INTRODUCING LITERARY CONVERSATIONS IN THE PRIMARY SCHOOL CLASSROOM

The paper presents a study of six teachers’ reflections based on an action-learning project of literary conversations in primary school classrooms. Teachers often use the term "literary conversation" when they talk about a way of working with literature, without discussing or studying the theoretical basis. Some teachers emphasize the “natural way” of discussing books, while others have clear criteria and a fixed method for the literary conversation in class. The teachers in our study were part time students in a further education course of reading literacy for primary school teachers. As an assignment work in the course, each teacher conducted a practical action-learning project in his/her own primary school class and wrote a report about it. Some of the teachers’ projects include reading picture books and discussing the books with their students. We have looked closer into six of these reports in order to study how the teachers reflect on their work in light of theoretical and practical literature provided in the course, among others inspired by L. Rosenblatt [1]. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory is briefly included in the course literature written by the Norwegian researchers A. Hennig [2] and L. Aase [3]. Results from the study are published in Garmann, N. G. & Ommundsen Aa. M. [4].

In this paper we concentrate on the teachers’ reflections about choices they made and the outcome for the children and themselves. The teachers’ reflections have different focuses, but they have some common features. We have categorized them into the following questions: Who is selecting the books to be read in class (students or teacher)? Who is controlling the conversation? What kind of questions are discussed, “open” or ”closed”? How is the teacher providing the student with text interpretation skills? These categories are areas of different positions in the course literature, and the teachers reflect and justify their choices in different ways. The study revealed interesting teacher reflections on practice and theory. The teachers experienced several challenges in introducing literary conversations in class, both in terms of organization of work, the choice of books and the content of the conversations. Furthermore, it appears that the teachers make other choices than suggested in the course literature without problematizing it. Despite this, they argue with the ideas and theories they have read in the course literature. To be discussed: How is the connection between the academic content of the course literature and the teachers’ reflective practice?

References:
[1] Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1994. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, 2. Ed. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press
[2] Hennig, Aa. 2012. Effektive lesere snakker sammen. Innfoering i litteraere samtaler. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.
[3] Aase, L. 2005. «Litteraere samtalar». I Nicolaysen, B. & Aase, L. (Eds). Kulturmoete i tekstar. Litteraturdidaktiske perspektiv. (pp. 106-124). Oslo: Det norske Samlaget.
[4] Garmann, N. G. & Ommundsen Aa. M. 2016 (Eds). Tekst for vekst. Litteratur, spraak og samtale. Oslo: Novus.