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CTL

7020, English Inquiry Project I


Lorilee Maclean, Maggie Ying, Shameran Zaya
Date: Oct.14th, 2014

Graphic Analysis of Book Club Dynamics


Book club is one of the most predominant ways for students to learn literature by
talking together about a text. A growing body of research (Literature Circle Resource
Centre) has shown that literature circles can enhance the reading achievement,
attitudes, and work habits of students at all grade levels.
After watching the video of the book club literature discussion named Book of
Negroes, we observed the change of dynamics in the classroom and would like to
implement several graphics to describe the interactive patterns in that book club
discussion. There are four different circles shifting and colliding with each other in the
graphs. Each of them respectively represents different groups of students in the
discussion. The smallest one stands for teacher while A represents the students who are
very familiar with the book, B represents those who are partially familiar with the book
and C is the group of students who have not read the book at all.
The inevitable problem lying ahead is that how teachers can manage a book club if
the students familiarity with the book content differ due to their different levels of pre-
class preparation. What kinds of strategies shall we apply in class when we find that
students have come to the club discussion with different levels of book content
knowledge? What types of criteria shall we apply to select the book club members?
What role shall a teacher take in facilitating a book club?
Students
A

Graphic 1:
(the beginning 14
minutes)

Students
B

Teacher
Students
C

We can see from graphic 1 that at the beginning of the discussion, all the students
are participating in the conversation regardless of how familiar they are with the book
content. Even students C who have not read the book are paying attention to the
dialogue between the other two groups, trying to make sense of their responses and
making effort to contribute by clarifying and asking questions. The overlapping area,
which indicates the interaction, is big enough to provoke a lot of thoughts generated
from each participants personal connection to the book.


Students
A

Graphic 2:
(the middle 15 minutes)

Students
B

Teacher
Students
C

We can see that in the next 15 minutes, a student who is very familiar with the book
content starts to dominate the discussion and both students C and students B are
getting less interactive with each other as they can hardly connect themselves with the
discussion since the conversation is swirling around the plot details that they are not
familiar with at all. The teacher does not address the occuring change and takes refugee
in the dominant students talk as she is also having difficulty memorizing the content of
the book.
Graphic 3:
(the last 30 minutes)


D
Students
B

Teacher

Students
A

Students
C

In the last 30 minutes, it is not difficult to see that very little interaction is
happening in the discussion as the teacher even encourages the dominant student to
elaborate a full summary of the book, which completely shuts down the communicating
channels in the activity.
There are verbal and nonverbal ways by which students can participate in any
literature discussion. The verbal cues that we noticed from the video fall into three
broad themes. First, most book club discussions have a few dominant individuals
leading the discussion. Second, the book may be analyzed through a variety of literary
lenses. Finally, students may find themselves making personal connections to aspects of
the story or specific characters. How a teacher chooses to deal with these verbal cues is
very important.

Considerations for the Verbal Dimensions to the Book Club


Teachers should be very cognizant of students contributions in literary circles


and should structure the tasks accordingly. In this video literature discussion, there was
one particular girl who did the majority of the talking throughout the 45 minute
meeting. It was noticed that the quiet girl with her head down for the previous minutes
of discussion attempted to respond to a question but she was silenced by the
dominating students. We tried to come up with a few possible reasons for why
particular students can dominate the discussion. The first explanation could be that the
student is the natural speaker for the group, either the individual student or the group
or both have an understanding that when the discussion slows, this girl picks it up.
Perhaps this explanation lines up with Bloomes reasoning that reading in the social
context requires navigating student to student relationships and student to teacher
relationships but also acting in accordance to these social norms (Bloome, 1985).
Another reason to explain the unequal talking role is that this one student has
completed the book or is the farthest one in the book. Now because the talkative
student did make it further into the book, she was the go-to speaker, another girl even
asked her for a quick summary. This quick summary drew on for more than half of the
discussion time.
As soon-to-be English teachers, we all agree that we need to structure the
discussion with specific roles for students to follow prior to coming to class and to
carefully facilitate discussion in class to ensure that most of the students have an
opportunity to talk. We also recognize that we need to direct discussion but also to
contribute comments every so often to get students thinking about the content instead
of allowing them free reign to discuss whatever they want and for however long they
choose to do so.
In literature discussions, teachers can use literary lenses to structure the student
responses or the students can naturally pick up on the themes themselves from the
books content. In the beginning of the video there was a back and forth conversation
about race between two girls. It began when one girl asked why [do] we tend to hurt
our own. The one with a university degree said that its not a black and white thing
its a humanity thing and that theres good and bad in all people in response to why
some black characters were betraying their fellow people to help the white characters.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for the teacher to expand the
conversation and illicit opinions and personal stories from the other students. While
this was a great discussion, it lasted only a few minutes before the summary began. A
discussion that is filled with analyzing the text through literary lenses invites more
discussion and interesting opinions the focus should have been on continuing this
discussion.

One of the first responses a teacher may hear when starting a literature circle is

the students personal response to the book. A teacher should also be ready to hear that
a student was unable or unwilling to continue reading the book because the emotionally
charged material can potentially be linked to his or her personal life. One of the first
things we heard in this video was one girl admitting she could not read the book
because she did not want know about what actually happened to people from her
cultural group. Or students may read the book, make those cultural connections, and are
willing to discuss their own cultural experiences and stories about a similar situation.
The older woman links the slaves belonging to a new community to what she personally
knows about how villages in Ghana operate in a similar way. Another way that students
made a personal connection to the book was to say how much they liked the main
female character for being so strong and brave and saying they could not have done
anything like that at her age. As English teachers, we will not have a classroom full of
students who are emotionally linked to the books we are reading. Adding a small
Reader Response Diagram activity can help students to confront the degree to which
they [are] unable or unwilling to have an emotional reaction to the book (Appleman,
2009, pg. 47).

Considerations for the Non-Verbal Dimensions to the Book Club


Established norms:
Because our inquiry group was not part of the metamorphosis of this book club
from its inception to its subsequent successes, it is important for us, as external
analysts, to understand that this book club moved from a teacher-led format in the
earliest meetings to a student-led learning community (Kooy, 2013, p. 8). One of the
concerns our group had as we analyzed the video clip was the fact that there was no
evidence of facilitation by the teacher at all. The strength of the teachers stance in this

book club is that it established a norm that undid the English teacher mode mentality
where the teacher directs all discussion because he/she knows best how to discuss
literature. This purposeful relinquishment of control allowed for an evolving norm that
took root in this book club that established the students as the drivers and initiators and
the teachers as receivers and participants. This participatory, teacher-as-learner role is
exemplified by her silence for most of the discussion. Her non-verbal participation was
actually speaking volumes.
Bloome (1985) describes the goings-on in a literary event such as a book club as
the social context of reading (first page). We noticed that there were certain accepted
roles within the group, such as the young woman who seemed to take the role of the
summarizer for those who had not read the story. Was her role an accepted role that
actually helped weaker readers or those who would rather hear the story than read it?
What were the social realities developed over the several years prior that had
established her in this role, and did the other young girls accept her role for her sake or
for theirs? Bloome (1985) suggests that there are cultural dynamics to group reading
sessions like this one that might determine reading and discussion practice. Since these
are all black girls, are there cultural dynamics that we are not privy to that make this
extended focus on one person in this group more acceptable? These questions have
forced us to acknowledge the reality of a social context within this book club that we are
not privileged to understand as insiders.
A final observation of established norms for this book club was that we only saw
evidence of one book beside one girl. Even the teacher did not have the book in hand.
No one opened the book to read from it or to check details. The missing book
bothered us somewhat, and we did not know if this was an accepted norm within the
group or if this was one aspect that could have been improved upon. It is possible to
argue that by allowing the girls to sit and discuss without the pressure to read aloud
or reference any text, the space was provided for these girls to focus on what Gee
(2001) calls acquisition which tends to only come from more naturalised settings and
happens on a subconscious level without a process of formal teaching (p. 3).
Perhaps the presence of the book and the deliberate handling of the text would have
made the book club more threatening to the participants, all readers of varying
strength, or made the book club too much like school? What these young women were
acquiring through increased comfort with discussing literature together with their

peers would more likely result in implementation in the learning environment of their
classrooms.

Body language and engagement:


Another non-verbal dynamic that is important to consider is the body language

of the participants and how this demonstrated their individual levels of engagement.
With arms crossed, some girls did not seem to be paying attention to the conversation
that was going on. One girl checked her phone. Others were holding eyebrow
conversations with participants across the room. Sometimes, girls were whispering
with one another. Were the girls bored, especially during the long summary provided
by the summarizer? One young woman sat slumped over the arm of the couch for
most of the discussion. At one point this young woman made an attempt to join the
conversation and another girl said, No, you dont get it, and this young woman went
back to slouching, communicating disengagement and even appearing antsy at times.
However, she did maintain eye contact with the summarizer. Is the girl slouching on
the couch not a strong reader and therefore values the summary? How did she feel
when the only time she tried to talk, the talkative one to her left told her that she didnt
get it? As Atwell (1998) points out about literature circles, we invite the messiness of
human response--personal prejudices, tastes, habits and experiences (p. 30). So
perhaps the messiness of what we have observed is actually what we should expect
when a book club is functioning authentically.
As outside observers, the apparent lack of engagement, the body language, the
predominance of only two or three speakers out of the whole group, these factors make
it difficult for us to corroborate some of the evaluations found in Kooys article (2013).
For example, according to Rebecca, one of the other teachers in the book club, the girls
were hanging on every word when the summarizer went through all the chapters.
Rebecca also describes the discussion as electrifying (Kooy & Colarusso, 2013, p. 8). It
is true that we have only watched a small segment of the whole book discussion.
However, the girls body language did not communicate to us that the girls were so
enthralled because we observed action unrelated to the book discussion itself as noted
above. However, while this gap between how the participants describe the experience
versus our arm-chair analysis as outsider may make this dichotomy a case of you just
had to be there to know what we mean. We must acknowledge that we were not part of

the historical shift in this book club, the shift from student non-participation to student-
led participation. Good teachers can read their students better than anyone else, and
the fact that these two teachers had spent four years with these same young women
means they are a better gauge of what electrifying meant in that context. Bloome
(1985) states: We need to understand reading events not as they appear to us, but
rather as they are understood by the people participating in those reading events (last
page). Bloomes caution to us is entirely appropriate. We must acknowledge that there
is a great distance between us as outside observers of a recorded session and those who
sat in the book club time after time for four years.

The teacher stance



The research of Kooy and Colarusso (2013) clearly demonstrates that this book
club was a student-led learning community (p.8) that resulted in transforming Evelyn
and Rebeccas pedagogical outlook (p. 7). The more experienced teacher, Evelyn, puts it
this way: You [as a teacher] have to be willing to go to a book club to learn. It is
collaboration--to help each other, to figure this story out for one another and for
ourselves (Kooy & Colarusso, 2013, p. 8). As discussed earlier, it was tempting for us
as observers to come down hard on the teacher. For one thing, Evelyn had not recently
read the book (she states she had read it a year prior), so her own memory of details
was unclear. We also sensed there were times when the discussion could have
benefitted from redirection of the conversation in order to give more silent voices
opportunity to be heard. Mary Kooy had a stronger presence and we did notice that
Marys responses and engagement caused the speaker, especially the summarizer, to
turn her body toward Mary and direct her reflection on the book to Mary. There was an
observable shift in discussion dynamics when more focused attention was directed at
Mary Kooy. So, perhaps, the teacher was on to something after all!
What the teacher had achieved by relinquishing control and by literally taking a
back seat was to allow the students to flourish as literary analysts in their own right.
Evelyn does not communicate in any way the premise that students need to be fixed
(Christensen, 2009, p. 2) and gives opportunity to voices that have been strangled and
made small by overcorrection (Christensen, p. 2). The active participation of the young
women in this book club has ensured that these teachers are lonesome no more
(Atwell, 1998, p. 50) as the young women moved from passive learners in the classroom

to active readers and talkers in the book club. These teachers actually became
connoisseurs of the girls lives and literacies (Simon, 2012, p.517) by doing the non-
English teacher thing to do: let the girls talk as much as they wanted in the way they
wanted and about what they wanted. Although this apparent wantonness in the
teachers stance is what first put us on red alert, it seems clear that we, as aspiring
English teachers, have not yet had the privilege of experiencing the freedom that is
possible when we have truly helped our students love literature (Atwell, 1998, p. 33).

Reference:

Appleman, D. (2009). Critical encounters in high school English: Teaching literary theory to
adolescents, second edition. New York: Teachers College Press & Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Atwell, N. (1998). Learning how to teach reading. In In the middle: New understandings
about writing, reading, and learning 2nd ed. (pp. 27-50). Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook.
Bloome, D. (1985). Reading is a social process. Language Arts, 62(2), no pages listed.
Christensen, L. (2009). Teaching for joy and justice: Re-imagining the language arts
classroom. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.
Gee, J.P. (2001). What is literacy? In P. Shannon (Ed.), Becoming political too: New
readings and writings on the politics of literacy education (pp. 1-9). Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Kooy, M. & Colarusso, D. (2013). The Space in between: a book club with inner-city girls
and professional teacher learning. Professional Development in Education 2013 (pp. 117).
Simon, R. (2012). 'Without Comic Books, There Would Be No Me': Teachers as
Connoisseurs of Adolescents' Literate Lives. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,
55(6), 516-526.

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