Literature and Discussions

For this week we read a few separate articles that mainly talked about the importance of discussion when reading literature. There were many great points and examples given but I found Judith A. Langer's four stances in interpreting literature to be one of the most interesting tidbits. After reading through the four stances and the examples from a seventh grade classroom I realized that these stances (or most of them) can also be related to younger elementary grades such as kindergarten and first grade. Here are the four stances and a short description of each.


1. Being Out and Stepping In: Here, students "make initial contacts." They do this using their prior knowledge and "surface features" (Langer, p. 813). I feel like this is one of the things that is very important for beginning readers. Looking at things such as the title and pictures gives the reader the opportunity to ibegin to ask question on what the text is going to be about and even make predictions (like we discussed last week with Gibbons).

2. Being In and Moving Through: This stance is where students begin to "develop meaning" (Langer, p 813). They do this by using both the "text knowledge and background knowledge." I feel as though I have not seen a whole lot of this in my classroom but it is still somewhat there.

3. Being In and Stepping Out: This is when readers use the text and relate/"reflect on their own lives." I also think this is an importance stance to learn and use early on. In my classroom I see the students making connections to their own lives after reading a story quite a bit. It might be something as simple as, "My sister and I once built a snowman just like they did in the story!" This may not seem very though provoking but it is giving this student the foundation to continue to make connections whenever he reads.

4. Stepping Out and Objectifying the Experience: Finally, stance four refers to the readers distancing themselves from the text and reflect on the content as well as the experience. Here, students also judge the text as well as relate it to other texts they have read. I would say that in my classroom there is quite a bit of this going on. Again, it might be at a beginning level but the experiences they have early on will make it easier for them in the future.

Another thing that really stood out to me while reading about the four stances is that they are not linear. I feel like as we are preparing to be teachers, we have been taught a lot about linear processes. In math, students need to do this before they can do that, in science they need to learn this concept before they understand the next one...and so on. I really like the fact that these stances can occur at any time during the students' reading of the text. It is still a organized structure but has some wiggle room at the same time.