Analyzing agency and authority in the discourse of six high school English classrooms

Though a growing number of educators recognize the value of placing more interpretive authority into the hands of secondary literature students, the pedagogical shifts this would require in most classrooms are profound (Applebee, 1996, Flood and Langer, eds., 1994; Rosenblatt, 1995, 2005). In addition, theoretical questions remain regarding the need to balance calls for students' intellectual agency with traditional expectations that students achieve fluency with established understandings of the field. In so unresolved a professional climate, individual teachers are likely to construct interpretive authority in a variety of ways (Hillocks, 1999).; In this research, I examine discourse patterns in the English classrooms of six high school preparatory academy teachers in order to provide a typology of highly-regarded practice relative to this fundamental issue. The teachers were selected to reflect three different pedagogical approaches in order to provide conceptual breadth. The resulting lens can then be taken into other school contexts where issues of intellectual authority will often be more contested and their clear articulation will arguably matter more.; Two transcripts from each classroom were analyzed in three stages: (1) discourse turns were coded according to the turn's role in shaping topic development (Chafe, 1994); (2) teacher turns were evaluated for the types of recurring participation structures (Au, 1979; Philips, 1972) they established; (3) the transcripts were read for what shifting participant frameworks (Goffman, 1974, 1981; Goodwin, 1990; O'Connor and Michaels, 1996) illustrated of the interpersonal dynamic within the various classrooms.; As hypothesized, classrooms distinguished themselves according to the extent to which student concerns framed the discussion and the manner in which interpretations were arbitrated. Specifically, text and teacher served as final interpretive authority to significantly different degrees across the classrooms. Although these differences were not associated with hypothesized variations in the breadth of student participation across classrooms, they were found to correspond to differences in the character of turns and turn sequences and to aspects of the interpersonal dynamics within the classrooms. Findings supported the characterization of three distinct pedagogical dynamics: (1) Teacher-orchestrated; (2) Co-constructed; (3) Student-orchestrated. These dynamics corresponded unevenly to the three original pedagogical categories.