"You Can't Get to Comprehension Until They Trust You": Teachers' Thinking About Practices That Foster Students' Meaning-Making of Literature

Abstract

Often in classrooms meaning-making skills are not acknowledged and therefore not fostered. In addition, there are many high school ELA classrooms that prioritize students’ reaching one correct answer, or one best interpretation of literature. Yet, some ELA teachers do engage their students in rich meaning-making processes, and do not privilege one answer or interpretation of a piece of literature. Learning how and why do they do this will shed light on how teachers can be supported in bringing their practice in line with research findings on adolescents’ meaning-making processes as they interact with works of literature in ELA classrooms. In addition, it may reveal effective practices not yet studied, and avenues for future research, given the current state of the theoretical and empirical literature. Consequently, the questions guiding this study are as follows: How do these four ELA teachers in my study work to foster student meaning-making by shaping the classroom contexts, texts, readers, and activities? Specifically, what do these teachers think about and what do they do when they are working to foster student meaning making? This study examines the practices of four teachers through classroom observations, interviews with teachers, and the collection of classroom handouts. The data collected through these means was then analyzed through constant comparative analysis. Each of these four teachers, in an effort to foster student meaning making, crafted environments, engendered relationships with students and between students and texts, chose and organized texts, employed instructional strategies, and modeled engagement. However, each of these teachers performed these activities differently based on how they were thinking about their work. If meaning making is to become a clear goal in high school English Language Arts classrooms, further study on meaning making, the role of intellectual risk taking in meaning making, the role of student teacher relationships in meaning making, the role of the classroom environment and meaning making, and the connection between standardized testing and meaning making is required.