARAH: You think we do respect each other? A.J.: No, I think racism still goes on this day and I think equal rights is better but it's not equal. SARAH: What makes you say that A.J.? A.J.: Because like- MYA: We respect each other more and we don't try to go at each other's neck as much. A.J.: Well not as much but it's still, it's better now but Impersonal it's still not equal like cops still get away with generalized text things that like it's better now, as I said, it's better now but cops still get away with shooting. SARAH: Yeah and not just cops but- MYA: Other people too. A.J.: Yeah. SARAH: Are the Native Americans in the book being treated fairly? A.J. So there's still reservations? That’s going on today? MYA: But they have no other choice but to stay there because they don't have any money. Continued

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Transcript 6 continued

SARAH: So, like that's what I'm talking about as being like systematic inequality where it's not like no body's forcing them to stay there so it's not as violent looking, nobody's killing them, nobody's holding guns to their head, but we're still sort of killing them if we put them on a reservation where they're drinking themselves to death and not giving them options. A.J.: So they can't come to Ohio? TRENT: If you disobey the reservation tribe or whatever, cause he [Junior, the main character in the focal text] disobeyed them by leaving and going to like White- MYA: Spoiler alert TRENT: So. MYA: So. TRENT: It's with topic. And they, they get mad at him, they [the other characters in the book] got like angry. … MARIA: I've got a question. SARAH: Uh huh MARIA: This is like the third book we've read about Written equality and segregation are all the books about that, cause we've read one about Asian people in America, Black people in America, Indian people in America is this like the theme of all the books that we're reading? SARAH: No, well I was looking for books when I picked books for us to look at I looked at books that were highly censored so books that have been on the banned books list so these books just happened to make the banned books list5 TRENT: Wouldn't Anne Frank kind of be like our books Written that we're reading because the Nazi's and the Jews kind of like this, the Jews are like treated badly. Continued

5 This is an inaccurate statement. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) is on the American Library Association’s (2015) most frequently banned books list, but Monster (Myers, 1999) and American Born Chinese (Yang, 2005) are not. 218

Transcript 6 continued

SARAH: Oh yeah, what makes you compare the Jews to the Native Americans? TRENT: Because um, just like the Native Americans are like, like the Whites look at them all weird like cause when he first went to a White school he was like the only one there and like nobody moved when he was there, they all just stared at him. And like, kinda like with the Nazi's and Jews like the Jews were treated um horribly kind of like he's being treated horribly by, I think White people, I think and like Nazis, wait, I don't think, didn't Nazi's not like Jews because- MARIA: Haven't you ever heard of the Holocaust? Impersonal generalized text TRENT: Yes, because of the blond hair and blue eyes. (transcript, 11/29/2016)

The numerous references in this discussion move across time, space, and text.

Several books emerged as intertexts: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time

Indian (Alexie, 2007), Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015), American Born

Chinese (Yang, 2005), and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank, 1952).

Several other texts emerged as intertexts: The Black Lives Matter Movement, the

Holocaust, police shootings, and Colin Kaepernick (a football player in the United

States who would not stand for the pledge of allegiance). These references were sparked by Mya’s initial comment that the Native American’s were poor because they were forced to be Christians, suffered from colonization, and used up all of their resources trying to make a new life for themselves. A.J. extended Mya’s assessment

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of the problems plaguing Native Americans by referencing Colin Kaepernick’s protest in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement. A.J. inferred that

Kaepernick’s protest was inspired by the recognition that equality has never existed in the United States for African Americans or Native Americans and he argued that presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again,” was inaccurate because “America was never that great as he [Donald Trump] thinks.” The other students recognized and extended A.J.’s contribution by asserting that things in the United States were more equal than they used to be, but still not equal.

Maria made connections to the focal texts that the students in Group A had read previously, noting that all of the books were about equality. Trent extended this further by suggesting that Anne Frank was similar to the books the group read and then connected the treatment of the Native Americans to the Holocaust. The students critically engaged with the numerous texts introduced in this discussion and considered that inequality has been present throughout history and continues to be present in the actions of the police, Donald Trump, and in the general way American citizens treat each other (which the students asserted is “better but not equal”).

Through all of the intertextual references the students took up critical race theory and co-constructed an understanding that social inequalities across time, location, and text were the result of systemic inequality.

The co-construction of the contribution of systematic inequality to living conditions of various groups of people in the United States, apparent in this

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discussion on 11/29/2016, stands in stark contrast to an earlier discussion where the students had shared that Steve, the character on the cover of Monster (Myers & Sims,

2015), looked guilty because he had a broad nose, big lips, and was born in the hood

(transcript, 10/18/2016). When I challenged the students’ description, A.J. said that

Steve looked “like Black people” and therefore looked guilty because “the percent of black people, the percent that they had of like shooting, people shooting is black,” by which he meant that Black people commit more crimes than White people. When I asked why the group thought Black people committed more crimes than White people

Mya said “both my brother and my sister has ADHD and they have both been to jail so like … genetics.” As Mya and A.J. both identified as Black, their responses were illustrative of internalized racism. Carter (2007) defined internalized racism as “self- blame and feeling responsible in the context of racism” (p. 36). After reading the CC for Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015), I revisited the topic of crime in

Black communities with Group A and this time Mya looked up a local crime map which confirmed her belief that Black people commit more crimes because the neighborhoods that she believed were predominantly Black had higher crime rates.

She explained:

Most African Americans live in poverty. They don't have good jobs to pay for

things that they actually want and need so they steal things that they can't have

this isn't really a problem to Caucasian people because, segregation. They had

good jobs good families, things to eat, good houses and stuff like that so they

didn't really have problems back then… to now here in the present people still

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don't have good jobs and houses and roofs over their heads. (transcript,

10/31/2016)

A.J. agreed with her noting, “Yep, it all starts with segregation.”

Kirkland (2015) wrote:

The massive use of state power to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Black

and Brown bodies; the de facto legalization of murder against the Children of

the Rainbow; chronic and mass un(der)employment; devastated, wasted, and

occupied communities; heightened state surveillance; and the like are but a

few of the looming examples of our current state of inequities. For Black lives

to matter, for Black life to endure, these inequities must be dismantled. (par.

Over the course of reading the various focal texts and discussing the CCs, the self-blame and internalized racism that predominated the conversation on 10/18/2016 was slowly dismantled. Through the discussions, the students recognized larger social injustices that contribute to social, political, and economic inequality.

Encouraging students to recognize multiple perspectives is at the heart of critical literacy pedagogy. In this research critical literary theories were used to read and resist harmful ideologies. Students did not just read the word critically, but also the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987) as they extended their critical interpretations to include numerous texts originating from their cultural resources.

The students continued to discuss the focal texts as text participants but also

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began to react to the texts with an increasingly critical orientation; the critical literacy practices they enacted did not supplant the literacy practices they brought to the group, but rather became integrated with those practices, creating a hybrid (Bakhtin,

1981). In Pappas et al.’s (2013) research with collaborative read aloud discussions, the researchers argued that the intertextual links that the students shared during dialogic interactions contributed to the heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) nature of the discussions because the students’ references introduced multiple viewpoints for consideration. Pappas et al. asserted that this heteroglossia contributed to the hybrid

(Bakhtin, 1981) nature of the discourse and that hybridization worked to transform the classroom discourse.

Cuddon (2014) defined hybridity as “the characteristic of a culture or a cultural form produced by the interaction of two (or possibly more) separate ‘parent’ cultures or forms” (p. 344). Pappas et al.’s (2013) argument could be extended to the present research, where the students’ intertextual references contributed multiple and competing voices to the discussions. Furthermore, as students considered the focal texts and their cultural resources from critical perspectives, they integrated the literacy practices that were in place in the group from the outset with critical literacy practices, creating a hybrid discourse. As Pappas et al. (2003) pointed out “hybridity is one of the most important modes for transforming social discourse” (p. 441) because it allows students to contribute their cultural resources to the process of co- constructing an understanding of literature and the social contexts in which the literature is read and written.

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How Discussions Impacted Students’ Views

Once, sitting down at the beginning of the book club discussion, A.J. said

“When we talk my brain goes,” he threw his hands up in the air, splayed apart his fingers, wiggled them around, and then brought his hands together and intertwined them – signaling that his brain was making connections as the group dialogued

(transcript, 11/8/2016). The transcripts in the previous section illustrate the ways in which students often used intertexts to enact critical literacy practices. As a result of these discussions and the use of the CCs, the students articulated changes in their thinking about the focal text and the relevant social issue. Research question four asked if the students’ views of the focal text and the relevant social issue changed during discussions with the CCs. In this final section of the chapter I address this question.

According to students’ responses during interviews, the CCs changed their perspectives on the focal texts. For instance, Mya noted that the CCs were “very informative about um, even if parts of the book were confusing they um, they helped me understand most parts of the book and how the authors and um, everyone else that worked on the book, see other readers, um see how other readers um, um read the book, see how they feel about it” (interview, 12/19/2016). She then gave an example with American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) explaining that “I was thinking about how other um other Asian people that read this book, is, I was thinking about um how they would react to Chin-Kee acting over the top cause most people, Asian people aren’t like that.” Mya’s response reflected an understanding that texts validate different

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voices, and opinions and acknowledged that there were multiple ways of interpreting the focal text. She noted that an Asian person might have interpreted the book differently than her and been offended by the over-the-top depiction of Chin-Kee.

These understandings reflect a critical perspective on the text.

In American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) Chin-Kee dances on a table in the school’s library singing “She Bangs” by Ricky Martin. His performance is an allusion to William Hung’s famously butchered performance of the same song on American

Idol. Hung had bad hair, buckteeth, and a bad accent. The video was viewed over more than 1.3 million times on YouTube (Hathaway, 2009). The CC describes

Hung’s performance and questions why the video was viewed so frequently. Because the students in Group C noted that they were unfamiliar with Hung’s performance, we watched the video during one of our meetings. During the discussion, Alessandra noted that that section of the book did not make her uncomfortable initially, but it did after she read the CC and saw the video “Because at first we didn't know that this was coming from an actual person that's name is Hung and it's basically like making fun of that person” (transcript, 10/5/2016). Alessandra had not initially understood the allusion to Hung’s performance in the focal text, but after reading the CC and watching Hung’s performance, she recognized Chin-Kee’s performance of the Ricky

Martin song to be offensive and changed her interpretation of Chin-Kee’s character.

Again, in this example Alessandra considered how an allusion in the text represented the texts ideational content, which caused her to reconsider her understanding of what the focal text was trying to do to her as a reader.

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In another example, during an interview with Sahra about Esperanza Rising

(Ryan, 2000), I asked her if reading the CC had helped her to understand the novel.

She responded that she did not think the CC had anything to do with the focal text:

SAHRA: It's [the CC] mostly not about Esperanza, it's mostly about farmers and people like going, people like crossing the border and stuff... In Esperanza Rising only two seconds of the book is about this, and they make the process look quick but= SARAH: For crossing the border? SAHRA: Yeah SARAH: What about her working in the farm camp and striking and stuff? SAHRA: But she didn't really work, she only worked, and when she worked she seemed like it was easy and like but like the striking um, in here [pointing to the CC] it looks way much, it seems way more serious because, but like in both they said that um the people took risks. It's both the same because in both they were getting like arrested and like sent back and stuff. (interview, 12/14/2016).

Because the novel did not represent the realities of border crossing in the same way as the CC did, Sahra perceived the contradictions between the focal text and the CC as disconnects. Although Esperanza Rising does go some way towards depicting the tribulations faced by migrant farm workers (e.g., the dangers of immigration, fear of deportation, exhausting working conditions, and substandard housing), as Sahra has observed, Esperanza’s fictional experiences are difficult, but not as dangerous as the real experiences of many migrant farm workers. For instance, in the focal text,

Esperanza and her mother flee two of Esperanza’s violent uncles in Mexico, but other than the threat Esperanza faces from her uncles, she crosses the border from Mexico to the U.S. without incident. In reality, many immigrants risk death from heat-related illnesses while crossing long stretches of dessert, or from drowning while crossing

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waterways into California and Texas (Marosi, 2005). When Sahra noted the discrepancy between the Esperanza’s story and the CC, she was in fact sharing a critical reading of the novel.

The CCs often contributed to the students’ thinking about a novel’s theme or purpose. For instance, when I interviewed Maria about her understanding of Monster

(Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) she shared that she thought the purpose of the novel was to “show how like Black people get convicted like more than White people and then like more like viewed as Black people in society” (interview, 12/1/2016). I asked her how she came to this conclusion:

MARIA: … after a few sessions I understood the book more about what it was about cause I got like more inside detail about it and about the book SARAH: Um, can you tell me about, like your exactly, if you can give me a little bit more details about what made you think about the book that way? MARIA: Um so he would like go through like flashbacks and stuff and then like stuff like that, and then it sort of built up over time of like he's Black so he doesn't really get that many chances. He lives in the hood and like he has a poor family and stuff. SARAH: Uh huh MARIA: And also because of that Critical Companion thing that we read about like why Black people are more on trial on than White people and White people are more trusted. SARAH: So can you tell me a little bit more about the Critical Companion? Like just what did you think of it? Did it impact your understanding of the book? MARIA: Well I think the Critical Companion helped a lot with trying to understand the book and its purpose and everything and it gave a lot of details, like numbers, statistics, and everything about African Americans that I did not know about at all. SARAH: Uh huh MARIA: I, cause I thought they were just like, I knew that Black people are like more convicted of jail but I didn't think it would be that much higher of a percentage than White people. SARAH: Uh huh MARIA: So it made me sort of like think about more of equality in society between Black and White people. 227

(interview, 12/1/2016)

Maria felt that the statistics in the CC caused her to think about how Black people are treated in society and how the focal texts reflected those biases.

The CC also caused A.J. to reflect on the biases in the U.S. criminal justice system in relationship to Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015), noting that:

It [the CC] says your brain doesn't fully mature until 25 so I liked how it did

that. So, like since it's said that I'm thinking like why are 16, 16 year olds

getting like, like Black 16 year olds getting harsh punishments when

scientifically it says that your brain don't mature until your 25? I know they

should be charged if they really did it, but they shouldn't get like a harsh, like

if's their first time they shouldn't get like a harsh punishment. (interview,

12/1/2016)

When I asked A.J. how that information made him feel about Steve, the main character of Monster, he said:

That makes me feel that he made a big mistake because he wanted to feel

good about himself I think because um they, they [other characters in the

novel] called him, they called him a word, like a chicken, something like that.

And since they called him that word he, he said he gone prove them wrong, he

gone prove them wrong and so he um, so he helped out and he made a huge

mistake and that was only his first mistake so I think he should have been

punished harsh. (interview, 12/1/2016)

The CC provided A.J. with background information that caused him to rethink his

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understanding of the criminal justice system in the United States and the way that the main character in Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) was treated by the courts.

The students’ intertextual references were an important part of the processes through which they extended their critical reading of the focal text to consider other texts and events in their lives. During an interview, A.J. articulated how the connection he made to his uncle’s incarceration altered the way he thought about

Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) remarking that:

It impacted the way I understood Monster because how um, like how they’re

treated, like how Black Americans are treated like as, as I said, like when he

[Steve, the main character in Monster] came into the courtroom they already

believed he was guilty so when they see Black people, like when they see

them come to the court, it’s like they don’t care if he’s, if they’re really

innocent, they um, they want to make them guilty. (interview, 12/1/2016)

A.J.’s connection changed the way that he thought about the book and about his uncle’s situation, and it also impacted how the other students understood the events of the novel and the criminal justice system in the United States. During interviews

Trent, Maria, and Mya all shared how A.J.’s story had made the issues in the focal text and CC more real to them. Maria said:

I think that A.J.'s story about his uncle sort of changed how I thought about

White and Black people like um his, his uncle's on trial for something he

didn't do and that's only because he's, that's, that's how society is cause White

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and Black people that's just bad and it's just like wow like your uncle's on trial

just cause he's Black, it's just like a really, like it changed how I thought cause

I thought it was just like ‘Oh well society, yeah.’ Thought it was just, but this

is actually what's, what's really happening, this, this is what's happening in

society and he's, he's Black. Black and white there's a big difference, and that's

racism. (interview, 12/6/2016)

It is through the students’ connections that the CCs worked to extend the students’ critical interpretation of their own worlds and those critical readings extended beyond just their personal experiences to include a variety of other texts. For example, Mya informed me that reading the CC had caused her to re-think her understanding of the characters in the Blueford series. When I asked her to explain she shared that:

It [the CC] connected by African Americans, how it was the first book I read,

was about how some people just want to fit in they don't want an actual

education they just want to be expected um um included by the public, and I

was reading about this one character, Jamal, that got held back twice and he

was a sophomore, and like he didn't know how to read and his little sister had

to teach him how to read, and stuff like that, and in the book it was very

realizing that some people don't have the advantages of other people.

(interview, 12/19/2016)

These instances where students used the CC to think about their cultural resources reflected their critical thinking about the world outside the focal text. Maria informed me that after Group A read three books where the CCs focused on racism in the U.S.,

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she thought about racism a lot more:

Because we've read how like Asian people in America, Black people in

America and Native Americans in America and like before that I was just like

"yeah racism in society, whatever" and then what's actually in the book, with

the books I actually started thinking about how more racism this world and

America really is … That I'm just not aware about and it just made me think

about how like different everybody is and we're not, as a whole we're sort of

just divided in little groups and then we're just judged by what group you're

in…And uh it's like you you give stereotypes in every single group like White

people are horrible because of slavery and then black people are horrible

because they steel and like stuff like that. (interview, 12/6/2016)

Becoming critically literate means critically reading the word and the world

(Friere & Macedo, 1987) and therefore intertextuality was an important part of how students came to demonstrate critical literacy practices. Through their connections to other texts from their own experiences—their cultural resources—the students critically read both the word of the focal text and the world that the focal texts reflect.

By using their cultural resources as knowledge sources, the participants questioned their position as socially constructed beings.

In this chapter, I used the heuristic of the Intertextual Take Up Model to examine what aspects of the CC the students responded to during discussions, and how the students responded to the specific features of the CC by using their cultural resources to make intertextual references during discussions. Students did not accept

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all intertextual references as equally valid. Instead, truth and topicality served as filters that regulated whether intertextual references were appropriate or inappropriate.

I also analyzed the discourse in several book club discussions to demonstrate how students employed critical literacy practices differently over the course of the discussions, leading them to sometimes challenge and sometimes reinforce hegemonic norms. As the students juxtaposed the CC, the focal text, and their cultural resources, they revised their thinking about the focal text and the relevant social issues.

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CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION

Over a 15 week period, seventh and eighth grade students from an urban charter school read and discussed young adult novels and Critical Companions (CCs) that were written from a critical literary perspective in order to provoke critical literacy practices during discussion of the novels. In critical literacy approaches, students are involved in analyzing the impact of capitalism, colonialism, and inequitable economic relations (Luke, 2012). This research involved the use of CCs that provided critical literary lenses through which adolescents could examine these issues as they were manifested in young adult literature.

In this chapter, I begin by reviewing the research questions and stating the main conclusions from this research. Next, I address the limitations of the study. I conclude by considering implications, lingering questions, and directions for future research.

Review of the Research Questions

The questions posed in this research grew out of the theoretical framing of this study, drawing from sociocultural, intertextual, and critical literacy theories. This theoretical framing led me to an understanding that what can be said in a particular context is governed by the social conventions and culture of that particular context

(Morgan, 1998). My research questions, therefore, focused on the role of the social

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construction of intertextuality in the implementation of critical literacy practices because, as noted by Bloome & Egan Robertson (1993), “As a heuristic, the social construction of intertextuality can emphasize the interactional work that people do in local events to invoke broader social, cultural, and political contexts” (p. 331).

My first research question asked: What aspects of the CC do seventh and eighth grade students from high-level classes in an urban charter school respond to when they talk about the focal text and the social issues that are relevant to the focal text? The textual features of the CC that the students responded to were a component of the intertextual substance of the book club discussions. During discussions of the

CCs, I found that students in the book club responded to the theory, factual information, stated stereotypes and common (mis)understandings, quotes from the author, confusing passages, and questions that were embedded in the CC. Critical literary theories were used to frame the composition of the CCs and nearly every textual feature of the CCs was impacted by these frames. Therefore, when students responded to specific features of the CCs, their response often led the discussion participants to engage with the CCs critical frame.

Although neither the CCs nor the students ever named the critical literary theory that they drew on, the students sometimes explicitly responded to the theories during discussion. When students drew on the theory in the CCs to provoke discussion, their responses generated conversation around alternative readings of the text and their social worlds. Other researchers have suggested that literary theories are useful for problematizing adolescent readers’ common sense assumptions about the

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world (Appleman, 2015a, 2015b; Soter, 1999) but my review of the literature yielded little empirical evidence to substantiate this claim. My research suggests that literary theories are indeed useful tools for students to use when considering texts from multiple perspectives, as well as problematizing hegemonic norms and dominant ideologies.

The theories that the CCs were written from permeated every component of these texts, including the selection of facts that were used throughout the CCs. During discussion the students often responded to these facts. Their response elicited further dialogue where students connected events to the focal texts or their own lives to the facts presented in the CC. Because the facts were embedded in the critical perspective, the students’ response to these facts frequently challenged or supported the critical perspective.

In order to present multiple perspectives, each CC contained statements about what some people might think about the topics the CC addressed. Students often responded to these statements. As the statements either supported or contradicted the critical perspective of the CC, when the students agreed or disagreed with a statement, they aligned themselves either in support of or against the critical theoretical perspective that undergirded the CC. In this way, the statements about other people’s beliefs enabled the critical perspective of the CC to become a driving force in the discussion.

Several CCs also contained quotes from the author of the focal text. In these quotes, the author of the focal text often explained the ways in which they made

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intentional decisions in the construction of the text, or their motivation behind constructing the focal text in specific ways. When the students responded to quotes from the author, they were required to acknowledge that people with particular orientations and ideologies constructed the focal texts. In Freebody and Luke’s (1990)

Four Resources Model, when readers operate as text analysts they consider what the text is trying to do to them and whose opinions, voices, and interests are at play in the text. Acknowledging the author’s role in shaping the text is an important step towards implementing these critical literacy practices.

Confusing passages in the CCs were often the impetus for discussions. This suggests texts that challenge students meaning making skills, or their skills that enable them to be successful text participants, may be productive for discussions that problematize hegemonic norms. When challenged by the text, the students worked together to co-construct meaning from the CCs. When students brought their cultural resources to bear on the meaning making process, the result was an understanding of how their social worlds connected to the textual worlds of the focal texts and the CCs.

The CCs contained questions embedded throughout the text with the hope of provoking readers to take a stance on the information that was presented. The students used the questions that were embedded in the CCs as entry points for dialogue. Because the questions asked students to consider the social issues in the

CCs, these questions led to dialogue in which the group members co-constructed an understanding of the social justice issue under question.

Altogether, these features of the CC appear to have played an important role

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for students in shaping the types of connections that were possible and acceptable during book club discussions. Because the students consistently responded to the aforementioned features, the CCs became an important aspect of the intertextual substance that the book club groups co-constructed as they developed relationships between and among texts. As the CCs were written from critical literary theories, those theories permeated all of the features of the CCs. Therefore, when the students responded to the CCs, they were often responding to the critical theory. Teachers frequently resist the idea that adolescent students can engage in discussions around issues of social, economic, and political power (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Ngo, 2003;

Swartz, 2003; Thein, 2013), and yet the present research demonstrated that students can make use of literary theory to examine their ideology, hegemonic norms, and the ideology of the author.

My second research question asked: How do seventh and eighth grade students from high-level classes in an urban charter school respond to the CCs when they talk about the focal text and the social issues relevant to the focal text? When students were reading and discussing the CCs, they made intertextual references to the characters, setting, plot, theme, and author of the focal text. Because the textual features of the CCs were the impetus for these discussions and because the CCs were written from critical literary perspectives, when the students made connections between the narrative features of the focal texts and the CCs, these connections led to dialogue that explored the ways in which different possible meanings could be constructed from the focal texts.

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Beyond connecting the CC to the focal text, the students also made intertextual connections to their cultural resources. They connected the CC to other written texts, things they had seen on the TV or internet, impersonal generalized texts, personal generalized texts, folk texts, previous discussions the group had had, hypotheticals, personal generalized events, personal or personally related events, and hearsay. The various resources students used to make meaning from the text were important components of the intertextual substance because they demonstrated the range of resources that students brought to the discussions. This range is significant because it extended beyond the CC and the focal text to include texts that the students felt were meaningful and productive for understanding, thus honoring the students’ resources and creating a more dialogic discussion.

Critical literacy approaches emphasize the understanding that learners’ cultural resources are shaped by their race, class culture, gender, language, sexual orientation, and physical abilities (Luke & Freebody, 1997). As the students’ connections were sparked by the CC and the CC was written to problematize dominant ideologies and hegemonic norms, the students’ connections to their cultural resources often led them to consider their personal experiences and the experiences of others differently. The participants’ juxtaposition of various texts to deconstruct taken-for-granted ideologies in this research mirrors previous work conducted by

Shuart-Faris (2004) who, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, found that intertextuality enabled the students and the teacher in her research to problematize ideological constructs. Taken together, the findings from this research and the research of Shuart-

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Faris suggest that, through dialogue and the elucidation of intertextual references, discussion participants can co-construct complex webs of meaning that result in the deployment of critical literacy practices. In the present research the complex web of meaning resulted in a heteroglossic understanding of the focal texts as well as the social issues that were relevant to the focal texts.

It is important to acknowledge that not every turn at talk taken by students during discussion of the CCs led to an intertextual reference. Sometimes students simply responded expressively, making statements such as “Wow” or “That’s interesting!” However, these statements frequently co-occurred with an intertextual reference. Similarly, sometimes students marked text for conversation, noting “I want to talk about this” or asking a question about a section of the CC. These types of comments were almost always followed up by another student making an intertextual connection as they responded to the section in the text that the first student had marked for conversation.

My third research question asked: What cultural resources are highlighted and supported during discussions? How are the book club participants’ cultural resources highlighted and supported? Exploring the students’ intertextual links to written texts, things they had seen on the TV or internet, impersonal generalized texts, personal generalized text, folk texts, previous discussions the group had had, hypotheticals, personal generalized events, personal or personally related events, and hearsay enabled me to identify and understand the cultural resources that the students possessed. Furthermore, identifying these resources helped me to conceptualize how

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the students’ resources became semiotic tools that contributed to the joint construction of knowledge during the book club discussions.

Not all cultural resources were legitimized during the discussions. Luke and

Freebody (1997) noted that “the selective process that leads some texts to be used in instruction and others not to be is necessarily a process of ideological selection, regardless of any other criteria that might explicitly come into play when materials are chosen” (p. 206). In the present research, the participants carried out the process of ideological selection as they established boundaries for what cultural resources were appropriate intertexts. Most references that were off topic, or not related to the focal text or the relevant social justice issue, were filtered out of the book club discussions, as were references that were perceived as untrue.

Regardless of relevance, connections to personal and personally related events were always taken up during the book club discussions. In contrast to the research of

Rogers (2002) who found that students rarely made connections between oppression in larger social institutions and their own lives, the personal connections that students shared in the present research enabled the students to see themselves within larger historical, political, cultural, and economic structures and to apply their awareness to texts outside the focal texts and CCs. By sharing and privileging personal narratives during book club discussions, the participants made the book club into a place where painful emotions were an accepted part of the learning process.

Students also relied heavily on their personal experiences when distinguishing between those references that they believed were true or untrue. For instance,

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knowledge gained from watching TV was not perceived as valid as knowledge gained through the lived experiences of a student or someone the student knew, as long as those experiences appeared to be true.

Because intertextuality is a social construction (Bloome & Egan-Robertson,

1993) dialogue played an important role in the establishment of intertextual relationships. Nystrand (1997) noted that genuine dialogue has the ability to dislocate the sources of textual authority, and indeed, as the book club participants took up some intertextual references and rejected others, they established borders for what texts and cultural resources could be used as meaning making tools during discussion.

Those resources that were taken up were validated and became important contributors to the meaning making process. Importantly, intertextual relationships are constrained in all contexts (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Lemke, 1985). According to Luke and Freebody’s (1990) Four Resources Model, the process of enculturation into what counts and what does not count as reading and discussing texts is an essential part of learning to read in specific contexts. Although boundaries to intertextual references always limit potential meaning making opportunities, when the students share authority with the teacher, as they did in this research, these restrictions can be productive. The participants in this research policed intertexts based on what they saw as relevant. When they were allowed to share control of the discussion, they could pursue their own interests so that no one voice dominated.

Notably, students’ entitlement rights also constrained possible intertexts.

Constraints on who has entitlement rights may limit potential meaning making

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opportunities for those students whose references are consistently ignored and for their peers who do not get the opportunity to critically consider those references.

Finally, my fourth research question asked: Do students’ views of the focal text and the relevant social issue change in discussion with the Critical Companion?

Critical literacy practices evolved over time as students participated in dialogically oriented book discussions. The discussions involving the CC often embodied a more nuanced and critical interpretation of the focal texts and relevant social issue than those discussions that involved only the focal text. Whereas in discussions of the focal text the students tended to focus on extracting meaning from the focal text and used intertextual connections to further their understanding of the focal text, in discussions with the CC the students connected the focal text, the CC, and their cultural resources in ways that often enabled them to be critical of the narrative features of the CC and their cultural resources.

Although students interacted with critical perspectives in every discussion with a CC, every discussion did not lead to the students taking up new perspectives or revised understandings of the hegemonic norms. For instance, when the students in

Group B discussed Speak (Anderson, 1999) with the CC, they initially supported the idea that rape victims bear some culpability for what was done to them. In this discussion, the participants co-constructed an understanding of rape and of the rape experience of the main character in the focal text that reinforced hegemonic norms and dominant ideologies. They asserted that the main character of Speak was complicit in her rape because she was drunk and did not fight back. The students in

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this conversation used their intertextual references to support a rape myth.

However, over time and through repeated discussions of the CC, the students understanding of hegemonic norms began to shift and become more nuanced. In a subsequent conversation about rape, the students in Group B did take up the feminist perspective, which was the dominant critical perspective of the CC for Speak.

Whereas in the earlier discussion they argued that rape victims are partially responsible for what was done to them, in the later discussion some of the participants established intertextual references to contend that the victim’s level of intoxication did not make them complicit in their rape. Therefore, the students’ use of their cultural resources in response to the critical theory sometimes enabled and sometimes prohibited critical literacy practices.

After repeated exposure to critical theory in the CCs, the students began to take up critical perspectives towards the focal texts without the assistance of the CCs.

In Group C, where the students read four focal texts with themes of racial prejudice, and where the accompanying CCs all employed a critical race perspective, the students took up the critical race perspective and enacted critical literacy while discussing the fourth novel without the aid of the CC. In this discussion, the students contributed numerous intertextual references to a dialogue about The Absolutely True

Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) where they co-constructed racial inequality as a result of systematic injustices. Their cultural resources enabled them to extend the application of critical race theory to social events outside the focal text without the use of the CC. The use of critical theory in the discussion without the CC

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suggests that over time the students began to critically evaluate texts without the supplemental resource of the CC. This conversation about The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian also reflected a dramatic shift in the students’ perspective about race. Whereas in earlier discussions about the novel Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers &

Sims, 2015) the students in Group A had attributed racial disparities in crime statistics and the existence of racial stereotypes to genetics, in the conversation about Alexie’s novel, the students attributed inequality to systemic societal problems.

Importantly, the students claimed that the CCs and discussions were useful in getting them to think differently about the focal texts and their cultural resources.

Students commented that the CCs helped them to think about how different readers might interpret a text differently than they had. For instance, Mya asserted that the

CC for American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) caused her to think about how an Asian

American reader might have been offended by the character of Chin-Kee. Students also noted differences in the ways that the focal texts depicted characters’ situations and the ways in which the CCs described the experiences of real humans. In fact,

Sahra remarked that she did not see the CC for Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) and the focal text as connected because the main character in the novel did not experience a reality that was as harsh as what many migrant farm workers experience. The CCs also caused the students to reflect on themes of the focal text in relationship to social justice issues. Maria stated that the purpose of Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims,

2015) was to show how Black people were treated by the criminal justice system and she attributed her understanding of the theme to the statistics presented in the CC.

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As reflected in the students’ interviews, the CCs also caused the participants to reflect on their cultural resources and lived experiences. A.J. noted that our discussions and the CC for Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) made him think differently about his uncle’s incarceration and Maria noted that, when A.J. shared his connection between the focal text and his uncle’s experience, it made her realize that racism is “what’s really happening” (interview, 12/6/2016). In this way, the CC helped the students to read the word and the world (Friere & Macedo, 1987) and to see themselves as socially constructed beings.

Limitations

Because I was so close to the phenomenon under study, the results of the research and implications for those results bare my fingerprints (cf. Randles, 2012).

However, in qualitative research, the researcher is never completely removed from the study and often the researcher’s involvement can be a strength rather than a limitation. Because of the personal and social contributions that I brought to the understanding of the social construction of intertextuality in the book club setting, my participation in the study may also be viewed as a strength of this research.

The generality of the study is limited as the research is qualitative in nature and the specific setting of the study would be very difficult to reproduce. The charter school where this research was conducted recruited its student population from the local public school district. The manner in which these students were recruited is another limitation of this study because it created a specific population of students that might be considered to further limit the generalizability of my research.

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Furthermore, the book clubs in this research occurred outside the classroom, in a context where the discussions were not accountable to district or national standards, with students who volunteered to read and discuss texts. Therefore, the conditions under which the discussions in this study occurred may not be possible to replicate in classrooms. However, as Blommaert and Jie (2010) explain, “Ethnography is an inductive science, that is: it works from empirical evidence towards theory, not the other way around” (p. 12). Although my research produced context-dependent knowledge, it is important to note that context-dependent knowledge is the type of knowledge that is “necessary to allow people to develop from rule-based beginners to virtuoso experts. Second, in the study of human affairs, there appears to exist only context-dependent knowledge, which thus presently rules out the possibility of epistemic theoretical construction” (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 391). In ethnographically informed research, generalization to theory is possible because what occurs in one case informs researchers as to what might be happening in other cases.

This study is also limited by the inclusion of students from only the higher- level reading classes in the book club groups. Because students from only the higher- level classes participated in the study, it is impossible to know whether the students at the school who were less capable code breakers would have responded differently to the discussions of the focal texts and the CCs. However, as the range of student abilities in the book club groups was quite wide, the groups were still relatively heterogeneous in ability.

Although I was able to interview every student in Group A, I conducted

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interviews with only two students in Groups B and two students in groups C. The students were selected for interviews based on their willingness to participate, their availability, and their ability to contribute to my understanding of how they used the

CCs during discussion. Though research is always limited by time constraints placed on the researcher and the participants desire to participate, in this research these limitations constrained my ability to gain insight into how all of the students perceived the usefulness of the CCs during the book club discussions. Consequently, I have a more detailed understanding of the book club discussions from the perspective of the students in Group A than from those students in the other groups. It is possible that the students I did not interview believed that the CCs were not useful and did not impact their understanding of the focal texts and relevant social issues. However, I argue the consistency with which the participants expressed their feelings that the

CCs were useful, coupled with my analysis of the discussion transcripts, is persuasive data to support my argument that the CC influenced dialogue and contributed to students’ understanding of various focal texts and social issues.

Implications

Implications for Practice

From this research, I found that the students used several textual features of the CCs to ignite dialogue: theory, factual information, stated stereotypes and common (mis)understandings, quotes from the author, confusing passages, and questions that were embedded in the CCs. Knowing the textual features of the CCs that the students responded to has important implications for practice for two reasons.

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First, this information is useful in looking to the future and to the creation of additional CCs. Second, because students found these textual features to be useful as the impetus for dialogue, teachers who want to implement critical literacy pedagogy in their own classrooms without the use of the CCs might consider supplementing their curricular materials with texts that contain some or all of these features.

Freebody, Luke, and Gilbert (1991) proposed that teaching multiple texts on the same topic might help students to contest hegemonic norms and reform classroom discourse. Much like in my research, other researchers have taken up this suggestion and used supplementary texts and resources to enact critical literacy pedagogy (e.g.

Johnson & Ciancio, 2013; Macken-Horarik, 1998; Mellor & Patterson, 2000, 2004).

The findings from my research build on previous research by indicating that supplementary texts with built in critique are particularly useful when teachers are attempting to encourage adolescent students to read critically. Teachers interested in encouraging critical literacy practices might consider using the CCs created for this research, or might create their own CCs by considering the features of the CCs that the students responded to, and which I described in the previous paragraph.

When I asked the students in Group A to read the CC independently, Trent noted that he had difficulty understanding the text. His difficulty may be an indication that the CCs were above his independent reading level. Stahl (2012) suggested that when selecting text for students to read together, teachers should select stretch texts, or texts that are at the high end of students’ zone of proximal development, noting that “difficult text does not have to be frustrating to students” (p. 51). Consistent with

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Stahl’s recommendation, the ability of the students’ in this research to identify their confusion and use their misunderstandings to generate discussion suggests that stretch texts benefit discussion. As students worked together to make sense of the text, they shared intertextual references and discussed the social issues that were relevant to the

CC and the focal text. In this way the participants were able to support each other in their reading of the CC.

I also asked Group C to read the first CC independently and, although they did not voice frustration with the text, they had little to say when I asked them to comment on the CC. Group C’s lack of commentary after their independent reading led me to suggest to students that they engage in shared reading of the CC. This approach provoked numerous comments, connections, and questions related to the text. Taken together, Trent’s voiced difficulty in reading the CC and Group C’s silence following their independent reading provide credence to the notion that the social nature of collaborative reading may be useful for providing opportunities for students to support each other’s understanding (Beck & McKeown, 2006;

Goldenberg, 1992) and co-construct intertextual connections (Short, 1992).

Importantly, this study indicates that shared reading of text is also useful for promoting critical literacy.

Additionally, this study gives credence to claims made by other researchers

(e.g., Appleman, 2015a, 2015b; Soter, 1999) that critical literary theories are useful tools for fostering critical dialogue about young adult literature and fostering critical literacy practices. Even though the students in this research never named a critical

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literary theory, at various times they responded to, pushed back against, or took up the theories that were present in the CCs. One goal of critical literacy, and a motivation behind using multiple critical literary theories to approach texts, is to prompt students to understand literature from multiple perspectives (Appleman,

2015b). During my interviews the students consistently articulated that the book club discussions enabled them to see the focal texts and the cultural phenomena that they proposed as intertexts from different points of view. When the students used literary theories to approach the focal texts and their cultural resources they were able to read the ideology in the various texts and at times they reacted by resisting the ideology.

These findings suggest that teachers can ask adolescents to use critical literary theories as lenses to support students as they work to interrogate texts.

As in the discussions with Group B about Speak (Anderson, 1999), the students sometimes responded to the CCs by pushing back against the critical theoretical perspective. In these conversations, I was often the only participant who worked to problematize hegemonic norms. Other researchers have suggested that the teacher plays a crucial role in the implementation of critical pedagogy (Davila, 2011;

Park, 2012; Thein, Guise, Sloan, 2011). Findings from the present research substantiate those claims.

Furthermore, over time the students in Group B who pushed back against the feminist theory pervasive in the CC for Speak, began to construct a more nuanced understanding of rape. As also suggested by Thein, Beach, and Parks (2007), this finding suggests that students’ take up of critical literacy practices may not happen in

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one interaction with critical theory, but instead might evolve over time. Group A’s take up of critical race theory to discuss The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time

Indian (Alexie, 2007), supports this claim as, after using the CC to support their critical reading of American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) and Monster (Myers, 1999;

Myers & Sims, 2015), the students were able to apply critical race theory to Alexie’s novel without the use of the CC.

Consistent with the suggestions of other researchers (e.g., Freebody & Luke,

1990; Johnson, 2010; Varelas & Pappas, 2006; Varelas, Pappas & Rife, 2004), this research indicates that the knowledge base of students—their cultural resources— should be valued and appreciated in the social construction of learning and particularly in the implementation of critical literacy pedagogy. Students’ cultural resources depend on their personal histories and students’ social, economic and political positioning impacts those histories. In the present study, students’ cultural resources enabled them to conceive of the personal as political and helped the students co-construct an understanding of inequality. The recognition that students are knowers, who are capable of using their various cultural resources to learn, challenges the deficit view of urban adolescents that is commonly held by teachers and the general public.

However, in the face of perceived inaccuracy, the participants in this study consistently relied on their personal experiences to distinguish truth from fallacy. As news sources continue to call into question which versions of the truth count, this finding may have significant implications for how educators approach critical literacy

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pedagogy. Other research has shown that students often have difficulty evaluating the validity of texts (Many, 1996; VanSledright & Kelly, 1998). However, as the concepts of truth and validity are central question of critical literacy (Luke, 2012), the ways in which students evaluate information cannot be ignored. The use of personal experiences to justify biases and misunderstandings (as in the example from Group C where the students asserted that Amish people get married at 13 based on their experience visiting Amish country) indicates that if educators want to treat students’ cultural resources as valuable sources of knowledge, then it is also necessary to teach students to critically evaluate their resources.

Researchers have found that dialogue is a useful tool for facilitating students’ comprehension of texts (e.g., Christoph & Nystrand, 2001; Nystrand, 1997), supporting intertextual connections (e.g., Short, 1992), and enhancing critical literacy education (e.g., Freire, 1970; Behrman, 2006). The present research positioned reading as dialogic and students as agentive participants in the dialogue. This framework was useful for incorporating students’ cultural resources into discussion in a way that enabled their resources to shape the epistemology of the book club and the students’ co-constructed stances toward the world. However, many teachers worry that sharing control of the discussions with students will result in chaos in classrooms where students are not used to participating in dialogue (Beck, 2005). Shor (1999) noted that students sometimes do not want authority or know how to use it. Other research, such as that conducted by Park (2012), has suggested that teachers should continually monitor student-centered book groups so that they do not become an

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“anything goes” space. The findings in this study go some way in combating these concerns as the participants in this research were from an urban charter school where behavior was tightly regulated and students were typically given limited control over classroom discourse. Yet, when the students and I shared authority during book club discussions, the students did much of the work of policing the relevance of the intertextual connections. Their control of the topic worked to ensure that the discussion never veered far from the issue at hand. This finding suggests that teachers who are willing to share control of discussions with their students may be surprised to find that their students are more than capable of maintaining dialogue that is on topic.

In this research, when I gave the students time to complete the journal prompts and questionnaires, they often chose to talk through their responses rather than to write them down. The students’ responses to my attempts to solicit their writing suggests that many of the participants valued time to talk through their ideas and indicates that teachers might find it useful to provide students with time to talk, or to allow students to talk while writing. On the other hand, some of the students did choose to write their responses and voluntarily used their journals extensively.

Students mixed reactions to the prompts and questionnaires implies that classroom teachers may find their students to be more capable of responding when they give their students a choice of how to respond. As the Intertextual Take Up Model suggests, students do complex work through dialogue; yet in classrooms they are often evaluated on their written work rather than their oral responses. In order to assess fully what students are capable of accomplishing, teachers should consider and

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make available opportunities for students to respond to literature orally as well as in writing.

Finally, intertextual processes and entitlement rights constrain meaning in all contexts (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Lemke, 1985). However, because in this research the register system of the book club limited possible intertexts and established varying entitlement rights among the participants, findings from the study highlight the need for teachers to be aware of how intertextual processes set boundaries to meaning making opportunities. When some students are consistently shut out of dialogue, the intertexts that the student might potentially introduce are excluded from the co-construction of meaning. When some students’ contributions are consistently neglected, all participants suffer. If teachers attend to the varying entitlement rights of their students, they can take opportunities to invite those students into the dialogue. Furthermore, interactional contexts and intertextual processes privilege some texts while prohibiting others. In this research, texts that were considered off topic were consistently dropped from discussion. Although dropping off-topic connections functioned to keep the conversation on task, it is important for teachers to consider how students are defining topicality. It is possible that, by rejecting certain texts discussion participants are actually constraining topics. For instance, in the present study, students in Group B were discussing rape when

Rhiannon made a connection to a YouTuber named jacksepticeye. Ashlee sidetracked this conversation by asking about jacksepticeye’s sexuality but then redirected the conversation to get back on task. This is the only example where sexuality was

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deemed off topic; in this example jacksepticeye’s sexuality was tangential to the discussion. However, if texts about sexuality in the book club discussions had been consistently perceived as off topic, this intertextual boundary would have limited the groups potential to critically explore the topic of sexuality.

Implications for Research

Data from this study point to several directions for future exploration. First, the creation of the data displays that I used to analyze students’ intertextual connections led me to realize that students’ intertextual connections were often multilayered. Sometimes students’ references connected only two texts, but at other times their intertextual references were more complex; they were mediated by social issues, critical literary theories, and they connected numerous texts and topics. Table

5 in Chapter Four demonstrates the layered nature of intertextual references.

Connections across numerous texts and topics may have different affordances for comprehension and critical literacy practices.

A quantitative analysis of the intertextual references made by participants in this study would enable me to explore the ways in which different types of references were made while discussing the focal text in comparison to the connections that were made while reading and discussing the CCs. Such an analysis could be used to supplement research examining the multilayered nature of discussions in different contexts. For instance, a quantitative analysis might demonstrate that certain texts and topics are examined through the lenses of critical literary theories more frequently than other texts and topics.

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Finally, in this research, I was unable to collect substantial data from students’ writing because many of the students did not use their journals or respond to the questionnaires in writing. This limited my ability to explore whether the students’ ways of responding to the CCs in writing were similar to the ways they responded to the focal text. Future research, might explore whether students establish similar intertextual relationships among the CCs, the focal texts, and their cultural resources in their writing in comparison to the intertextuality that they demonstrated during discussions.

Further research with the CCs should involve the use of the CCs in a variety of contexts. For instance, in this research I acted as the teacher even though I was the author of the CCs. Future research should involve other teachers using the CCs with adolescent students. Additionally, in this research, each novel was paired with only one CC. Continued research might examine the use of multiple CCs from a variety of critical literary perspectives on the same novel.

Conclusion

The CCs in this research functioned to introduce critical literary lenses into discussions around the focal texts. While responding to the CCs, the book club participants shared intertextual references to their cultural resource, thus making their cultural resources valuable semiotic tools. However, the various intertexts that students contributed to the dialogue were valued and taken up differently. When certain types of references were excluded from the intertextual substance of the discussions, these intertexts were not available for the co-construction of meaning

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about the focal texts and the relevant social justice issues. In this study, students consistently valued those references that were personal, making the book discussions into spaces where emotions were a valuable part of the learning process and where personal experiences could be critiqued through critical lenses—making the personal political.

In the discussions with the CCs, the students shared responses to the CCs and focal texts that were influenced by the various critical literary theories. Often they used the critical lens to critique hegemonic norms, but sometimes they pushed back against the critical theory. However, over time, the participants began to exhibit more critical practices and the discussions reflected a more nuanced understanding of the focal text and the relevant social issue. This finding suggests that the critical theories in the CCs were useful for encouraging critical literacy practices.

Importantly, the students in this study claimed that the discussions enabled them to attain a richer understanding of the focal text and relevant social issue than they had had prior to the completing the readings and participating in the discussions.

They stated that the CCs and their intertextual connections helped them to realize that the events in the focal text reflected reality. Taken together, these findings suggest that the CCs, and the critical literary theories from which they were written, were useful tools for encouraging critical literacy practices.

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Appendix A: Example Critical Companion

Critical Companion Monster By Walter Dean Myers

Monster is a novel that explores the intersection of childhood, race, and the concept of innocence, from both a cultural and legal standpoint. Steve is only 16 years old and is on trial for his participation in a felony murder. He is accused of being the

“lookout” during a convenience store robbery where the storeowner, Mr. Nesbitt, was shot and killed (Myers). During Steve’s trial, his age, his skin color, and the biases of the

United States legal system work to lessen the possibility of Steve receiving a verdict of innocent.

Consider the word “child.” What is meant by the term? Who is a child and who is not? Although the understanding of how childhood is defined has changed throughout history, today the term “children” is typically used to define a group of individuals who are innocent and need to be protected (Goff 527). This means that whether or not someone is considered a child is based on the perceptions and beliefs of the society in which that person lives. Because children are thought to be innocent, families, laws, and cultures all work to protect children from the harsh realities of the world. In the United

States, most laws and policies treat children as different from adults (Deitch et al. XV).

Children are not allowed to vote, drink, or drive; they are treated as too immature to justify being treated as adults. However, the boundaries of childhood are tested when

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children engage in violence or crime (Hintz and Tribunella 29). Children who commit crimes often become “adults” for the purposes of the criminal justice system. These children and their crimes raise numerous questions for the court system. How old does someone have to be to in order to understand the difference between right and wrong and to be convicted as a crime such as murder (30)? Does understanding the difference between right and wrong make a person an adult? Should a criminal’s sentence fit their crime regardless of the criminal’s age?

In the U.S. criminal justice system, state law permits children as young as the age of seven to be transferred to the adult criminal court system (Deitch et al. 1). A large number of young children find themselves in the unclear area where the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems intersect. Judges for juvenile cases have substantial flexibility when deciding how to deal with young offenders (32). However, when children are tried in an adult criminal court, they are often confronted with the harsh realities of adult sentencing (38). In adult court, the average sentence length is 64 months; this is a longer sentence than most youth can even face in juvenile court. If these children are sentenced as adults and sent to juvenile facilities, they are “twice as likely to be assaulted by a correctional officer, five times as likely to be sexually assaulted, and eight times as likely to commit suicide” (Goff 526). A startling reality of these statistics is that Black children are 18 times more likely to be sentenced as adults than White children. But why are Black children are more likely to be tried as adults than White children?

These questions might be answered by looking at research on how Black children and White children are perceived which indicated that “Black boys as young as 10 may

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not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their White peers, but instead are more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime” (Goff et al. 541). Although most children are considered innocent until they reach adulthood, Black children may be perceived as innocent only until they look suspicious. This description is consistent with the depiction of James King, one of the boys on trial for felony murder in Walter Dean Myers’ novel, Monster. Although

James is only 23, when he appears in court he “looks older than 23” (13). James’ older appearance is incriminating and makes it difficult for both the reader and the jury to see him as innocent of the crime of which he’s been accused.

The statistics reported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a paper titled, Race and the Death Penalty, are even more revealing. The ACLU reports that

“People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43% of total executions since

1976 and [account for] 55% of those currently awaiting execution” (qtd. in Staples 33). In the United States, the law considers juvenile offenders to be less responsible than adults, and therefore juveniles receive less severe punishments than adults, even for the same crime (Rattan et al.). There is scientific research that suggests that children have less impulse control and more difficulty choosing between socially appropriate and antisocial courses of action because their brains are still developing (Deitch et al. XIV). One researcher, Dr. Jay Giedd, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of children and found that the brain does not fully mature until the age of 25 (13). Some researchers believe that because there are areas in the brain that do not develop until people are in their 20s, children are less blameworthy than adults (14). However, because of the serious nature of felony cases, a child felony suspect is at a higher risk of

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being tried as an adult. Despite the fact that Steve is a juvenile, it is unlikely that he will receive much sympathy from the judicial system since he is on trial for felony murder and juveniles involved in felony cases are more likely to be tried as adults. It is no wonder that Steve is worried when the detectives, Williams and Karyl, threaten him with the death penalty (72). Black men on trial for felony murder do not have many statistics in their favor.

Steve’s lawyer, Kathy O’Brien, remarks on the racial bias that is present in the

United States judicial system when she tells Steve, “Half of those jurors, no matter what they said when we questioned them when we picked the jury, believed you were guilty the moment they laid eyes on you. You’re young, you’re Black, and you’re on trial.

What else do they need to know?” (78-79). When asked to explain this statement during an interview Myers said:

There are three ideas here. Many people serving as jurors feel that any

young person is less responsible than an older adult and will have a

tendency to be prejudiced against them. The idea that a Black person is on

trial can bring up the unconscious racial feeling that a Black defendant is

“more likely” to be guilty than a white defendant. The most devastating

concept, and one I’ve often heard, is that the person is probably guilty

because they’re on trial. The thinking here is that the prosecutor, who is

clean cut and upstanding, wouldn’t lie, the police wouldn’t lie, nor would

the prosecution witnesses, so the defendant is probably guilty. As Miss

O’Brien says, if the defendant is young, Black and on trial, there’s a lot to

overcome. (Myers “Questions for Walter Dean Myers” 9)

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O’Brien tells Steve that in order to win the trial he will need to make sure that the jury disassociates him from his acquaintances, all of whom are Black or Latino. But the prosecution is working hard to counteract O’Brien’s efforts; they bring in other people involved in the felony as witnesses, and most of these witnesses have criminal records that make Steve and King look guilty by association. Osvaldo, an acquaintance of Steve and King who is brought in to testify, has a history of gang violence (107). Another witness, Bobo Evans, has been arrested previously for breaking and entering, selling drugs, grand theft auto, for stealing, and for killing a man during a fight (176). Steve writes in his journal that the prosecution is “bringing out all of these people and letting them look terrible and then reminding the jury that they don’t look any different from me and King” (60).

Steve is also worried about appearing human in the eyes of the jury rather than appearing like a monster, a name that the prosecuting attorney called the boys involved in the trial. During the trial Steve’s lawyer stops him from writing “MONSTER,

MONSTER, MONSTER…” all over a legal pad (24). She crosses out the word and tells him “You have to believe in yourself if we’re going to convince a jury that you are innocent” (24). O’Brien also tells Steve, “My job is to make sure the law works for you as well as against you, and to make you a human being in the eyes of the jury. Your job is to help me” (16). In an article he wrote for The New York Times, Myers explains that while doing research for Monster, Myers interviewed a lawyer who was doing pro bono work in the courts. The lawyer told Myers that the trouble he had while defending poor clients “is to humanize [them] in the eyes of the jury. To make them think of this defendant as a human being and not just one of ‘them’” (qtd. in “Where Are the People of

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Color in Children’s Literature Books”). Myers realized that when he wrote about inner- city children he wanted to “make them human in the eyes of the readers and, especially, in their own eyes.” But Steve struggles with feeling human when he looks around the prison and realizes that he looks like all of the other inmates. In his journal Steve writes:

I want to look like a good person. I want to feel like I’m a good person

because I believe I am. But being in here with these guys makes it hard to

think about yourself as being different. We look about the same, and even

though I’m younger than they are, it’s hard not to notice that we are all

pretty young. I see what Miss O’Brien meant when she said part of her

job was to make me look human in the eyes of the jury. (62-63).

Dehumanization is a term that refers to removing a person’s or group of people’s humanity by treating them as though they lack compassion, individuality, or civility

(“dehumanization”). According to Frieire, a famous educator and philospher, dehumanization is “the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors” (44). Frieire means that when we stop seeing another person as human, it makes it easier for us to act violently towards them or to treat them in ways that would be morally unacceptable if they were fully human. When the prosecuting attorney,

Petrocelli, tells the jury, “there are … monsters in our communities – people who are willing to steal and to kill, people who disregard the rights of others” she is trying to dehumanize Steve and King and make them appear less than human (21).

Dehumanization can be a strong weapon against adolescents, whose age makes them appear less childlike and therefore more likely to be perceived as guilty (Goff et al. 528).

Consequently, adolescents often find themselves receiving less protection from the law.

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Being dehumanized as a monster would work strongly against King and Steve while they are on trial for felony murder.

In order to convince the jury that Steve is innocent, O’Brien builds a case around trying to separate Steve from King and the other boys who were involved in the crime.

O’Brien tells Steve that he is going to need to testify during the trial in order to let the jury look at him and decide that he is innocent. She tells Steve:

The prosecutor’s strongest point against you is the connection between

you and King…. I don’t know why you’ve chosen this man as an

acquaintance, but it’s going to hurt you big-time if you don’t manage to

get some distance between you and him in the eyes of the jury. You’re

going to have to break the link. He’s sitting there looking surly. Maybe

he thinks he’s tough; I don’t know. I do know that you’d better put some

distance between yourself and whatever being a tough guy represents.

(215)

Her message is that Steve’s appearance as a young Black male, a “tough guy” is hurting him. If he does not want to go to jail then he needs to separate himself from any appearance of toughness.

When Steve gets on the stand he appears to be nervous, and his nervousness is helpful because it makes him look less tough in the eyes of the jury. Miss O’Brien actually uses Steve’s nervousness to connect him with the jury when she reminds them of it during her closing argument saying, “I submit to you, the jurors in this case, that you, too, would have had a degree of nervousness. He’s on trial for his life! He’s facing the possibility of spending his entire life behind bars!” (252). By asking the jury to think

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about how they would feel in Steve’s shoes, O’Brien is making Steve appear more human in the eyes of the jury as well as encouraging young readers to identify and empathize with Steve. She is telling the jurors and the readers that Steve is like them and not like

James, Bobo or Osvaldo. The testimony of Mr. Sawicki, Steve’s film club director is also helps the jury to see Steve as different from James, Bobo and Osvaldo. Mr. Sawicki describes Steve in sharp contrast to Bobo and Osvaldo when he testifies that Steve is an honest young man who is “talented, bright, and compassionate” (235). Convincing the jury that he was not a monster like Bobo, Osvaldo, and many of the other witnesses that were brought in by the prosecution, was the only hope that Steve had.

During her closing argument, O’Brien also uses dehumanization to convince the jury that Steve is not like Bobo Evans. She dehumanizes Bobo when she asks the jury “is this a shallow, gullible man who doesn’t think about very much of anything? Who among us can watch a man die in a drugstore and then go out for a quick bite a few blocks away? Is this a man whom we can trust to tell the truth about anything? I don’t believe him. Do you?” (250). O’Brien craftily depicts Bobo as callous and unfeeling so that the jury sees him as the real monster. She intentionally separates him from Steve whose testimony she describes as open and honest. Then she asks the jury to “Think of

Steve Harmon’s character as opposed to that of Bobo Evans. Compare Steven Harmon to

Mr. Zinzi, another of the state’s witnesses. Compare him to Mr. Cruz, who admitted that to become a member of his gang, he had to slash a stranger in the face” (252). Because

O’Brien is successful at getting the jury to see Steve’s character as different from Bobo’s and Osvaldo’s, Steve receives a verdict of not guilty.

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As Staples explains, “the US is still a country where people are judged on the color of their skin, not the content of their character” (40). Throughout Monster, the prevailing message is that being a young Black man is incriminating and dangerous in the

U.S. court system. Steve can only be seen as innocent when the jury is convinced that he is different from his associates. O’Brien successfully convinces the jury that Steve is innocent, but for the readers, for Myers, and for O’Brien, the issue is more complicated.

What is Myers communicating to his readers when Steve receives a verdict of not guilty despite his apparent involvement in the crime? Has Myers successfully convinced the reader that Steve is innocent? Did Steve deserve the not guilty verdict that he received?

In the case of Steve Harmon did the U.S. judicial system work?

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Works Cited

Christoph, Julie Nelson, and Martin Nystrand. Taking Risks, Negotiating Relationships:

One Teacher’s Transition Towards a Dialogic Classroom (Report Series 7.9).

Albany: The National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement,

State University of New York, University at Albany.

CNN Library. “Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts” CNNU.S. 22 Feb. 2014. 17 April

2014 < http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/>.

“Dehumanization.” Def. 1. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English

Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2003. Web. 17 Apr. 2014

Deitch, Michele, Amanda Barstow, Leslie Lukens, and Ryan Reyna. From Time Out to

Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System. Austin, TX:

The University of Texas at Austin, LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary edition). New York:

Continuum, 1970.

Glazier, Jocelyn, Seo, Jung-A. “Multicultural literature and discussion as mirror and

window?” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48.8 (2005): 686-700.

Goff et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,”

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526-545.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. New York: Amistad, 1999.

Myers, Walter Dean. “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Literature Books?”

The New York Times on the Web 15 March 2014. 20 April 2014

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color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=1>.

Rattan, Aneeta, et al. Race and the Fragility of the Legal Distinction between Juveniles

and Adults. PLos One 7.5 (2012): Web.

Staples, Robert. “White Power, Black Crime, and Racial Politics.” The Black Scholar

41.4 (2011): 31-41.

Thein, Amanda Haertling, Megan Guise, and DeAnn Long Sloan. “Problematizing

Literature Circles as Forums for Discussion of Multicultural and Political Texts.”

Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 55.1 (2011): 15-24.

Upokodu, Omiunota Nelly. “Teaching Multicultural Education from a Critical

Perspective: Challenges and Dilemmas.” Multicultural Perspectives 5.4 (2003):

17-23.

Yancy, George, Janine Jones, eds. Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and

Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics. Lanham, MD: Lexington

Books, 2012.

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Appendix B: Description of the Data

Students Topic Audio/

Video Data

Date Entries Journal Journal Meeting Field Notes Field Questionnaire

Group A Recruitment 1 9/12 Mrs. • Recruitment None X A.J. Halloway’s Trent advisory Mya Maria American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) 2 9/13 A.J. • Distributed American Born 20:00 - VD X SJ Trent Chinese Questionnaire Mya • Discussed timeline & -A.J. discussion rules -Trent -Mya 3 9/20 A.J. • Discussed of American Born 36:49 - AD X CSPT Trent Chinese 37:49 - VD Questionnaire Mya • Distributed CC for American -A.J. Maria (1/2) Born Chinese and asked -Trent students to read it 4 9/27 A.J. • Discussed of CC 39:26 – AD X CSPT Maria Trent 40:13 - VD Questionnaire Mya -Mya Maria -Maria Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers & Sims, 2015) 5 10/4 A.J. • Distributed graphic novel of 27:35 – AD X Mya Trent Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) 33:26 – VD Mya Maria 10/4 Maria • Interview 9 :56 – AD 7:02 - VD 10/6 Trent • Interview 22:12 - AD

6 10/11 A.J. • Discussed of graphic novel of 31:59 - AD X Trent Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) 33:26 - VD Mya Maria 7 10/18 A.J. • Discussed of graphic novel of 30:34 – AD X Trent Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) 32:01 – VD Mya & prose novel of Monster Maria (Myers, 1999) 8 10/25 A.J. • Read & discussed CC for 35:20 – AD X Maria Trent Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers Mya & Sims, 2015) Maria 9 10/31 A.J. • Read & discussed CC for 43:21 – AD X Mya Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers 42:48 - VD Maria (1/2) & Sims, 2015) 10 11/1 A.J. • Read & discussed CC for 36:30 – AD X Maria Trent Monster (Myers, 1999; Myers 37:21 - VD Mya & Sims, 2015) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian (Alexie, 2007)

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11 11/8 A.J. • Distributed The Absolutely 39:02 – AD X CSPT Maria Trent True Diary of a Part Time 44:43 - VD Questionnaire Carlia Indian -A.J.

12 11/15 A.J. • Discussed The Absolutely True 42:08 – AD X Trent Trent Diary of a Part Time Indian 41:02 - VD Mya Maria 13 11/29 A.J. • Discussed The Absolutely True 45:00 - AD X Trent Diary of a Part Time Indian 46:43 - VD Mya Maria 12/1 Trent • Interview 12:09 - AD 12/1 Andre • Interview 28:04 - AD 12/6 Maria • Interview 17:25 - AD 14 12/6 A.J. • Discussed The Absolutely True X Maria Trent Diary of a Part Time Indian Mya (Alexie, 2007) Maria 15 12/13 A.J. • Read and discussed CC for The 31:09 - AD X Trent Absolutely True Diary of a Part 31:00 - VD Mya Time Indian Maria 16 12/19 A.J. • Read and discussed CC for The 40:35 - AD X CSPT Trent Absolutely True Diary of a Part 36:02 - VD Questionnaire Mya Time Indian -Trent Maria -Mya -Maria 12/19 Mya • Interview 13:53 - AD Group B Recruitment 1 9/12 Mrs. • Recruitment None X Aesha Halloway’s Devine advisory Ashlee Tiffany Speak (Anderson, 1999) 2 9/15 Aesha • Distributed Speak 32:11 – AD X SJ Devine • Discussed timeline & Questionnaire Ashlee discussion rules -Aesha Rhiannon -Devine -Ashlee -Rhiannon 3 9/22 Aesha • Discussed Speak 33:26 – VD X Aesha Devine 32:54 – AD Devine Ashlee Rhiannon Rhiannon Tiffany 4 9/29 Aesha • Discussed Speak 40:46 – VD X Aesha Devine 37:34 – AD Devine Ashlee Rhiannon Rhiannon Tiffany Tiffany 5 10/6 Aesha • Discussed Speak 12:15 - VD X Aesha Devine • Gave students time to catch up 11:58 - AD Devine (late) on reading Ashlee (late) Rhiannon (late) Tiffany 6 10/13 Aesha • Discussed Speak 38:10 – VD X Aesha Devine 37:15 – AD Devine Ashlee Rhiannon Tiffany 7 10/21 Aesha • Discussed Speak (Anderson, 7:00 – VD X

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Devine 1999) 25:36 – AD Ashlee Rhiannon Tiffany 8 10/27 Aesha • Discussed Speak 31:07 – VD X Aesha Devine 31:07 – AD Devine Ashlee Rhiannon 9 11/3 Aesha • Discussed Speak 44:30 – VD X Devine 44:17 – AD Ashlee Rhiannon 10 11/10 Aesha • Read and discussed CC for 35:22 – VD X Devine Speak 35:00 – AD Ashlee Rhiannon 11 11/14 Aesha • Read and discussed CC for 45:18 – VD X Aesha Devine Speak 43:42 - AD Ashlee • Gave students Monster (Myers Rhiannon & Sims, 2015) 12 11/28 Aesha • Read and discussed CC for 47:47 – VD X Devine Speak 47:56 – AD Ashlee Rhiannon Monster (Myers & Sims, 2015) 13 12/5 Aesha • Discussed Monster 45:00 – VD X Aesha Devine 44:36 – AD Devine Ashlee Rhiannon 14 12/12 Aesha • Read and discussed CC for 30:00 – VD X Aesha Devine Monster 29:56 – AD Devine Ashlee

12/13 Aesha • Interview 23:54 – AD 12/13 Devine • Interview 9:38 – AD 15 12/19 Aesha • Read and discussed CC for X Aesha Devine Monster Ashlee Rhiannon Group C Recruitment 1 9/19 Sahra • Discussed participation in X Sahra Maryan research Maryan Alessandra Alessandr Ezekial a Ezekial American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006) 2 9/21 Salma • Distributed American Born 56:19 – AD X SJ Sahra Maryan Chinese 52:42 – VD Questionnaire Maryan Alessandra - Sahra Alessandr Ezekial - Maryan a - Alessandra Ezekial - Ezekial 3 9/28 Sahra (late) • Discussed American Born 1:01: 35 – X CSPT Sahra Maryan Chinese AD Questionnaire Maryan Alessandra 59:03 – VD - Sahra Alessandr Ezekial - Maryan a - Alessandra - Ezekial 4 10/5 Sahra • Read and discussed CC for 1:05:10 – X Sahra Maryan American Born Chinese AD Maryan Alessandra 1:02:11 – Alessandr Ezekial VD a

5 10/12 Sahra • Read and discussed CC for 57:50 – VD X CSPT Maryan Maryan American Born Chinese Questionnaire

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Alessandra • Distributed Esperanza Rising - Maryan Ezekial - Alessandra

10/18 Sahra • Interview 22:37 – AD 6 10/19 Sahra • Read and discussed CC for 1:00:34 – X CSPT Sahra Maryan American Born Chinese AD Questionnaire Maryan Alessandra 1:01: 02 – - Sahra Alessandr Ezekial VD a

10/25 Maryan • Interview 20:36 – AD 10/26 Sahra • Touched base with students and Sahra Maryan documented journals. No Maryan Alessandra formal meeting. Alessandr Ezekial a Ezekial 7 11/2 Sahra • Discussion of transcript from 57:18 – AD X Sahra Maryan 10/26 58:04 – VD Maryan Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) 8 11/9 Sahra • Discussed Esperanza Rising 59:33 – VD X Maryan • Read and discussed CC for Alessandra Esperanza Rising Ezekial 9 11/30 Sahra • Read and discussed CC for 53:26 – AD X Maryan Esperanza Rising 33:26 – VD Ezekial 10 12/7 Sahra • Read and discussed CC for 48:14 – AD X Maryan Esperanza Rising 50:12 - VD 12/14 Maryan • Interview 16:07 X 12/14 Sahra • Interview 26:12

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Appendix C: Student Interview Protocol

Students were asked to come to the interviews with their book club book, a copy of the Critical Companion, and their book club journal.

Sample questions/prompts included:

a. How would you rate yourself as a reader: below average, average, or above

average? Why?

b. Who do you know that is a good reader?

c. What do you think has made this person a good reader?

d. What does this person do that makes you think he or she is a good reader?

e. Think about the last time that you read a book that you picked. Can you describe

yourself to me as if you were watching yourself read?

o Where did you read?

o Do you write in the book?

o What did your face look like while you were reading?

f. Did you talk about (title of book you liked) with friends?

g. Do you expect to agree with everything you read?

h. Why did you decide to join the book club?

i. Why do you think (your friend) decided to join the book club?

j. Think about our book club meetings. If I just watched you for the whole meeting,

what would I see you doing?

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o What makes you do these things?

k. What do you think is the purpose of book club meetings?

l. What do you do to prepare for book club meetings?

m. Tell me about (focal text).

o Would you want to be (the protagonist)’s friend? Why?

o Describe the setting of the book for me. If you were the author, would you

have used the same setting? Why?

n. How do you think the person who wrote the CCs would describe a “good reader”?

o. Think about when you read the critical companion. If I was watching you while

you were reading, what would I have seen you doing? Why would you have been

doing these things?

p. When you read the critical companion, did it make you think differently about

(protagonist)?

q. Did the critical companion change the way that you thought about any other

books you have read?

r. Did the critical companion make you think differently about any experiences that

you have had?

s. The focal text is read in a lot of schools across the country, why do you think so

many teachers require their students to read it?

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Appendix D: Prompts for Book Club Journal Reflections

1. The following prompts are an attempt to understand how the students see themselves and also to understand the ideology that each student already possesses. As Hall and Piazza (2008) note, teachers also need consider their students’ needs and understandings before attempting to enact critical literacy pedagogy in their classroom. Also, since ideology is not something that the teacher transfers to students, but rather something that each child already possesses, the teacher needs to consider the students’ ideologies before planning instruction (Comber, 2001; Hollindale, 1988).

a. Prompt: Draw a picture of how you see yourself and then write a brief description explaining your picture.

b. Prompt: Describe yourself as a reader.

c. Prompt: How do you know if something you’ve read or heard is true or accurate?

d. Prompt: What makes you decide whether you like or dislike a book?

2. I will distribute the following prompt to students during one of the first meetings in order to get a profile of each participant. It is inspired by Allen (1995).

t. Prompt: Which of these remarks comes closest to the way you feel about reading?

! “I hate reading.”

! “Reading is something you do if someone makes you, but I don’t enjoy it.”

! “Reading is okay. Sometimes I pick things up to read.”

! “I like to read but have a hard time with it.”

! “I really enjoy reading and often read when I have free time.”

Explain what makes you feel this way.

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3. Tatum (2008) suggests having students create a textual lineage in order to identify the characteristics of texts they found meaningful and significant.

a. Prompt: In each box below, place the title of a book, essay, or poem that you think you will always remember. Place only one title in a box. Explain why you think you will always remember the book, essay, or poem. If this book led you to read other books connect it with a line. Put the books in chronological order. Look at the example.

Example:

The Princess Bride When I Am an Old Woman This I love this book because it is funny poem became an inside joke with and it containes romance and my best friend and I. We loved the adventure. I've re-read it tons of idea that when we grew up we times. would be less proper.

e.e. cummings poetry Stardust After I discovered poetry, I This book made me feel as if I was The Mists of Avalon couldn't get enough of e.e. transported into another time and cummings. I love the way he plays place. This book captured all of my attention. I couldn't put it down. I with words on the page. felt as if the magic in it were real.

4. As Schensul and LeCompte (2013) indicate, timelines can invite individuals to reflect on important events. This prompt is an attempt to solicit student reflection on book club conversations:

a. Prompt: Create a timeline of today’s book club discussion. Mark the most important things we talked about and summarize your thoughts on what we discussed.

5. Sketch to Stretch (McLaughlin & Allen, 2002):

a. Prompt: Choose a scene or a passage from the novel and draw it. Include a brief written description of what you have drawn so that I can understand your thinking.

b. Prompt: Choose a character and use colors, shapes and visual symbols to portray that character without drawing them. Write a brief explanation of why

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you chose the particular character and also explain the artistic choices you made for your portrayal.

c. Prompt: Draw an issue in the reading that interests you. Write a brief description of that issue and describe why you chose to draw it in the way that you did.

6. General prompts for during reading a novel:

a. Prompt: What are “three main events or things that capture your attention as you read today? Jot them down below and explain why each event stood out to you” (Singer, 2006, p. 60).

b. Prompt: Briefly summarize what happened in the reading for today and describe why these events are or may be important to the story as a whole (Singer, 2006).

7. General prompts for after completion of a novel:

a. Prompt: “What is this book about? Please explain the plot” (Singer, 2006, p. 9).

b. Prompt: “Please find a place in the book where the main character experiences a turning point and quote it below” (Singer, 2006, p. 9).

c. Prompt: “Who or what acted as an ally or support for this character? How did the character find or receive support?” (Singer, 2006, p. 9).

d. Prompt: “What stands out to you in this book? Or what do you find disturbing or unsatisfying? Be specific” (Singer, 2006, p. 9).

e. Prompt: How is this book similar or different to other books you have read in school?

f. Prompt: How is this book similar or different to a book you might choose to read for fun?

g. Prompt: Use the chart below to explain your experiences with reading (focal text) (Tatum, 2008).

Title of text

When and where I read this text…

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What this text meant to me when I first read it…

What this text meant to me after discussing it with peers…

What I will carry with me from this text…

This text influenced me by…

This text led me to read…

8. Some prompts might be specific to the novel that the students are reading. An example prompt for Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) might be:

a. Prompt: Do you think that immigration should be talked about in school? Why or Why not?

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Appendix E: Questionnaires About the Characters, Plot, Setting and Theme

ABC Questionnaire – Characters, Plot, Setting, & Theme6

1) Describe Jin Wang. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

2) Describe the Monkey King. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

3) Describe Chin-Kee. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

4) Describe the setting of the novel.

5) Why do you think the author choose that setting?

6) Summarize the novel.

7) What do you think the theme of the novel is? What makes you think so?

8) How does the topic of identity impact the novel? Think about: a. How does identity impact Jin Wang? b. How does identity impact the events that happen in the story?

9) How does the topic of race impact the novel? Think about:

6 The original spacing that was provided for student responses between questions has been condensed in order to conserve space within this document.

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a. How does race impact Jin Wang? b. How does race impact the events that happen in the story?

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Esperanza Rising Questionnaire – Characters, Plot, Setting, & Theme

1) Describe Esperanza. Think about: a. What does she look like? b. How does she act? c. Why does she act that way?

2) Describe the setting of the novel.

3) Why do you think the author choose that setting?

4) Summarize the novel.

5) What do you think the theme of the novel is? What makes you think so?

6) How does the topic of immigration impact the novel? Think about: a. How does immigration impact Esperanza? b. How does immigration impact the events that happen in the story?

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Monster Questionnaire – Characters, Plot, Setting, & Theme7

1) Describe Steve. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

2) Describe James King. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

3) Describe the setting of the novel.

4) Why do you think the author choose that setting?

5) Summarize the novel.

6) What do you think the theme of the novel is? What makes you think so?

7) How does Steve’s race impact the events in the story?

8) How does Steve’s age impact his actions?

9) How does Steve’s age impact the events of the story?

10) Do you think Steve is innocent or guilty? Explain your answer.

11) Write any other thoughts you have about the characters, setting, plot or theme that you think are important for me to know.

7 The original spacing that was provided for student responses between questions has been condensed in order to conserve space within this document.

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Speak Questionnaire – Characters, Plot, Setting, & Theme

1) Describe Melinda. Think about: a. What does she look like? b. How does she act? c. Why does she act that way?

2) Describe the setting of the novel.

3) Why do you think the author choose that setting?

4) Summarize the novel.

5) What do you think the theme of the novel is? What makes you think so?

6) How does the topic of rape impact the novel? Think about: a. How do character’s beliefs about rape impact Melinda? b. How do character’s beliefs about rape impact the events that happen in the story?

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Absolutely True Diary Questionnaire – Characters, Plot, Setting, & Theme8

Name ______Date ______

1) Describe Arnold. Think about: a. What does he look like? b. How does he act? c. Why does he act that way?

2) Describe Arnold’s family. Think about: a. How do different members of his family act? b. Why do the members of his family act this way?

3) Describe the setting of the novel.

4) Why do you think the author choose that setting?

5) Summarize the novel.

6) What do you think the theme of the novel is? What makes you think so?

7) How does the topic of life on a Native American reservation impact the novel? Think about: a. How does life on the reservation impact Arnold? b. How does life on the reservation impact the events that happen in the story?

8 The original spacing that was provided for student responses between questions has been condensed in order to conserve space within this document.

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Appendix F: Questionnaires About the Social Justice Issues in the Focal Text and Critical Companion

ABC Questionnaire - Social Issues in Focal Text and Critical Companions9

1) What is identity?

2) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about a person’s identity… (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

3) If you do talk about identity, describe when and why you talk about it?

4) What is racism?

5) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about racism … (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

6) If you do talk about racism, describe when and why you talk about it?

7) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about racism? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

9 The original spacing that was provided for student responses between questions has been condensed in order to conserve space within this document.

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8) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about racism?

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Esperanza Rising Questionnaire - Social Issues in Focal Text and Critical Companions

1) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about immigration… (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

2) If you do talk about immigration, describe when and why you talk about it?

3) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about immigration? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

4) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about immigration?

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Monster Questionnaire - Social Issues in Focal Text and Critical Companions10

1) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about males of color being arrested … (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

2) If you do talk about males of color being arrested, describe when and why you talk about it?

3) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about males of color being arrested? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

4) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about males of color being arrested?

5) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about young people going to jail … (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

6) If you do talk about young people going to jail, describe when and why you talk about it?

7) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about young people going to jail? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

8) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about young people going to jail?

10 The original spacing that was provided for student responses between questions has been condensed in order to conserve space within this document.

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Speak Questionnaire - Social Issues in Focal Text and Critical Companions11

1) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about bullying or aggression… (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

2) If you do talk about bullying or aggression, describe when and why you talk about it?

3) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about bullying or aggression? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

4) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about bullying or aggression?

11 Although the primary social issue in Speak is rape, I elected not to use the word rape on the questionnaire because in Speak the reader does not find out that the main character has been raped until the end of the novel.

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Absolutely True Diary Questionnaire - Social Issues in Focal Text and Critical Companions

1) Do you ever talk about or hear people talk about Indian reservations and Native Americans… (circle one)

In school Yes/ No

At home Yes/ No

With friends Yes/ No

2) If you do talk about Indian reservations and Native Americans, describe when and why you talk about it?

3) On a scale of 1-10 how comfortable are you talking about Indian reservations and Native Americans? (circle one)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

4) Explain why you circled the number that you did? Why are you comfortable, or uncomfortable with talking about Indian reservations and Native Americans?

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Appendix G: Transcription Markers

Conventions of Transcription for Classroom Dialogue Examples

Loud Whisper Uncertain words Reading from written text @@@ Laughter # # Overlapping language spoken by two or more speakers at a time ( ) Local noises XXX Language that is inaudible and impossible to transcribe - Truncated Word = Breaking off of a speaker’s turn due to the next speaker’s turn [ ] Identifies what is being referred to or gestured and other contextual information … Part of transcript has been omitted

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Appendix H: Coding for Intertextual Substance

• In the discussion from 9/27 where students came to the meeting having read the CC prior to the meeting, the students made connections from the focal text to the CC (whereas in all other instances they were reading the CC so connections were made to the focal text)

Focal Text

• Character. The category of character refers to comments about the looks, personality, and motivation of a character in the focal text.

• Setting. References to the time and the place in which the novel took place were coded as setting.

• Plot. References to the specific events or the sequence of events in the novel were categorized as plot.

• Theme. The category of theme refers to comments about the underlying message of the focal text.

• Author. The category of author refers to comments about the focal texts’ author’s motivation for writing, or regarding perceptions of the author’s intended message.

Other Texts Relevant to Social Issue

• Written. The category of written texts includes printed texts that take on a material form such as books, articles, or student writing.

• Media. References to TV/radio/ internet videos or movies were categorized as media connections.

• Impersonal generalized text. The category refers to intertextual references to generalized knowledge. When speakers shared impersonal generalized texts they often did so without reporting the source of their knowledge. Therefore, references in this category may have been based off of the speaker’s lived experiences, or they may have stemmed from hegemonic or stereotypical beliefs.

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• Personal generalized text. Texts in this category are those that reference knowledge acquired from habitual experience.

• Folk texts. This category includes sayings, rhymes, and idioms that are familiar to the speaker.

• Previous discussion. This type of intertextuality involves connections to previous book club discussions.

• Hypotheticals. In this category are events that the speaker thinks could potentially happen, or hypothetical events. These events were often described with “what if” and “If I were…” statements.

Recounted Events:

• Personal generalized events. The events in this category are not retellings of specific occurrences, but are rather references to events that have been experienced habitually.

• Personal and personally- related events. The category of personal and personally-related events includes intertextual connections to events that have happened to the speaker or to someone the speaker knows.

• Hearsay. This category refers to hearsay, or events that were neither experienced by the speaker or by someone the speaker knows first-hand. When speakers shared these events they often used statements such as “I heard” or “Someone told me.”

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