> I believe there will be a difference, if only because children
> responding to teacher-directed inquiry are proceeding generally
> not from their own goals and therefore are involved in a process of
> realizing the context from which those questions come: what is it
> the teacher wants of me, my construction of what she means by such
> and such a thing, why does this matter and are any of the things
> that occur to me relevant or irrelevant, etc.? I can see how the
> discussion of prolepsis as I am now beginning to understand it is
> most relevant here.
>
> I have used poems (fairly challenging) for such discussions, simply
> because they are open texts that most people and even teachers
> simply avoid reading on their own (there's a whole process of
> mystification involved), and particularly because the reading of
> poems in school is mediated to a high degree by teachers' directive
> questions.
The wonderful work of Patrick Dias at McGill is directly relevant
here -- both his published stuff and the superlative videos he has
of junior high school groups discussing "fairly challenging" poems
(like Ted Hughes' "The Thought-Fox"). If you don't know it, you
should: it would be very illuminating (I don't think he's looked at
his data from the point of view of prolepsis, but he might have).
-- Russ
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