Peter's paper calls for the need for further research on how
readers' literary responses are shaped by their participation in
activity systems. In my research on readers' learning through
participation in classrooms, chat rooms, or discussion clubs, I'm
interested in how culturally-embedded objects or outcomes drive the
tools, roles, rules, community, and traditions operating in those
systems. For example, readers' emotional engagement with achieving
certain objects reflect their needs for power, affiliation, security,
love, control, which, in turn, are based on larger social or cultural
desires (Davydov, 1999, in Chaiklin, Hedegaard, and Jensen).
In one study, for example, I found that "high ability" and
"regular-ability" high school students' responses to a short story
portraying differences in ability group levels reflected their
participation in the hierarchical tracking system in their school
(Beach, 1995, English Journal). And, in another study, I found that
teachers who were students in a graduate writing methods course
responded to a story about a teacher evaluation of a paper according
to the value promoted in this course on giving non-judgmental,
descriptive feedback to student writing (Beach, 2000, Jr. of Literacy
Research). Their responses reflected their participation in not
only the course, whose object was to change how they evaluated
student writing, but also their participation in their own school and
family systems.
I am also interested in how readers interpret activity systems
operating within social worlds portrayed in literature.
Interpreting at the level of activity requires readers to go beyond
inferences about characters' acts and goals to interpret larger
activities/objects shaping those acts and goals (Beach, 2000;
Smagorinsky & O'Donnell-Allen, 1998, Reading Research Quarterly).
Readers need to be able to infer how specific acts as trees-are
shaped by the woods of a cultural or historical activity system.
Interpreting at the level of activity also leads readers to
analyze the tensions, contradictions, and competing social agendas
inevitably inherent in cultural/historical systems, analysis that
leads to critical interrogation of these systems. As Carole Edelsky
(1999) posits "being critical means studying systems-how they work
and to what end-focusing on systems of influence, systems of culture,
systems of gender relationsbeing critical means questioning against
the frame of system, seeing individuals as always within systems, as
perpetuating or resisting systems. Being noncriticalmeans seeing
individuals as outside of[and] separate from systems and therefore
separate from culture and history" (p. 28).
Readers are continually attending to the tensions between
competing systems or changes in systems as characters or people adopt
new objects or tools to cope with limitations or double binds in the
traditional system (Engestrom, 1987). Status quo systems are driven
by the object or motive of maintaining the current institutional
status quo, of not rocking the boat. Potential systems emerge out of
the creation of new tools or objects that challenge these status quo
systems. As Jerome Bruner (1990, Acts of Mearning) notes,
narratives "mediate between the canonical world of culture and the
more idiosyncratic work of beliefs, dreams, and hopes" (p. 52). In
responding to the novel, Huckleberry Finn, Yrjo Engestrom (1987)
constructs a number of competing systems. He perceives Huck as
initially operating in a status-quo middle-class, small-town, racist
system, a system associated with Tom Sawyer's world. When Huck and
Jim go down the river on the raft and enter into a world in which
slavery still operates, they face the double bind of being "free"
through their escape, but being less "free" because they are no
longer in "free territory. " To cope with this double bind, they
mutually construct a potential system to solve their dilemma, using
new tools-lies and deception, which, for the honest Huck, creates a
new double bind. Through his adventures with Jim, he transforms
himself and Jim, as well as the systems in which he operates. In
the process, as Engestrom argues, Huck creates a new system "of
radical moral anarchism [that] makes Huck a personality of entirely
different dimensions from that of Tom Sawyer. For Tom, freeing Jim
is a safe, imaginary adventureFor Huck, it is a deadly serious moral
and existential struggle" (p. 183).
Similarly, teachers responding to the story about teaching (Beach,
2000) perceived a tension between a female student character as
driven by the need to achieve success in her marriage and the
teacher, as driven by the need to change the system of female
students' marrying right out of high school. Some teachers
perceived the teacher as imposing his own middle-class value system
onto the student, responses reflecting their participation in the
system of schooling. Others, drawing on their experience in
families, empathized with the issue of whether or when to impose
judgments on premature marriages.
Peter, Judith Langer, and I will be discussing these and other
topics related to literature instruction at the AERA Literature SIG
Business Meeting, Tuesday, from 6:15 - 7:45 Sheraton Hotel, Oakley
Room.
Richard Beach University of Minnesota
359 Peik Hall 159 Pillsbury Dr., S.E.
Minneapolis, MN 55455 612-625-3893
rbeach@tc.umn.edu
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