Conversations about literary conversations

An inquiring assemblage

Abstract

This article represents conversations about L1 literary conversations. It is an assemblage of discussion, literary quotation, transcriptions of classroom dialogue, and our reflections on making audio recordings of lessons to review L1 teaching. We adopt an unconventional article format intended to reflect qualities of L1 literary conversations, which may be provisional, layered, recursive and open-ended. They allow for different perspectives and, as intertextual links in a Bakhtinian chain of literary expression and exchange, never really end. They are embodied in materialities of shifting ratio, tilting to print or the spatial arrangement of a page, then to speech and sound. They span time and occur through multiple voices, some belonging to teachers and students, others participating through literary constructs such as ‘narrator’ or ‘character’. We present a posthumanist account of how we recorded literary conversations, conveying our methods and considering the extent to which MP3 audio files helped us understand the voices comprising L1 literary pedagogies. We work in a space between research and professional development, declining social science conventions which inform many education research publications. We attempt an aesthetic that complements the distinctive modes of knowing and learning through literature (an epistemological orientation) conveying the unique nature of collaborative enquiry about L1 literary pedagogies (an ontological orientation).