Abstract

This study brings into conversation two bodies of research that operate from different assumptions and make divergent conclusions about high school students’ capacity to read and respond to literary texts. On one hand, cognitively-oriented expert-novice research comparing experienced literary readers to high school students indicates that students tend not to engage in expert-like interpretive sense-making when they read literature. On the other hand, socioculturally-oriented studies of students’ “funds of knowledge” and socially situated “interpretive communities” indicate that students do engage in expert-like interpretation. One likely reason for these divergent findings is that by default, expert-novice studies often define interpretive expertise by drawing on Western, White discourses and epistemologies. This study experiments with a situated expert-expert methodology that considers the influence of culture, race, and the practices of different interpretive communities on participants’ literary reading and response. First, it offers an expanded definition of interpretive expertise by looking outside conventional academic interpretive communities. Then, the study ascribes interpretive expertise to two groups: Black, Latinx, and Asian-American high school students who self-identified as experts in hip-hop; and mostly White doctoral students who self-identified as experts in poetry. Both groups read lyrics to a highly regarded hip-hop song and a highly regarded poem. Analyses showed that each group was more likely to engage in expert-like practices, such as building symbolic interpretation and appreciating realness, within the genre belonging to their interpretive community. These findings offer empirical support for the power of interpretive communities and the value of funds of knowledge frameworks. The findings strengthen the call for the still predominantly White, Western academy to honor other interpretive communities and recognize the limits of their own.

摘要

本研究将两个研究机构引入对话，这些研究机构根据不同的假设运作，并对高中生阅读和回应文学文本的能力得出不同的结论。一方面，将有经验的文学读者与高中生进行比较的认知导向专家-新手研究表明，学生在阅读文学作品时往往不会进行专家式的解释性意义建构。另一方面，以社会文化为导向的对学生“知识基金”和社会地位“解释社区”的研究表明，学生确实参与了专家式的解释。这些不同发现的一个可能原因是，默认情况下，专家-新手研究通常通过借鉴西方、白人的话语和认识论来定义解释性专业知识。本研究采用一种情境专家-专家方法进行实验，该方法考虑了文化、种族和不同解释社区的实践对参与者文学阅读和反应的影响。首先，它通过超越传统的学术解释社区，提供了对解释专业知识的扩展定义。然后，该研究将解释专业知识归因于两组：黑人、拉丁裔和亚裔美国高中生，他们自称是嘻哈专家；大部分是自称诗歌专家的白人博士生。两个小组都阅读了一首备受推崇的嘻哈歌曲和一首备受推崇的诗歌的歌词。分析表明，每个组都更有可能从事类似专家的实践，例如建立符号解释和欣赏真实性，在属于他们的解释社区的类型中。这些发现为解释社区的力量和知识框架基金的价值提供了实证支持。这些发现加强了对仍然以白人为主的西方学院的呼吁，以尊重其他解释社区并认识到他们自己的局限性。