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Bibliography: pages 87-92. / The aim of this dissertation is to present a means to redress imbalances that have operated in and continue to pervade our school classrooms. The singularity that is demanded by compliance, conformity and order of the Modernist era is now rejected in a celebration of in diversity and heterogeneity. At the root of the journey is belief in the power fit challenges that lie within the dissolution of our foundations and frames of reference - to capture the moment, and to move beyond into a new set of relationships with a world and those who constitute it. Postmodernism is about a new way of thinking - being conscious to the manner in which we are positioned and being aware that the knowledge we gain is not innocent, but carries with it a historical weighting. Our struggle in the classroom rests in language, for we fundamentally recognise that it is through language that we are constituted as subject, but also in which we act as a constituting subject. The task of the postmodernist is to disturb the constructs of our lived realities - "to make strange" and to enter into new relationships that are grounded in possibility. It is the postmodern moment that is the point of "rupture" (Foucault's term) - that moment of realization of being within a language and a particular historical and cultural framework [Marshall: l992:3]. For this to be possible, it is necessary to uncover the mechanisms that take control and how they do so. Truths are provisional and limited, thus any transformative potential lies in the spaces that are constituted in the differences provided by that which is meaning. Our task in the classroom is to recognise the frames of reference which validate the subject's position in the world, and lay open alternative empowering channels to move beyond the immediate. Literature is our instrument of liberation. As we seek to understand how our meanings have been constituted, a state of constant deferral of meaning must be achieved.-In the classroom, such possibilities create a new type of "knower", one whose meaning is validated by experienced and whose positioned is guaranteed by a redefined reader-text-author-teacher relationship. We regard Literature as an act of interaction, and as unity lies in its destination (the reader), it is critical that we redefine the ideas about society's centre and the margin. Our struggle in the classroom, therefore, is about the questions of identity, place and values.

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Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This study investigates what classroom participants do with literary texts and how literary texts are pedagogically recontextualized through classroom activities in L2 tertiary literature classrooms. Premised upon the pedagogic processes of decontextualization and recontextualization that take place in the meaning-making practices of the literature classroom, the current study examines the process of literary text recontextualization via the multimodal partnership of vocalization and gesticulation. Through this process, esoteric literary meanings requiring specialist knowledge are transformed into mundane meanings from one semiotic-institutional domain to another, where the literary text qua cultural artifact is recontextualized via first-order languaging by dint of pedagogic activities. To understand the real-time first-order languaging dynamics (Thibault, 2011a) that enable the pedagogic recontextualization of literary texts to take place, a micro analytical toolkit grounded in qualitative multimodal interaction analysis is used. This toolkit draws upon the concept of the Growth Point (McNeill & Duncan, 2000) in conjunction with Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) and McNeill‘s (1992) theory of language and gesture. Classroom observation and video recording in university literature classrooms in Hong Kong and Taiwan provide multimodal data on students‘ languaging behaviours when they engage with literary texts in classroom talk. In order to make links with second-order socio-cultural norms that regulate first-order classroom interactivity (Thibault, 2011a), Bernstein‘s (1990) sociological theory of recontextualization in education is re-thought from the distributed language view (Cowley, 2011; Steffensen, 2011; Thibault, 2011a). Maton‘s (2007) Legitimation Codes of Specialization and Hunter‘s (1988) Foucaultian analysis of literature education (Foucault, 1972, 1985/1984) also inform the conceptual framework. The findings indicate the stability of the textual and lexicogrammatical constructions that function as second-order constraints and the variations in gesture use in its embodied coordination with speech in the pedagogic process of literary text recontextualization through different pedagogic activities. The semantic cohesive relations of Elaboration, Extension, Enhancement, Engagement, and Equipment, fostered by different gesture types together with their corresponding linguistic constructs in the recontextualized texts, demonstrate that the semiotic integration of speech and gesture comprise a single languaging system in the meaning-making process. Based on the production of literary meaning in moral judgement, the specialized consciousness of the ethical self is raised, with ethical subjects constituted through processes of subjectivity, self-reflexivity, and self-confession in the process of literary interpretation and appreciation. The conceptual framework integrating macro- and micro-levels of analysis manifests its theoretical originality by establishing both the methodological framework for multimodal interaction analysis and the cognitive framework for languaging dynamics. The understanding of the meaning-making process in the first-order languaging dynamics suggests that language is an embodied multimodal process. This major conclusion stimulates a re-thinking of important aspects of classroom interaction that have received little attention. Hopefully, the analysis and findings in the current study illustrate the significance of English literature education and suggest new directions for multimodal research in classroom interaction studies. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Responding to the political and educational crises over cultural literacy, multiculturalism, and expanding the canon of literature, I present case studies of eight first-year college students and their attitudes about literature. These are students who have scored 4s or 5s on the Advanced Placement English Examination and who represent a discourse community well versed in a traditional canon of literature. In first-year composition, I offer them a multicultural curriculum, presenting contemporary Native American and Mexican American literatures in dialogue with more traditional literatures. Specifically, I examine their responses to the politics of aesthetics, setting up a contrast between canons of texts and canons of methods in Advanced Placement English and a first-year college composition course stressing multicultural literatures. I pay special attention to their "cultural literacy" and to their awareness and acceptance of cultural differences. Chapter 1 gives a background and overview of the study. Chapter 2 examines the literature on cultures and its effect on canons of literary texts and methods of teaching and responding to them. Chapter 3 describes the ethnographic methods of this study, traces the history of Advanced Placement English, and lays out the multicultural curriculum of this study. Chapter 4 is a case study of one student before, during, and after the multicultural curriculum. Chapter 5 examines the past histories--families, high schools, and Advanced Placement English--of seven other students. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the responses of these seven students to a multicultural literature curriculum. Chapter 8 reviews the findings, offering interpretations and commentary on Advanced Placement English, the Advanced Placement English Examination, cultural literacy, and multiculturalism, concluding with recommendations for curricula of the future.

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