Transforming classroom discourse as a resource for learning: Adapting interactional ethnography for teaching and learning

Abstract

This chapter shows how an interdisciplinary team of instructors (a professor of literature and a professor of English education) transformed classroom talk from a graduate class into a resource for constructing interpretive principles and practices of literary texts and generated deeper learning opportunities for the students, most of them practicing classroom teachers. By integrating an Interactional Ethnographic perspective, the instructors examined selected classroom discourse and engaged students in reflexive processes to explore classroom interactions and recognize how the experiences may lead them to (re)think and expand repertoires for interpreting and teaching literature.