Tensioning interpretive authority during dialogic discussions of literature

Abstract

This analysis of classroom discourse offers a dialogic perspective on interpretive authority—the argumentative assertion of meaning—by mobilizing the Bakhtinian concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces to analyze how one teacher and his students co-constructed literary meanings during two 45-minute whole-class discussions of the text Grendel in two secondary English classrooms in the United States. Discussion transcripts were segmented into interpretive episodes and coded for the form and function of students' (a) interpretations (e.g., how students made meanings in interaction by dialoguing with other students, texts, and ideas) and (b) source of authority (e.g., how students asserted text-based meanings that either validated or disrupted conventional or locally ratified interpretations). Micro-level discourse analyses revealed how participants co-constructed interpretive authority by tensioning talk between centripetal tendencies to unify, centralize, and standardize text meanings and centrifugal tendencies that reimagined, expanded, and disrupted standard interpretations of the text. Critical to the development of students' dialogic construction of interpretive authority was the teacher's stance as listener and discussion participant, teacher and student tensioning of standard and non-standard literary meanings, and a classroom environment in which students' colloquial language could be used to support literary sensemaking. Rethinking interpretive authority as a dynamic concept tensioned between centripetal and centrifugal forces may shed light on how dialogic practices are enacted given the complexities that inform how students and teachers participate during literary discussions.