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This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Language in Education on Oct 20 2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.609298

To cite this article: Kerry Anne Enright , Daniela Torres-Torretti & Orlando Carreo ́n (2012) Hope is the thing with metaphors: de-situating literacies and learning in English Language Arts classrooms, Language and Education, 26:1, 35-51, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2011.609298

Abstract  

In  this  paper,  we  examine  the  relationship  between  classroom  talk,  teacher-­‐student  roles,  

and  paradigms  for  literacy  and  learning  in  two  9th  grade  English  Language  Arts  classes.    

Our  goal  was  to  understand  how  these  roles  and  practices  socialized  students  into  norms  

for  academic  language  and  literacy  as  they  read  and  wrote  poetry  in  preparation  for  a  high-­‐

stakes  standardized  essay.    Drawing  from  social  and  critical  approaches  to  literacy,  we  

describe  how  a  policy-­‐driven  narrowing  of  the  curriculum  also  narrowed  conceptions  of  

literacy  and  knowledge.    Differences  in  the  treatment  of  students’  poems  versus  the  

Dickinson  poem  positioned  students  as  unable  to  co-­‐construct  knowledge.    The  high-­‐stakes  

essay,  not  yet  assigned,  drove  almost  all  discourse  about  text,  meaning,  and  legitimate  

knowledge,  essentially  “de-­‐situating”  literacy  from  the  tasks  and  immediate  context,  and  

prioritizing  technical  skills  over  communicative  purposes.    Implications  for  research,  

teaching,  and  students’  development  of  academic  language  and  literacy,  address  the  

tension  between  meaningful  literacy  instruction  and  accountability  demands  of  

contemporary  classrooms.    

Keywords: literacy, socialization, knowledge construction, classroom discourse

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Hope is the Thing with Metaphors:

De-Situating Literacies and Learning in English Language Arts Classrooms

As countries continue to educate learners from non-majority language backgrounds, a

variety of classroom configurations have emerged with regard to majority and minority language

speakers. In U.S. secondary classrooms, many multilingual students are learning subject-matter

curricular content and the academic language and literacy skills of that content in linguistically

diverse “New Mainstream” classrooms where English is the medium of instruction amidst native

English-speaking students as well as young people "from different cultural and linguistic groups,

with their respective language and literacy traditions" (Enright, 2011, p. 111). As diversity

increases in U.S. public school classrooms, so have national mandates for curricular standards

and accountability. Many students within this context are being educated amidst a tension of

conflicting paradigms, and this tension is visible in the day-to-day practices of classroom

instruction, with consequences for their curricular learning and development of academic

language and literacy.  

In this article, we analyzed the classroom discourse of two ninth-grade English Language

Arts (ELA) classes that included 25-30% of students officially designated as English learners,

dominant in a language other than English (mostly Spanish). The purpose of these analyses was

to examine how patterns of language use mediated constructions of knowledge and literacy and

their corresponding roles and interactions for students. Since the curriculum addressed in these

classes included student-authored and “canonical” published poetry within the same session, we

were able to consider how the pedagogical activities and routines positioned students and teacher

differently, depending on text type and text authorship. Ultimately, this article is concerned with

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the relationship between classroom talk, teacher-student roles, and paradigms for literacy and

learning operationalized in the classroom.  

Classroom Discourse and Academic Literacy

In this article, we describe classroom practices and interactions as representing one of

two general paradigms related to academic language and literacy. While one paradigm or

orientation might be dominant in a particular moment or interaction, we recognize that

classrooms are dynamic social spaces in which priorities, norms, and roles can shift from

moment to moment. The particulars of these shifts, or adaptations (Baquedano-López, Solís, &

Kattan, 2005), mediate the roles available to students, teachers, and texts in institutional settings.

In other words, learning is always situated in one way or another. This perspective on literacy is

consistent with Street’s ‘ideological model’ of literacy, which understands literacy to be “a social

practice….always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. The ways in

which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge,

identity, and being” (Street, 2008, p. 4). In other words, literacy involves a variety of socially-

situated ways of making meaning among particular participants engaged in literacy practices and

events for particular purposes. In contrast, an autonomous model of literacy in Street’s

framework is one in which literacy is “seen as simply a universal technical skill, the same

everywhere”, such that “the particular form being taught in school gets to be treated as the only

kind, as the universal standard that naturalises its socially specific features and disguises their

real history and ideological justifications” (Street, 1997, p. 48). This autonomous model of

literacy is pervasive in most testing and measurement efforts, since any standardized approach to

measuring literacy skills requires divorcing those skills from the very particular social contexts

and interactions in which they occur in everyday life.  

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In an ideal learning environment, literacy is situated in the local co-construction of

knowledge among members of a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).

However, in institutional settings, especially schools, the texts that mediate learners’ interactions

are often artifacts of other interactions, policies, institutions, and people (Barton & Hamilton,

2005; Brandt & Clinton, 2002). At times, the salience of these outside influences can actually

serve to de-situate language and literacy learning from co-construction of knowledge in the

immediate interaction. The current paradigm of accountability and standardization encourages

this shift away from an ideological model of literacy towards an autonomous model. This de-

situating of language and literacy from a text’s author-intended and genre-based communicative

purposes has consequences for the ways in which language learners are socialized into norms for

academic language and literacy at the secondary level. The tension between these alternative

paradigms or orientations towards literacy and knowledge was apparent in this study. While

Street has described these theories and articulated their implications for literacy learning in

school settings, this study contributes an empirical example of this autonomous model in action,

and more importantly, illustrates its relationship with current accountability mandates in the

United States.  

Studies of situated learning and literacies often focus on these phenomena in everyday

out-of-school contexts (Barton & Hamilton, 2005; Street, 2001; Wenger, 1998), since the

authentic co-construction of knowledge is especially rare in most traditional classrooms,

particularly at the secondary level. In its place, transmission models of learning dominate

secondary classrooms (Bakhtin, 1981; Freire, 1990, 1997; Nystrand, 1997). In these classrooms,

teachers serve as directors or managers, transmitting information to students, who demonstrate

learning by reproducing the information or skills in prescribed ways on standard measures

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(Vaish, 2008). This model of learning often coincides with “essayist” notions of literacy (Heath,

1993; Poole, 2008), in which literacy is considered “decontextualized,” and “stands apart from

its context of production and in theory supplies the contexts necessary for interpretation within

the text itself” (Poole, 2008, p. 379). This essayist orientation to literacy often coincides with a

“componential” approach to teaching and assessing literacy in schools; literacy becomes a

commodity reflected in quantifiable skills that can be measured on standardized assessments

(Enright, 2011; Poole, 2008).  

A growing area of inquiry is the role of language use in mediating roles for student

participation, norms for literacy learning, and conceptions of knowledge in classrooms. Duff

(2008) calls the extension of language socialization research into specialized classroom language

contexts, “discourse socialization research,” which she describes as “the interaction of work on

LS and academic literacies or academic discourse(s)” (p. 111). Street provides a compelling

rationale for these lines of inquiry when he highlights the effects of particular forms of

teacher/student interaction on the “nature of the literacy learned and the ideas about literacy held

by the participants, especially new learners and their positions in relations of power” (Street,

2008, p. 4)  

Early work in the study of classroom discourse sought to describe the “scripts” and

discourse participation patterns evident in traditional classrooms, such as studies by Mehan

(1982) and Cazden (2001) noting IRE/F as a standard classroom discourse pattern. More

recently, discourse socialization researchers seek to understand the implications of these patterns

for advanced language and literacy development (Wedin, 2010), how these patterns impact

diverse populations of students differently (Losey, 1997), how disruptions or adaptations of these

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norms impact the creation of knowledge (Baquedano-López, et al., 2005), and how alternative

discourse patterns can promote particular kinds of learning (Ball & Wells, 2009).  

Many discourse socialization researchers draw on Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of monologic

versus dialogic discourse. According to Nystrand (1997), monologic discourse reflects

transmission-oriented education norms, whereas dialogic discourse in classrooms suggests a

more interpretation-oriented stance. In monologic classrooms, “the content of literature is

autonomous, ‘in the text,’ and unrelated to students’ efforts aside from their correctly decoding

‘it’” (Nystrand, 1997, p. 8). Dialogic classrooms, on the other hand, suggest that “the content of

literature is not autonomous but has to be constructed by readers in engaged encounters with the

text,” and “understandings are focused by struggles over meaning” (Nystrand, 1997, p. 9).

Research in the United States and Singapore (Vaish, 2008) suggest that dialogic discourse

patterns hold greater potential for co-construction of knowledge and more advanced literacy

learning.  

Barton and Hamilton (2005) note that learning is often textually-mediated; Brandt and

Clinton (2002) caution that even when learning is textually-mediated, texts are often not

produced locally and therefore represent influences from beyond the local context. Since the

classrooms in this study included texts that were locally created in relation to officially-

sanctioned curricular texts, they provided a unique opportunity to examine how text, talk, and

context interact to influence literacy norms and learning in secondary classrooms.

Research Design / Methods

The Diverse Adolescent Literacies Project, 1 from which these data were selected, took

place in a diverse comprehensive high school in northern California with the purpose of

examining academic language and literacy across curricular areas. Field techniques were

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informed by case study methods of classroom literacy studies (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), first and

second language studies of classroom discourse (Cazden, 1988; Gibbons, 2006; Walsh, 2006),

and general qualitative methods in sociolinguistics (Gee, 1999; Johnstone, 2000). Three sections

of English class were visited 12-15 times each. Classroom data included audio-recordings of

classroom language use, fieldnotes of classroom observations, copies of curricular materials and

student work, and photographs of classroom artifacts (teachers’ board-work, overhead

transparencies, PowerPoint presentations, student posters, other visual artifacts). Earlier analyses

that examined writing across the curriculum suggested that literacy practices around academic

writing in English, science, and mathematics classes were deeply constrained by district

accountability mandates (AUTHORS, 2011). This narrowing of the curriculum across

classrooms with regard to writing led us to the current inquiry, a more focused examination of

language and literacy in English classrooms. While the earlier analyses documented ways in

which accountability mandates impacted literacy practices in these English classrooms around

writing, we were especially interested in looking at the role of classroom discourse in this

phenomenon, and expanding beyond writing practices in the classroom. This classroom level

inquiry required reducing the data, which we did by identifying sessions that were typical or

representative of the course in terms of classroom activities, curriculum, and general classroom

talk. Next, to select class sessions for the analyses presented in this article, we reviewed

fieldnotes and transcripts from this subset of representative class sessions to find two class

sessions in which the same lesson was being taught on the same day with demographically

similar students, using the same texts. In the first analytical pass, we performed microanalyses

of the discourse, noting the communicative function of each turn in relation to conversational

and pedagogical context; this drew from methods in conversation analysis to provide a sense of

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what was happening linguistically. Next, we divided the class sessions into shorter segments that

represented curricular events (with bound activity cycles related to pedagogical goals and

curricular materials) to note patterns within and across class activity types. At this point, we

reanalyzed data at the level of general discourse, turn by turn, with a focus on teacher/student

roles and participation structures. This analysis generated a sense of the relationship between

pedagogical focus and classroom talk, and highlighted some distinct differences in the way

literacy and knowledge were portrayed, depending on the particular texts focused on in each

curricular event. Finally, we shifted our focus to the texts that were mediating talk during these

curricular events, again analyzing discourse turn by turn with a focus on the relationship between

text, interlocutor role, and talk, informed by the pedagogical and conversational norms revealed

in earlier analyses.

Language and Literacy in Focal Classrooms

Demographically, both ninth grade English Language Arts classes were similar. They

were both taught by Mr. Brown, a young Caucasian man with five years of teaching experience,

considered by school administrators to be especially effective with students from diverse

language backgrounds. Mr. Brown’s rapport with his students was obvious; he and the students

often joked and shared personal stories until the bell rang and occasionally during transition

moments between activities in class. Each class had 13-15 students, with approximately 50% of

them coming from homes where Spanish was spoken, and the other half from monolingual

English-speaking homes.

In the week prior to the session analyzed here, students submitted the culminating essay

of their prior curricular unit, the descriptive essay. The next benchmark essay, the analysis of a

poem, would be students' fifth benchmark assignment out of eight such essays in ninth grade

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English. To begin the new unit, Mr. Brown introduced students to figurative language and

literary devices used in poetry such as imagery, simile, metaphor, rhyme and rhythm. Two days

before the focal session, the class read two catalog poems from their textbook, with the teacher

leading discussion about the poems' uses of imagery and rhythm to convey the drudgery of the

work described in the poets' lists of activities. The day before the focal session, students worked

independently or in pairs to answer textbook questions about the catalog poems and begin to

write their own. Mr. Brown pointed out the requirements for their catalog poems and the

sentence structures from the model poems that they could imitate in their own texts. He

encouraged students to work independently as much as possible, however, so that he could have

time in class to grade their descriptive essays. While some class sessions throughout the year

involved small group work as students prepared posters or presentations together, the focal

session described here represents a typical day in which recently-presented concepts are being

anchored in practice assignments in preparation for the high stakes standardized assignment.

The district-mandated essays, known as benchmark assignments, were graded based on a rubric

of evaluation criteria; English teachers met at the district office for training to standardize their

use of the rubrics. Now that the descriptive essay was finished, Mr. Brown's English classes

would prepare for the next benchmark assignment, which was a literary analysis essay in

response to the following prompt: Write a response to literature essay in which you analyze the

literary elements in relation to your selected poem's theme. This essay had its own benchmark

assignment rubric (see Appendix A), and would be assigned a week after this focal session.

On this day in late January, both classes engaged in nearly identical activities. Class

began with an activity related to the catalog poems that students were assigned to write the

previous day. Next, they reviewed the definition of a metaphor. The teacher led an I-R-F

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sequence in which he attempted to lead students to an understanding of extended metaphor,

followed by a curricular sequence in which they read Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with

Feathers together as a class, stopping at the end of each stanza (and sometimes, individual lines)

to discuss the poem. They answered textbook questions on the extended metaphor in the poem.

Finally, Mr. Brown assigned their homework, to be started in class: Students must write their

own extended metaphor poems, due the next day in class. There were only two distinct

differences in classroom activities across classes: In one class, most students had completed the

assigned catalog poems and read them aloud to the class before working on extended metaphors;

whereas, the other class had not completed their poems and worked on them at the beginning of

class. Also, in one class students read the page-long introduction to Emily Dickinson before

reading the poem, while the other class read the introduction to the poet after reading her poem.

Otherwise, classroom activities were identical across classes.

We began these analyses with the general descriptive question of: “What’s happening

with language in these classrooms? What can we learn about the nature of academic language

from these data?” When we linked our analyses of discursive roles and participant structures

with the analyses anchored in particular curricular events, we could see pervasive and consistent

patterns in the data. First, we noted that the discursive roles consistently reflected recitation or I-

R-F discourse patterns, with the teacher as manager of discourse and keeper/evaluator of

knowledge, and students as obedient workers and receptacles or reproducers of that knowledge.

In other words, when the teacher would ask the class a question, it was a known-answer question

with one correct answer that students were expected to provide. These discursive patterns

reflected a conception of knowledge as static, which contradicted our own understanding of what

it means to interpret or write a poem, involving literacy practices that emphasize a poem's

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communicative function, with "poetry as an instrument in a dialogue between writer and reader,"

intended to communicate some sort of idea, experience, mystery, or emotion by establishing a

connection with the poem's readers (Schreiber, 2006). The conceptions of knowledge in the

classroom discourse began to make sense when we abandoned our sense of the poems'

communicative purposes, and instead read the transcripts through the lens of the teacher's stated

purpose-- to prepare students for the benchmark assignment literary analysis essay. The

instructional purpose, then, was not to learn to interpret poetry with the poet's intentions and

experiences or the readers' intentions and experiences in mind; rather, the purpose was to use the

textbook and student poems as a vehicle to prepare for a high-stakes literary analysis essay. This

purpose reflected an autonomous model of literacy, which made sense given the number and

pacing of mandated benchmark assignments during the year.

At this point, we refined our approach to ask the following analytical question, grounded

in the data: How are norms for knowledge and literacy mediated discursively and textually in

this literacy event? More specifically, in each literacy event, what is the relationship between

student-teacher talk (and their corresponding discursive roles), the particular focal texts, and

resulting norms for knowledge and literacy? Rather than critique the teacher's instructional

choices as yet another example of transmission-method teaching or an autonomous model of

literacy, we wanted to understand the conditions that encourage these language and literacy

norms, since the mode and manner of assessment seemed to influence the teacher's meaning-

making, instructional choices, and priorities.

The most striking and consistent pattern that we noted in the data was the absence of any

focus on the communicative functions of literacy in these classrooms. In other words, there was

little attention to the author’s communicative purposes in constructing a text, the reader’s stance

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and interpretive resources for understanding a text, or the rhetorical purpose of a text as

representative of a particular written genre. Street’s ideological model of literacy was not

operating in this classroom. Instead, a focus on technical aspects of literacy that would be tested

in high-stakes assessments—in this case, literary devices assessed in the upcoming essay,

especially “extended metaphor”—became the driving factor behind instructional goals and

classroom discourse. We began to think of this focus as a mechanism for de-situating literacy

from the communicative functions that literacy typically serves outside of assessment purposes.

For this reason, as we selected transcript excerpts for inclusion in this article, we considered the

ways in which literacy was de-situated with regard to each focal text, and chose transcript

selections that best illustrated how these mechanisms played out in each literacy event. Other

than the exception noted in this article, the discourse in these class sessions consistently

displayed the patterns noted in this article unless the students and teacher were engaged informal

personal conversations (for example, about a reprimand that a student received in another class).

Likewise, the autonomous model of literacy was consistent in the data throughout the year, not

only in these English classes, but in data from science and mathematics classes as well. (See

AUTHORS, 2011).

In this section, we give three examples of how literacy was de-situated in these English

classrooms, one example for each text-type and curricular event (student-written catalog poems,

the Emily Dickinson poem in the textbook, and student-written extended metaphor poems). We

conclude this section with comments about moments when disruptions to these patterns and an

alternative more situated literacies paradigm was signaled but not taken up. In general,

classroom talk in the focal classes was teacher-directed, following the recitation model described

by Nystrand (1997) in which the teacher poses a known-answer question and students attempt to

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guess the answer or “fill in the blank.” At the beginning of one focal class, Mr. Brown

specifically tells students that...

we're working on different kinds of poems because at some point, at some point in the

next week and a half, you're gonna have to write an essay about a poem. Now, in order

for you guys to be able to do that, you need to kind of understand how all these poems

work, and one way that you understand these poems is by writing them. Okay? It's good

practice. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to help you guys be prepared for your next

essay.

The upcoming essay was actually a high-stakes district-mandated "benchmark assignment" in

which students would need to analyze a poem for its use of literary devices. Students could only

advance to the next grade level if they passed all benchmark assignments. In the following

example, the teacher has just scolded the students for not having completed their catalog poems

for homework, and tells them they must finish them in the next few minutes of class. When a

student asks, “Does it have to rhyme?” the teacher responds as follows:

Excerpt 1: Student Catalog Poems

T   It does NOT have to rhyme. The only requirement, actually there are TWO

requirements. One of the requirements is that it's a minimum of 10 lines.

Okay, that's it! 10 lines. Can you guys come up with a list of 10 activities or

10 things that you do every day?

1

2

3

4

Ss   Yeah.   5

T   I think so. Okay? The only other requirement other than that is that you

IMITATE THE STRUCTURE of one of the poems that we read, okay? Now,

there's one of two ways you can do that. On page 409, we have this poem,

6

7

9

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Woman Work. Now she starts off her poem, or each of her lines, with the

words, “I've got”. I've got to... okay? I've got to... What's the first line? “I've

got the children to tend, the clothes to mend. I've got company to feed, I've got

the shirts to press”, all these things. So what I want you guys to do when you

imitate is to start off every single line like this: I've got to wake up in the

morning. I've got to brush my teeth. I've gotta to do this, I've gotta do that.

Okay? Or, or, go on and turn the page, page 410. This, this poet does it a little

bit differently. Instead of starting off lines with I've got to or I've gotta, she

just says, THESE. THESE, THIS. “These shriveled seeds we plant, these

t-shirts we fold, these tortillas we slice and fry.” Okay? So that's another way

you can do that. You can use the words “these” or “this” to start off each line.

One of those two ways. So the requirements... minimum of 10 lines, and you

imitate this structure. Okay?  

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

In his instructions, the teacher focuses on “requirements," even using the word

specifically in lines 1, 2, 6, and 21. As such, he focuses entirely on technical and componential

aspects of literacy, reflecting an autonomous model of literacy. This focus on “requirements”

was consistent across classes any time students were instructed to write. In this instance,

“structure” is important (lines 7 and 22). To fulfill the requirements of the assignment, students

must create a list of activities from their daily lives (lines 3 and 4), include 10 lines (lines 2, 3,

21), and imitate the linguistic structures from the textbook examples by reducing the textbook-

sanctioned poems to formulas that they could reproduce in their own poems (lines 7-21). While

the textbook focused on imagery and tone as the priority literary devices in the model catalog

poems, imagery and tone were never mentioned as students wrote their own catalog poems. In

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the other class, where students read their poems aloud, the same focus on technical and

componential aspects of literacy was evident. The teacher nominated a student to stand and read

aloud. He led the class in applauding the poet’s performance, made a cursory evaluative

comment such as “Alright, at least he’s got something. Let’s give him a round of applause” and

then proceeded to call on the next student. There was never discussion of the content of

students’ poems, why they chose particular activities to include in their poem, or how their

poems evoked particular kinds of images or feelings. Completeness and adherence to the

requirements was the focus of all talk at all times, even though the required topic of the poems

focused on students' personal lives, with potential for a more situated or student-centered

approach to examining poetry. Knowledge in these activities were static and pre-established;

catalog poems were lists written according to specific guidelines. Students could demonstrate

mastery of this knowledge by reproducing linguistic structures and creating their own lists.

In the next example, language mediates literacy and knowledge quite differently as the

official textbook poem becomes the focus of instruction and talk. While the focus in the student

catalog poems was on completeness and structure (an underlying expectation for the benchmark

assignment essay according to the rubric), the focus in the activities related to the textbook poem

prioritizes the literary device of extended metaphor-- an emphasis that was much more closely

aligned with five of the eight evaluation criteria in the benchmark assignment rubric. Emily

Dickinson's Hope is the thing with feathers was the textbook example of an "extended metaphor

poem." Before the class answered textbook questions about the poem together, the teacher led

the class in reading the poem aloud and discussing the text stanza by stanza, and often line by

line. After the teacher and a student took turns reading the poem aloud for the class, the teacher

launched their discussion of the poem by drawing students' attention to the metaphor.

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Excerpt 2: Textbook Poem by Emily Dickinson

T First, let's talk about the metaphor. 1

fS Mr. Brown, what's "gale"? 2

T We'll get there. That's a great question. We'll talk about it. First, let's talk about

the metaphor. What is she comparing here?

3

4

Ss Hope. 5

T Is she comparing hope and feathers? 6

mS Hope and storms. 7

T She's comparing hope, that's true. Hope is what? In the poem, hope is what? 8

S Feathers! 9

T Hope is the THING with feathers, which is WHAT? 10

S A bird! 11

T A bird, right? Good! Here's our metaphor. [Teacher writes notes on the board.]

Ooops. Not hope is bird. Hope is A bird. How in the heck is hope a bird? Let's

read through. Let's see what Emily Dickinson says about hope being a bird.

Okay? Let's look at the first stanza, okay? When, the first line, she sets up her

metaphor... hope is the thing with feathers...that perches in the soul. So where is

our bi, where is this bird?

12

13

14

15

16

17

Ss It's in the soul. 18

T It's in your soul, right? So what does she say about hope? 19

fS //It's [unint]// 20

mS //It's everywhere// 21

T Hope is in your soul, right? Good. Hope is in your soul. And sings the tune 22

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without the words and never stops at all. What do we think? What is she saying

about hope?

23

24

mS That it can never go away. 25

T We always have hope, right? Okay. So look at the metaphor. 26

fS Isn't hope like wishes? I hope to have... 27

T Hope is like, Yeah, I hope I can do this... good. 28

T Let's look at, okay, thinking of the metaphor... what is the bird doing in the

poem, what is the bird doing?

29

30

mS Singing? 31

mS2 Flying. 32

T It's what? 33

mS2 Flying. 34

T Ronaldo, it's singing, okay? It's sitting and singing, okay? Does the bird ever

stop singing though?

35

36

Ss/T No! 37

T No, so Emily Dickinson then is saying that we always have hope, okay? 38

T Hope never leaves us. 39

fS Yeah it does! 40

T Well, we'll talk about it. Next stanza... 41

In this exchange, Mr. Brown attempts to elicit from students the correct identification of

the metaphor in the Dickinson poem by breaking down the identification of the metaphor into

small steps. To this end, he invites student voices on several occasions through I-R-F or

recitation-type sequences (lines 4, 6, 8, 10, 17, 19, 23, 30, 36). While Mr. Brown is concerned

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with the ways in which particular chunks of text signal the metaphor in the poem, students are

still concerned with word-level meanings, and interrupt the "metaphor" recitation to ask for

definitions (What's gale?, line 2) and clarifications (Isn't hope like wishes?, line 27). When we

first separated the transcript into curricular events, we labeled this segment as "interpreting the

poem." However, after analyzing the data more carefully, we realized that an authentic process

of interpreting a poem would generally involve the presentation and examination of various

meanings and perspectives, either by an individual or group of people, before arriving at one or

more interpretations that could be supported by textual evidence. In both class sessions,

however, there is a sense that the meaning of this text is predetermined. Although student

voices are evident, the discourse is not "dialogic" and there is no co-construction of meaning.

Rather than introducing students to a text and interpreting it together with them, the discourse in

this segment suggests that there is one static meaning to the text; this predetermined meaning

appears to be integrally connected to the technical use of extended metaphor, and understanding

how the technical use of extended metaphor was employed will help students to crack the code,

or decode, the meaning of the text. The teacher is the "knower" who has already decoded the

poem; his role is to guide students through this process of decoding the poem's metaphor, and

the students' role is to follow his lead. In this episode, then, the text is the legitimate source of

static knowledge, and the teacher's role is to mediate that knowledge for his students. There is

little sense of literacy as a social practice; rather, an autonomous and technical approach to

literacy is evident.

Unlike the focus on structure and completeness in the catalog poem episode, this episode

focuses very little on the number of lines in the poem or overall structure; instead, all structural

or componential aspects of the poem are presented in service of the literary device, "extended

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metaphor." In fact, the teacher refers to the literary device of metaphor eight times during this

episode in one class, and eleven times in the other class. The close line-by-line attention to the

text and to the poet's intention with each line of text is in stark contrast to students' catalog

poems, in which ownership, authorship, intention, and meaning were never addressed, even in

the class where students read their poems aloud. Also remarkable in this episode was the sense

that meaning only mattered in relation to the poet's use of extended metaphor. Rather than

discuss students' or the poet's personal experiences of hope or despair, the teacher tells students

to look at the first line where the poet "sets up her metaphor" (line 15). The linear, sequential,

line-by-line approach that the class employs to decode the extended metaphor implies that the

poet's writing process was also a technical line-by-line process where the message was the

metaphor, and was predetermined at the beginning of her composing process.

After “decoding” the Emily Dickinson poem to extract the formula of an extended

metaphor poem, the class transitioned to the last part of the teacher’s agenda for the day: the

writing of students' extended metaphor poems. In this excerpt, Mr. Brown introduces the

requirements for their writing assignment, then elicits examples of emotions from students to

help them get started with the "first step" in writing their own poems.

Excerpt 3: Student Extended Metaphor Poems

T Alright. You're gonna be writing, thank you Nanci, your own extended metaphor

poem. Now, there are a few requirements, so I need you guys to pay attention,

okay? The first requirement?.... 10 lines. Minimum 10 lines. Can it be more than

that? Of course. This is the minimum. You're going to choose a human emotion

or characteristic and you're going to compare it to, this is the key, listen up,

okay? You're going to compare it to something tangible. It's a big word, right?

1

2

3

4

5

6

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mS What does that mean? 7

T What does that mean? It's something you can see, or touch, or feel? You're going

to compare it to a concrete noun, right? She compared the human characteristic

of hope...

8

9

10

fS To a bird... 11

T To a bird, which is a concrete noun, right? So the first thing you're gonna need to

do... you're gonna take this in steps. The first step is to choose an emotion or

characteristic. What are some emotions or things that we can write about? What

are some human emotions we can write about?

12

13

14

15

mS Oranges? Crying? 16

T: So, sadness? 17

mS Yeah. Happiness. 18

T What else? 19

S Happiness. 20

fS Love. 21

T Love. 22

mS Death. 23

T Is death an emotion? Anger? Depression? What else? 24

fS Are we gonna write about love? 25

T You can, write about love. 26

S What? 27

S Loneliness. 28

T Loneliness. Death isn't an emotion. What else? What are some other emotions or 29

HOPE IS THE THING WITH METAPHORS

 

 

21  

things we can write about? Characteristics. We've got happiness. 30

The writing practice in this segment of the class is detached from meaning and

communicative purpose, reduced to strict compliance with technical requirements. As is

reflected by the excerpt above, when giving the instructions, the teacher is emphatic in

establishing the “few” requirements of the assignment (lines 1-6), all of which signal a

componential notion of literacy. That is, the requirements included the numbers of lines that the

students must write (“minimum 10 lines”), and the need to begin the poem by adhering to the

formula extracted from the Dickinson poem, which represents the legitimate structure to be

imitated and the metaphor to extend for a minimum of 10 lines: “human emotion or

characteristic compared to a concrete noun” (lines 6-9).

To help students meet the requirements, the teacher prescribes a linear process to write

the extended metaphor poems, telling students, “you’re gonna take this in steps” (line 13).

According to the teacher talk in this excerpt, the steps are (1) choose a human emotion or

characteristic; (2) compare it to a concrete noun; (3) extend the metaphor through a minimum of

10 lines. When students offer examples of emotions as potential poem topics, the prescriptive

and technical character of these steps is reaffirmed by the teacher, who responds to students'

examples based on compliance with the established formula (is death an emotion?, line 24)

rather than focusing on the meaning or communicative purpose behind the example, or even the

ways in which the student's example could indeed be the core concept for an extended metaphor

poem regardless of whether or not it was an emotion. Thus, the process of writing poems is

reduced to quantity and formula compliance. The students lacked authentic ownership of ideas

or authorship, since the meanings they wanted to communicate in their poems were irrelevant;

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instead, the emphasis was on adhering to the formula and following the teacher's requirements.

In this sense, writing is constructed in this class as a technical process detached from

communicative purpose, meaning and voice. Literacy was de-situated from the poets' potential

communicative purposes, reduced to a technical process and series of prescribed components.

Overtures and Contradictions: Situating and De-Situating Literacy

The emphasis on componential and technical aspects of text rather than communicative

purposes of text was consistent in almost all of the data from these classrooms. Rare overtures

towards more situated literacy norms and an ideological model of literacy did exist in the data;

however, they were always quickly absorbed into the more technical and prescriptive classroom

routines before having any impact on classroom discourse or literacy practices. For example,

after reading and decoding the Dickinson poem together stanza by stanza, the class answered

textbook questions together about the meaning of the poem by reading each question aloud,

discussing it via a teacher-led I-R-E sequence, and then writing the teacher-sanctioned correct

answer in their notebooks. In the following excerpt, a student reads aloud the fourth question

and the I-R-E sequence follows.

Excerpt 4: There's no right or wrong answer

mS Think of all the ways Dickinson extends the metaphor. How is hope's song

endless?

1

2

T How is hope's song endless and how does it keep you warm? Let's look at that

last question, how does it keep you warm? Does that question mean how does

hope, like, make sure that you're not cold?

3

4

5

mS No. 6

T No, what does that mean? How does it keep you warm? 7

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23  

mS Like, good inside. 8

T Yeah, how does it make you feel good inside, right? How does it keep you

warm?

9

10

mS It's always there for you. 11

T It's always there for you, right? No matter what. Good! 12

fS Should we write that down? 13

T Answer the question. [pause] You guys, for these ones, there's no right or wrong

answer. It's how you interpret the questions, okay? [pause] Make sure you write

in a complete answer, okay?

14

15

16

By this point in the class, they have carefully read the poem line by line and stanza by

stanza to establish the correct interpretation of each line, with the teacher as the "knower"

validating the correct meaning throughout the process. They have also read together the first

three textbook questions with Mr. Brown eliciting the "correct" answer from a student (for

example, T: What does it symbolize? S: That hope is there for you through thick and thin. T:

There we go! Alright!). Question number four, which ends with "How is hope's song endless?"

(line 1), cannot be answered by simply "decoding" the metaphor in the poem. The teacher

reformulates (Cazden, 2001) or breaks down the question into simpler less abstract questions and

concludes the I-R-E sequence with "Good!"-- typically his signal that they have arrived at the

"correct" answer to record in their notebooks. When a student asks "Should we write that

down?", Mr. Brown wants them to answer the question for themselves this time, though, and

urges them to remember that for the interpretive textbook questions, "there's no right or wrong

answer. It's how you interpret the questions, okay?" The teacher's response here signals an

overture to a more dialogic notion of interpretation and meaning, marked a few turns later in the

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24  

transcript with the teacher's encouragement: "What do you think? Whatever you think is correct."

Knowledge and literacy are still reduced to their technical requirements, however, when the

teacher closes this question with, "Make sure you write in a complete answer, okay?"

Discussion

Often during times of increased accountability, the curriculum is narrowed and

approaches to literacy become more technical and constrained (McCarthey, 2008; Poole, 2008).

In this class session, students read the poem, "Hope is the thing with feathers." Ultimately,

though, hope was the thing with metaphors; any concept related to the poem only entered the

discussion if it could be related to the technical use of metaphor in the poem directly and

explicitly. The curricular goals at the heart of Mr. Brown's instruction were not his own; they

were tightly related to the district-level Benchmark Assignment essay and the published

curriculum from which the Benchmark Assignment was developed. The mandated pacing of the

Benchmark Assignments, in combination with their high-stakes nature, left teachers with little

time to reflect on alternative approaches. These accountability measures were designed to drive

instruction; in essence, they were intended to become the context in which literacy and

knowledge were situated in these classrooms, ostensibly to prepare students of all backgrounds

with the same academic rigor. Of the nine Benchmark Assignments in grade 9 English language

arts, only one, a grammar test, was a multiple-choice exam. The others were all writing

assignments intended to promote deeper learning and more sophisticated uses of literacy. The

assignments themselves did not suggest an autonomous model of literacy or a curriculum

narrowed by standardized tests. The number of these writing assignments, coupled with their

high-stakes nature, prescriptive rubrics (such as the one in the appendix), and tightly constrained

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25  

district-mandated pacing, resulted in an autonomous model of literacy that depended on efficient

transmission, consumption, and reproduction of knowledge.

As in all classrooms, knowledge and literacy in Mr. Brown's classes were mediated

discursively and textually; on this day in particular, the focus was on knowledge and literacy

related to poetry. At first glance, students had multiple opportunities to participate in generating

or co-constructing knowledge about poems in these classes. Students wrote and shared original

poems based on their personal experiences. They participated in class discussions to interpret a

textbook poem, and they volunteered ideas and concepts as a class to create a list from which

they could write their own metaphor poems. If we consider the ways in which each literacy

event socialized students into norms for language, literacy, and knowledge, however, we see a

linear technical progression from one activity into the next. In the first activity with student

poems, there is a focus on requirements and structure; meaning, in terms of the communicative

purpose of their texts, was irrelevant and unmarked. In the next activity with the Dickinson

poem, the emphasis is on decoding the static meaning of the poem and understanding the

technical use of metaphor. In the final activity to plan student poems, the focus is on encoding

metaphors into a poem that meets precise requirements. In some ways, this progression reflects

good pedagogical principles within the current accountability context. The teacher uses every

classroom activity as a way to build towards some aspect of the literacy skills that students will

need for the benchmark essay that concludes this curricular unit on poetry. He begins with a

focus on language structures and assignment requirements by using material that is familiar to

students and grounded in their home lives. As they shift to the textbook poem, Mr. Brown

prioritizes their understanding of the literary device, extended metaphor, since their benchmark

essays will require an understanding of this device. He brings together both priorities-- meeting

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26  

requirements and structural expectations, and understanding metaphor--in the final assignment in

which students will write their own extended metaphor poems.

As noted by Brandt and Clinton (2002), texts at the heart of literacy events are often

created elsewhere for purposes beyond the local moment and context. When the activities and

priorities in Mr. Brown's classroom are understood within the context of national and district-

level accountability mandates, they appear orderly and coherent. Students experience these texts

and activities locally, however, and need to make sense of them within the classroom context in

which they experience them. The monologic (Baktin, 1981; Nystrand, 1997) transmission-

oriented nature of most of the classroom discourse, and the orientations towards meaning when

student poems versus textbook poems were discussed, suggest some important norms into which

students were being socialized in terms of knowledge and academic literacy. First, literacy was a

technical skill based on requirements and the decoding or encoding of simple static meaning, a

meaning created by an author without attention to notions of message, audience, or multiple

interpretations. These norms of "technical skill" and "static meaning" were consistent regardless

of whether the poem was the canonical textbook poem or poems of the students' creation. Next,

knowledge was "contained" by the teacher or textbook in each of these literacy events. Since the

catalog poems were not written by the teacher or textbook, knowledge in the first class activities

focused only on students' adherence to the requirements: imitating linguistic structures from

textbook poems, and including 10 lines as mandated by the teacher. Meaning was only a focus

of discussion when the class was decoding the Dickinson poem, and even during those I-R-E

sequences, the interpretation of the poem was explicitly in the service of understanding the

technical use of extended metaphor, not in understanding the poet's communicative purposes

behind her poem on hope and despair. Finally, moments of disruption or contradiction in the

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27  

data made salient the tension between situating literacy locally in ways that invite authentic co-

construction of knowledge, and de-situating it by prioritizing technical skills over

communicative purposes. In Excerpt 4, when the teacher urges students to develop their own

understanding and perspective while answering the textbook interpretation questions (lines 14-

15), he makes an explicit overture to a more situated understanding of literacy. These overtures

are never developed beyond a one-sentence claim by the teacher, however, because in practice,

situated approaches to literacy are not efficient, predictable, or manageable within standard I-R-E

transmission models.

While technical aspects of literacy are indeed important, a skills-driven orientation to

literacy is problematic when it divorces literacy from its communicative purposes. In classroom

contexts where the personal relevance of curricular material is often unclear to students, the

author-intended, genre-based, and reader-interpreted communicative purposes of classroom texts

become even more important, since these communicative purposes mediate the genres and

meaning-making norms that are unique to each particular discipline or curricular area (Fisher &

Ivey, 2005; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Attention to these communicative purposes not only

socializes students into disciplinary norms; it also helps students to integrate discrete skills into

more flexible and transferable literacy repertoires that are needed for academic, personal, and

professional success (Gee, 2004; Graham & Perin, 2007). In classrooms where approaches to

language and literacy are purely technical, students are positioned as mere recipients of

knowledge and imitators of skills; they have no role in co-constructing meaning or producing

knowledge within their learning (Gebhard, 2004). When instructional goals are driven

exclusively by accountability measures, literacy becomes de-situated, socializing students in

language and literacy norms that are technical, impersonal, constrained, and inflexible. If

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accountability measures are necessary to ensure equitable access to the curriculum for diverse

learners, then they must incorporate flexible approaches that allow teachers to join with learners

in situating literacy experiences in ways that are locally meaningful and responsive to students'

perspectives, priorities, and backgrounds.

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Footnotes

1 The  Diverse  Adolescent  Literacies  Project  (2007-­‐2010)  was  made  possible  by  

funding  from  the  Spencer  Foundation  and  the  University  of  California  Linguistic  Minority  

Research  Institute.