When Reading It Wrong Is Getting It Right: Shared...

56 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 42 August 2007

56 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 42, Number 1, August 2007

Maren S. AukermanUniversity of Pennsylvania

When Reading It Wrong Is Getting It Right: Shared Evaluation

Pedagogy among Struggling Fifth Grade Readers

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension

by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher

sought to displace himself as “primary knower” (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study

examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his students even when they sought to reposi-

tion him as primary knower. Rather than relying on explicit strategy instruction or other forms

of directive guidance, he refrained from evaluative steering toward particular interpretations or

interpretive techniques, and he did so even when the students offered a pronunciation or inter-

pretation that was non-standard and would be considered flat-out “wrong” by many adult readers.

The two focal students, both considered “struggling readers,” gradually took up positions as “pos-

sible knowers,” but they did not do so all at once. Their intentions and understandings shifted

across the course of the discussion as the students wrestled with one another’s sometimes conflict-

ing ideas and purposes. The article proposes that teaching should primarily follow (rather than

attempt to lead) students’ shifting social and intellectual intentions as they wrestle with textual

meaning-making.

Depth of understanding requires elaboration of the learner’s, not the teacher’s,interpretive framework.

—Nystrand, 1997, p. 20

There are very clear moments where a child says something about a text that indicatesthat they really didn’t understand what was happening, or that they understood part ofit, but missed some really key, you know, plot development, or you know, whatever, keypiece of information . . . I don’t think I stay completely neutral. I mean, I don’t think Iever say, “No, that’s not right,” but I might say something like, “Hmm, I’m not sureabout that, that’s interesting, but I think instead that, this.” . . . If it’s still on topic but it’sout there, I’ll try to say, “Well, that’s a really interesting thought.” And I’ll try to redirectit in some other direction. (Elsie,1 second grade teacher)

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selson

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Copyright © 2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

AUKERMAN When Reading It Wrong Is Getting It Right 57

When students’ interpretive frameworks about text fall solidly within the realm ofthe plausible, comprehensible, and transparently relevant, then allowing studentsto elaborate on these makes for a compelling pedagogical premise. As Elsie’scomment suggests, however, teachers may be far more reluctant to honor andmake room for the elaboration of interpretations of text that, from their matureadult reader’s perspective, seem manifestly off track. In such cases, there is anintuitive tendency to instead model or “scaffold” toward a more clearly text-based(Tierney & Pearson, 1981) understanding rather than to follow the child downwhat would appear to be a dead-end street.

Moreover, the perceived imperative to guide students ever more narrowly to-ward standard interpretations and predetermined strategies increasingly domi-nates reading classrooms as teachers face mounting “accountability” pressures frompolicies such as the No Child Left Behind Act; teachers and schools bump againstthe increasing threat of sanctions if their students do not do well on standardizedreading tests where, after all, there is only one designated “right” answer. In ourquest to have kids “get” what they are reading—and do well on those tests—we areoften rather uncomfortable with any pedagogical approach that leaves that out-come in question.

In this article, I propose that we need to move away from currently promi-nent approaches to instructional scaffolding in reading in at least two ways. First,we need to refrain from the temptation to use prompts, questions, and evaluationto steer students toward textual “big ideas” and “standard” interpretations that wefind more relevant and plausible than the ones they are putting forth. Second, andperhaps more radically, we need to stop framing our teaching around ways ofreading (i.e., comprehension strategies or specific interpretive techniques) drivenby our adult sense of what is important; instead, our teaching should be mindfulof and meaningfully led by students’ shifting social and intellectual intentions asthey engage with text and with each other. I propose, in short, that, in the serviceof genuine accountability in the teaching of reading comprehension, we para-doxically let go of our obsessive focus on ensuring that the students are “gettingit”—or even approaching it—on our terms, or on the narrow terms dictated byNo Child Left Behind and its posse of related standardized reading comprehen-sion tests.

I build my case around a fine-grained analysis of a conversation about a fablethat took place among a group of fifth graders when their teacher deliberatelychose not to evaluate a child’s miscue, and later a different child’s apparent misin-terpretation of the meaning of that particular word in the story. Here, I documentsome of the ways in which that teacher paved the way for shared evaluation amongall participants in the conversation. I also trace how these two students graduallyshifted away from looking to the teacher (literally and figuratively) to evaluate the

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rightness of their claims, and how they developed new reasons for engaging withthe text and with each other as that shift took place.

In particular, the need to persuade and understand others besides the teacherhelped push these students toward adopting additional interpretive and discur-sive strategies largely without the teacher’s specifying or directing the kinds ofstrategies they were “supposed” to learn. The students evolved in their thinkingand in the kinds of strategies they employed because they needed to do so in orderto accomplish their own purposes, not because the teacher scaffolded them to-ward those understandings and ways of reading in the traditional sense. My find-ings suggest that we might do well to move away from a model of reading com-prehension instruction centered on scaffolding toward “right” understanding or“right” ways of reading, and instead frame our teaching in ways that take students’existing purposes and understandings fully seriously—even when these may seemnon-standard at first glance.

Interpretive Authority and Teacher GuidanceThere appears to be considerable pedagogical agreement within the scholarlycommunity of the often problematic nature of the prototypical teacher exchange,in which the teacher initiates with a question, a student responds, and the teacherevaluates this response (Cazden, 1988; Mehan, 1982). While there may be somelimited benefits to such exchanges under certain circumstances (Mercer, 1995),researchers have noted that this I-R-E exchange structure frequently functionsmore to assess proficiency in reading than to improve that proficiency (Allington,2001), and that such exchanges can work to truncate classroom dialogue anddeeper thematic discussion, since the teacher’s evaluative move at the end of thesequence functions to close down the preceding topic for further conversation(Nystrand, 1997; Poole, 1990). Young readers appear to benefit from theopportunity to evaluate texts for themselves (Britton, 1970) and to exerciseinterpretive authority (Fish, 1980) in situations where multiple perspectives areencouraged (Almasi, 1995; Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Chinn,Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001; Goldenberg, 1992/1993).

But there is far less discussion about how teachers might most usefully re-spond during classroom moments in which those divergent textual interpreta-tions are more troublesome, for instance, when students appear to be misinter-preting the text, or when children offer ideas that appear only tangentially relatedto story content, or when they miss aspects of an interpretation of the story thatthe teacher considers to be critical. While a number of researchers who have closelyexamined mathematical thinking (Ball, 1991; Horn, 1999; Lampert, Rittenhouse,& Crumbaugh, 1996) have long argued for the intellectual benefits of providing

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students the opportunity to articulate and discuss apparently faulty mathematicalreasoning without teachers stepping in to evaluate and steer toward “right” an-swers and “right” thinking, existing literature situated within the domain of lit-eracy instruction has often steered clear of closely considering instructional peda-gogy around “off track” interpretations. Even researchers who have identified thevalue of discussions that do not privilege right answers in math and/or scienceoften take a more conservative view with regard to word meaning and compre-hension, proposing more traditional forms of correcting “misunderstandings” and/or explicit strategy instruction (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Nicholls & Hazzard, 1993).

With a few exceptions (e.g., Ballenger, 2004), the approaches that appear withinthe domain of literacy research that explicitly take up the problem of “misinter-pretation” or “error” similarly suggest ways for the teacher to take the lead in di-recting students toward “right answers” and toward apparently more supportableand “standard” ways of reading.2 For example, Beck and McKeown (2001) notethe frequency with which young children privilege their background knowledgeand information available from a book’s pictures in offering interpretations ofread-alouds, and they discuss ways teachers can handle such moments. They de-scribe one case where a class discussion revolved around The Wolf ’s Chicken Stew(Kasza, 1987), a story in which a wolf leaves food for a chicken in hopes of fatten-ing her up to eat her; the chicken, in turn, feeds the food to her large family. Whenthe teacher asked students what the chicken thought the food was for, a studentsuggested, “Poison,” and several other students agreed. Beck and McKeown en-dorse the following suggested response, generated by a group of teachers withwhom they were working:

“We sometimes do hear about food being poisoned, especially bad people doing that atHalloween, but let’s think about what’s happening in the story. Why did this food getleft for the chicken? Who can remind us?” Presumably children would recall that thefood was left to fatten up the chicken. From here the teacher could lead children to seethat the food therefore would have been good food, not poisoned. (Beck & McKeown,2001, p. 17)

Such pedagogical moves to lead students to apparently more appropriate strat-egies for textual engagement (and thus, conveniently, to a more acceptable an-swer) are generally composed of initiations and evaluative moves that replicateaspects of I-R-E exchanges; yet, they are generally not analyzed in this way, per-haps because they are undertaken in the service of scaffolding students towardmore textually consistent interpretations. Whether it is the need to teach betterways of reading, or simply the human discomfort with the “wrong” interpretationitself and the desire to correct that, the teacher frequently reduces room for the

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play of student interpretive authority (or jettisons it entirely) when s/he finds astudent’s understanding problematic.

Even educators who are squarely positioned within a more sociocultural frame-work, and who strongly argue for valuing the logic of students’ unconventionalreadings, sometimes fall back on similar evaluative moves intended to lead stu-dents toward grasping their own, more conventional line of thinking. For example,while Hull and Rose (1990) argue for pedagogical approaches that allow studentsto better articulate their own textual ideas, the conversation involving a “reme-dial” college student at the center of their article ultimately also privileges theteacher’s interpretation: “‘That’s certainly possible,’” the teacher (Rose) says afterthe student has elaborated his views on a poem. “‘Um, the only thing I would sayif I wanted to argue with you on that would be . . . ’” and goes on to propose hismore conventional interpretation of the poem in question (p. 291). The insertionof Rose’s interpretation, albeit after the student has had the chance to explain hisview of the text, functionally mirrors that of Beck and McKeown’s evaluative re-sponse to the young children’s poisoning hypothesis—even though it stems froma different epistemological tradition. The implicit assumption seems to be thatthe teacher needs to tell the student the more conventional interpretation, andmodel the more appropriate (or more culturally valued) way of reading, in orderfor the student to learn how to produce a more standard reading for himself: “Roseoperates with a conventional reading in mind and begins moving toward it . . . anddoes so out loud to reveal to Robert [the student] the line of such reasoning”(p. 297).

The Problem of “Error” in Reading Comprehension: Three TraditionsIndeed, the unresolved ambiguity within Hull and Rose’s position—recognizingthe need to value student understandings while wanting to ensure that studentsacquire more standard ways of reading—has plagued each of the major theoreticaltraditions that have sought to explain the reading process over the past quartercentury or so. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, cognitive psychology intellectuallytrounced previously popular behaviorist notions of reading, in which the mindwas considered a neutral tabula rasa onto which a text-inherent meaning could beaffixed; cognitive psychologists, by contrast, put forward the proposition thatreaders rely on abstract knowledge structures established from previous experi-ences. They argued that, during reading, these schemata are activated, and thatthese enable the reader to find a mental “home” for new textual material(Anderson & Pearson, 1984).

This view remains arguably the most influential within reading research, peda-gogy, and policy; yet it is deeply conflicted, as McCormick (1994) argues, aboutthe conclusions that could be drawn by taking schema theory fully seriously. Ratherthan celebrating the radical notion that each reader—by virtue of inevitably read-ing with a different set of schemata—will understand texts differently, many cog-

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nitive psychologists have tried to harness and tame the unruly heterogeneity ofreaders’ schemata, aiming to “reproduce traditional roles in students who mustpassively accept from their teachers the ‘appropriate’ background knowledge sothat they can understand texts ‘correctly’” (McCormick, 1994, p. 22). In other words,despite the powerful implications of schema theory, much of cognitive psychol-ogy ultimately failed to fully separate itself from the behaviorist, objectivist no-tion of the text as static container of meaning with “right” and “wrong” interpre-tations, arrived at through “right” and “wrong” ways of reading. Consider, forexample, the somewhat convoluted definition of reading comprehension used inthe influential RAND report on reading comprehension: “the process of simulta-neously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involve-ment with written language” (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002, p. 11); whileconstruction of meaning is in line with schema theory, the notion that meaningcan be extracted from text is behaviorist at heart.

Reader response theories, which gained currency in education circles aroundthe same time as schema theory, shared schema theory’s assumption that what areader brings to the text in the way of prior understandings and experiences isimportant. But reader response theorists have been far more willing to privilegereading as a profoundly personal transaction between reader and text (Rosenblatt,1978), and they have tended to be less put off by readings that are individualizedor even idiosyncratic—up to a point. Rosenblatt distinguished between an aes-thetic, highly personal stance toward reading and what she termed an efferentstance, where “the student has to learn to focus attention mainly on the public,referential aspects of consciousness and to ignore private aspects that might dis-tort or bias the desired publicly verifiable or justifiable interpretation” (Rosenblatt,1989, p. 163). And Probst, another leading figure in reader response, argued againstletting “errors” go ignored even in classroom discussions in response to literature:“Although words may be imprecise, they stand for a range of possibilities, callingto mind similar meanings, images, or relationships in all who know them. To dis-regard those shared understandings is to deny the possibility of communicationat all” (Probst, 1984, p. 18). Of course, the issue with “errors” is precisely that themeanings, images, and relationships are not always perceived as similar, and thatthe taken-for-granted understandings are not shared by all; therein lies the rub.

McCormick has pointed out a core theoretical difficulty that the responsetradition has been unable to resolve: “While reader-response critics were able tosay what the text was not—an objective container of meaning—they were neverable to articulate what it was, other than a projection of the reader” (McCormick,1994, p. 36). As a result, perhaps, there was never full intellectual clarity abouthandling readings that fell significantly outside the realm of some kind of norm.The rise of sociocultural theory, however, offered a potentially compelling alter-native theory of text. Within this cluster of views, texts are neither objective con-

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tainers of meaning, nor personal constructions of individual autonomous sub-jects, but rather are sociohistorical constructions whose writings and readings areproduced in conversation with circulating discourses (Bennett, 1985) associatedwith varying amounts of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984; Luke, 1996). Butthe sociocultural constructedness of texts means not that our readings are prede-termined culturally, but rather that they are overdetermined: “That is, readers en-counter such a wealth of complex and contradictory ideological forces that theymust continually negotiate among them” (McCormick, 1994, p. 58). This per-spectival shift has been tremendously useful theoretically; it does not negate thevaluable insights of schema theory and of reader response—indeed, many schol-ars associated with sociocultural theory (e.g., Fairclough, 1989; Rabinowitz &Smith, 1998; Smagorinsky, 2001) build explicitly on one or both of these tradi-tions—but it quite literally places them within a context. This view of reading isone I adopt as my own.

Yet there is little consensus among sociocultural theorists about how childrenenter into a skillful negotiation of available meanings of texts, and how explicitlyteachers should guide students toward ways of reading associated with more cul-tural capital. A classic text reflective of (and explicitly reflective on) this tension isthe New London Group’s (1996) “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”; it argues for bothsituated practice, characterized by student immersion in meaningful practices, andovert instruction, “all those active interventions on the part of the teacher andother experts that scaffold learning activities, that focus the learner on the impor-tant features of their experiences and activities within the community of learners,and that allow the learner to gain explicit information at times when it can mostusefully organize and guide practice, building on and recruiting what the learneralready knows and has accomplished” (New London Group, 1996, p. 86). Thatsomehow these two belong together and can work together seems indisputable,but in the messy reality of classrooms where young students insist that the chickenis being poisoned, the question of how remains.

Scaffolding and the Question of PurposeBefore returning to directly tackle the thorny question of how to handle readingsthat appear non-standard, though, it is worth briefly tracing the lineage ofscaffolding, overt instruction, and related ideas of teacher guidance. Scaffolding,used in a formal educational sense, turned thirty last year (2006); it was firstapplied by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) as a way of talking about tutor-childinteractions, although Bruner (1975) had used the term earlier in reference tomother-child interactions. In that usage, the scaffolding metaphor referred to amother’s action in response to her “interpretation of the infant’s behavior as anintention to carry out some action. In such instances, mothers most often see theirrole as supporting the child in achieving an intended outcome, entering only toassist or reciprocate or ‘scaffold’ the action” (Bruner, 1975, p. 12). At the center of

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this original view of scaffolding, then, is the adult’s interpretation of the child’sintention, which the adult seeks to support through joint activity.

But the first, oft-cited, educational reference to the term was far more equivo-cal on the question of intention, defining scaffolding merely as a “process thatenables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task, or achieve a goalwhich would be beyond his [sic] unassisted efforts” (Wood et al., 1976, p. 90).Whose problem, task, or goal was at stake remained syntactically unspecified, butwithin the context of that study, it was clear that the goal or “intended outcome”was one set by the tutor in the study, whose job (especially with the very youngestsubjects, three-year-olds) was “luring them into the task” (p. 95) of assembling athree-dimensional wooden puzzle in a particular way. (It was also clear from theirstudy that children who did not grasp or accept the adult-posited “intended out-come” did not do very well at it!) This subtle shift in emphasis had enormousconsequences in terms of how the concept subsequently came into use; scaffoldinglargely became associated with the help teachers provide students to achieve aca-demic goals that teachers set for the students, without meaningful attention tostudent intention. In the early 1980’s, when scaffolding was increasingly becominga part of common educational parlance, Searle voiced this critique: “The adequacyof the metaphor implied by scaffolding hinges on the question of who is con-structing the edifice. Too often, the teacher is the builder and the child is expectedto accept and occupy a predetermined structure . . . What we should be doing,instead, is working with children, encouraging them to adapt their own languageresources to achieve new purposes which they see as important” (Searle, 1984, p.482).

Yet notions of scaffolding since then, especially in the field of reading instruc-tion, frequently continue to emphasize teacher-defined notions of academic per-formance and ability, and to neglect or omit reference to student purposes in fa-vor of explicit strategy instruction (e.g., Clark & Graves, 2005; Palincsar, 1986;Pressley, 2002) and the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson &Gallagher, 1983), which is also prominent in discussion-based approaches to lit-erature (Kong & Fitch, 2002/2003; Kong & Pearson, 2003). Even the above-citeddefinition of the related term overt instruction, deeply rooted in sociocultural theory,pays no explicit homage to student intentions. A notable departure from this trendis Rogoff ’s (1990) term guided participation, which she explicitly links not only tojoint activity, but to joint purposes; she maintains that an adult cannot guide par-ticipation unless the child to be guided shares a common purpose. But guidedparticipation has not taken hold in the educational vernacular to nearly the sameextent as scaffolding.

And even when terms such as guided participation or scaffolding build on stu-dent purposes, they become significantly less a propos when adults and childrendo not share the same sense of what is meaningful or purposeful, as Dyson (1990)

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has argued: “differences in intentions and in ways of fulfilling intentions—differ-ences that exist among children, between teacher and children, and within anyone child—make the scaffolding metaphor problematic if it is our only way ofthinking about teaching and learning” (p. 204).3 In other words, we need to findways not just of building on joint purposes for successful joint activity, but ofconducting meaningful teaching on those occasions when there is not a commonunderstanding of the problems, tasks, and goals that are at hand—as is often thecase, I propose, when student textual interpretations appear “off track.”

Scaffolding Non-Standard ReadingsTo return again to Beck and McKeown’s (2001) poisoning example, it is clear thatan explicit evaluative response that leads students to a more standard interpreta-tion and way of reading would typically be seen as scaffolding, as the word hasoften come to be used; indeed, Beck and McKeown refer to their approach as aform of scaffolding for student comprehension. It is true that student purposes arenot illuminated or even examined; thus, such leading would not constitutescaffolding in Bruner’s original strict sense of the term. But the common-sensebelief underlying these forms of explicit instruction appears to be that this willhelp students learn ways of reading that are more conventional; if in fact it does so,then is a deeper concern for student intentions even relevant?

A case study by Lewis (1993) calls into question both the efficacy and thedesirability of this kind of scaffolding of students’ readings toward that which weas adults, acculturated into particular ways of reading, consider reasonable. In athink-aloud lesson she conducted with a struggling fourth-grade reader (Rick),she found that her efforts to steer the boy toward her reading of a fable led toprogressively more clipped, often monosyllabic, responses from him. For example,as she tried to get Rick to see that the Pelican in the fable had notable shortcom-ings, she asked him how the other character in the fable, Crane, felt about Pelican;Rick responded first that he did not know, and then offered a response that didnot match Lewis’ understanding of the story:

R: It didn’t bother him.

T: It didn’t? Look again at that last sentence, and find some clues that maybe itdid bother him.

R: He shook his head.

T: O.K. So how do you think the Crane, then, feels about the Pelican?

R: Not very good.

T: Because he’s sighing and shaking his head. Do you think he’ll invite thePelican back again?

R: No. (Lewis, 1993, p. 457)

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And yet, when asked to state the story’s moral after all this guidance, Rick putforward a moral that was consonant with his initial reading of the story, not withLewis’ recognizably standard one. While one might argue that more skillful scaf-folding might have led to a different outcome, Lewis makes a different and moreprovocative point: She critiques her own inability to recognize, value, and exploreRick’s alternative reading—his purposes—and argues that it is the job of the read-ing teacher to take such readings seriously and make room for the classroom ten-sions and contradictions they create.

My own work, in a sense, picks up with where the work of Lewis left off. Iinvestigate how, in an early lesson with a literature discussion group, the instruc-tor worked against the default positioning of the teacher as primary knower (Berry,1981), in part through not stepping in to correct what might be considered textualerrors or misunderstandings, nor actively scaffolding these toward a more “stan-dard” take on the text in the usual ways. I also explore how the students, in par-ticular two boys who were in special education because of reading difficulties,came to develop and entertain a wider repertoire of social and intellectual pur-poses for engaging with the text and with each other in light of the teacher’s un-willingness to endorse or scaffold toward a privileged interpretation or particularways of reading.

MethodSite, Students, and Data CollectionThe study took place during a summer school program at Lakeside Middle, anethnically and socioeconomically diverse school in a semi-rural mountain area inthe western United States. The summer school students were drawn from aroundthe district, primarily from two local populations. Roughly half were EuropeanAmerican, generally from middle class backgrounds; most of the rest were Latino,largely from Mexican-heritage Spanish-speaking households, with parents typi-cally working in low-paying jobs in the local service economy built aroundtourism.4 About a fifth of the students in the district were on free or reduced lunch,although that percentage was estimated to be significantly higher during thesummer school.

In part because neither the students’ regular summer school teacher nor thesmall group instructor had previous familiarity with any of the students, the smallgroup students were selected at random from among all fifth graders who were insummer school because of reading difficulties. (We were prepared to balance forgender and ethnicity, but this was not necessary.) This gave students an equal shotat participating. It also helped us to steer clear of any real or perceived tendency tocherry-pick students according to particular qualities that might have made themappear more likely to flourish in the small group setting, and it enabled the result-ing group to more closely resemble the kind of mix a teacher might encounter in

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a small group early in the school year, before s/he has had a chance to thoroughlyget to know her students.

The one significant exception was that we did not initially include in the poolthose few fifth graders at the site who manifested severe difficulty with decoding;while we felt that such students could benefit from the small group, we hesitatedto introduce this additional pedagogical complexity for the relatively short dura-tion of the summer program, given that we would not be explicitly addressingword identification concerns. However, these plans were “foiled” by the persever-ance of Berta, who originally had not been considered for the group, for this rea-son: After hearing about the first session from her friends, she begged the smallgroup instructor on the playground to be allowed to come, and he acquiesced; shebecame an apparently eager participant in the group. (We need not have wor-ried!) In the end, all but one of the participants in the group were either specialeducation students, second language learners, or both. Table 1 indicates theethnicity and native language for each child, as well as whether the students re-ceived special education services for reading during the school year.

This student discussion group was taught within the context of a professionaldevelopment academy for district elementary and middle school teachers on theteaching of reading to students in the intermediate grades and beyond. The dis-cussion group had been designed in part as a way to provide academy teacherswith a thought-provoking instructional model for analysis and discussion pur-poses within their academy curriculum. Thus, most of the sessions that took placeover the course of the summer were observed by several of the academy teachers(no more than seven at a time). The observing teachers did not participate in anyway in the instruction, although their presence likely had some impact on thediscussion, especially for the more shy students. For pedagogical and researchpurposes, we also videotaped four of the small group discussions (sessions 3, 5, 7,and 8).

TABLE 1: Students in Small Group Discussion

Student Ethnicity Native Language Receiving SpecialEducation Services?

Adam White English Yes

Angelica Latina Spanish Yes

Berta Latina Spanish Yes

Elena Latina Spanish No

Jenny White English No

Alfredo Latino Spanish No

Thomas White English Yes

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The Small Group Discussion SessionsThe seven participating students were pulled out of their regular summer schoolinstruction twice a week in order to participate in the discussions, which took placein an otherwise unused classroom. During each hour-long literature discussionsession, the students met to read and discuss a piece of short fiction. Thesediscussion sessions were facilitated by Max, a veteran teacher of twenty-three yearswho was of Puerto Rican heritage, and who did not teach in the Lakeside areaduring the school year. He introduced himself to the students as Max, and theysubsequently spoke to him on a first-name basis.

I am frequently asked how Max laid the initial groundwork for the kind ofdiscussion described in the subsequent analysis, which, as many of them had toldMax by the end of the summer, was substantially different from what they wereused to in their regular classes. There are two particularly notable features of hisinitial conversation with the students worth mentioning in this regard. First, hetold them explicitly that that their work was to collaboratively “figure out” thetexts at hand, using as a metaphor the detective work depicted on the popularC.S.I. television series: this was the kind of careful analysis he hoped they wouldengage in together, he told them, when looking at the texts during their discus-sions. Secondly, the initial session was the only one not to focus on a written text;instead, Max asked the students to talk about a piece of artwork. Beginning with amedium that was likely perceived as less bound up with a single correct interpre-tation could have played a role in the students’ willingness to accept the premise.

But, aside from these two deliberate ways of framing their work together, it isstriking that Max—and the students—jumped right into analytic textual conver-sations without additional up-front meta-talk or discussion of norms and expec-tations. Indeed, the discussion session that is the subject of this article took placeduring what was only the third time the group had met together (making it aninteresting discussion in which to consider how these alternative discursive pat-terns were fostered and developed). It may be, in fact, that Max’s decision not topressure the students with more detailed expectations about what “good” partici-pation would look like may have helped some students feel more at ease. Whenasked, for example, why he allowed the quieter students (in this case, the Latinagirls, all second language learners) to “get away with” less talking, Max respondedquite simply: “I want them to feel safe not to have to talk.”

In other words, he wanted to communicate that they should talk if and whenthey had something they wanted to add to the conversation—a purpose—notbecause he, the teacher, expected them to say something. He realized that this wasunlikely to lead to fully equal amounts of participation on the part of all partici-pants (as of course is the case in most discussions among adults as well), but hedid not judge the quality of each student’s participation solely on the basis of howoften s/he spoke or even what s/he said. With second language learners in particu-

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lar, Max felt that pressuring them to speak when they were not yet fully comfort-able in the language could do more harm than good. And, as he was apt to pointout, he also saw listening as a form of participation; he watched for students’ eyecontact with each other as well as other body language. (“Okay, Berta, you, youchuckled . . . What did you find funny about that? I’m just curious.”) Still, hecontinued to make space for and invite the comments of the more quiet students(sometimes asking the more vocal ones to hold their thoughts for a bit).

All this seemed to lead to a gradual building of trust and confidence: Berta,for example, was volunteering responses by the end of this session (she had re-sponded, only when directly addressed by Max, with shrugs and head-shakes earlyon in the discussion). In comparing her participation from this lesson (the third,analyzed here) to her participation in the seventh lesson (the last for which shewas present), it was notable that she shifted from not addressing her peers to re-sponding directly to her peers on a number of occasions, including to disagreewith them (e.g., to Adam: “But you don’t know if he’s poor,” when Adam made aclaim about the poverty of a character they were discussing). She also doubled herrate of participation (transcript lines spoken, not including passages read aloud)from the third to the seventh session. While transcript lines spoken are only arough indicator of participation, they provide some indication of turn length andturn frequency, and are the most reliable in this case because the quality of audiomade some comments (precisely those made by the quieter students in several ofthe later videos) hard to make out, rendering an analysis based on exact words oridea units impossible.

Data AnalysisMy role in the larger project was professional development academy co-directorand instructor. As such, I first began viewing the videotapes of the small groupinstruction for pedagogical purposes related to my professional developmentwork in the academy; I simply wanted to inform myself about what my studentswere observing and discussing. However, after viewing the first videotape (fromwhich the subsequent analysis is drawn), I felt that I needed to spend much moretime unpacking the nature of that instruction in its own right because, for as muchas I found what I saw compelling, it also violated some of my preconceived ideasabout what good comprehension instruction was “supposed to” look like.

Over the course of the summer, and well after the summer was over, I viewedand reviewed all four videotapes in order to obtain a holistic sense of the nature ofthe small group instruction. In this initial pass through the data, I took note ofsome of the language Max used and of what students did in response to this, andjotted analytic memos (Strauss, 1987) based on my observations. I screened sev-eral of the videos with Max, taking rough notes about his analyses of what wasgoing on in the conversations. I also prepared and reviewed transcripts of the

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videotapes, and calculated verbal participation of all participants based on con-versational turns and transcript lines spoken. (See Endnote 5 for conventions usedin the preparation of transcript data.)5

My subsequent macroanalysis (Alvermann, O’Brien, & Dillon, 1990) suggestedthat Max was consistent across sessions in withholding evaluation about students’interpretations of the text—and that his refusal to privilege his own take on thestory was intimately related to the kind of conversation the students were able tohave. In order to support this overall impression, however, I needed to undertakea more detailed microanalysis, for which I elected to rely primarily on conversa-tion analytic tools of investigation. Conversation analysis (CA) proceeds from thepremise that “the significance of any speaker’s action is doubly contextual in be-ing both context-shaped and context-renewing” (Heritage, 1984, p. 242). That is,what is said—or not said—is shaped by what has come before and itself shapesthe subsequent course of conversation; it can only be understood within the se-quence of talk in which it appears. CA highlights the analytic importance of inter-actions that are in some way “deviant” from what is anticipated in particular insti-tutional settings, and explores these in part through looking at how languagefunctions when adjacent turns at talk violate an expected conversational norm(Drew & Heritage, 1992); as such, it offered a particularly useful way of consider-ing how the talk in this group established a different context and offered a differ-ent set of opportunities from that which might have taken place if Max had cho-sen a more evaluative role in the conversation.

In a departure from qualitative analytic traditions based in grounded theory(Strauss, 1987), the major analytic emphasis in the form of CA that I pursue hereis not on coding large chunks of data for broadly recurrent patterns that takeplace across contexts and conversations; instead, it involves a focused, close-uplook at successive turns and gestures, including eye gaze (Goodwin, 1980), withinbounded sequences of activity (stretches of talk) (Markee, 2000). I chose to focuson a series of such sequences that took place during the third session of instruc-tion, about an Aesop’s fable, “The Miller, His Son, And Their Donkey.” This par-ticular version was drawn from Pinkney’s Aesop’s Fables (2000), which had beenreproduced so that only a paragraph or two appeared on each page, with the con-cluding moral (“If you try and please everyone, you’ll please no one—not even your-self,” p. 39) omitted.

I decided to look at how, during the course of that conversation, the studentsworked through a disagreement over the pronunciation and meaning of a word inthe context of that story. I homed in on those sequences of talk where this dis-agreement became salient because the focus on word meaning helped make ananalysis of the differences in interpretation particularly clear to delineate. In addi-tion, the sheer intensity and length of time the students spent in conversationabout the word provided a rich store of discursive data for analysis.

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While the selected sequences of activity are in many ways representative ofthe quality of interaction that took place across all the sessions, because this par-ticular disagreement over word meaning appeared to be most important to Adamand Thomas, the sequences analyzed and discussed here over-represent total con-versational participation of these two boys. (The student who spoke most in thissession was actually Jenny, and the student whose comments were routinely thelongest, as measured by transcript lines per conversational turn, was Alfredo.) Myemphasis on these students is in no way meant to suggest that these two studentswere doing more intellectual heavy lifting, nor that I believe they are the onlystudents who learned from the exchanges presented here.

Drawing on Drew and Heritage’s (1992) method of using conversational analy-sis in institutional settings, I closely examined the sequence of the talk; I also probedteacher and student turn design, encompassing both “the selection of an activitythat a turn is designed to perform” and “the details of the verbal constructionthrough which the turn’s activity is accomplished” (Drew & Heritage, 1992, p. 32).I was especially interested in the illocutionary logic of each student turn—what itis the children appeared to be striving to accomplish conversationally when theythrew their metaphorical hats into the discursive ring. This analysis was arrived atthrough consideration of the turn within the broader context of the session, trac-ing the logic as it emerged through longer sequences of activity. I also coded forpatterns in direction of gaze for Max and for the students, to the extent that thiswas possible from the video. (The recording was made with a stationary camera,and not all students were visible at all times, although the two focal students forthis analysis, Adam and Thomas, were usually visible.) In the transcript excerpts Ireproduce within this article, I have included information on gaze direction whereit was available and applicable to the analysis.

I did not formally interview students to solicit their accounts of reasons forsaying what they did, for both practical and theoretical reasons. Given the diffi-culty of pulling the students out of class from a summer school teacher who wassometimes reluctant to let them go, it would not have been possible to interviewthe student participants formally (although Max gathered and noted their infor-mal impressions of the program, which had been shared spontaneously and in afinal celebratory session he held with them after the discussion sessions had ended).Moreover, as Markee (2000) has argued, self-report data from a participant aboutwhat was “really” meant may provide a different sort of reconstruction and rein-terpretation of the event (and, I would add, is often quite valuable in its own right),but it is generally undertaken for a different set of purposes, since post hoc inter-views and other solicitations themselves create new contexts for interpretation ofthe talk, outside the frame of the original discursive context. (It is worth notingthat some ethnographers who are deeply interested in student intention rarely askstudents their interpretations of events outright either; see, for example, Dyson in

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Dyson & Genishi, 2005.) My own intention here was to use convergent evidencefrom within the conversational text to begin with largely “text-internal triangula-tion of the data” (Markee, 2000, p. 60) about what participants were seeking toaccomplish, and were actually accomplishing, with each turn at talk. While thisobviously did not allow an unmediated or “raw” glimpse at students’ illocutionarylogic, it did enable me to consider what was most salient for my area of investiga-tion, that is, evolving discursive intention as observed—much as a teacher mightobserve—within the flow of a pedagogical conversation.

To further verify my findings, I shared my preliminary analysis with severalother researchers and practitioners (including the resource teacher who taughtAdam and Thomas the subsequent year), and asked some of them to screen thevideo with me in light of this analysis and to provide feedback. I often re-screenedexcerpts of the video on my own as well, partly to make sure I had the exact lan-guage right, but also in order to confirm my analysis of the transcript in light ofwhat was captured visually. And I was able to review all findings with Max, whotold me that his interpretation of the conversation was in line with my own. Bythe time this secondary analyzing and confirming phase of analysis was over, Ihad screened the video well over thirty times.

FindingsPinkney’s (2000) version of the fable of “The Miller, His Son, and Their Donkey”opens as follows:

A miller and his son set out to market to sell their donkey, leading the beast behindthem. They had not gotten far down the road when they passed a group of schoolgirls.“Look, what fools!” mocked one laughing girl. “Why are they walking on such a hot day,when at least one of them could ride?”

“It’s worth a try,” said the miller thoughtfully. He lifted his young son up onto thedonkey’s back, and they continued on their way. (Pinkney, 2000, p. 38)

Subsequently, the miller and his son meet others offering different advice, and theyalways listen. A farmer says the man and not the boy should ride, and so the twotrade places. An old woman tells them to both ride, and again they take the advice.When they meet a merchant on a horse who tells them, “You could carry him moreeasily than he can carry you!” (p. 38), they suspend the donkey from a stick, makingthem the laughingstock of a crowd. As they are going over a bridge the animalbreaks free and falls off the bridge into the water, leaving them entirely without thedonkey (Pinkney, 2000).

Thomas was the first student to read aloud from the fable. Within the firstsentence, he made a meaning-changing miscue: “A miller and his son set out tothe market to sell their donkey, leading the beh-, best behind them.” Of course, thepassage read beast, not best. The teacher, Max, did not correct Thomas nor guide

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him to self-correct, and no other student stepped in at that point with the rightpronunciation—even though there were other students in the group who couldhave decoded the word correctly (and did, as turned out to be the case later).Thomas continued reading to the end of the first paragraph, and the mistake wasleft alone, despite the possibility that it could undermine Thomas’ comprehen-sion, and possibly that of his peers, in a session devoted to exploring this text’smeaning.

Thomas appeared satisfied with the word he had chosen—he did not have aproblem with the way the passage read, with the word best in place of the wordbeast. It appears that he had struggled with the word and then figured out whatthe word had to be, from his perspective: He had no need, in that moment, of adifferent word in order to make sense of what he was reading. There might havebeen a pedagogical purpose served by telling him the word, or by scaffolding thatenabled him to figure it out for himself, but that purpose would not have beenThomas’ purpose. It would have been the teacher’s. Thus, Max left Thomas and“the best” alone.

The word beast could easily have disappeared, unremarked upon, but afterJenny had read the subsequent two paragraphs (in which the word beast did notreappear), and there had been some discussion about the comments of the school-girls and the farmer, Adam brought up that opening passage again:

ADAM: Um, (looking down at text) it says up in front that, um, the, a miller andhis son set out to market to sell their donkey, (looks at Max, then back attext) and, leading th-, the beast behind them. (looking at Max) I mean,maybe the donkey [was//]

THOMAS: [The best.]

ADAM: The// (looks at Thomas, then looks at text) Doesn’t it say beast? (glanc-ing quickly at Thomas before returning his gaze to Max)

Thomas interrupted Adam to express a certainty about his previous readingof the word: To him, it was best, and he felt confident enough in his reading thathe corrected Adam. He did not even look at the text. Adam was confident in hisreading as well, but he expressed his confidence by turning to the presumed au-thority in the conversation, Max, for affirmation of his reading of the word. Surelythe teacher would tell him he was right! But Max deflected this positioning by notresponding, and Adam went on with, “Well anyways,” and continued with theprevious point he was making without explicitly reaffirming his belief about thepronunciation of the word.

Still, he had put it out there. Faced with Adam’s counter-assertion, Thomashad a purpose for wrestling anew with the word, where he had previously been

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satisfied with his reading. Thomas hunched over the text, tracing certain lines of itwith his index finger. As the conversation continued around him, he spent 14seconds looking down at the text, before bringing his palm to his forehead in agesture that appeared to signal recognition of error. It is notable, though, thatThomas’ renewed attention to the text did not come at the moment of initial chal-lenge itself—neither when he said “the best” to Adam, nor when Adam uttered hiscountering words: “Doesn’t it say beast?” Rather, Thomas dug into the text againjust a bit later, right after Max began his turn as the next speaker without steppingin to settle the disagreement. In other words, Thomas only assumed responsibilityfor verifying his own claim after it became clear that the teacher in no way was goingto settle it for the two of them.

Berry (1981) has proposed that, in usual classroom situations, the teacher isthe primary knower, and students are positioned as secondary knowers. When sec-ondary knowers contribute new information, which prototypically happens inthe response slot of the I-R-E exchange structure (Mehan, 1982), that informa-tion becomes legitimate only after it has been ratified by the primary knower (usu-ally in the evaluation slot). In this conversation, even outside of the classic I-R-Estructure, both Adam and Thomas appeared to be expecting that set of conversa-tional rules—Adam, by asking Max for validation, and Thomas, by waiting forthat validation to be given. But Max broke the rule: He deliberately abdicated hisrole as primary knower. It was this abdication, not the mere existence of the dis-agreement, that led Thomas to plunge more deeply into the text on his own. With-out a primary knower in the conversation, he suddenly had a compelling reasonfor doing so.

Adam as Secondary Knower, Thomas as Possible KnowerThe point that Adam had been anxious to make about the beast in the fable was onethat many adult readers would consider as much an error as Thomas’ miscue,perhaps even more egregious because it presented a whole interpretation thatmight seem off-base, rather than just a single misread word:

ADAM: Well anyways, it sounds like he, the donkey’s mean and he’s just givinghim a try to ride the donkey but they’re not riding the donkey because it’sprobably very mean and it will kick you off.

Since the donkey’s personality is not elaborated upon in the story, and playsno role in the classic Aesopian moral, it ordinarily would not figure into the waymost acculturated adult readers would make sense of the tale. But Adam had hisreasons for formulating this hypothesis. About a minute and a half earlier in theconversation, Angelica had referenced the first thing the miller had said.

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ANGELICA: The miller put his son on top of the donkey, and, so he could ride it?

MAX: Okay. What// And why did the miller put the son, his son, on top of thedonkey? What does that tell you?

ANGELICA: Just to give it a try or something?

MAX: Give what a try? (4 second pause)

ANGELICA: Um.

MAX: Okay. To give it a try. All right.

Max left “to give it a try” alone at that point, and did not insist on a resolution.(This helped relieve the pressure on Angelica, who was among the more reticentstudents in the group.) And neither Jenny nor Alfredo, who spoke in the interven-ing transcript lines, addressed the meaning of giving it a try about which Max hadinquired. But Adam, highly attentive to the question Max had posed, was stillworking to make sense of what “giving it a try” might mean in this story. To Adam,the language of “trying” seemed to imply the possibility of not being successful.He formulated a theory based in part on the word beast to account for why tryingto ride the donkey might wind up as an unsuccessful enterprise. He was, I believe,seeking to give Max the answer (the “right” answer) to the question that he hadposed to Angelica earlier.

Max acknowledged but tabled Adam’s comment: “Okay, hold on. I, I just wrotethat down here. Let’s go, um, all right. We left Alfredo’s thinking out here kind ofup in the air. What do we think about what Alfredo said? And then we’ll comeback to what Adam said.” One might be tempted to believe that Max set asideAdam’s comment because it was such an apparent red herring, a misguided inter-pretation that was better left alone and forgotten by all. But this was not so. Max,true to his word, indeed did come back to Adam’s point approximately two min-utes later, after Alfredo’s point had been discussed (see Appendix for an uninter-rupted transcript of this portion of the conversation):

MAX: And, Adam, you want to go back, let’s go back to what [you were talkingabout.]

ADAM: [Well, it//] Um, last, (looks up at Max, then back at text) last time Tho-mas was reading the first part and he said the best behind them. (looksback at Max)

MAX: Okay.

ADAM: And I think, d-doesn’t it say beast? (looks back at Max. Max looks downat text.)

THOMAS: Yes, it does. (Thomas is leaning on his elbows, his fists covering hisface)

ADAM: It says beast, right? (his eyes have not left Max) [So well//

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THOMAS: [I read it wrong.]

MAX: Okay. (softly, glancing over at Thomas; he has not looked at Adam.)

ADAM: A mill// See, (reading) a miller and his son set out to the market to selltheir donkey. And, leading the beast behind them. (speaking) So that meansthat the donkey may be very mean so they won’t, so they don’t want to ridehim and the son// So the father was right. Maybe the son shouldn’t ride it,only him. [So//

THOMAS: (looking down) [No.] Because beast could mean, could mean a lot ofthings. It could mean like (looks up at students across from him, not look-ing at either Adam or Max) what Adam is thinking like bi:g and mea:n andstuff. And beast could also just mean that he’s big. Not just because he’smean. It could mean a lot of things.

Several noteworthy things took place in this exchange. Adam again soughtvalidation for his reading of the word beast, and this time he got it. But not fromMax, where it was visually sought; Max avoided looking at Adam, choosing tolook primarily at the text, signaling that, not he, but the text, should be consultedas an arbiter of such disputes. Adam’s sought-for affirmation came instead fromThomas who, without missing a beat or looking back at the text (since he hadalready done so), yielded to Adam’s reading of the word. He had changed his read-ing well before Adam brought up the miscue for the second time, so now he ac-cepted without hesitation that Adam was right about it. However, Adam did notinitially accept Thomas’ validation—even though Thomas had been the one whohad made the initial miscue. He was still focused on securing approval for hisposition from the perceived primary knower. But after his third verbal attempt toget Max to ratify his pronunciation (recall that he had already asked for it once,earlier in the conversation, and had visually checked in with Max even more times),he proceeded without that ratification.

One might consider Thomas’ admission that he was wrong as a capitulationto Adam, and in one sense it was. Simultaneously, though, Thomas quietly as-sumed authority for himself as someone authorized to provide this validation—in a sense, he was stepping into the teacher’s shoes, taking the stance of a knower,even if what he was expressing knowledge of was his own previous miscue. He didnot look to Max when he spoke, suggesting that he accepted Max’s abdication ofthe primary knower positioning well before Adam did. He did not need Max to tellthe group the right pronunciation of the word, or reinforce Adam’s statement,because he could do it himself.

A moment later, after Adam spoke, Thomas made a similar move again whenhe seized the opportunity to respond to Adam’s hypothesis about the donkey’sbeing mean. Thomas was engaging intellectually with that hypothesis, and in do-ing so he was again setting himself up as what I call a possible knower, someone

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authorized to voice opinions and to persuade others. Some of his need to do somay well have been engendered by the previous exchange, where Adam had turnedout to be right about something. Now, Thomas had both an intellectual and aninterpersonal reason for opposing Adam’s hypothesis (indeed, it is somewhat ar-tificial to try to tease these two apart). Intellectually he did not buy it because hehad identified another meaning of the word beast that he found more plausiblewithin the context of the story. Socially, he may have wanted to let others knowthat, even if he was wrong about the best business, he had other important ideasand that Adam, even if he had been right about beast’s pronunciation, was notbeyond disproof. Not only was Adam wrong, in Thomas’ eyes; Thomas felt autho-rized to prove it.

The competitive edge between the two boys was amplified in the conversa-tion that followed Thomas’ counterassertion:

ADAM: (looking down at text, pointing at a section with his finger) I know butthey’re selling him. [Leading the beast behind them.] (He starts to look upat Max but his gaze shifts to Thomas when Thomas cuts in)

THOMAS: (looking straight ahead, at neither Adam nor Max) Yeah, [maybe theyneed the money.]

ADAM: (looking down at text) I know, but why (looking over at Thomas) wouldthey be selling a beast, (looking back at text) I mean, selling a donkey and(looking over at Thomas) calling it a beast behind them. [So that//]

THOMAS: (looking at Adam) [Because he could] be very, very big.

ADAM: (looking up, fiddling with his baseball cap) So that should mean thathe’s mean and they don’t, the, they don- they don’t want to ride him causehe’s (shifts gaze back to Thomas) mean and he will kick them [off.]

THOMAS: [It] could mean a lot of things.

MAX: Well, let’s go there for a second. Very quickly. (Looks up from takingnotes about the conversation. Shifts his gaze to Angelica and Berta.) What,when you think of the word beast, what do you think of?

Adam, before this, had most intensively addressed Max, both by asking forvalidation of his opinions and by checking in with his gaze to see how Max wasresponding. This exchange, which took place about ten minutes into the lesson,signaled a shift. Adam was no longer primarily seeking Max’s approval; instead, hewas visually checking in with Thomas to see the effects of his argument. In place ofspeaking in order to get the “right” interpretation, according to the teacher, Adamwas speaking in order to convince a peer. This shift could come about only be-cause Max refused to step into the role of primary knower repeatedly, despiteAdam’s persistence in trying to position him in that way. It also may have been

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due in part to Thomas’ positioning of himself as a possible knower—if Thomaswas positioned that way, and Max was not going to stop him, then Adam couldand should act as a possible knower as well. (After all, he was just as qualified asThomas!)

After this point, Adam frequently addressed Thomas and looked at him di-rectly; in exchanges with other students, he often addressed them directly as well.It is not the case that he stopped looking to Max entirely—he visually checked inwith Max far more frequently than Thomas throughout the lesson. But he nolonger spoke purely to Max—there were others he needed to convince, or argueagainst. In short, there were other possible knowers after that, for Adam.

When Adam first put forward his claim (“It sounds like he, the donkey’smean”), he did so on the basis of his interpretation of the word beast and the giveit a try phrase. Faced with the need to defend his position, because Thomas wasnot buying into it, Adam needed to find additional evidence to show that he wasright, and he seized on the additional textual evidence that the donkey was beingsold to make his case. That Adam’s interpretation of the fable was off the beatentrack should not blind us to the fact that his inferencing was not only relevant andpurposeful, but also precisely what teachers often prompt students to do. Yet Adamin this case, like Thomas when faced with the beast/best pronunciation quandary,drew on a wider range of textual evidence in this case not because a teacher di-rected him to, but because he needed the additional evidence to position himselfconversationally as a possible knower. If he wanted to get heard, and be convincing,he had to give other people some good reasons to accept his idea.

Thomas, by contrast, was not publicly drawing on textual evidence in thisexchange. While he almost certainly drew on textual evidence of some kind todevelop his theory, as well as drawing on his prior understanding of several pos-sible meanings of the word beast, he did not cite anything from the text itself thatwould support his claim over Adam’s, instead relying on speculation (“maybe theyneed the money”) and broad definitions. Thus, while his benign view of the don-key-beast more closely aligns with readings that might be considered “standard,”he did not—yet—have a purpose for having his private reasoning refract againstthe reasoning of others in the public discourse.

Thomas and the Need to ConvinceWhen Max opened up the conversation to get viewpoints on the word beast fromthe other students, it became clear that all others in the group, with the possibleexception of Jenny, were far closer to Adam’s thinking than to that of Thomas, eventhough Thomas eagerly jumped in to give his opinion first. (He did this despite thefact that Max had gesturally nominated other students, by turning to Angelica andBerta.) Table 2 indicates how each of them responded to Max’s request forelaboration on how they thought about the word beast.

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Max neither settled the matter, nor asked the students to settle the matter,after each had had her/his say. Instead, he said: “Clearly we have more than oneunderstanding of the word beast. Maybe if we read a little bit further on it’ll helpus clarify what, what their understanding of beast is.”

Before that could happen, though, Jenny made a comment about why shefound the schoolgirls’ advice to the miller and his son foolish, and then Thomasjumped back into the fray again about the word beast. This time, though, he backedup his interpretation with textual evidence:

THOMAS: Then also, if, if the, if the, if the man knew that the donkey was mean,why would he put his own son on it. That’s kind of rude.

MAX: Adam, you mentioned something about that. What was your reasoningbehind that?

ADAM: What?

MAX: Thomas made a p-// Repeat what you just said, Thomas.

THOMAS: I said if, if the man knew that the donkey was mean, why would heput his own son on? That’s kind of weird because what if the donkey likebucks him off and then the boy gets hurt.

Even though Max had signaled that the group might continue reading, thestudents were not inclined to do so, and Max followed their lead. In particular,Thomas (having heard interpretations of beast that contradicted his own from hisclassmates) did not want to let the subject of the word’s meaning rest. And now—realizing that he had failed to be persuasive in his earlier assertions—he had aburning reason to provide direct textual evidence; he backed up his claim by point-

TABLE 2: Student Definitions of Beast

Student Definition of beast

Thomas “Well, I think of a lot of things. Beast could mean he’s very mean, and he like,kicks people off his back and stuff. And beast could also mean he’s just big.”

Angelica “Big and mean?”

Berta “Someone that’s not nice.”

Elena “Mean?”

Alfredo “Like furious and, um, like really// (Pause) Uh, really strong and bad?”

Adam “Very big, ugly, and strong, and mean.”

Jenny “Very like, I don’t know, big muscles, um, like, I sort of think of like ana:nimal, or like a wolf, because, wolves, get pretty big. They can get pretty big,like (inaudible) tigers or something, cause tigers get like up to a man’s hip//waist.”

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ing out that it would be an odd father indeed who would put his child on a viciousdonkey. So the donkey could not be mean. No one told him to prove it from thetext. But he needed to if he wanted his point to be convincing.

Max redirected the comment to Adam, who apparently had not been listen-ing to Thomas’ point (“What?”). Such lapses of attention are not uncommon indiscussion groups; I believe students frequently learn that there is little reason forthem to listen to what other students are saying. And, thus far in the conversation,Adam had appeared far more attentive to the teacher, Max, than to his peers. ButAdam was pulled back into the conversational and textual fold, not by any sort ofadmonition by the teacher about the need for “active listening,” but by the need topresent a counterargument or else have to cede Thomas’ point. (And Max deliber-ately made sure it remained Thomas’ point, by having Thomas restate it ratherthan restating it himself.) Adam watched Thomas intently when Thomas repeatedhis remark, for he had to listen to Thomas in order to identify a way to refute him.Indeed, there were no other verbal or gestural indicators during the remainder ofthe lesson that indicated Adam’s attention had drifted: he contributed often, andnever needed anything else repeated!

Adam, after listening to Thomas, went back to something he had said the firsttime he had made his claim about the donkey, that “giving it a try” signified sometrepidation on the miller’s part about putting his son on the donkey. Unlike whathe had done the first time, though, this time he went back to the text directly, andexplicitly drew attention to the particular textual passage that had helped himdevelop his idea. Like Thomas, Adam was driven to engage more deeply with thetext in the public forum by the need to prove that he was right — to Thomas, inparticular:

ADAM: (still looking at Thomas) Well didn’t you hear him say in the story, um// Let’s see// (looks at text) He said, he said, it’s worth a try. (looks back overat Thomas)

(one second pause)

MAX: Who said that?

ADAM: Um, the [miller. (looks at Max)

JENNY: (looking at text) [The mill]er.

ADAM: The dude. (looks over at Max) He said, it’s worth a try.

MAX: What’s [worth a try?

JENNY: (reading, tracing text with index finger) [ It’s worth a try,] the millersaid thoughtfully. He lifted the young boy onto the donkey’s back. (looksat Max)

MAX: Okay. [What, what . . .

JENNY: [It’s worth a try] to, to ride the donkey. (looks at Max)

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Adam, in this exchange, was not only looking at Thomas, but also addressinghim as “you”—the first time he had done this to any peer in the lesson (thirteenand a half minutes into the discussion); this signals his further recognition ofThomas as a conversational partner and possible knower to be convinced. Maxengaged in uptake of Adam’s response, as a way to make sure that all participantsin the conversation were understanding Adam’s line of reasoning. In doing so, ofcourse, he did draw the students’ responses back to himself—both Adam and Jennylooked at Max when responding to his question (and indeed, this is conversation-ally routine, when responding to someone’s question).

But notice, here, that Jenny was now taking a position in the argument as well,affiliating with Adam. Although she did not explicitly state that she believed thedonkey was mean, she offered textual evidence in support of Adam’s theory. Whatbegan as a disagreement between Adam and Thomas was now engaging anothervoice as well. Max deliberately tried to help this happen at various points, includ-ing the exchange where each student was asked to weigh in about the meaning ofbeast. In this particular exchange, his use of uptake (“Who said that?”) cleared theway for Jenny to enter the conversation—but the tradeoff was that he ended upbeing the person to whom both Adam and Jenny spoke. Still, their engagementand overlapping talk here suggests that, while Max was the person they addressed,they were responding to multiple voices in the conversation—something at leastAdam had done less of in the early part of the dialogue (“What?”). While theyspoke to Max, Adam and Jenny saw (and heard) one another as allies.

Thomas had his counterargument ready to go, but Max stepped in before hecould say it, again to try to draw others into the dialogue:

THOMAS: But that also could mean like, what’s//

MAX: Wait a second. Elena is looking at me over here, looking puzzled. Whenit, when it// do you see that part that says it’s worth a try? [It’s um,

ELENA: [Yeah.]

MAX: The second paragraph, it’s worth a try. When you read that, when youread that, it’s worth a try, what, what do you think? What are you thinkingof? What do you think he means there?

ELENA: So the son can get on?

MAX: So the son can get on? Okay. All right, and why wasn’t the son on, whywasn’t the son on originally. Do we need to know that? Is that important toknow?

ADAM: Because it, it might be mean because they said it was a beast and I thinka beast is a big, hairy, ugly, strong (pause) [be-

THOMAS: [Or,] or ’cause they were in the sun and then if you ride the donkeyit’s more weight and then it could just die and then they won’t be able tosell it.

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MAX: That kind of goes back to what Jenny was talking about. It’s sweaty andtired and people may not want to buy it.

Max asked a question about importance here. His question, in effect, was: Dowe really need to know why nobody was riding the donkey in the first place? Doesit make a difference? For many teachers, this would not have been an authenticquestion. After all, the initial reasons the miller and the son might have had fornot riding do not play a critical role one way or another in arriving at the Aeso-pian moral in alignment with the one Pinkney had written (which the studentsnever saw): The whole line of discussion, which had taken almost half of the in-structional time so far, might well be viewed as an irrelevant tangent. The stu-dents, after all, were not debating the moral of the fable itself, or other teacher-selected themes (Goldenberg, 1992/1993), or predetermined key questions (Chinnet al., 2001) that might ordinarily be considered worthy of so much talk. Shouldthey really be sweating the small stuff?

For Adam and Thomas, the question of whether it was important to knowwhy the donkey wasn’t being ridden at first was taken as indisputably authentic.And their answer was transparently yes. It mattered a lot, because each of themhad invested themselves in a position, and had built a warranted argument tosustain that position. What was textually worth talking about emerged throughthe refraction of these students’ voices, and both Adam and Thomas, by this pointin the conversation, felt authorized to stake out a position on what was worthtalking about, and why. Even Adam, who had previously addressed Max as thearbiter of textual meaning, responded to Max from a possible knower stance, bythis point in the conversation.

Noteworthy here is the fact that it was not the teacher who determined theimportance or relevance—it was not Max who answered the question—but thestudents themselves. Indeed, I propose that these students assumed “seriousepistemic roles” (Nystrand, 1997, p. 7) in textual conversations not only becausethe teacher refrained from evaluating their responses, but also because they sharedresponsibility for determining what was purposeful and relevant. Even if—or pre-cisely because—their answer to the question of importance was strikingly differ-ent from the response many adult readers would give.

Intellectual Realignment and Social Purposes: “Our Thinking Changes.And That’s Okay.”Thomas not only felt authorized to stake out that position; he also felt authorizedto bring the conversation back to what, for him, remained unresolved. It wasunresolved, at least in part, because he apparently had not won anyone else over tohis way of thinking so far. Even Jenny, the student whose view of beast initially wasarguably closest to his, was siding with Adam’s view. Three more times, when theconversation was about other matters, Thomas initiated a change of subject in

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order to hammer home his argument that the donkey-beast could not be mean. Hewas able to do so in part because the relevance of the disagreement had been, andcontinued to be, acknowledged; even when Max tabled the disagreement, he did soin a way that in no way undermined its importance and tellability.

The first of these topic-changing initiations by Thomas took place seventeenand a half minutes into the conversation:

THOMAS: See, hang on.

MAX: All right, I’ll hang on.

THOMAS: If I was the miller, I, and I knew that the donkey was dangerous, Iwouldn’t put my own kid on the back, I’d just, I would put me.

MAX: So you’re, I’m, I’m hearing you saying that you’re not necessarily com-fortable with that idea, that you don’t think that’s really what’s going on,that, that it=

THOMAS: =No! Because I’d rather have me get hurt than my own son.

MAX: All right, well, let’s hang onto that, and let’s, let’s, can you rememberthat? Can everyone remember that? We’ve got a bunch of ideas that wewant to remember.

Twenty-three and a half minutes into the conversation, Thomas brought it upagain:

THOMAS: Then also, I don’t think the donkey, the donkey can’t, it can be mean,but I don’t think it is because if, if the man told the donkey to stop orsomething=

MAX: =Um hm.=

THOMAS: =like pull up, it wouldn’t stop, it would just keep on going.

ADAM: No.

MAX: I heard a no over there.

ADAM: Me.

MAX: Okay. You’re still, you’re still struggling with that idea, the two of youguys. Fine. Let’s just hang on to that for a second. All right. Jenny?

Almost twenty-six minutes into the discussion, Thomas reintroduced the topicone more time, with fresh textual evidence now gleaned from scanning part of thepassage that had not yet been read aloud in the group:

MAX: (reiterating a point made by Berta) They would have just kept on walk-ing like normal people. [Like in the beginning//

ADAM: [Instead of listening] to the girls and then getting on that p-, donkey.

THOMAS: (looking at text, suddenly draws breath in sharply, then speaks softly)Hang on.

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ELENA: (inaudible)

MAX: (to Elena) Okay.

THOMAS: I didn’t, I didn’t read ahead or anything, I was just looking aroundand I saw it said// it says, (reading) how can you, how can the two of youride, on the, on that poor skinny beast? (speaking) So it can’t be that meanbecause it’s skinny.

MAX: [All right.

ADAM: [So:, why would] it matter? [A beast can be skinny.

MAX: [Well, let’s go] ahead. Let’s go ahead. Thoma-, let’s see, we need a, weneed a young lady to read now.

Max allowed these interjections to take place, acknowledging the argumentand new evidence in the matter, but in each case he did not invite the disagree-ment to continue, tabling it instead. One might be tempted to assume, particu-larly given his last response, that Max privately had decided the conversation wasunnecessarily tangential and should not be continued despite the boys’ ongoinginvestment in their differing ideas. However, Max subsequently allowed for thediscussion that Thomas was so eager to have after Angelica read the next sectionof the story, which included the line alluded to by Thomas. Before that elaborateddiscussion could take place, though, there was a somewhat heated exchange be-tween Adam and Thomas. Angelica had just read what the merchant in the storyhad told the miller and his son: “‘How can the two of you ride on the poor skinnybeast? You could carry him more easily than he can carry you!’” Thomas jumpedin:

THOMAS: See:? (looking at Max)

MAX: Okay, the poor sk// [So you’re

ADAM: [’Cause you] read ahead, Thomas. (looks ahead, then over at Thomas)

THOMAS: (looking down at text, slightly increased volume) No, I didn’t. I justlooked.

(Adam holds index finger over lips in shushing motion to Thomas.)

MAX: That’s// You know, but that’s exactly what we want to do because as we’rereading, as we’re reading, we, our thinking changes. And that’s okay.

JENNY: (looking at Max) You can scan it, can’t you? [You can just scan it.

MAX: (slightly lower volume) [Oh, I haven’t got a problem] with that.

THOMAS: (glances at Max) I wa-, I was just (looks down at text) looking ‘cause Iwas just looking around and I looked at it and I was like, poor skinny (looksover at Max) beast.

One risk in having students become so drawn into their intellectual positionsis that the debate will become personal and hostile—there is arguably far more

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“safety” in a conversation where students give the teacher answers in which theyare not particularly invested. At this moment in the conversation, this concernwas borne out in a way that might well leave many teachers quite uncomfortable:I believe Adam was upset that Thomas had raised such a good point (one he couldnot refute), and so he leveled a criticism at Thomas intended to indicate thatThomas’s looking ahead was cheating. Thus he simultaneously criticized Thomasand sought to deflect the conversation away from the topical domain where hewould otherwise need to respond to Thomas’ point.

Max stepped in at this point, not to reprimand Adam, but to draw his atten-tion back to the textual work the group was doing, and to situate what Thomashad done (scanning ahead in the text) within this context. The content of hismessage, although ostensibly about Thomas (offering support for Thomas’ pur-poses), was just as much a message for Adam and the others: “As we’re reading . . .our thinking changes. And that’s okay.” Max was suggesting that we read, not onlyto bolster our own position (which is what both Adam and Thomas had beendoing so far), but also to allow our understandings to evolve. His voice in commu-nicating this was certainly one of a knower (he was not asking the students fortheir views on this one, at this point). But he immediately moved back into therole of someone trying to understand the various arguments being made, andalmost at once the students shifted toward directly addressing each other again—this time in a less confrontational way:

MAX: (looking back and forth between the text and Thomas) All right. Sonow you’re saying that, on the basis of that, that it’s not, it’s not a terrible, [danger-ous] animal//

THOMAS: (looking at Max) [No].

MAX: Because//

THOMAS: (looks down at text) Because it just said (looks back at Max) [if it wasa beast

JENNY: [Poor skinny beast!]=

MAX: =Um hm.=

THOMAS: =like it was very strong, it would have been able to carry both of themno problem! (looks down at text) But what he (the merchant) just said. Hesaid, (reading; Max, who has been looking at Thomas, also starts lookingdown at text) You, you, you can’t, you could carry him more easily than hecan carry (looking back at Max) you.

MAX: (looking down at notepad on his lap, and writing) [Okay.

THOMAS: (still looking at Max) [So if] (looks back down at text) he was biggerand had more muscle, he: would, he would be able to (looks at Max) carrythem no problem.

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MAX: (looking down at notepad, still writing) All right. (looks up at group)[Anybody else?

ADAM: (looking at Thomas) [But why are they] selling him?

THOMAS: (looking straight ahead) Because [they probably need the money.

JENNY: (looking at Adam) [It’s probably because] they are probably poor. [(in-audible)]

ALFREDO: [Because he’s] [skinny and they probably (inaudible)].

ADAM: (looking at Thomas and Jenny) [It doesn’t say that.]

THOMAS: (looking straight ahead) I know! We’re just, we’re just, (looks over atAdam) we’re just guessing.

Thomas was introducing a third piece of textual evidence to the evidence thathe had cited earlier (that the father wouldn’t put his son on a mean donkey, that amean donkey wouldn’t “pull up” obediently when asked to stop), and he addressedthis new evidence to Max, the previous speaker. Once Thomas began reading,though, Max signaled that he was joining that investigation by looking down atthe text as well, and he did not look back at Thomas even though Thomas was stilladdressing (and looking at) him. His attentiveness was displayed through takingnotes (he had explained to the students that he wrote down things they were say-ing so he could remember them), but when he looked back up, his eyes swept thewhole group and he opened things up (“Anybody else?”), inviting others to evalu-ate Thomas’ existing claim in light of the new evidence.

Jenny, who had earlier sided with Adam, signaled a shift of allegiance to Tho-mas’ point of view when she chimed in with “Poor skinny beast!” While it is im-possible to know whether what Max had just said about changing one’s thinkinghad any bearing on facilitating this shift, it is notable that Jenny was doing whatMax had just talked about.

Adam, too, indicated a subtle change in his thinking, though much less forth-rightly than Jenny. For the first time, in responding to Thomas, he was not ques-tioning the evidence presented, nor presenting direct counterevidence of his own.Adam, if he took the words of the merchant in the fable to be true, could not refutethe claim Thomas was making (and Jenny was supporting) with textual evidence,and he knew it. But he still went back to his previous point, which earlier had beenpresented as evidence but now was being raised as a broader concern: There hadto be some reason the donkey was being sold, and Thomas and Jenny had notaccounted for that in their reasoning. Even when they voiced their alternative ex-planation, that the miller and his son were “probably” poor, Adam did not acceptit. He may well not have wanted to accept it from them, but his stated reason wasentirely textual: They could not back it up. And this time, it was Thomas whoconceded that his claim was based on conjecture, not on anything directly statedin the text.

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The students were making a key distinction here, between ideas that could bebacked up with textual evidence and other ideas that were less directly groundedin the text. Max never told them to make that distinction, and did not “lead them”to the realization through scaffolding: They came to this realization, instead, be-cause they needed to account for ideas they wanted to put forward where theycould find no textual evidence.

But of course, textual evidence was going to trump such conjecture — anddid. Alfredo, who spoke next, raised an alternative suggestion about why the don-key was being sold; Adam seized on it immediately to help build the new hypoth-esis and to publicly abandon his old one.

ALFREDO: They’re sell, they’re probably selling him because he’s skinny and he,like, they can’t [(inaudible)]

ADAM: (looking at Alfredo) [He’s weak.]

ALFREDO: Yeah.

ADAM: (turning head from Alfredo to Thomas) You can’t ride him.

ALFREDO: And they have no use for him.

ADAM: (looking at Max) Yeah, because you can’t ride him two at a time. What’sthe use for a skinny donkey. (looking down at text) Because, as Thomassaid, um, they passed a guy on a horse back, and said that you, how can thetwo of you ride on that poor (looks up) skinny beast? And he’s all skinnyand stuff, well, so what’s the use for riding a skinny [and poor donkey.

THOMAS: (looking at Adam) [So you’re changing] your, idea=

ADAM: (looking at Thomas) =Yeah=

THOMAS: =[about a beast.

ADAM: (looking at Thomas) [Yeah, it’s not] a beast. But it’s poor and skinnyand it’s ugly and furry and//

MAX: Is it okay to change your ideas as you are reading?

(All of the children, with the possible exception of Elena, who is not visible onthe video recording, say “Yes,” “Yeah,” or nod.)

JENNY: Yeah, it’s fine!

For Thomas, it was important that Adam acknowledge the change in his think-ing; he was directly holding Adam accountable for his previous position. But bothboys appeared remarkably sanguine about the matter. Adam was much more con-cerned with enumerating the attributes of the donkey, as he now understood it;because he had used textual evidence to reach a new understanding, he was markedas a sophisticated reader, not a poor one.

Max’s question at that point about whether it was okay to change one’s ideaswas a moment in which his own evaluative stance came into play more identifi-ably than usual. (Arguably he was seeking the chorus of “Yes” and “Yeah” that he

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received.) But what he was evaluating, through his use of this question, was aprocess initiated by one of the children, not a particular reading of the text or afavored pre-designated interpretive strategy. He was apt to take such a visibly evalu-ative stance only in situations in which he wanted to remark on a purposeful in-tellectual process a student was undertaking as part of the collective meaning-making.

The Collaborative Construction of ComprehensionOne might have expected that the conversation about beast would be over, givenAdam’s new perspective. But it was not, quite. Moments later, Alfredo broughtbeast back into the conversation:

MAX: Okay, Alfredo, what do you think?(inaudible)

ALFREDO: You know when Thomas said that beast meant big=

MAX: =Yeah.=

ALFREDO: =And strong?

MAX: Uh huh.

ALFREDO: Well [I don’t, I don’t think//

THOMAS: [I didn’t say that.]

ALFREDO: Yeah you did.

THOMAS: I didn’t say beast means big and strong.

ALFREDO: You said big.

JENNY: You said there’s two=

THOMAS: =Yeah!=

JENNY: =definitions for beast.

THOMAS: There is. Big! [Like tall!

ALFREDO: [And then] why are they, why are they calling him big if he’s skinny.Or beast?

Just as Thomas had questioned Adam’s take on beast, Alfredo was now ques-tioning how Thomas had defined it. He was pointing out that the “big” definitionof the word was not fully consistent with the text either. Thomas, in reply, sug-gested that big could mean height rather than bulk, and he and Jenny subsequentlybuilt on this idea in data I have not reproduced here.

Collectively, then, the students appeared to be edging toward an understand-ing of the word beast as something that might be neither dependent on meannessnor on brute size. They were engaging in a collaborative construction of meaningat a level that was at once quite basic (wrapped around the meaning of one word),and highly sophisticated (particularly in the use of textual evidence). AlthoughMax occasionally asked one of them to read “where you got that from” after astudent voiced an idea, the primary impetus for developing their thinking, and

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for delving deeply into the text, came as the students responded directly to oneanother—and realized that they could and should respond directly to one an-other rather than communicating their ideas at Max for his validation.

Encountering Narrative Unreliability: “He’s Not Skinny”Later, shortly before the end of the lesson, Max handed the students a copy of thelast page of the text. It had the text’s only picture on it, of the donkey slung upsidedown from a wooden rod the miller and his son were carrying. For the first time inthe entire lesson (thirty-four minutes in), Angelica spontaneously spoke up aboutthe text, saying, “He’s not skinny. I thought he was skinny and he looks fat.” Therewas then a buzz of overlapping talk as the other students made similarobservations, all spontaneously. Berta and Elena each said, “He looks fat.” Alfredosaid: “He doesn’t look skinny.”

MAX: So the picture doesn’t quite look like what the story says. He doesn’t lookskinny.

JENNY: Yeah, and the merchant said that he was a skinny, a poor skinny thingand he’s upside down and he’s like this big! (makes a gesture with arms asif hugging a huge barrel)

THOMAS: (looking at Jenny) ’Cause his horse, (looks back at text) ’cause maybehis horse (looks back at Jenny) is fatter than that.

The beast in the illustration was not skinny at all, and Angelica found the sizeof the donkey noteworthy—as did each of the rest of the students, subsequently.(Adam commented on it several lines later.) This suggests that the students, in-cluding the students who had not verbally participated much in the exchangesabout the word beast, had changed their mental image of this particular donkeyfrom a big and mean animal to one that was skinny—as Thomas had maintainedthroughout. In the words of Bakhtin (1981): “Each word tastes of the context andcontexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms arepopulated by intentions” (p. 293). Through the text and the conversation, the so-cially charged life of this one word, beast, had become something different, popu-lated by the intentions of each child.

Of course, what is also notable is that the culminating evidence upon whichThomas had based his argument about the meaning of the word beast, earlier inthe lesson, turned out to have stemmed from an unreliable source. Jenny pointedout the unreliability of the merchant as an informant, and Thomas speculated ona reason why that merchant might have had a skewed perspective. Notice, though,that (after looking at the text) Thomas checked himself from stating definitivelythat the merchant had a fat horse, shifting from “’cause his horse” to “’cause maybehis horse . . . ” Thomas was signaling his awareness that his hypothesis was not adefinite conclusion drawn from textual evidence.

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Yet none of the students had the need to revisit the meaning of the word beastin the public discourse. Adam did not reintroduce his theory that the donkey mighthave been mean (perhaps because the poor donkey suspended by its legs lookedanything but vicious, in the Pinkney illustration). I suspect that the word beastbecame something else again for each of them, differently, when they engagedwith the illustration. But they did not need to talk about it, and they certainly didnot need to look to Max, who did not bring it up.

DiscussionI argue that this collaborative, dialogic process of comprehension is part and parcelof what Vygotsky (1978) termed internalization. For Vygotsky,

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the sociallevel, and later on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), andthen inside the child (intrapsychological) . . . All the higher functions originate as actualrelations between people. (p. 57)

Often, the social dimension of internalization has been portrayed as a projectof mimesis, where an expert models how to do something, and the learner picks itup through imitation and/or “appropriate” appropriation. Pearson and Gallagher’s(1983) gradual release of responsibility model, which Cazden (1988) suggests well-represents “the basic structure of all learning environments that fit the term scaf-fold” (p. 104), in many ways stems from this perspective on internalization, I wouldargue: Task completion is first undertaken entirely by the teacher; then there isjoint responsibility for the task, and finally the student practices or applies thelearning independently. Such a model has often been applied as a carefully de-signed sequence for reading comprehension strategy instruction that includes:“1) An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should be used . . . 2)Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action . . . 3) Collaborative use ofthe strategy in action . . . 4) Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release ofresponsibility . . . 5) Independent use of the strategy ” (Duke & Pearson, 2002, pp.208-209, italics in original). Reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) andCollaborative Strategic Reading (Vaughn, Klingner, & Bryant, 2001) are promi-nent examples of explicit strategy instruction within this tradition.

But a gradual release of responsibility perspective is also sometimes visible inclassroom settings that build in reader response and literature discussion. EllenFitch’s approach to guiding discussion in her classroom Book Clubs is one ex-ample of such a program; she explicitly sought to scaffold students’ ways of par-ticipating in their small group literature discussions by, for example, providingspecific prompts about issues she saw as central to a text and demanding thatstudents address these in discussion; introducing sentence starters so students

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would generate only “fat, juicy questions” (not “skinny” ones) in their small groups(Kong & Fitch, 2002/2003, p. 358); and using evaluative language to guide towardthe kinds of responses she saw as appropriate:

ELLEN: (to Alicia) You said that Marty is a very determined boy. I’d like to knowwhat type of things he did that shows he is determined. (pause)

ALICIA: He wants the dog. Shiloh is the one he wants. He tried to get . . .

ELLEN: What kind of words did he say that tells that he is determined?

JR: He does not use bad language?

ELLEN: Does that tell you that he is determined?

ALICIA: He said, “Shiloh, I’ll never let anybody mistreat you and kick you again.”

ELLEN: Thank you. (Kong & Fitch, 2002/2003, p. 355)

I do not dispute that these forms of scaffolding can serve certain purposes.But my findings suggest that there is an alternative worthy of careful consider-ation: I propose that scaffolding of reading comprehension should not begin, asthe gradual release of responsibility framework does, with an expert model fromthe outside (“Here’s how I interpret this poem”; or “This is how I predict, now youtry it”; or “This is what makes a question ‘fat and juicy,’ can you think of one?”),but rather with a social relationship between people, and social purposes. Thestudents’ own evaluative takes on the text, and on the talk, ought to drive theconversation from the get-go; for instance, student questions are not better orworse depending on how they align with a teacher’s notion of “fat and juicy” or“skinny,” but develop dialogically from things the students want to talk and findout about. What makes a question—or a donkey—fat or skinny depends on whois doing the talking, and when, and with whom!

The learning of reading strategies and interpretive technique is thus not aprerequisite for comprehension, since, as Rumelhart (1981) argues, “Readers aresaid to have understood the text when they are able to find a configuration ofhypotheses (schemata) which offer a coherent account for the various aspects ofthe text” (pp. 9-10). (From within his frame of reference, Adam understood thefable even when his understanding of beast was non-standard.) Rather, studentsdevelop and appropriate additional ways of reading only when they have taken onintellectual, social roles in which they are evaluating the text, that is, when they arealready doing the work of comprehension. For I argue that comprehending a textdemands taking an evaluative stance with respect to it: That is to say, the readermust be in a position of one who knows, seeks to know, and discovers—and whohas the authority to make claims about what a text says and means and what s/hethinks of that. The moment a reader makes those claims, s/he is evaluating, in thesense that s/he is assigning value and meaning to the text. Thus I propose thatreading is a fundamentally evaluative task, and that by making the child’s evalua-

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tive stance toward the text irrelevant (which is what happens when reading in-struction principally focuses on the teacher’s interpretation and interpretive tech-niques), we misrepresent to children what reading actually is. The child need notbe a primary knower, but needs to recognize herself/himself as someone whoseevaluation matters, as a possible knower. As I see it, then, a reader who is not posi-tioned to evaluate a text is not positioned to comprehend it.

In his work on internalization, Vygotsky used the example of a young childlearning to point. A child may extend a hand toward an out-of-reach object ini-tially, wanting to grasp it. When the adult sees this and gives the child the object,the child learns to attach a social meaning to stretching out her/his hand: Themotion becomes a sign, a means of accomplishing something with/through an-other person (Vygotsky, 1978). The students in Max’s small group, while actingmore intentionally perhaps than Vygotsky’s grasping child did initially, were alsotrying out moves on each other in this interpersonal plane (such as drawing onprior knowledge, utilizing textual evidence, and so forth), developing as readersin a zone of proximal development that had very little to do with a teacher-as-more-knowledgeable-other, in any straightforward sense.

Indeed, while Vygotsky’s take on development is helpful, Bakhtin’s (1981)notion of authoritative discourse provides a fuller account of why the scaffoldingof interpretation and interpretive strategy by a teacher who functions as primaryknower may fail to be “internally persuasive” (p. 345) to the children who aresupposed to learn from it. For Bakhtin, authoritative discourse “binds us, quiteindependent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter itwith its authority already fused to it . . . It is therefore not a question of choosing itfrom among other possible discourses that are its equal” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). Itis not, of course, that there fail to be multiple voices and perspectives in suchpedagogy; it is, rather, that the authoritative voice (whether it is concerned withproviding “right” interpretations per se or “right” interpretive techniques to arriveat those interpretations) “demands our unconditional allegiance” (Bakhtin, 1981,p. 343); thus, it frequently drowns out all others. I may predict or summarize orask “fat, juicy questions” quite apart from any arisen need to tell or need to know:In a classroom, if I accept the authority of the teacher as primary knower, I haveno choice in the matter.

The learning in the Lakeside group was far messier, as students wrestled theirown and each other’s words into new purposes that would serve them well, I be-lieve, as solitary readers with texts on their own, at a later point: “When such aninfluence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act ofreproduction, but rather a further creative development of another’s (more pre-cisely, half-other) discourse in a new context and under new conditions” (Bakhtin,1981, p. 347). The Lakeside students undertook such transformative discursivework not only around the word beast, but also in a number of other situations

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over the summer, including conversations in which they debated more “signifi-cant” subjects such as the nature of God and the devil. But I argue that, in all cases,the internalization of these means of reading comprehension proceeded initially fromtheir own social intentions (e.g., to persuade, to be seen as a knower) and from theirinteractions, interactions that were engendered by these intentions and that helpedengender new intentions. And they were fortunate enough to have a teacher wholet that happen, who withheld his own evaluative authority on the matters theydisagreed about even at the end of the conversation. Max never did step in to saywhat the word beast “really” meant. To do so, he felt, would have undermined theentire process, because it would have communicated the message that, when allwas said and done, it was only his view on the matter (his authoritative discourse,in Bakhtin’s terms) that ultimately held currency.

What distinguishes this approach, this shared evaluation pedagogy, is not a setof shared prompts or procedures, then. There is no clearly delineated terrain ofactivities or repertoire of instructional moves as there is in explicit strategy in-struction (Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997; Palincsar & Brown, 1984;Vaughn et al., 2001); nor is it defined primarily by the structure of an activity suchas a Book Club (McMahon, 1997) or peer-led discussion (Almasi, 1995; Almasi,O’Flahavan, & Arya, 2001); nor is it about the unpacking of a particular “conven-tional” way of reading (Hull & Rose, 1990). Instead, in line with Nystrand’s (1997)notion of dialogically organized instruction, it is through the sometimes disor-derly refraction of student voices that meaningful learning takes place. Sharedevaluation pedagogy is primarily defined through an epistemic stance that takesstudent intentions around text very seriously, that provides a space for children’sown evaluative stances to come to the fore, and that sees the construction of “in-ternally persuasive” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 345) textual understanding as a dialogicprocess without a predesignated (or necessarily common) outcome.

As this study indicates, of course, children’s intentions are no stable, simplematter; constantly in flux, they are fundamentally irreducible to acontextual andatheoretical notions of student interest and motivation. Indeed, because studentintention emerges dialogically and cannot meaningfully be considered as the fixedproperty of one participant, teachers should be wary of assigning fixed intentions,or even of the notion that students can be “assigned challenging and seriousepistemic roles” (Nystrand, 1997, p. 7, italics added) a priori, as though such roleswere a straightforward outcome of a design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). It is notenough to ask the “right” kinds of questions; it is not enough to get students ac-tively engaged with one another and one another’s ideas through a particularlywell-crafted activity or lesson structure; it is not even enough to refrain from theinitiation-response-evaluation framework in favor of moves likely to be more dia-logic.

What is required is the willingness to let go of authoritative discourse pre-cisely where that seems most risky—in the face of answers and interpretive tech-

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niques that fly in the face of everything we have learned to assume must be true.And that letting go is not in the exclusive domain of the teacher, either: Max mademoves to let go of authoritative discourse, but it was only as the students in thegroup let go as well that the conversation became truly multi-voiced. And, of course,different students are likely to approach this letting go of authoritative discoursein quite divergent ways, as Adam and Thomas did. Just as I-R-E discourse doesnot automatically shut out all student interpolation of their own ideas and priori-ties (Candela, 1999), the absence of traditional teacher evaluation does not auto-matically insure that students will assume stances as possible knowers. Thus, it isnot only that a pedagogical conversation can be more monologically or more dia-logically organized (Nystrand, 1997), though this is important; we must also real-ize that, even when the teacher cedes interpretive authority and rejects authorita-tive discourse for him/herself, students are likely to find their way into dialogictextual discussion at different points and with different purposes, in part depend-ing on how they find their own ways of letting go of authoritative discourse cen-tered in the teacher, a discourse that remains half-theirs from previous discursivecontexts.

Much of what enabled such a shift, for the students in this group, was Max’sremarkable ability not only to withhold evaluation, but also to invite them intoserious epistemic roles on their terms, rather than privileging a given kind of inter-pretive approach, theme, or question that he thought should drive the conversa-tion. It took more than valuing divergent student responses to the questions anddilemmas he might have begun with, that he had thought significant to the text athand—it took following their initiations (questions and dilemmas they encoun-tered in the written text and discussion) down apparently blind alleys, and takingthe considerable bumps along the road in stride. Not all student comments weretaken up or equally valued, of course. But it was the group as a whole, not justMax, that forged decisions around what was worth discussing seriously: Althoughthere was some discussion of what the students thought the moral of the fablewas, this was accomplished in far less time and with far less talk than the debateover beast.

What Does Shared Evaluation Pedagogy Offer?

I can only aim at making a triangle of myself, the children, and the activities outsideboth of us, but in which we are both involved for different reasons. (Rosen, 1967, p. 27)

It would be disingenuous to suggest that Max’s own pedagogical purposes or“intended outcomes” disappeared entirely as he facilitated the small group. In linewith a sociocultural understanding of text and of learning, he cared deeply aboutdeveloping students’ abilities to navigate complex and sometimes contradictoryinterpretive possibilities, and their facility with culturally valued ways of reading.

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But he saw these culturally valued ways of reading as not having primarily to dowith reaching a “right” answer, nor even with reaching proficiency in somevaluable predesignated interpretive technique. Rather, he wanted students todevelop increasing flexibility with using texts for their own purposes, and with thehard work of wrestling with the purposes of others vis-à-vis the texts at hand (cf.Britsch, 2004; Dyson, 1993)—a fundamentally sociocultural take on the meaningof reading comprehension.

Students had occasion to make the case for their own thinking in ways thatmultiple others around them potentially would find plausible and important—but they also had occasion to recognize that the ways of reading that these othersactually valued were not univocal, nor beyond challenge. In short, students notonly had the opportunity to engage in “response to literature,” though that was animportant dimension; the pedagogy was simultaneously and equally about re-sponse to each other. Even good arguments sometimes failed to convince, for ex-ample; Max felt it was important for interlocutors on whatever side of a discus-sion to understand and to respect that.

Of course, this shared evaluation pedagogy does not simply lead to a pleasant,tension-free utopia where understanding and respect come easily to all. There wasvisible friction at times between Adam and Thomas as they struggled with oneanother’s ideas. And there were indications that, without active intervention fromthe teacher, social hierarchies among students could enable one or more studentsto take over the teacherly role of primary knower, while the other students re-mained positioned as secondary knowers (cf. Hinchman & Young, 2001). WithinMax’s group, certain students spoke up more, and with more authority, notablythe white students and the boys, although (as noted earlier) Berta’s participationincreased significantly in the later videotaped sessions. Clearly, we need more re-search on how teachers might work toward positioning different students as pos-sible knowers in light of profoundly different initial patterns of participation de-pending on gender, native language, and cultural histories. In addition, it may bethat, for some students, becoming discursively positioned as possible knowerswithin a textual conversation does not align with their purposes, whether becausethey favor the security of being secondary knowers, or because they privilege otherforms of knowing over textual knowing, or for some other reason entirely.

If students do come to see themselves as possible knowers, however, sharedevaluation pedagogy may have the power to change how students and teachersthink about misunderstandings of what is being read. When students are posi-tioned as secondary knowers, they frequently change their perspectives in orderto have them align with the teacher’s authoritative discourse (without that changebeing internally persuasive). And any “misunderstandings” may be taken as evi-dence—by the teacher, by peers, and by the reader her/himself—as weakness inreading. Students with frequent “misunderstandings” (especially on standardized

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tests) often come to be seen as poor readers, which in turn can easily become aself-fulfilling prophecy that compounds initial achievement disparities (Weinstein,2002). But when students are possible knowers, they may feel more entitled tochange their thinking in light of new evidence, as Adam did—indeed, they maysee it as one mark of a strong reader. If so, experiences with shared evaluationpedagogy could dramatically change the ways in which students and teachers thinkof what constitutes ability. We need to learn more about whether and how thishappens, and how it relates to student learning.

Moreover, in an era in which accountability has become a buzzword increas-ingly associated with standardized testing and lock-step curricula, textual misin-terpretations are frequently viewed purely as problems, signals of children’s defi-cits as learners that need to be corrected and fixed. In shared evaluation pedagogy,by contrast, “wrong” answers and even the most bizarre interpretations can beimportant as sites of pedagogical possibility, and as sites where a more meaning-ful form of accountability can emerge over time. It is not that anything goes, orthat all answers are equally groovy. Rather, students who see themselves as pos-sible knowers may increasingly come to rely on the text (and not the teacher) inorder to evaluate and revise their textual hypotheses, becoming increasingly inde-pendent in their negotiation of the kinds of choices they need to make aroundtext. And, in addition to finding themselves more accountable to the text, theymay become accountable to each other for grounding their textual interpreta-tions; certainly Adam, Thomas, and Alfredo held one another accountable (e.g.,“It doesn’t say that!”). And while they go about this, students might even developan awareness (well before college) that characters and texts can be unreliable (“He’snot skinny!”) and that multiple, contested interpretations of the same text are parfor the course.

To my mind, the broad set of pedagogical possibilities I have sketched here isfar richer than anything that could be assessed on a standardized reading compre-hension test, and far truer to a rich conceptualization of reading comprehension.But these goals demand not only a reorientation toward assessment, but also afundamental reorientation to teaching, one that turns the more widespread un-derstanding of scaffolding on its head. Typically, scaffolding has been conceptual-ized like this: the “more knowledgeable other” (usually the teacher) begins with ahigh level of evaluative guidance about textual content, interpretation, and strate-gic reading processes, in order to guide the student toward the most appropriateways of engaging with text (the teacher’s “intended outcomes”). As the studentbecomes more competent, the teacher gradually withdraws support, so the childbecomes progressively more independent with these reading processes.

In shared evaluation pedagogy, by contrast, the teacher begins with a low levelof evaluative guidance about textual content and strategic textual thinking, pro-viding a deliberate, wide-open space for students to encounter the texts—and each

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other’s ideas about the texts—on their own terms. However, as students becomeflexible and grounded in working with their own and each other’s interpretations,and come to see themselves as possible knowers (which will not happen all atonce), the teacher’s role may need to subtly shift. At that point, the teacher can upthe ante, re-entering the conversation about the text as a fellow possible knower,not as the voice of authoritative discourse, in order to introduce alternative per-spectives and pose dilemmas around nuances. My own study was not long enoughto reliably trace out changes in the teacher and in the students over time, but Ibelieve this is a critical area for further investigation.

The editors, in reviewing the manuscript of this article, posed an importantquestion: Isn’t the active teacher guidance in shared evaluation pedagogy itself aform of scaffolding? Max, after all, played a critical role even in making movessuch as looking down rather looking at the current speaker. My answer to thatquestion is, “It depends.” Just as beast had different possible meanings to differentreaders and interlocutors, so scaffolding does as well.

If the reader of this article associates the word with forms of teaching thatprivilege teachers’ “intended outcomes” over those of children, as is implied, forexample, in phrases such as “scaffolding for comprehension,” or “scaffolding strat-egy use,” then I would argue that scaffolding as a metaphor for shared evaluationpedagogy must be roundly rejected, even if such uses of the term acknowledgethat “motivation” and “interest” play a part in the learning enterprise. (Motivatinga child to do what the teacher wants her/him to do in the conversation is not thesame as allowing the child’s purposes to lead in the conversation.) If the readerinstead sees scaffolding as an undertaking that supports joint activity when teacher-student intentions are aligned, à la Rogoff ’s (1990) guided participation, then Ibelieve the term will sometimes be useful, but will not always apply. And if scaf-folding is seen in the ways Searle (1984) had hoped it would be, where studentpurposes are at the very center of the conversational edifice under construction,then the term has more currency still, although it still remains what Dyson (1990)calls a “vertical metaphor” (p. 204) that does not easily account for the divergentand sometimes disorderly purposes that are brought into conversation whenmultiple children are involved across time.

I tend for this reason to lean away from scaffolding to describe the kind ofpedagogy I have explored above, to reserve the term for other uses where I believeit can and does play a significant role in children’s learning. But others will likelymake different choices with the word, depending on their purposes and to whomthey are listening and talking. I do not imagine under any circumstances that Iwill have the final say on it, but that is as it goes, in heteroglossic discourse. Maxput it another way to the Lakeside children: “It’s amazing how one word can get ustalking in so many different directions. Isn’t it?”

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

My thanks go to the Lakeside children at the heart of this study; to Jessica Zacher, Paige Ware,

David Pearson, and Cynthia Lewis for commenting on various drafts; and the RTE reviewers and

editors for their feedback and remarkable forbearance. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Max

Vélez, who changed my mind with his talking and his listening, and still keeps changing it.

ENDNOTES

1. A pseudonym, as are the names of all students and the school site mentioned in this article. I

have permission to use the focal teacher’s real first name.

2. This is not to say that all those who have argued for ceding interpretive authority to students

would share this view, even if they have not written specifically on this dilemma.

3. Dyson has put forward an important related critique of the notions of literacy apprenticeship

and “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991), arguing that these tend to em-

phasize “individual practices already differentiated and defined by those in charge” and may ren-

der “inaudible children’s potential to transform unfamiliar practices into ones in which they are

anything but ‘peripheral’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the goings on” (Dyson, 2002, p. 173).

4. A small percentage (3%) of district students represented other ethnic backgrounds, but none

were involved in this study.

5.

Conventions Used in the Preparation of Manuscripts

Convention Signification

(abc) Parentheses enclosing text contain notes with contextual and nonverbalinformation

So: A colon indicates an elongated sound in a word: “Soooo”

[ ] Brackets indicate overlapping speech by two speakers

first Italicized words indicate a stressed word

You= An equal sign indicates latching speech

=What

i- A short dash indicates an unfinished word, or a false start on a word

When// Two backslashes indicates the end of a false start on a sentence, or anincomplete sentence

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APPENDIX: THE FIRST EXTENDED DISCUSSION OF THE MEANING OF BEAST

MAX: And, Adam, you want to go back, let’s go back to what [you were talking about.]

ADAM: [Well, it//] Um, last, last time Thomas was reading the first part and he said the bestbehind them.

MAX: Okay.

ADAM: And I think, d-doesn’t it say beast?

THOMAS: Yes, it does.

ADAM: It says beast, right? [So well//

THOMAS: [I read it wrong.]

MAX: Okay.

ADAM: A mill// See, a miller and his son set out to the market to sell their donkey. And,leading the beast behind them. So that means that the donkey may be very mean sothey won’t, so they don’t want to ride him and the son// So the father was right. Maybethe son shouldn’t ride it, only him. [So//

THOMAS: [No.] Because beast could mean, could mean a lot of things. It could mean likewhat Adam is thinking like bi:g and mea:n and stuff. And a beast could also just meanthat he’s big. Not just because he’s mean. [It could mean a lot of things.

ADAM: [I know but they’re sell]ing him. [Leading the beast behind them.]

THOMAS: Yeah, [maybe they need the money.]

ADAM: I know, but why would they be selling a beast, I mean, selling a donkey and calling ita beast behind them. [So that//]

THOMAS: [Because he could] be very, very big.

ADAM: So that should mean that he’s mean and they don’t, the, they don- they don’t wantto ride him cause he’s mean and he will kick them [off.]

THOMAS: [It] could mean a lot of things.

MAX: Well, let’s go there for a second. Very quickly. What, when you think of the wordbeast, what do you think of? Let’s just, see. Okay?

THOMAS: Well, I think of a lot of things. Beast could mean he’s very mean, and he like, kickspeople off his back and stuff. And beast could also mean he’s just big.

MAX: Okay. What do you think of beast? When I say the word beast, what comes to [yourmind?]

ANGELICA: [Big and mean?]

MAX: Big and mean? Have you ever// You’ve heard the word beast used before. Berta, whensomeone says beast to you . . . its kind of like the Spanish bestia, isn’t it, it’s kind ofsimilar to bestia. What do you think of when you see, when you hear beast?

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BERTA: Someone that’s not nice.

MAX: Someone that’s not nice? Okay. Angelica// Elena, I’m sorry, I told you I’ll always,forever keep getting you guys mixed up. Elena, what do you think?

ELENA: Mean?

MAX: Okay, Alfredo, what do you think?

ALFREDO: Like furious and, um, like really// (Pause) Uh, really strong and bad?

MAX: Okay.

ADAM: Very big, ugly, and strong, a:nd mean.

JENNY: Very like, I don’t know, big muscles, um, like, I sort of think of like an a:nimal, or likea wolf, because, wolves, get pretty big. [They can get pretty big, like (inaudible)] tigersor something] cause tigers get like up to a man’s hip// waist.

ADAM: [Oooh, like a, like a werewolf.=

THOMAS: =Yeah, but//]

THOMAS: Yeah, but those werewolves are (inaudible).

JENNY: Not tigers.

MAX: Well let’s go ahead. Is it okay with everyone if, uh// Clearly we have more than oneunderstanding of the word beast. Maybe if we read a little bit further on it’ll help usclarify what, what their understanding of beast is. Go for it, Jenny, what is it?

JENNY: See, I think they’re selling their donkey and if it’s a hot day, the, I think the girls arethe fools because they’re saying, like oh look at what fools they are, it’s such a hot dayand they’re, they’re not riding the donkey? Well, why would they want to sell an oldsweaty tired donkey? Nobody would want to buy it.

MAX: Oh, I see. Okay.

THOMAS: Then also, if, if the, if the, if the man knew that the donkey was mean, why wouldhe put his own son on it. That’s kind of rude.

MAX: Adam, you mentioned something about that. What was your reasoning behind that?

ADAM: What?

MAX: Thomas made a p-// Repeat what you just said, Thomas.

THOMAS: I said if, if the man knew that the donkey was mean, why would he put his ownson on? That’s kind of weird because what if the donkey like bucks him off and thenthe boy gets hurt.

ADAM: Well didn’t you hear him say in the story, um// Let’s see// He said, he said, it’s wortha try. (one second pause)

MAX: Who said that?

ADAM: Um, the [miller.

JENNY: [The mill]er.

ADAM: The dude. He said, it’s worth a try.

MAX: What’s [worth a try?

JENNY: [ It’s worth a try,] the miller said thoughtfully. He lifted the young boy onto thedonkey’s back.

MAX: Okay. [What, what . . .

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JENNY: [It’s worth a try] to, to ride the donkey.

THOMAS: But that also could mean like, what’s//

MAX: Wait a second. Elena is looking at me over here, looking puzzled. When it, when it//do you see that part that says it’s worth a try? [It’s um,

ELENA: [Yeah.]

MAX: The second paragraph, it’s worth a try. When you read that, when you read that, it’sworth a try, what, what do you think? What are you thinking of? What do you think hemeans there?

ELENA: So the son can get on?

MAX: So the son can get on? Okay. All right, and why wasn’t the son on, why wasn’t the sonon originally. Do we need to know that? Is that important to know?

ADAM: Because it, it might be mean because they said it was a beast and I think a beast is abig, hairy, ugly, strong (pause) [be-

THOMAS: [Or,] or ’cause they were in the sun and then if you ride the donkey it’s moreweight and then it could just die and then they won’t be able to sell it.

MAX: That kind of goes back to what Jenny was talking about. It’s sweaty and tired andpeople may not want to buy it.

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