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“BUT I’M NOT GOOD AT ART”: PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDING
OF ARTISTIC RESPONSE TO CHILDREN'S AND ADOLESCENT LITERATURE

By

Suzanne M. Knezek

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2007

ABSTRACT

“BUT I’M NOT GOOD AT ART”: PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDING
OF ARTISTIC RESPONSE TO CHILDREN'S AND ADOLESCENT LITERATURE

By
Suzanne M. Knezek

Many preservice and practicing teachers equate artistic response to children’s and
adolescent literature to craft-like activities that are only loosely tied to literature read. In
the tradition of literature response theory, however, artistic response involves readers
using artistic forms to work through their questions, feelings, and thoughts about texts — a
perspective that is unfamiliar to most students and teachers. This study originated out
of a related problem of practice — the challenge preservice teachers and their instructor
faced as they struggled to reach a common conception of artistic response to children’s
and adolescent literature. The central question guiding the study was: How do
preservice teachers come to understand artistic response and what factors influence their
understanding?

Using historical definitions of art as a lens to view data presented in a telling case
format, three major levels of preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic response are
identified in this study. The first level, Artistic Response as Object, consists primarily of
responses that either reproduced the story or used the text as a teaching tool. These
responses focused on the art objects preservice teachers created and moved the discussion
away from the literature. The second level, Artistic Response as Process, features
responses that represented particular events from text for specific reasons, but the end
products again did little more than retell the story. At this level the focus again included

the art object, but placed a greater emphasis on the artist and the artist’s creative process.

At the third level, Artistic Response as Social Experience, preservice teachers created
responses that invited others to critically explore characters, themes, and situations. The
focus at this level of artistic response included not only the art object and the artist and
the artist’s process, it also considered the social aspects of artistic response to children’s
literature, including the impact the art (process or product) has on others’ understanding

of the book.

Copyright by
SUZANNE M. KNEZEK
2007

Dedicated with deep love and respect to my parents, Mary and Bernie Knezek,
and to my brothers and sisters, Pat Marie, Dan, Katy, and T.J.

In loving memory of my grandparents,
Hertha and Julius Heim and Marie and Ernest Knezek.
I miss you.

ACKNOLWEDGEMENTS

The generous support, intellectual contributions, and determination of many
people made this dissertation possible. Without them, the work represented here would
not have happened.

My committee members were remarkably generous as I made several stops and
starts in the dissertation process. I wish to thank each of them for their special
contributions. Sandra Crespo helped me see my data in new and exciting ways and
brought joy into my life and work when I needed it most. Raven Wallace consistently
offered keen insight, overwhelming kindness, and an unrelenting conviction that this
dissertation would happen. Cheryl Rosaen calmly, and with great compassion and
fortitude, helped me to see a depth in my work that I would never have recognized
without her. And my chair, Laura Apol, has been a mentor, colleague, and friend. Her
presence in my life has been a true gift. With wisdom, spirit, and grace she inspired,
guided, stood beside, and challenged me to do what I so desperately wanted to do —
something that mattered.

Many past and present colleagues at Michigan State also contributed to this
dissertation in direct and indirect ways. My dear friends and fellow members of the
Children’s Literature Team deserve much of the credit for the development of this work.
Claire Batt-Vandenburg, Tom Crisp, Jackie LaRose, Valerie Struthers, and Kumia Yahya
tackled the difficult aspects of teaching and research with me and made me laugh at every
turn. Hanna Obbink, a Children’s Literature Team member by default, shared her mom
and her zest for life. Several professors, including David Pearson, Jenny Denyer, and

Nell Duke, provided important counsel, insight, and encouragement early in my graduate

vi

career. Kristin Grattan opened the door to graduate school for me. Cathy Tower and
Carolyn J aynes were role models, guiding lights, and kindred spirits.

My family has always been my greatest source of strength, and there were many
times during this process when they held me up. My dog, Gracie, took me for walks and
sat beside me. My sister, Pat Marie, flew me to Hawaii more than once, truly understood
what I was going through, and supported me in ways that no one else could. My brother,
Dan, took me to the beach and showed me that people can change in the most surprising,
loving, and delightful ways. My sister, Kate, sent me packages with candles, music, and
books, and let me know that she loved me fiercely — no matter what. My brother, T.J.,
traveled this road with me, took on the world, and gave me insight into what courage is
all about. My dad took care of my dog, mowed the grass, and did a hundred things for
me every day. My mom, who always told me that I needed to do my dissertation in
children’s literature, read and edited every page of this dissertation at least three times

and is still reading as I write this. They are the loves of my life.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ................................................................................... xii
List of Figures .................................................................................. xiii
Typographic Conventions .................................................................... xiv
Chapter One
Introduction ................................................................................. 1
Background ............................................................................ 1
The Problem ........................................................................... 2
The Research Questions ............................................................. 5
Guiding Theoretical Concepts ....................................................... 6
Why Reader Response Theory? ......................................................... 6
Reading as a Transaction ................................................... 7
Reader and text ..................................................... 7
Why Socially Situated Reading? ........................................................ 8
The Social Nature of Reading, Responding, and Learning in TB 348. . . . 9
Book Discussion Groups: The Social Nature of Learning ............. 10
Book Discussion Groups: Reader Response Roles ...................... 13
Types of reader response ........................................... 13
Reader response roles in TB 348 .................................. 15
Discussion group assignment ..................................... 16
Plan of Dissertation .................................................................. 18
Chapter Two
A Literature Review ...................................................................... 20
Introduction: Expanding Upon the Problematic Nature of
Artistic Response ...................................................................... 20
Reasons for Including Artistic Response ............................................... 21
The Review ............................................................................ 24
Background ................................................................... 24
The Literature ................................................................ 25
Artistic response in elementary school ........................... 25
Artistic response in middle school ................................ 28
Artistic response in high school ................................... 31
Artistic response in higher education ............................ 34
Looking Across the Literature ............................................. 34
Contributions ................................................................. 36
Chapter Three
A Methodology ............................................................................ 39
Introduction ............................................................................ 39

viii

Setting .................................................................................. 39

The University ............................................................... 40
The Classroom ............................................................... 40
The Course ................................................................... 41
Course goals ......................................................... 41
Course readings ..................................................... 42
Participants ............................................................................ 45
The Participant Instructor: Teacher and Researcher .................... 46
Teacher research .................................................... 46
The Student Participants and the Establishment of a Telling Case... 50
The telling case ...................................................... 53
Data Sources .......................................................................... 55
Data Source One: Artifacts ................................................. 55
Data Source Two: Audio Tapes and Transcriptions ..................... 58
Data Source Three: Instructor J oumal .................................... 59
Analysis ................................................................................ 61
Background: Grounded Theory ............................................ 61
Coding Using the Constant Comparison Method ....................... 61
Step 1: Highlight Key Passages in the Text .............................. 63
Step 2: Restate Key Passages ............................................... 63
Step 3: Create Code Clusters ............................................... 65
Step 4: Create Meta-Clusters ............................................... 66
Step 5: Hypothesizing Linkages, Memo-Writing, and Generating
Theory ................................................................ 71
Chapter Four
A General Introduction to Literary Response ......................................... 76
Introduction ........................................................................... 76
Goals of the Chapter ................................................................. 76
Session One: Literary Versus Non-Literary Response ......................... 77
Session Two: Types of Literary Response ....................................... 82
Introducing Personal Response ............................................ 85
Introducing Textual Response ............................................. 89
Introducing Intertextual Response ........................................ 93
Introducing Critical Response ............................................. 97
Introducing Artistic Response ............................................. 100
Why Artistic Response Falls Short ................................................. 103
Chapter Five
Artistic Response As Object ............................................................. 107
Introduction ........................................................................... 107
Goals of Chapter ..................................................................... 110
Introducing the Telling Case ........................................................ 112
What Was Created In Response To This Book: Examining Artistic
Response Artifacts ........................................................... 113
The art object ........................................................ l 12

ix

The written rationale ............................................... 1 14

Teacher response to the written rationale — then ............... 1 15
Teacher response to the written rationale — now ............... l 16
What Happened During This Discussion?: Examining Group
Reactions To Artistic Response ............................................ 117
Considering the teacher candidates’ ideas ....................... 117
Considering the ways the teacher candidates engaged in the
process of dialogue ................................................. 119
The Large Group Discussion ........................................................ 120
Returning the Responses ............................................................. 120
Looking Back ......................................................................... 122
Chapter Six
Artistic Response As Process ............................................................ 125
Introduction ............................................................................ 125
Goals of Chapter ...................................................................... 126
“It’s a deeper kind of thinking!”: The Struggle Continues ..................... 127
What Was Created in Response to this Book: Examining Artistic
Response Artifacts .......................................................... 129
The art object ........................................................ 129
The written rationale 130
Instructor response to the written rationale — then .............. 131
Instructor response to the written rationale — now. . . . . 132
What Happened During This Discussion?: Examining Group
Reactions to Artistic Response ............................................. 133
Considering the students’ ideas ................................... 133
Considering the ways the students engaged in the
process of dialogue ................................................. 138
Looking Back ......................................................................... 140
Looking Across: From Discussion One to Discussion Two ................... 141
Chapter Seven
Artistic Response as Social Experience ................................................ 145
Introduction ............................................................................ 145
Goals of the Chapter .................................................................. 148
Deeper Understanding through Poetry: The Telling Case Continues .......... 150
What Was Created In Response To This Book: Examining Artistic
Response Artifacts .......................................................... 150
The art object ................................................................. 150
The written rationale ................................................ 151
Instructor response to the written rationale ..................... 155
What Happened During The Small Group Discussion?: Examining
Group Reactions to Artistic Response .................................... 155
Considering the students’ ideas ................................... 155
Considering the ways the students engaged in the process
of dialogue ........................................................... 158

What Happened During The Large Group Discussion?: Examining

Group Reactions to Artistic Response .................................... 160
Considering the students’ ideas ................................... 160

Considering the ways the students and their instructor
engaged in the process of dialogue ............................... 166
Looking Back ................................................................. 167
Looking Across: Discussions One, Two, and Three ................... 168

Chapter Eight
Conclusions ................................................................................. 173
Introduction ............................................................................ 173
Background: Definitions and Theories of Art .................................... 175
Changing Definitions, Theories, and Understandings: Art and Artistic

Response ................................................................................ 176
Level One ...................................................................... 177
Art as object .......................................................... 178
Artistic response as object ......................................... 177
Level Two ..................................................................... 183
Art as process ......................................................... 184
Artistic response as process ....................................... 186
Level Three ................................................................... 190
Art as aesthetic experience ......................................... 191
Artistic response as social experience ............................ 194

Reconsidering the Historical Definitions of Art as a Lens for Artistic
Response ............................................................................... 199

Chapter Nine

Implications ................................................................................ 202
Introduction ........................................................................... 202

What Can This Research Tell Us About the Nature of Artistic Response?... 203
How Are The Findings In This Study Relevant To TE 348 Students and

Instructors, Elementary Teachers, and Teacher Educators? ........................... 205

TE 348 Students ............................................................. 205

TB 348 Instructors ........................................................... 208

Elementary Teachers ........................................................ 210

Teacher Educators ........................................................... 214

What Are The Possibilities For Future Research? .......................................... 216

Conclusion ............................................................................. 21 7
Appendices

Appendix A — TE 348 Course Syllabus ................................................ 219

Appendix B — Discussion Group Assignment Description .......................... 227

Appendix C — PowerPoint Slides Introducing Reader Response ................... 230

References ....................................................................................... 236

xi

Table 1.1

Table 1.2

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 3.3

Table 3.4

Table 3.5

Table 4.1

Table 8.1

Table 9.1

LIST OF TABLES

Harvey Daniels ( 1994) Literature Circle Role Descriptions ........... 15
Descriptions of TB 348 Response Roles ................................. 16
Initial Code Clusters and Example Phrases ............................. 65

Codes and Example Quotes for the Attention to Text
Meta-Cluster .................................................................. 68

Codes and Example Quotes for the Preservice Teacher
Engagement With Discussion of Artistic Response Meta-Cluster. . 69

Codes and Example Quotes for the Patterns in Artistic Response

Discourse Meta-Cluster ..................................................... 71
Historical Definitions of Art ................................................ 74
Literary and Non-Literary Response Characteristics ..................... 79

Parallels Between Historical Definitions of Art and Levels of
Artistic Response ............................................................ 174

Original (Spring) and Revised (Fall) 2005 Discussion Assignment
Descriptions for Artistic Response Roles ................................. 208

xii

Figure 1.1
Figure 5.1
Figure 6.1
Figure 7.1
Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2

LIST OF FIGURES

The dimensions of the Vygotsky Space .................................. 12

Erin’s artistic response featuring a drawing of a monster .............. 114
Lari’s artistic response —— a picture book .................................. 129
Sara’s artistic response -- a poem ......................................... 151
The additive nature of the historical definitions of art .................. 192
The additive nature of artistic response ................................... 198

xiii

TYPOGRAPHIC CONVENTIONS
/// Indicates pauses within the speaker's turn. Each note (/) indicates about one second.
[ Indicates overlapping talk.

Indicates the speaker's thoughts were interrupted by talk, but the other speaker might
have begun during a slight pause in the first speaker's turn.

Indicates when portions of text have been removed between sentences.

italic Indicates author/transcriber comments, including interpretations of how someone
stated something, or what other group members were doing at the same time.

" " Indicates the speaker was reading from a paper or book.
, Indicates a slight pause in speech.

(?) Indicates the speaker said something that was not distinguishable on the tape.

xiv

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
Background

In the fall of 2003 I was a doctoral student in a teacher education program and had
just been hired to teach an introductory children’s literature course in that same program.
I was truly excited about the opportunity, as children’s literature had always been one of
my major interests. As the first semester progressed I felt things were going unusually
well: I loved the books, I thought the preservice teachers I was instructing were
thoughtful and hard—working, and I was collaborating with a supportive and
knowledgeable team of colleagues. There were, however, some aspects of the work I
found troubling.

Teacher candidates in the education program I was part of were likely to have a
range of experiences with children’s and adolescent literature. Most received instruction
in other classes about how to teach using children’s texts as instructional tools. When
they arrived in my class some were aware, for example, that predictable books could help
children learn the concept of rhyming words. Others could see literature as a means to
get their future students excited about subject matter areas like history or science. These
recognitions of possible literature usages were commendable, but they really didn’t give
teacher candidates the opportunity to engage with and respond to children’s and
adolescent literature as literature. The class I taught, TE 348 — Reading and Responding
to Children’s Literature, was specifically designed to address preservice teachers’ limited

exposure to the literary side of children’s books.

TE 348 provided numerous opportunities for teacher candidates to engage with
and react to children’s texts. They were asked to talk and write about how the texts
linked to their own lives, how and why particular words or passages were important in
the texts, who had power in the texts, plus various other observations. Along with these
discussions and writing assignments, the students in the class were also asked to respond
to the books through art. A major reason why this option was offered was because
recent research had indicated that, “scholars are acknowledging that the use of art forms
has the potential to broaden our teaching and understanding of the ways students make
and share meaning in response to literature” (Rascon-Briones, 1997, p. 15). The teacher
candidates were to have the opportunity to know they didn’t always have to write reports
to clarify their understandings or confusions concerning a particular text. Instead, they
could work through and represent these ideas through painting, writing poetry, sculpting,
or other art forms.

The Problem

The opportunity to create art in response to literature, which I will refer to
throughout the rest of this dissertation as “artistic response,” was often received quite
negatively by the teacher candidates. They usually made it clear very quickly that they
weren’t at all comfortable with the idea. “But I can’t draw,” some would say. Others
would simply comment, “I don’t do art.” That initial resistance to creating art was
disturbing, especially when considering the likelihood that these future teachers would
one day share something they found so off-putting with their own students. Even more
distressing, however, was the nature of what they actually created when they made

attempts to respond to literature in artistic ways.

The kinds of artistic responses teacher candidates created — or asked others to
create - in connection with children’s and adolescent literature often had little to do with
the texts they read. Instead, they would engage in “craft-like” activities that had more to
do with the “fun” they had while creating them than with the book itself. One student,
for example, who read a book about a princess, made crowns out of sparkly pipe cleaners
so that everyone in the class could “have fun looking like princesses, too!” Another, who
read a book about a child who took a trip, had the other teacher candidates in class, “draw
maps of journeys they would like to take themselves.” These were not, in themselves,
“had” activities. It was important that the students have a chance to enjoy creating art in
connection with literature. However, I was concerned with how much these activities
seemed to function as ends in themselves, and how loosely these creations were tied to
texts or the understandings of texts. When I asked teacher candidates how the art they
created connected back to the books they read, they often spoke about how they had tried
to make something “fun” that represented someone or something in the text. They rarely
spoke about how those creations helped broaden their understanding of the literature.

When I asked students to write or talk in response to texts in TB 348 I did so with
the intent of having them deepen or in some way extend their thinking about a story. I
had the same intention when I asked teacher candidates to create artistic responses, but I
noticed again and again that the “craft-like” activities they tended to create did not reflect
greater or more involved understandings of the text. While the “crafts” created were often
quite impressive (I once received a full-sized quilt), most continued to be detached from
the texts read. Every so often, however, one student or a small number of students

created artistic responses that did deepen and forever change the ways books were read

and understood by both themselves and other members of the class. Colleagues teaching
other sections of TE 348 noticed the same thing, but none of us understood exactly what
was going on. We just knew that when “artistic response” really happened both we, the
instructors, and the students recognized it. We could not figure out, however, what
caused the differences in the ways students understood the concept of artistic response
and what it was supposed to entail, and, no matter how often we discussed the problem
and tried to address it, little seemed to change. Because we all found artistic response to
be both problematic and beneficial, we decided to investigate what was happening with it
in systematic and scholarly ways. This group of people, including TE 348 instructors and
researchers, worked together in many aspects of this endeavor and I will refer to them
from now on as either the “Children’s Literature Team” or the “Team.”

The research from that larger investigation involving the Team informs but is not
the focus of this work. Instead, this dissertation tells the story of how the teacher
candidates in one section of TE 348 and 1, their instructor, came to understand artistic
response over the course of the 2005 spring semester. It also identifies and clarifies
elements of artistic response that were particularly relevant to that developing
understanding. As the story unfolds, readers will be introduced to many of the 30
students I taught in that one class section, but will primarily follow the progress of one
particular student, Lari. Lari’s journey highlights how discussing, creating, and writing
about artistic responses afford teacher candidates multilayered ways to experience and
work through text — ways that have the potential to impact the nature of the candidates’
own teaching and learning and the learning of their future students as well. By describing

this journey, I will show how Lari and other TE 348 students struggled to learn what

artistic responses to children’s and adolescent literature were and what they entailed. My
goal for this work is to inspire greater discussion about artistic response in the literacy
education and language arts communities so that teachers and scholars will question
“craft-like” activities and move toward investigating texts through artistic responses in
more meaningful ways.
The Research Questions

As a researcher, I continually find that the work I do is strongly influenced by my
teaching. This dissertation, for example, was a direct result of the problems I was
experiencing with artistic response as part of my practice. Therefore, when I first began
investigating artistic response within the context of TE 348 I asked myself,

0 How do preservice teachers come to understand artistic response and what
factors influence their understanding?

As the semester progressed I kept this as the main question guiding the study. Over time,
however, I realized that, if I was going to be able to identify the factors that influenced
teacher candidates’ developing understanding of artistic response, then I needed to be
able to identify characteristics or patterns in the ways teacher candidates were writing and
talking about artistic response. I also realized that I, as the instructor, was likely to be
one of those factors influencing candidates’ developing understanding of artistic
response, so further clarification of the roles the teacher candidates and I played
throughout the semester was essential. In an effort to address these complexities, I added
two sub questions that would help bring to light the factors necessary for addressing the

overarching research question:

o Are there patterns to the characteristics/elements of oral or written
language used by students when describing artistic response that I, as the
TB 348 instructor, and the teacher candidates in some way (written
acknowledgement, oral reinforcement, extension, etc.) recognize as
comprising genuine artistic response — one that leads to deeper
understanding/new perspectives?

- What roles did the teacher candidates and I play in facilitating the
development of this deeper/new understanding?

Guiding Theoretical Concepts
Whv Reader Response Theory?

In the past, “literature became almost a spectator sport for many readers satisfied
to passively watch the critics at their elite literary games” (Rosenblatt, 1978/1995). For
example, in a skills—based approach to teaching literature, an instructor in a class would
typically initiate in explicit ways an interaction with a student about a book and then
assess the student’s response:

Teacher: Who is the main character in the story?

Student: The main character is Max.

Teacher: (evaluating the student’s response) Correct, Max is the main

character. (Mehan, 1979)
While this form of interaction still often happens with readers, teachers, and texts, many
literary critics and theorists now believe that readers play an active role in the reading

process (Fish, 1980; Iser, 1978; Rosenblatt, 1938/1976, 1978/ 1995).

ReadingLas a Transaction

Complex interpretations of the relationship between reader and text have varied
throughout history, with debates questioning where the meaning of a story resides
(Eagleton, 1986; McMahon & Raphael, 1997). Many have believed that meaning was to
be found or created within the mind of the reader. Others thought that it resided in the
text itself. Refusing to see meaning as residing in either the text or the reader, Louise
Rosenblatt (Rosenblatt, 193 8/ 1976) was one of the first scholars to present a view that
articulated an interactive relationship between the two. Her writings, along with those of
scholars whose work aligned with the notion of mutually-constructed meaning, provided
part of the foundation for this dissertation and the basis for insights into the reader-text
relationships that emerged, the types of response in which readers engaged, and the
process of student response that occurred in this study (McMahon & Raphael, 1997).

Reader and text.

The concept of reading for meaning used in both this dissertation and TE 348 is
largely grounded in Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading (Rosenblatt, 1978/1995,
1994). In that theory Rosenblatt postulates that the act of reading is a transaction
between the text and reader.

The transactional phrasing of the reading process underlines the essential

importance of both elements, reader and text, in any reading event. A person

becomes a reader by virtue of his activity in relationship to a text, which he

organizes as a set of verbal symbols. A physical text, a set of marks on a page,

becomes the text of a poem or of a scientific formula by virtue of its relationship

with the reader who can thus interpret it and reach through it to the world of the

work. (Rosenblatt, 1978/1995, pp. 18-19)

Along with her conviction that reader and text had to interact before meaning
could emerge, Rosenblatt also argued that a reader’s initial reaction to the text was the
essential beginning of instruction. She noted that children often responded to literature in
connection with their own experiences and posited that instruction should begin with the
reader’s initial reactions and then return the focus of readers back to the text for fiirther
reflection. Others have observed that, at the most basic level, what happens when the
reader and text come together can be described as similar in form to a dialogue, with the
reader and text mutually dependent on one another (Davis, 1988).

The instructional possibilities associated with interaction between reader and text
did not, however, exist free of social context. Rosenblatt also noted that teachers can
enable readers to consider the perspectives of others by indicating that individual
reactions could be elaborated through a communal exchange of ideas.

WhLSocially Situated Reading?

There is a long history of scholarship on the social nature of reading. Though
reading is often conceptualized as a solitary pursuit, Manguel (1996) noted in his book, A
History of Reading, that even in the past when most people were illiterate, they still were
read to — a very basic example of the social nature of reading. He further discussed how,
after the orally-based stories of cultural groups were recorded in print following the
invention of moveable type in the mid—15th century, these same stories were then often
read in solitude. However, they still tied people together by virtue of the common values

and norms the texts reflected. Meanwhile, Brenner (1999) asserted that this social

context goes beyond the reading of the text to include response to the text as well when
she wrote, “the sharing of responses to readings can support and change readers’
interpretations of their own readings in powerful ways” (p. 87). In addition, in her
modem-day exploration of how women use reading in their everyday lives, Long (2003)
argued that reading occurs within the boundaries of a social infrastructure, where readers
mediate their interpretations with each other, their cultures, and their society.

The established socially-situated nature of classroom settings supports the second
major theoretical concept girding the framework of this study — that the reading and
responding to literature and learning that occurred in TE 348 were inherently social acts.
As Rosenblatt (1978/1995) wrote,

As we exchange experiences, we point to those elements of the text that best

illustrate or support our interpretations. We may help one another to attend to

words, phrases, images, scenes that have been overlooked or slighted. We may be
led to reread the text and revise our own interpretation. Sometimes we may be
strengthened in our own sense of having “done justice to” the text, without
denying its potentialities for other interpretations. Sometimes, the give-and-take
may lead to a general increase in insight and even to a consensus. Sometimes, of
course, interchange reveals that we belong to different subcultures, whether social

or literary. (pp. 146-147)

The Social Nature of Reading, Responding, and Learning in TE 348

Because I, along with other members of the Children’s Literature Team, believed
in the importance of both the transactional and socially situated aspects of reading, one

aspect of TE 348 was designed to explicitly foreground many kinds of response within a

classroom setting: book discussion groups. Five times during each semester teacher
candidates spent approximately thirty minutes participating in small discussion groups.
Each of those sessions was followed by a large group, instructor-led discussion, where
students shared what they had discussed with the whole class. Many times these
“debriefing” gatherings were the places where teacher candidates made public the most
interesting or challenging ideas their groups had encountered- The large group sessions
averaged anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes in length.
Book Discussion Groups: The Social Nature of Learning

In the same way that reader response theorists like Rosenblatt focused on the
interaction between reader and text, social constructivist theorists “emphasize the role
that transactions among individuals, in dialogue, play in the learning that is constructed in
any experience” (Brenner, 1999, p. 54). In order to provide the teacher candidates in TE
348 opportunities to engage in such dialogue, the Team, as mentioned above, designed
book discussion opportunities that occurred within a community setting. While engaged
in these groups and in talk about what happened during these sessions, teacher candidates
learned to reflect, discuss, and form opinions while in dialogue with others. The
discussions provided the social interactions the candidates needed to consider varied
perspectives, including alternate interpretations of literature (Brown, 1994; Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1986).

According to Vygotsky (1978), individuals are guided by their own mental
processes as they participate in social acts. However, these social acts are also influenced
by social experiences. He argued that mental functions begin on a social,

interpsychological plane and then move to an inner, intrapsychological plane (McMahon

10

& Raphael, 1997). This process, which Vygotsky termed “internalization”, can be
thought of as an individual’s way of making meaning. The learning associated with this
meaning-making, however, occurs in a social context, and any revisions in that learning
come about as individuals interact with one another.

Several scholars (Brock & Gavelek, 1998; Gavelek & Raphael, 1996) have built
upon the work of Vygotsky and Harré (1984) in order to reformulate a “rich heuristic for
conceptualizing how individuals appropriate and transform that which they experience in
the public/social realm” (Brock & Gavelek, p. 83). Harré’s original model, which he
called the Vygotsky Space, was a representation of the inter- to intrapsychological
processes by which learning occurs. Gavelek and Raphael’s updated version shows two
dimensions — the public-private and the social-individual. The public-private dimension
pertains to the ways in which what is known is displayed or made observable to varying
degrees. What is known, as reflected in this dimension, can be made public as it is shared
with a community, or it can remain private, locked away in the mind of the knower. The
social-individual dimension refers to the location of knowledge. Knowledge may be
social, for example, in that all members of a community may share a way of thinking
(Brenner, 1999). “These two planes are a continuum that, when crossed, form four
quadrants depicting different ways in which language is used in the learning process”
(McMahon & Raphael, 1997): appropriation, transformation, publication, and
conventionalization. Figure 1.1 depicts the intersection of the two dimensions and the

four quadrants.

ll

Public

 

Individual Social

 

Private

Figure 1.1: The dimensions of the Vygotsky Space as featured in Brenner
(1999). This figure represents Gavelek and Raphael’s (1996) modified version
of Harré’s (1984) original.

Individuals appropriate ways of thinking as they take part in public, social
transactions with others. Appropriation is the process by which students adopt concepts,
strategies, ideas, and language that have been introduced and shared in the public-social
quadrant. In TE 348, for example, teacher candidates, while in discussion groups,
listened to and talked about the ideas of others. At times they may have adopted concepts
shared by other group members, but those concepts would not have been changed in any
way if the teacher candidates in TB 348 simply stopped at this point.

In order for learners to transform ways of thinking, they must first privately
connect them with prior knowledge, which changes both the individual’s knowledge and
the ideas and concepts originally appropriated. One of the concepts outlined by this
aspect of the theoretical framework is that the teacher candidates in TB 348 would need
to modify and adapt what they learned about literature response to achieve higher levels

of text comprehension. Thus, in order to move further along in their learning, the teacher

12

candidates cannot hold on to private, individualized knowledge. They must again make
the transformed knowledge public by sharing it with others.

Learners conventionalize new knowledge when transformed ways of thinking
made public by individuals are adopted by the community. In TB 348 this would mean
that a teacher candidate’s transformed knowledge of literature would be made public and
then taken up by others in the class. The discussion groups provide the public contexts
fundamental to students’ individual and cognitive development, the means by which
learning about literature can continue to develop and build upon past histories of the
culture, the community, and the individual.

Book Discussion Groups: Reader Response Roles

Reader response theory advances the idea that, depending on life experiences and
purposes for reading, there are many ways that readers can respond to text. This concept
is important because it implies that, if given the chance, the teacher candidates
participating in book discussion groups in TE 348 would likely respond in a range of
complex ways. Therefore, members of the Children’s Literature Team wanted to
understand, anticipate, and then institutionalize — in the form of class assignments and
activities —— some of the more common reader responses to literature. To accomplish
these goals they began by researching the types of reader responses that have been
identified in recent literary history.

Types of reader response.

According to McMahon and Raphael (1997), Odell and Cooper (1976) and Purves
and Beach (1972) examined the array of responses by categorizing the final oral or

written comments made after readers completed their reading. In their text, Purves and

13

Beach (1972) noted that readers’ interest in text was connected to their understanding of
text. Furthermore, they found that readers were influenced in emotional, intellectual, and
attitudinal ways by what they read. Their findings indicated five types of responses: (1)
the personal statement, (2) descriptive responses, (3) interpretive responses, (4)
evaluative responses, and (5) miscellaneous responses. These categories were later
amended by Odell and Cooper (1976) who added subcategories which specified that
personal statements could be about the text or the reader, descriptive responses might be
narrative or could focus on particular aspects of the text referenced, and interpretive
statements could allude to parts of the text or the whole text. Odell and Cooper also
indicated that evaluative statements could refer to the meaningfulness, evocativeness,
and/or to the construction of the text.

The identification of these types of responses to literature provided groundwork
for researchers and practitioners who advocated discussion groups as an instructional
strategy in literature study for a wide range of grade levels (kindergarten-college)
(Daniels, 1994; McMahon, Raphael, Goatley, & Pardo, 1997; Samway & Whang, 1996;
Smith, 1996). Some of the researchers and practitioners who established literature-based
curriculum that included discussion groups (also called literature circles or book clubs)
were torn, however, because, while they wanted these groups to be valuable, leamer-
centered activities, they were also concerned about off-task behavior or wasted time in
student-run groups (Grisham, 1997). Therefore, response roles were often established for
the readers rather than letting readers respond in completely spontaneous ways. For

example, Daniels (1994) provided role sheets to act as an organizer that gave purpose and

14

focus for reading. These roles and elements of their associated descriptions, which laid

some of the groundwork for roles established in TB 348, appear in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 — Harvey Daniels (1994) Literature Circle Role Descriptions

 

 

 

 

 

 

Role Role Description

Discussion Director Acts as facilitator and keeps the discussion going

Illustrator Draws some kind of picture related to the reading

Summarizer Gives a brief but complete summary of the plot

Word Master Does a close reading of the text and focuses on single words or
short phrases

Connector Finds connections between the text and real world

 

 

Passage Person

 

Does a close reading and locates well written or key passages

 

Reader response roles in TE 348.

There was an essential difference between the literature discussion roles that were

developed by Daniels (1994) and those created for TB 348. While Daniels’ roles focused

on the task associated with a response, the Children’s Literature Team made the

responses themselves the foundation of each role. In this way the Team hoped to have

teacher candidates not only experience what it was like to respond to literature in multiple

ways, but also to have them reflect upon and have a deep understanding of the response

roles, including the perspectives those roles help develop and why reading from multiple

perspectives might be important. By requiring teacher candidates to discuss the response

roles in a public forum, the Team hoped that students would make public any role-

induced private transformations in their understandings of literature so that others might

have access to the transformed knowledge as well.

15

 

Discussion group assignment.’

The book discussion groups are comprised of five students and meet five times

during the semester. Each student in a discussion group is expected to be responsible for

responding in one of five ways at the individual meetings. See Table 2 for descriptions of

the TE348 response roles based on the rubric for the book discussion assignment.

Table 1.2 — Descriptions of TE 348 response roles

 

Role

Role Description

 

 

Group Facilitator/Personal
Response Person — 10 points

 

The facilitator for the discussion does not write a one-page paper ahead of
time. Instead, on the day of the discussion she/he:

prepares a list of questions or prompts to guide the group around
important issues of the book

begins the discussion and keeps it moving throughout the group
meeting. The facilitator does not need to do all the discussing,
but merely makes sure the discussion begins and continues in a
strong and relevant way

brings personal response into the conversation, making relevant
connections to prior experience (i.e. life) and articulating relevant
emotional reactions to text (and their basis)

monitors whether everyone gets a chance to talk, whether all
voices in the group are heard and keeps track of the time to make
certain that all the responses get covered in the allotted time
period

takes notes during the discussion

After the discussion, the facilitator:

collects the other papers in the group on the day the discussion
groups meet (there should be four papers: textual, critical,
intertextual, and artistic)

reads the l-page papers from the other group members
completes a 2-page write-up summarizing what was discussed
(and whether there were significant differences between the
group members writing and the discussion), as well as what went
well and what might have gone better in the group, noting the
individual members’ participation. A list of questions and
discussion prompts should be included explaining why the
facilitator felt they were relevant to the conversation

hands in to the instructor as a packet the following: the four
response papers from the discussion meeting, the summary of the
group’s conversation, and the discussion questions or prompts
This summary is usually due the week following the conversation
and is worth IMints.

 

 

’ The assignment description provided here has been taken almost verbatim from my TE 348 course
syllabus for the spring of 2005. For a more detailed look at the syllabus and associated discussion group
assignment description, readers can see Appendices A and B.

16

 

Table 1.2 — cont’d

 

Textual Response Person — 5
points

The person responsible for textual response
- finds and shares significant literary passages, explaining their
significance
0 talks about the genre of the book
0 brings literary elements into the conversation (e.g., setting, plot,
characters, theme, style)

 

Critical Response — 5 points

The person responsible for critical response explores questions about
issues of power surrounding race, class and gender (who has power in this
book and who does not) and voice (who is heard in this book and who is
not)
0 talks about the book’s expressed and implied beliefs
0 talks about what the author might want readers to believe, how
the author works to make that happen and what the author seems
to assume about readers and about the subject

 

Intertextual Response — 5
points

The person responsible for intertextual response
0 reads and connects one or two other works by the author or
another author (picture books, novels, poems, biographies, non-
fiction, etc.)
finds and discusses articles, reviews, or interviews
may find and discuss other media forms of the text (movies, CDs,
etc.)

 

 

Artistic Response — 5 points

 

The person responsible for artistic response

0 creates a creative, artistic response to the book that has the text at
its center and that promotes understanding and conversation (for
example, a collage of literary passages, a choral reading, a poem,
a poster, 3 song, a drama). This is meant to be more thoughtful
and text-centered than a simple craft or activity that is loosely
tied to the book (No “busy work”).

0 presents this response to the group or guides the group in creating
it, requiring no more than a fifth of the allotted discussion group
time

0 includes (in a write-up) a rationale and explanation for the chosen
artistic response and hands in the artistic product created

 

Each student in a group is expected to take the lead on each of the five roles by

the end of the semester. Four of the five responses (literary, critical, intertextual, and

artistic) are written up before class and turned in to the group facilitator on the day of the

discussion. When students take on the group facilitator/personal response role, however,

they provided their response the week after the group met.

For the students and this instructor, one of these roles — artistic response — was

particularly challenging, and it was the difficulty associated with that response role that

led to the research reported on in this dissertation.

l7

 

Plan of Dissertation

This first chapter provided an introduction to the study and its guiding theoretical
concepts. In Chapter Two: A Literature Review I will examine how children, and some
adult readers, respond to literature using artistic art forms, including drawing, dance,
drama, and other sign system forms. In Chapter Three: A Methodology I will describe
my work as a researcher through all stages of this study, including my approach as a
teacher—researcher, my data collection, and the analysis techniques I used.

My data analysis comprises chapters four through seven. Chapter Four, A
General Introduction to Literary Response describes the way I introduced, very early in
the semester, the teacher candidates in TB 348 to the terms and definitions related to
reader response theory and how the TE 348 students responded to those introductions.
Chapter Five, Artistic Response as Object is the first of the three case-based chapters. It
tells the story of what happened with artistic response in one small group of teacher
candidates (Group D), including Lari, the student introduced earlier in this chapter, when
we discussed Maurice Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are. Chapter Six, Artistic
Response as Process focuses on Lari (and Group D) as she tries to grasp the meaning of
artistic response. Chapter Seven, Artistic Response as Social Experience explores further
the case of Lari (and Group D) -- and how artistic reactions to literature can change and
expand.

The two concluding chapters point to the significance of this overall study. In
Chapter Eight: Conclusions 1 will express how I saw artistic response taking shape across
the data. I will describe the progression (including the struggles of both the students and

myself as instructor/researcher), what I now make of the development of sense-making

18

around artistic response, and how I understand this development. In doing this, I will
also describe how I used art history as a lens to help clarify my thoughts on the various
stages of artistic reSponse. Finally, I will reflect upon what undermines and complicates
the use of that lens in my effort to describe how preservice teachers come to understand
artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature.

Chapter Nine: Implications will revisit and clarify the differences between post-
reading “activities” and artistic response. It will also explain how the findings in this
study are relevant to TB 348 students and instructors, elementary teachers, and teacher

educators. I will close this chapter by discussing possibilities for future research.

19

CHAPTER TWO
A Literature Review

Introduction: Expanding Upon the Problematic Nature of Artistic Response

In our work with preservice teachers, members of the Children’s Literature Team
were often dismayed at the enthusiasm with which these teachers in training embraced
“craft” activities that seemed only loosely—or not at all—linked to the literature they
sought to understand (Apol, Rop, & Harris, 2001). We wanted to encourage preservice
teachers to develop ways of evaluating what they saw as the relationship between the
artistic response activities they designed and the text they had read. Ultimately, the Team
wanted to help these future teachers discover ways to direct their attention “toward”
rather than “away from” texts so that artistic responses to books could enrich their

experiences with literature as literature (Apol, Knezek, LaRose, & Crisp, 2005).

Although TB 348 instructors and other members of the Team designed the course
assignments together and met regularly to talk about ways to understand and research
teaching practice, we found that, even after several semesters, we were still grappling
with what was meant by “artistic response” to literature and with how Team members
recognized artistic response in students’ work. Sometimes the “art object” or “product”
included in an artistic response seemed to clearly indicate deepened engagement with and
understanding of literature; the same “product” at another time seemed mechanical and
superfluous to the literature or to any thoughtful literature response. Instructor
discussions often focused on the ways students described their activities (through papers

and small group conversations), as we asked each other persistent questions about what

20

we were doing and not doing — accomplishing and not accomplishing —- with artistic

response (Apol et al., 2005).

Those questions -- about craft versus art, responses that “faced the text” compared
with responses that “looked away from the text,” process versus product, intention,
engagement, and the search for a common language — led to my desire to explore how
preservice teachers came to understand artistic response in my TE 348 class, and what
role they and I played in facilitating that understanding. In order to carry out this inquiry
in an informed manner, however, I first needed to investigate how other scholars had
studied artistic response to literature and what they had found as a result of their efforts.
What I learned from my research into the literature base comprises the bulk of this
chapter. Before I report my findings, however, I must first discuss why, even though it
was so problematic, the Children’s Literature Team chose to keep artistic response as a

part of the curriculum in TE 348.
Reasons for Including Artistic Response

Many elementary classrooms now include literature circles and book clubs as a
regular part of their literacy instruction. Grossman (Grossman, 1991a, 1991b) and
Wedman, Smith, and Jared (1994) have shown that asking teacher candidates to
participate in a particular pedagogical strategy and then asking them to analyze the
activity from an instructional perspective is a more effective means of facilitating
candidate learning than direct instruction. Based on this finding, the Team created
experiences, including discussion groups, in which preservice teachers would participate

in various kinds of literature responses—including artistic response—in order to better

21

understand, critically analyze, and later design such experiences for their own students

(Apol et al., 2005).

Along with learning how to implement literacy teaching strategies, preservice
teachers must also become aware of national and state standards for English Language
Arts and ways in which those standards might be addressed as part of their practice. The
current national standards (N CTE, 1999) state that there are five major areas that must be
included in literacy teaching and learning: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and
visually representing. While the book discussion groups in TE 348 address all five of
these areas, visual representation is the one area that would be left out if artistic response
were not included in the TB 348 curriculum. As with the national standards, most states
also require work in the area of visual representation within their English Language Arts
programs. The Michigan English Language Arts Grade Level Expectations (Education,
2006), for example, require students to “respond to individual and multiple texts by
finding evidence, discussing, illustrating [italics added], and/or writing to reflect, make
connections, take a position, and/or show understanding” (p. 5). The artistic response
role gives teacher candidates an opportunity to represent their understanding of text in a
visual way and to meet the standards by engaging their own students in creating and
interpreting through visual representations. It must be noted, however, that artistic
response is not limited to visual representations, so respondents who choose to sing,

dance, or sculpt, for example, would not meet visual representation standards.

Until recently there have not been many studies that have examined students and
teachers working through their thoughts and questions concerning literature using artistic

forms. Some scholars have conjectured this might be because teachers and theorists have

22

tended to focus on speech and writing as the tools people are most likely to use to make
sense of, participate in, and negotiate the world around them — especially within the
context of schools (Rascon-Briones, 1997; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994a, 1994b;
Vygotsky, 1987). Vygotsky (1987), for example, is well known for focusing on speech
as the primary tool people use to create meaning, and Emig (1977) claimed that writing is
a unique mode of knowing with an inherent capacity for promoting learning. Others,
however, have argued against the privileged status of speech and writing in education and
have instead advocated acceptance of broader means through which students mediate

thought or activity within school settings (Gardner, 1983a, 1983b; Wilhelm, 1995).

In summary, the Children’s Literature Team decided to keep artistic response as
part of the curriculum because it gave teacher candidates the chance to experience
learning with a strategy they might one day use in their own classrooms, and it provided
them with a possible way to address the visual representation expectations of national and
state standards. More important, however, is the fact that, if the Team had discontinued
artistic response as an appropriate and acceptable mode of responding to text, we would
be concentrating on writing and speaking, while failing to consider “the diversity [italics
added] of mediational means available to human beings” (W ertsch, 1991, p. 11). In
doing so the Team would favor those preservice teachers most capable of responding to
literature in written and verbal ways and would miss opportunities for greater

understanding of that literature from preservice teachers who respond best through art.

23

The Review

Background

The past two decades have seen an increase in the number of studies written that
describe students using artistic forms as a part of their literacy development (Rascon-
Briones, 1997). While it is likely that many teachers may view art as a subject matter
area separate from literacy and may not feel qualified to include art because of their own
inexperience teaching and learning with artistic forms, an increased number of studies
linking literature and artistic response show that more researchers and teachers are
considering this link to be a potentially powerful way for students to explore and share
texts. This chapter contains a review of the literature explicating the ways artistic

response has been researched in the recent past as guided by the following questions:
1. What forms of art were used in the studies?
2. Who were the participants?
3. What were the findings?

Along with these guiding questions, I made a decision to limit the articles and books
reported here to those that contained references to artistic response in connection with
literature. While some very interesting and provocative studies have examined the ways
people of all ages respond to music, nature, mathematics, and science through art, this

dissertation is specifically focused on art as a response to literature.

24

The Literature
Artistic response in elementary school.

The majority of literature that focuses on artistic response in elementary schools
featured students producing visual art forms. Often these studies looked at students who
either could not write or were just beginning to write. Berghoff’s (1994) study, Multiple
Dimensions 0f Literacy: A Semiotic Case Study Of A F irst-Grade Nonreader, analyzed a
male first grader, David, who was not reading or writing within the normal range of other
children. The author described the time David spent at reflection centers where he did
not engage in standard written language practices. Instead, he often created three-
dimensional artifacts that demonstrated connections he had to prior experiences,
including the stories he had heard. David was not able to retell or engage with
predictable texts, but through dramatic reenactments and the creation of his art pieces
David’s skills improved. The author also noted that David engaged in sign system forms
other than traditional written and spoken language in many other literacy events
throughout his first grade year, suggesting that literacy is more complex than
acknowledged in schools and that the incorporation of non-traditional sign systems into
the curriculum might allow for a more complex view of literacy and what it means to

know and participate in the world.

In another description of first graders who used the visual arts in response to
literature, Harste, Short, and Burke (1988) found that the children created dramas,
dioramas, murals, and other art work in response to fairy tales. These children read,
listened to, and discussed the fairy tales during a one-month period. Based on their

observations, the authors concluded that language learning was a multimodal event.

25

Along with using the visual arts (drawing, painting), the authors of this study also saw.
first graders gesture, act out, and use movement when requested to “write.” Art forms
arose spontaneously during the literacy events. The authors noted that the children
constructed meanings by engaging in dialogue, created and shared art work with others,
reflected upon their meaning-making, and, by doing so, saw learning as an on-going
process.

Hubbard’s (1989) ethnography, Authors 0f Pictures, Draughtsmen 0f Words,
also addressed first graders’ usage of visual and verbal sign systems in the process of
reading and writing. The author analyzed literacy acquisition strategies that children
used as they created meaning through art objects. Hubbard concluded that the children
used both visual forms and words to communicate their inner thoughts. She found that
not only were those inner thoughts tempered by the task at hand and the cognitive bias of
the child, but also that the role of the teacher (including her values), literacy behaviors,
and the classroom environment significantly influenced the literacy behaviors of the
children. Hubbard’s study is one the few that addresses how the role of the teacher and
the classroom environment impacted children’s artistic responses to literature.

Like Hubbard (1989), Rascon-Briones (1997) sought to understand how teachers
structured and influenced artistic response events. In her dissertation, Artistic Responses
From A Semiotic Perspective, she examined how children in multiaged classrooms
(grades three—five) used artistic forms to work through their ideas, questions, and
thoughts about literature they had read. She found that teachers controlled and narrowed
children’s artistic responses to literature by using directives, and that the teachers’ ways

of talking about literacy events were adopted into the speech behaviors of children. She

26

also noted that, as children worked with artistic forms, form and thought engaged each
other and children participated in reflective and generative behaviors. Artistic responses
in this study involved music, painting, drawing, sculpture, and song.

In Ernst’s (1994) book, Picturing Learning: Artists and Writers in the Classroom,
the focus was solely on elementary children who used literature, writing, and drawing in
an artists’ workshop. As a part of the workshop, children learned about and created art
by examining the work of artists and of their peers. Ernst describes how published
picture books became the inspiration for the children to create their own pictures, while
their conversations brought connections to their reading, writing, and picture-making.

In their book, New Entries, Learning by Writing and Drawing, Hubbard and Ernst
(1996) extended upon Emst’s (1994) earlier work when they invited other authors to
share their classroom experiences involving art forms, reading, and writing. These
contributing authors proposed that drawing and image making should be seen as tools for
exploring literature and the world, and their investigations showed that the potential of
literacy as communication and expression was broadened when art forms were connected
to literature experiences. Children of various ages were able to expand upon their ideas
and generate new meaning as a result of thinking about literature, talking about ideas, and
interacting with artistic forms.

In case studies written by these different authors, children were involved in art,
reading, and writing and the ways that these art forms worked together to expand the
children’s understanding of the topics was studied. F ountas and Olsen (R. Hubbard &
Ernst, 1996), for example, gave an account of a fourth grade classroom where children

explored topics by reading, talking, writing, painting, drawing, dancing, predicting, and

27

hypothesizing. The authors found that children were able to translate detailed ideas from
a visual form to a verbal product and vice versa. As a result, the children’s responses to
literature were broadened.

In the same text Ernst portrayed second graders during an artists’ workshop using
art and literature. The children read to get artistic ideas and responded to literature
through pictures and words. Ernst discovered that reading literature can enable children
to develop images in their minds that in turn influence their artistic creations.

Most of the studies described thus far have captured work done in classrooms
which included practicing teachers. In her study, "Wax On/ Wax Ofl": Helping Preservice
Teachers "Read” Themselves, Children, And Literature, Wolf (2001) explored strategies
teacher educators can use to help preservice teachers open themselves emotionally and
intellectually to diverse students. She tells about a preservice teacher who encouraged a
fourth grade bilingual child to sketch responses to texts written in both Spanish and
English. Wolf wrote that, “The combinations of using bilingual books and literary
response through the visual arts continued throughout Crystal’s remaining sessions with
Elisa. Ultimately, Crystal felt that bilingual books combined with opportunities for the
visual expression gave Elisa a stronger voice” (p. 210). Though this was just one piece of
her larger study, Wolf argued that this case provided a glimpse into the potential of
developing visual response to literature.

Artistic response in middle school.

While much of the research examining artistic response to literature focused on
children in elementary school, there are several investigations that have taken place in

middle school settings. In a year long study of suburban middle school seventh graders,

28

Whitin (1996a) investigated how children used visual representations in the form of pie
graphs to generate and represent interpretations of literature. By employing students as
co-investigators, Whitin found that pie charts were used by several of the students to
signify ideas such as exploring the feelings of the characters and empathizing with those
characters. The students used colors within the pie charts to represent feelings and
character traits. The inquiry examined the ways the researcher and the children talked
about the pie charts; findings indicated that examination and discussion of the charts
generated new insights into the literature. The author concluded that discussions based
on interpretive differences of how pie graphs were used provided opportunities for
critical thinking and reflection, along with chances for the students to establish links

between the literature and their graphs.

In her book, Sketching Minds, Stretching Stories, Whitin (1996b) continued to
follow the work of seventh graders who responded artistically to literature. In this study
students used sketches and/or response journals to reflect on their readings. They
participated in small groups in which they prepared collaborative projects (created by
using the communication form of their choice) and produced reaction papers (in either
essay, sketch, or commentary form) that indicated their individual insights. Whitin’s
findings suggested that when students explained their sketches to their instructor or peers,
the sketches helped the students reconsider the story in new ways. Whole class
reflections on the art work led to further mental revisions of the students’ sketches. The
sketches were not viewed as final products but instead as ways to enhance students’

meaning-making experiences.

29

In his text, You Gotta Be the Book, Wilhelm (1997) focused on both the visual
arts (including illustrations of impressions of texts, actual texts, picture mapping and
collages) and dramatic arts to engage eighth grade “submissive readers” who expected to
read meaning passively from texts. Through the use of story-related drama and various
forms of visual art, the “submissive” readers began, for the first time, to exert control
over the strategies and processes of meaning-construction with text. By asking students
to respond to literature through art, Wilhelm helped them experience the stories and “see
the various ways in which one text could be evoked and the various possibilities that it

held to be read in different and potentially richer ways” (p. 137).

In their study of twelve-year-old middle school students who read and discussed
The Giver (Lowry, 1993), Whitelaw and Wolf (2001) analyzed how the visual arts
(including collage, drawing, and graphing) served to strengthen students’ capacities to
“see beyond,” to consider alternatives to their own lives, and to view both text and life in
new and different ways (p. 58). The authors focused on how students interpreted their
own artwork as well as the artwork of other students in the class. The authors noted
students followed through three distinct processes of reader response through the visual
arts:

1. envisioning

2. composing

3. interpreting
While the middle school students in this study did engage in these three processes, the
authors noted that they did not always do so in a linear fashion, but tended, instead, to

cycle back and forth between these processes. Ultimately the inclusion of these processes

30

and this cycling motion resulted in powerful discussion and a depth of literary response
the students had not previously revealed. One of the goals of this study was for the
authors to find a way to slow the students down in their reading so they would be more
reflective and thorough. By having the students create and discuss art in response to
literature the authors accomplished this objective.

Artistic response in high school.

Like Whitelaw and Wolf (2001), Smagorinsky and Coppock (1994c) also had a
process orientation in mind when they focused on the thoughts two high school-aged girls
went through when they responded to literature through their own choreographed dance.
By using stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account of the central relationship
between two characters in a short story, the authors explored how the dance form acted as
a mediational tool that enabled the students to create meaning. The authors also noted
how social context, including the communication genres of the classroom, their own
interaction, the teacher’s intervention, and the stimulated recall interview itself,
influenced the manner in which the dance was used to create meaning.

The findings revealed that there were three thought processes central to the girls’
descriptions of working through their choreographed dance:
1. They used the dance form to work through the empathy they felt for the
characters.

2. They represented the characters’ relationship through spatial images and
configurations.

3. They used dance as a psychological tool to both represent and mediate their

thinking about the story.

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In another similar study, Smagorinsky and Coppock (1993; 1994a) set out to
investigate the potential of nontraditional sign systems for enabling students to construct
meaning in school settings. They devised a case study of a student who represented his
response to a short story by drawing a picture. In doing so, they found that the subject of
their study, a sixteen year old white male who had a hearing deficit and had experienced
many failures in school, was able to both represent and develop his construction of
meaning in response to a story by drawing a picture. In summarizing their findings, they

noted:

1. The sixteen year old drew on his personal experiences to empathize with one

of the characters.
2. He represented action symbolically.

3. He created an intertextual link between his creation and a form he had seen

earlier.

4. He produced a drawing that acted as a mediational tool that both shaped and

was shaped by his thinking. (Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1993, 1994a)

Siegel (1995) examined secondary students supporting their interpretations of
articles related to mathematical issues by reading, talking, and drawing. Working in
pairs, the students first read, then discussed the articles. They next produced a sketch of
their combined ideas, thereby translating their understandings of the story into another
sign system. The author found that the dialogue students engaged in around the creation
of the sketches sometimes helped them to further develop and generate ideas about their

interpretations of the articles. Siegel’s findings suggested that the images students

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created used metaphors and contained cultural conventions, both of which extended their
understandings of the texts and classroom experiences.

The use of drama was mentioned earlier in connection with literature response
activities with middle school-aged learners. Smagorinsky and Coppock (1995), however,
studied accounts of dramatizations in response to a short story by four high school-aged
students. Rather than focusing on the linear unfolding of cognitive processes in response
to literature, the researchers were interested in finding the “range of processes recalled by
students” (p. 377). Thus, they again used stimulated recall techniques to elicit what the
students had to say about their experiences dramatizing the short story. As a result of this

study, they found the following:

1. The students’ personal experiences often connected to characters and events in

the story, causing them to respond with empathy toward the characters.

2. The students made intertextual connections between the story, books read, and

films previously viewed.

3. The students used symbols, such as props that represented character traits, to

portray their interpretation of the story.
4. The students resolved conflicts with varying degrees of cooperation.

5. The students’ experiences involved mediational processes that produced a text

that was both shaped and was shaped by their thinking.
Artistic response in higher education.

Like research done in middle school settings, Purves, Rogers, and Soter’s (1995)

book, How Porcupines Make Love 111 contains support for the visual and dramatic arts in

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response to literature in work done at the college level. The authors report having been
intrigued with nonverbal or visual responses because they found that high numbers of
their college students showed preferences for nonverbal symbolic action in response to
literature. Their book outlines both pedagogical experiences and theoretical support for
using the arts in response-based literature classrooms at all educational levels.

Wolf and Enciso (1994) also used drama as a medium for interpretation of a short
story with participants in an inquiry session at a National Reading Conference meeting.
The participants read a short story and were asked to engage in “drama conversations” in
which they acted out individual and group interpretations of the characters or scenes from
the story. These same participants were also asked to create sketches as a response to a
character or scene in the story. Finally, they were asked to reflect and write a response
based on the previous interactions. Findings indicated that participants assumed various
perspectives of characters as a result of acting out drama conversations with each other,
and that these conversations offered the actors an awareness of which perspectives they
used to discover the actions and feelings of the characters. The authors suggested that the
sketches and drama conversations afforded participants the opportunities to reflect upon

private experiences with literature in a public context.

Looking Across the Literature

The review of studies here demonstrates that work done thus far on artistic
response to children’s and adolescent literature has several points in common. In the
majority of the pieces featuring elementary school students, various art forms and media
existed and were made available to participants within specified contexts as means for

them to explore and reflect upon literature. These artistic forms were seen as potential

34

meaning-making systems and the visual arts used included drawing, painting, sketching,
collage. Some researchers who worked in elementary settings also saw music,

movement, drama, and dance used in ways that helped children make meaning with texts.

Middle school settings, like those in the elementary school studies, featured the
visual arts as one way in which students could respond to literature through art. While
many of the same artistic forms were emphasized in both settings (e. g., sketching and
drawing), middle school students were also seen using graphs and charts as artistic
responses to literature. Both the visual and dramatic arts were utilized to help students
become active readers who could exert control over the strategies and processes involved
with making meaning with text. This movement toward more structured types of artistic
response appeared as researchers at this level began to see more of a focus on a process

orientation to artistic response.

Studies set at the high school level continued to have the more process-oriented
perspective on artistic response. Artistic forms seen at this level included dance, drama,
and drawing. Many of those conducting research at the high school level spent a good
deal of time trying to ascertain the thinking behind students’ responses. They found that
many students created art that reflected empathy for the characters in a story and made
connections between their lives and the lives of the characters. They also found that
some students who responded to literature through art used that art to both represent and
mediate their thinking about the story. Work done at the college level and beyond, while

scarce, showed similar results.

Art was used at all grade levels in combination with other communication forms,

such as speaking and writing, which enabled learners to expand and develop their ideas in

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creative ways. The few studies that included a focus on teachers found that teachers who
structured learning environments so that those environments included art as a response
form made it possible for their students to explore the ideas of others and to understand
that there can be many perspectives on any given piece of literature. In these limited
number of studies it was determined that teachers and curriculum design play a large role

in the ways in which students respond to texts through art.

While several of the pieces reported here found the role of the teacher to be
important in providing environments that supported explorations and inquiries through
artistic forms, very few gave any indication as to how either teachers or students
developed understanding of artistic response. Neither did many of these studies indicate
factors that might influence the evolution of that understanding. There were little data
reported that demonstrated how the actions of teachers and students were interpreted by

those attempting to create and explain an artistic response.
Contributions

With a richly described account of a teacher candidate, her peers, and her
instructor enacting artistic response, this dissertation makes several key contributions to
educational research, with implications for classroom practice. First, it highlights how a
group of preservice teachers and their instructor responded to children’s literature texts
and to each other as they cultivated an understanding for how art can help make meaning
with texts. Utilizing the voices and ideas of the preservice teachers themselves, I
consider how they learned to use art to work through their questions, negotiate meanings,
construct new understandings, and take action to make their learning public. Drawing

upon transcriptions of their discussion group conversations about artistic response and

36

their artistic response papers, I also explore how they made sense of their experiences
during the semester. These findings can serve to inform teacher educators about the ways

preservice teachers view art as a mediational means for understanding text.

This dissertation also contributes insights into how an experienced instructor
grapples with the challenges of defining, planning for, and enacting an artistic response
approach to literature. Throughout the dissertation I weave analyses of written and
spoken interactions between the teacher candidates and myself. This provides readers
with a window into an unexplored area and helps me surface key misunderstandings,
confusions, and questions. What exactly is artistic response? How is it different from an
activity that is loosely tied to the text? How do we know it when we see or hear it? What
are some of the challenges in supporting students as they learn to create artistic
responses? What are some of the factors that contribute to the students’ learning about
artistic response? What is the instructor’s role in all of this? This study thoughtfiilly
considers these questions by offering nuanced interpretations of what happened with

preservice teachers in one children’s literature classroom.

Finally, this study investigates how the social nature of the classroom
environment impacts teacher candidates’ understanding of artistic response. This work
has the capability of initiating dialogue at all grade levels about what it means to engage
in artistic response that is educative and meaningful within classroom settings. It also has
the potential to invite comments about the larger question of the place of art in schools
and what might be lost when art no longer has a valued place in the curriculum.

Ultimately, my study will attempt to examine not only the social contexts in which

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artistic response was used to create meaning, but also to detail how preservice teachers

came to understand artistic response in those contexts.

38

CHAPTER THREE

Methods of Operation

Introduction

 

The primary goal of this dissertation is to explore how preservice teachers
develop an understanding of artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature. In
order to investigate that developing understanding, the study closely examines the ways
teacher candidates in one section of a children’s literature course created artistic
responses, wrote about them, and then discussed them with their peers and instructor. In
this chapter I describe the methodology used to collect and analyze the research data.
The first part of this chapter provides a more thorough description of the setting in which
the study took place, including the university, the classroom, and the course. In the
second section I detail the participants and their roles, the tradition of teacher research
and how it informs this work, and various aspects of the “telling case” (Mitchell, 1983,
1984) and how it is used to explicate the data in chapters four through seven.. In the
third portion of the chapter, I delineate the data sets and how I used the guiding principles

of grounded theory to analyze the data.

Setting

The work of this dissertation has been done in the qualitative tradition, where data
are made up of “well-grounded, rich descriptions and explanations of processes in
identifiable contexts” (Miles & Huberrnan, 1994). While the data used in this study did
not necessarily originate in only one particular setting, the majority of it was gathered
within the context of one university classroom. That is the setting that will be described

here.

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The University

The educational institution featured in this study is a large public university in a
Midwestern suburban community with a student body of approximately 33,000
undergraduate students. The College of Education has about 2,300 students in its teacher
preparation program. This program, which includes a fifth-year internship, requires
undergraduates to apply during their sophomore year for junior status admittance.
Students are primarily from the Midwest, though there are some from other regions
throughout the United States. There is also a large international student population, but
most of those students enroll in graduate programs rather than undergraduate teacher
preparation programs.
The Classroom

Teacher candidates enrolled in the TB 348 class featured in this research met on
campus once a week for class sessions that lasted two hours and fifty minutes. The
sessions took place in a spacious, carpeted, first floor classroom with three interior walls
and one wall of windows. The room contained twelve large mobile tables that were
generally pushed together into six groupings of two tables each, with an average of four
to five students sitting at each grouping. Normally there were no designated seating
arrangements, but, on the days discussion groups met, students moved locations mid-way
through the class session to meet with the rest of their group members at an assigned
table grouping. The classroom contained a large chalkboard which was rarely used. It
also featured a technology cart which contained a computer, VCR, DVD player, wireless
Internet access, along with a sound system. A projector and screen were also

permanently affixed in the classroom, as was an overhead projector. The overall

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atmosphere was pleasant and there was room to move freely. However, noise levels were
sometimes problematic when all discussion groups were meeting at the same time.
The Course

TB 348 — Reading and Responding to Children ’s Literature -- is a teacher
preparation class. It is an open enrollment course, but since it is required for elementary
education majors, juniors and seniors who have been admitted to the education program
comprise the majority of the course participants. The sections offered per semester are
limited and, historically, the number of students who need to take the class exceeds the
available openings. Increasingly, however, sophomores intending to apply for admittance
into the education program are being enrolled in TE 348 and occasionally there are
freshmen who appear on the class rosters. On even rarer occasions non-traditional
students are registered, including those who have already received degrees and those who
are considering a late change to a major in education.

The instructors of the course are typically graduate students enrolled in a doctoral
program at the university where this study is set. Though experience levels vary, course
instructors generally have taken children’s literature courses as a part of their doctoral
program, taught at both the elementary and university levels, and been members of the
Children’s Literature Team for at least one semester before they teach TE348.

Course goals.

TB 348 focuses on literary understanding and genres in reading and teaching
children's literature. Students discuss critical and theoretical perspectives in evaluating

children's literature. They also concentrate on the literary, social, and pedagogical issues

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encountered in the study of children's literature. The course readings, activities and
projects are designed to provide them with opportunities to:

0 read widely and identify, appreciate, and evaluate genre elements — including
picture books, folklore, fantasy and science fiction, contemporary realistic fiction,
nonfiction, historical fiction, biography, and poetry

0 make meaning with children’s literature by participating in book discussion
groups -- so that they will be capable of not only selecting quality materials but
also looking at, evaluating, and talking about children’s literature with their future
students

0 take a literary stance — to learn the differences between literary and curricular uses
of children’s literature
Course readings.

TE 348 is primarily a discussion-based course and was planned to encourage
dialogue and an exchange of views. This sharing process necessitates that teacher
candidates read, purchase, and/or bring in a variety of books that they use to demonstrate
and support their developing knowledge. At the time of the study they were required to
purchase both course text and discussion literature (which could be found at local college
bookstores), along with eight children’s and adolescent books that comprised a text set.

The course text was Literature and the Child (Galda & Cullinan, 2002), selected
by CLT members because it covered the genres of children's literature (e. g., picture
books, folklore, etc.) in a thorough manner, presenting evaluation criteria with each one.

It was illustrated with numerous plates taken directly from children's books. Though

42

expensive, the Team felt its extensive booklists would. provide the teacher candidates
many years of use as an ongoing resource.

Throughout the course students were to be participating in discussion groups.
Similar to the literature discussion circles found in many elementary classrooms, these
groups discussed the same four books (Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963),
Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998), Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), City of Ember
(DuPrau, 2003)), along with one book each individual discussion group selected.

Selecting texts is just one of many factors that instructors must reflect on when
implementing literature discussion groups in a classroom setting. While the Team
members agreed that all preservice teachers in TE 348 would likely be able to read well
enough to comprehend most children’s and adolescent literature, the team did not
randomly select titles, but specifically chose the books that were assigned, along with the
order in which they were to be read. I will provide a brief rationale for each of the pieces
of literature picked for in-class discussion, but the first three books are featured again in
chapters five through seven and plot summaries are available for them in those chapters.

The books selected for TE 348 were chosen based on four factors: (1) overall
excellence of the text, based upon its textual and genre characteristics, the reputation of
the authors and illustrators, and the quality of any illustrations; (2) genre variability (the
team tried to make certain that genres like science fiction and fantasy, often
underrepresented in classrooms, were very visible); (3) representations of diversity
(Children’s Literature Team members wanted to be sure that the texts reflected accurate
and diverse perspectives); gender of the main character (there needed to be a relatively

equal mix of male and female protagonists); and (4) complexity (Team members wanted

43

books that would challenge our preservice teachers as they advanced in their knowledge
of reading and responding to children’s and adolescent literature).

Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), was chosen to be the first book
discussed because it is deceptively simple. Though it has minimal text, the messages to
be found are quite profound; likewise, the illustrations are layered with meaning. The
book presented a great discussion opportunity for those newly invested in children’s and
adolescent literature.

Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998), a fantasy like Where the Wild Things Are
(Sendak, 1963), is also a picture book. The illustrations and text are laden with imagery
and it is filled with social commentary. By the time the teacher candidates read Voices in
the Park they are ready to encounter a book that allows them to test out the critical
perspective, which is new to many of them.

Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) is a novel-length piece of historical fiction that,
like Voices in the Park, contains a great deal of social commentary. It is also unique in
that it presents a little-known piece of American history and does so through characters
dealing with prejudice, gender issues, and familial relationships.

City of Ember (DuPrau, 2003) was selected for only one semester. It was chosen
to replace the science fiction novel, The Giver (Lowry, 1993), when that book was
followed by a sequel that made it less appropriate for discussion. While City of Ember
seemed a logical replacement at the time, student conversations surrounding the book
were quite bland and it did not have the complexity The Giver had offered previous
classes. Therefore, the book was not included in this study and it was dropped from the

TB 348 book list the following summer.

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Participants

Because my inquiry was conducted within the context of a larger study of artistic
response in TE 348, there were certain guidelines that impacted the collection and
analysis of data. Permission for participation in the larger study, for example, was
required from teacher candidates in every section of TB 348. Members of the Children’s
Literature Team and the university research board wanted to be certain that all students
and instructors involved were protected in as many ways as possible from any potentially
negative consequences that might be associated with the study.

One such possible negative consequence was that the grades of students enrolled
in the class, or the ways instructors viewed those students, might be impacted in some
way by the decision of whether or not to participate. Because all of the TB 348
instructors were invested in the study as both teachers and researchers, measures were
taken to make certain that we as instructors did not know which students had agreed to be
part of the study, and that we as instructors would not be the ones requesting that students
participate in the investigations, a situation which might have caused students to feel
undue pressure to participate.

In order to guard against the possible ramifications of the TE 348 instructors
being seen as recruiters for the study or having knowledge of who had agreed to
participate in the study, the Children’s Literature Team created letters of consent that
explained the study in detail and provided a way for students to sign up if they wished to
participate. Before any data was gathered, these letters were brought to sections of the
course and team members (who were not teaching the sections of the course being

addressed) introduced the study, read the permission letters aloud, explained why

45

students were being asked to agree to be part of the study, and answered any questions.
After listening to the Team members, the students were given time to read through the
permission letter -- a copy of which each student had received beforehand -- and indicate
whether or not they wanted to participate. The non-teaching members of the Team then
had the students place the letters into sealed envelopes. These envelopes were kept
locked in a file cabinet until the end of the semester when courses were completed and
grades had been submitted; at that time the instructors were allowed to View which
students had agreed to participate in the study and which had not.
The Participant Instructor: Teacher and Researcher

As the instructor of the TB 348 section featured in this study and as a member of
the Children’s Literature Team, I was aware of all aspects of the larger artistic response
study and agreed to participate fully. During the semester in which the data were
gathered, I was an advanced doctoral student in the university’s education program,
concentrating on children’s literature, early literacy, and preservice teacher education.
Before I enrolled in the doctoral program, I had been an early elementary school teacher
in the Southwestern part of the United States for seven years. As part of my graduate
program, I taught several literacy methods courses that were offered to both
undergraduates and teacher interns. I joined the Team in the spring of 2003 and had
taught eight sections of TB 348 before the spring of 2005. I am a female of European
American descent and at the time of the study I was 40 years old.

Teacher research.

I chose to conduct this qualitative study within the tradition of teacher research,

which Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) define as “a systematic and intentional inquiry

46

carried out by teachers” (p. 3). The gathering and recording of information, the
documentation of experiences inside and outside the classroom, and the creation of
written records are all done within the “systematic” ways of this tradition. Teacher
research is “intentional” in that it typically results from questions generated by teachers
trying to make sense of their classroom experience in disciplined ways. It is not
spontaneous or rash in nature, but is, instead, the planned, reflective, and analytical study
of questions that matter in the lives of teachers, such as those that rise out of problems of
practice or the curious minds of learners. This study follows in the teacher research
tradition in several ways. It evolved out of a recurring problem of practice; the intent of
the study and its guiding question were established ahead of time; and, at the appropriate
time, data were gathered in systematic ways.

Though teacher research is recognized by many scholars as valid so long as the
tenets of systematic and intentional study are maintained, there have been several major
criticisms leveled against teachers researching their own practice. In order to strengthen
the validity of the teacher research I have done for this dissertation, I will address several
of those criticisms here, including concerns about whether or not teachers can properly
conduct research, can conduct research and still successfully attend to the work of
teaching, and can conduct research that can be generalized to populations outside of their
own classrooms (Zeichner & Noffke, 2001).

I agree that teachers need training in order to carry on research and approached
my study with scholarly rigor. I had been trained in both quantitative and qualitative
methodologies, so I knew when I conducted this research that I would need to triangulate

my data. I did so by collecting three different data sets and, during my data analysis,

47

constantly contrasted and compared what those data sets indicated. When I noted
patterns appearing in one data set, I looked to the others to see if the findings were
consistent across sources. If they were not, I asked questions about why this disruption in
patterns might be occurring, made notes, and checked and rechecked my findings. I
asked other scholars familiar with my study for input on the patterns I was seeing and the
associated codes I was creating (the code creation process is detailed later in the Analysis
section of this chapter). I also asked another doctoral student, who taught TE 348 during
the same semester I did, to code clean copies of all of the artistic response papers I had
already coded, with both of us using the codes I had created. In doing so I established an
inter-rater reliability of 94%, and we were able to come to an agreement when we
discussed our slight differences of opinion.

The very nature of my role as instructor of the course meant that I would be
present and involved during most of what occurred throughout the gathering of this
study’s data. Though I did not feel that my teaching was being negatively impacted by
the addition of my research perspective, I did have concerns that, despite the regulations
put into place by the Team to guarantee participation anonymity to students, my role as
teacher would cause students to feel undue pressure to take part in the study. The
unequal authority distribution between teachers and students has always been a concern
of mine, and I try to be conscious at all times that it contributes to the nature of my
relationship with my students (Tom, 1984). Even in the most democratic of classrooms
teachers have the final say over parameters for acceptable behavior and over grades,
activities, and schedules. I recognized that my role as teacher/researcher undoubtedly

impacted what students and I said, did, created, and wrote about in connection with

48

artistic response. That is why I asked about my own role and its impact on the preservice
teachers’ artistic responses in one of my research questions. It is also the reason why I
triangulated my data and established inter-rater reliability for the coding done on artistic
response papers. I made every effort to conduct the class sessions as I would have
whether the tape recorders, or any other research constructs, had been present or not, but
the triangulation of data was my best check for the possibility of undue instructor
influence in interpreting data.

Instead of feeling that my teaching was negatively affected by the study, I felt
quite the opposite. Like Massey and Duffy (2003/2004), I found teacher research to have
many positive influences for both me — as the TE 348 teacher -- and for my students. As
Massey and Duffy reported:

These influences include helping teachers to: (a) learn about research (Cochran-
Smith & Lytle, 1993; Lampert, 2000; Shulman & Brandt, 1992), (b) improve
instruction (Henson, 1996); (0) connect with other teachers and colleagues
(Burnaford, F ischerJ ., & Hobson, 1996; R. S. Hubbard & Power, 1993), (d) bring
about change in classrooms, schools, and educators' thinking (Anderson, Herr, &
Nihlen, 1994; Grisham, 2000), and (e) gain new understandings of students (R. S.
Hubbard & Power, 1993). (Massey & Duffy, 2003/2004, p. 1019)
Each day I was involved in this study I found myself becoming more reflective as a
practitioner, asking questions of my students, myself, and my practice. The collaborative
work I did with my students and colleagues in the Children’s Literature Team for this
research challenged me to change dramatically the way I was thinking about artistic

response. I quickly came to realize that I did not know as much about it as I thought and

49

that I wasn’t even certain of a clear definition for artistic response. I found myself eager
to learn, right along with the teacher candidates, what artistic response really was. As
Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) noted, self-study became research for me when it achieved

the balance between the way in which private experience can provide insight and

solution for public issues and troubles and the way in which public theory can

provide insight and solution for private trial ...” (p. 15)

When conducting my research I felt empowered by the notion that I was
addressing a problem that my colleagues and I had experienced in our teaching practice.
I felt that if I could describe how my students came to understand artistic response and
how it was different from a craft-type activity that had little to do with the text, then I
could provide enough information to other educators who teach children’s and adolescent
literature (including TB 348 instructors, elementary educators, and teacher educators) so
that they might better understand what artistic response can be, why it is important, and
how it can increase engagement and expand thinking in connection with literature. At the
same time, I recognized that, because it had been in a qualitative, teacher research
tradition, my study would automatically need to address issues of generalizability. In
order to discuss this topic more fully, however, I must first clarify who were the student
participants in TE 348.
The Student Partimants and the Establishment of LTellirg Case

The student participants included in this dissertation were undergraduates enrolled
in one of my sessions of TB 348 during the spring of 2005. There were twenty-seven
students enrolled in the class. After I had turned in grades and was allowed to open the

envelope containing permission letters, I found that twenty-two of the twenty-seven

50

students in my class agreed to participate fully in the study, granting access to all of their
audio-taped comments, art objects, and artistic response papers. Three other students
granted permission for analysis of their written work, but did not want their audio-taped
comments used. As a result, all of their comments were deleted from the transcriptions
of large and small group discussions. Two students did not agree to participate in the
study at all, so copies of their written work were destroyed and their comments were also
removed from the audio tape transcriptions. Thus, twenty-five out of the twenty-seven
students in the class agreed to be featured in the study at some level.

Of the twenty-five teacher candidates who agreed to participate in the study there
were two freshman, ten sophomores, six juniors, and seven seniors; there were twenty-
two females and three males. The majority was European American, but there were also
a small number or African American and Asian American students. Most of the students
were between the ages of 19 and 23, but there were also several who were 24 to 27 years
old. Eighteen participants were education majors, three were English majors seeking
teacher certification, and four were enrolled in other programs (either hoping to transfer
into education or thinking about making that move).

While several students will be featured in this dissertation, and the coursework
and discussion contributions of all who agreed to participate have been considered, one
student will be the focus of the data analysis chapters. At the time data were gathered,
Lari, a European American female, was twenty-six years old. She was a non-traditional
undergraduate student who worked at least twenty hours a week and did not live on

campus. She had received training of various kinds in the medical field but had come to

51

the university to obtain a bachelor’s degree in education and was a sophomore applying
for admission into the program.

I chose to concentrate on Lari for several reasons. She was an animated
discussant, quite verbal, and interacted with me several times over the course of the
semester about her confirsions concerning artistic response. Her strong desire to find out
what she was “supposed to do” for this response, and her conviction that she didn’t have
the skills necessary to create an acceptable art object were typical reactions shared by her
TE 348 classmates. Lari’s willingness to verbalize her confusions and concerns to me,
however, made her unique. I watched with particular interest how Lari’s
conceptualization of artistic response developed as I analyzed the data gathered over the
course of the semester. It wasn’t until after data analysis had been completed and I began
to attempt to describe my findings, however, that Lari emerged as the central figure of the
dissertation.

While I knew, after I had analyzed all the data, that I would share anecdotes and
quotes that featured Lari’s contributions, I initially pictured the structure of the analysis
sections of this dissertation as unfolding from a larger picture perspective down to the
more particular aspects and participation -- much like one might see in a movie. I
thought I would begin by establishing a “wide-angle” shot, looking at the class as a
whole, then “pan the room” so that readers could see what had happened with artistic
response in three discussion groups and, finally, “zoom in” on Lari. As I described the
factors that influenced students’ understanding of artistic response, however, I kept
finding that Lari played a large role in every “scene.” Other students from the class,

including members of Lari’s discussion group, Group D, also played important roles in

52

the data analysis chapters. However, as I was writing about them I found that I most
often portrayed their roles within the context of their interactions with Lari.

I had already developed cases of the other groups I originally intended to
foreground in the “panning” scene of my data analysis chapters when I began to realize
that the focus of my description might need to be primarily on Lari. I was deeply
concerned, however, that by describing Lari’s development and “dropping” the other
cases, I would be portraying Lari as representative of all members of her class, or worse,
as representative of all preservice teachers who were learning about artistic response.
Based on my analyses, I knew that her experiences did not directly map onto those of her
classmates. At the same time, however, I found that, by describing what I had observed
about Lari’s understanding of artistic response (including descriptions of the context and
other people with whom she interacted), I could most clearly portray the factors that I had
found contributed more widely to the broader set of preservice teachers’ understandings
of artistic response in TE 348.

The telling case.

Unsettled by my concerns over making Lari’s the only case in this dissertation, I
remembered having read Wolf’s (2001) article, Wax on/ Wax Ofl: Helping Preservice
Teachers “Read " Themselves, Children, and Literature, in which the author details how
she explored one preservice teacher’s evolving understandings of diversity and literary
interpretation through a “telling case.” Wolf cited Putney, Green, Dixon, Durdin and
Yeager (2000) as having described a telling case as, “not a representative case, but one
that allows in-depth exploration of theoretical issues not previously visible” (p. 87).

Because I had found that writing about what I had learned from my data analysis meant

53

writing about Lari, it made sense to me that a detailed description of her changing
understandings of artistic response, and the factors that influenced her understandings,
could surface the “theoretical issues not previously visible” concerning how preservice
teachers came to understand artistic response.

The concept of the telling case can be traced to the work of Mitchell (1984), who
argues that case studies in general can be rigorous, reliable, and generalizable, but that
they do not have to be representational. In a chapter he wrote outlining the various forms
of case studies and situational analyses, Mitchell (1983) said,

The case study, because of the observer’s intimate knowledge of the connections

linking the complex set of circumstances surrounding the events in the case and

because of the observer’s knowledge of the linkages among the events in the case,
provides the optimum conditions in which the general principles may be shown to

manifest themselves even when obscured by confounding side effects. (p. 206)
He also argues that there is no advantage in going to the trouble of finding a “typical”
case, when there is already a theory “sufficiently well developed to enable the analyst to
identify within [those] events the operation of the general principles incorporated in the
theory” (p. 204).

While Mitchell (1983) saw no benefits in choosing a representative case when the
theory behind the case was well defined, he saw tremendous advantages in “choosing
particular sets of events” (p. 204) to explicate that theory. This type of case he later
called a “telling case” (Mitchell, 1984). Initially I had not planned to use a telling case in
this work, but after completing my data analysis, and developing theory from that

analysis, I had found a “particular set of events” I needed to elucidate in order to describe

54

'9 ‘6

how preservice teachers came to understand artistic response. Lari s telling case”
provided me with a way to do that. It also offered me a means for investigating the data
at a deeper level and further identifying and explicating related theory as it emerged.
Thus, Lari serves as the main subject in this dissertation.
Data Sources

Qualitative research usually involves field observations and artifacts, along with
reflective and interpretive work done in connection with the field work (Miles &
Huberrnan, 1994). For this dissertation, the data collected included artifacts and
transcripts of audio tapes from the seven class sessions (out of fifteen in total) in which
artistic response was explicitly discussed. I also kept an instructor’s journal, which
featured my field notes and summaries of what had happened inside and outside of class,
reflections on the nature of artistic response, and any other notes I had taken about related
conversations, interactions, and readings.
Data Source One: Artifacts

The first data source analyzed for this inquiry were the artifacts teacher candidates
had produced in connection with the artistic response role, including the art objects they
had created and the artistic response papers they had written to accompany those art
objects. The assignment description for the artistic response role was detailed in Chapter
One but I will again briefly describe it here. When taking on the role of artistic response,
the teacher candidates were required to prepare both their art object and artistic response
paper ahead of time. The art object was supposed to be something the student created
that had the text at its center and promoted understanding of and conversation about that

text. The teacher candidates were invited to create the art object using any medium or

55

form they chose, including something that required their group members to help in its
creation, as long as it was not “busy work” or a craft activity that led members “away
from the text.” The artistic response paper that went along with the art object was
supposed to contain a rationale for the chosen artistic response activity or product. I
provided students with other details concerning the art object and artistic response paper
in class, and particulars on these assignment clarifications and additions can be found in

Chapters Four through Seven.

Art objects were collected from “artistic response people” on the day they were
discussed in class. The objects were then photographed with a digital camera, copied, or
scanned so that a permanent record of them remained for analysis. Any special features
or thoughts about the art objects that might not have been observable in the images or
recordings were noted in the instructor’s journal. For example, one teacher candidate
created an art object that featured a string with a padded ball at one end in response to the
book Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000). When the string was pulled, the ball rose several
inches above the base of the art object. When the string was released the ball landed in a
bed of coffee grounds and made a muffled sound similar to that of a heartbeat. The
sound of the heartbeat is an important symbol in Esperanza Rising, and the student who
created this object wanted to draw attention to that sound. Because the purpose or
operational qualities of the string and ball were not apparent in the digital photo I took of
the art object, I also recorded notes describing it in my instructor journal so that these

details would not be lost.

The artistic response papers were collected by each group facilitator on a weekly

basis, along with all the other papers for that week written in connection to the response

56

roles. The facilitator was supposed to read the papers and then include references to them
in the report she or he created, noting details of the group’s discussion. If done
completely, the facilitator’s report would contain references to every response role,
including artistic response, and would indicate how each role was received as a part of
the group discussion. Any disparities between the papers and what was discussed by the
groups during class time were also to be included in the facilitator’s notes. The
facilitators turned all response papers over to me the week after the discussion groups had
met. At that time, I read and graded each paper, including handwritten comments, and
then made copies for later analysis.

It would have been helpful in the determination of factors that influenced
preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic response if facilitators’ papers had also been
collected for this study, but a decision was made at the beginning of the larger project to
retain and analyze only artistic response papers. This decision was based on the
knowledge that the larger study covered nearly 180 preservice teachers and that analysis
of facilitator responses, along with those of artistic response papers from each student,
was not feasible, given time constraints. Also, at the time data were actually being
gathered I had not yet determined which teacher candidates I would focus on, so I
followed the original decision and did not retain facilitator responses. I did gather from
reading the facilitator papers from my own class that there was minimal discussion about
artistic response or artistic response people’s responses, but this perception does not
negate the fact that important data was likely lost as a result of not including facilitator

reports.

57

Data Source Two: Audio Tapes and Transcriptions

As noted earlier, audio tapes were made during seven out of the fifteen class
sessions. Single tapes of whole group sessions were made on the day I introduced the
concept of reader response theory and the discussion assignment, the day I returned the
first response papers, and on the five days when, after having discussed literature in small
groups, the students came back together for a teacher-led conversation about what had
transpired in the small groups. Tapes were also recorded of the small group discussions
on those same five days. Each group had a recorder placed in the center of their table,
and group members were in charge of turning the tapes recorders on at the beginning and
off at the end of each discussion. These small group discussions began with group
members stating their names and the response roles they were assigned for that particular
week, thus providing greater opportunity for accuracy in identification of participants
during transcription. Because of background noise (particularly from other group
discussions) and mediocre microphone quality, determining who was making comments
on the tapes proved challenging. However, since I personally transcribed the majority of
the tapes, I believe the voices of individual teacher candidates are correctly recognized
most of the time. When I was in doubt about who had made a comment I made a note in
the transcription. Comments from unknown contributors were eliminated because
permission for their usage could not be obtained.

Audio tapes do not record gestures, facial expressions, body movements, or other
non-verbal cues that might have provided insights beneficial to this work, so
accompanying videotaped records would have been ideal. They were not possible,

however, because of the size of the larger study. In order for the groups to be video

58

 

recorded properly, six video cameras would have been required in the classrooms during
each discussion — with operators needed to guide each lens. Also, as stated earlier, I did
not know until the summer following the study which groups I wanted to focus on, nor
did I know who had agreed to participate in the study while I was gathering data. So the
use of videotapes would not really have been feasible even though they could have
provided additional usefiil information.

Data Source Three: Instructor J oumgfl

As an elementary teacher I always carried a notebook with me to record what I
noticed about teaching and learning in my classrooms. I have continued that tradition in
the college setting and, on the first day of class, I tell my students that I will be jotting
notes as the class progresses. Sometimes I record insightful comments students have
made, sometimes I write questions that I have, and sometimes I make notes about things I
need to remember to do the following week.

During the time that I spent developing this study, teaching the class, and
reading, reflecting, and writing about what I was seeing and thinking in connection with
the inquiry, I always had what I called an “instructor’s journal” in my hands. The journal
contained many kinds of information, some of which were entered consistently and
others that were not. During each of the fifteen class sessions, I collected field notes.
These notes included information on course topics, a chronology of events, student
observations, my thoughts about what was happening during class, who seemed on-task,
who needed to be brought into discussions more often, and related comments. In some
ways these field notes were no different than the ones that I take every time I teach a

class. One difference, however, which was planned and apparent from the time I began

59

the journal, was that I made a concerted effort to record in great detail any instances
related to artistic response.

After taking field notes during each class session, I wrote reflections about what
had happened before, during, and after class time and my thoughts about the sessions’
events. I was usually in the classroom about thirty minutes ahead of the scheduled start
of class and students often spoke with me and with each other as I set up for the day.
Students also tended to stay for about twenty to thirty minutes after class, sometimes
needing more information about assignments or to tell me about upcoming absences, but
at other times they wanted to talk more about what had been discussed in class.

Because I wanted to reflect and record as soon as possible about all of these interactions,
while the information was still fresh in my mind, I tried to do so within two hours after
the class ended. There were some summaries, however, that were not written until the
following day.

Field notes and summaries were the only truly consistent entries in my
instructor’s journal. Because I was keeping the journal for teaching and research
purposes, I sometimes entered research—related descriptions of art objects — like the one
described earlier that was created in response to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000). At other
times I wrote notes to myself about teacher-related issues, such as remembering to bring
a particular book to share with a student in class. I made a conscious decision to keep all
of this information in the same place because of my belief that the socially situated nature
of the classroom setting, and all that it involved, needed to be considered when I was later
culling through data trying to understand what factors influenced the ways the preservice

teachers in TE 348 came to understand artistic response. While the audio tapes provided

60

some insights into these issues — especially the types of verbal interactions that occurred
during group literature discussions -- my instructor’s journal was really the only other
source I could later analyze for insights about the context and social interactions in
connection with artistic response.

Analysis

Background: Grounded Theory

The teacher candidates’ artistic response papers, the transcriptions of their
discussions, and the instructor’s journal were analyzed using grounded theory (Glaser and
Strauss, 1967). One of the reasons I chose to work with grounded theory is because
grounded theory is built on the premise that, as a researcher reads through and codes his
or her data, theoretical concepts will emerge out of the data. This approach was
particularly appealing to me because of its emergent nature. Researchers who use
grounded theory generally ask questions like, “What is the situation?” and “What’s going
on in this data?” Because I was in a situation where I was truly mystified as to why the
teacher candidates in my class, semester after semester, continued to conflate artistic
response with crafts loosely tied to a book, I wanted to approach my data without
preconceived theoretical notions about what I would find. I wanted to be open to ideas

about this phenomenon that would emerge from my study of the data.

Coding Using The Constant Comparison Method

In the tradition of grounded theory, data (which often includes field notes and
interviews) is analyzed using what is called the constant comparison method. This
method involves reading one data source, then reading the next data source with the first

in mind, and continuing on through all data sources. As researchers read they make notes

61

in the margins of their data indicating any theoretical notions that occur to them. These
notes should include the names of categories or patterns that seem apparent after repeated
readings and comparisons between data sources, links between those categories, or
indications when a category appears to be central to the study (Glaser, 1992). While the
overarching question guiding this dissertation was about how preservice teachers came to
understand artistic response and what factors influenced that understanding, both of the
sub-questions required that the data analysis method I used recognize developing patterns
and connections. As I considered methods for data analysis, I felt the constant
comparison method, with its emphasis on the search for emerging repeated categories and
links, could help me identify those patterns, if any existed.

According to the constant comparison tradition, I began the analysis process by
reading and re-reading the first source of data -- the artistic response papers -- several
times. As I read, I compared what I noticed in the artistic response papers to my other
data sources, including transcripts of the audio tapes, the instructor’s journal, and the
artifacts themselves, searching for repeated patterns, common themes, and connections
which either the teacher candidates or I had made. I kept notes on the results of these
constant comparisons and after several readings I began to code in the margins of the
papers, transcripts, and journal.

Before I continue further, it should be noted that there are criticisms leveled at
researchers using grounded theory, which include a lack of adherence to the method as
described by its creators and a paucity of details explicating how scholars code and
analyze their data (Bulger, 2003; Eaves, 2001). In an effort to address these concerns,

this section of the dissertation details the grounded theory procedures used in this study,

62

including descriptions of the five steps used to code and analyze the transcripts of small
and large group discussions, artistic response rationale papers, and the instructor’s
journal. These steps, adapted from the work of Chesler (1987) and developed by Bulger
(2003), illustrate how methods of contextual coding and constant comparison can be
described in detail.

Step 1: Highlight Key Passages In The Text

Step 2: Restate Key Phrases

The first step in the coding process was to recognize passages in the data that
reflected the research questions — identifying factors influencing preservice teachers’
understanding of artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature (Bulger, 2003,
p. 68). Each passage that addressed the research was highlighted and major ideas were
restated in the margins using language as close as possible to the original language in the
passage. Following the example set forth by Bulger (2003), I highlighted and restated
phrases concurrently, thus conducting procedures one and two at the same time. This
allowed me to return to the original text and to recheck the logic of the restatement. It
also provided a means by which other researchers and reviewers could duplicate this
initial data reduction technique.

One example demonstrating the utilization of these first two steps is taken from a
paper that accompanied an artistic response to Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak,
1963)

Original Text: “For my artistic project I decided to use the descriptive words of

the text to enlighten the students of the certain characteristics that the monsters

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should have” (Erin, 2/8/05) was restated as “artistic project used descriptive

words to enlighten students.”

A second example of a restatement of the original text comes from an artistic

response paper written in connection to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000).

Original Text: “Through symbols this poster shows how Esperanza changed
from a pampered, stuck-up, rich girl to an understanding young woman” (Nicole,

3/22/05) became “symbols on the poster show how Esperanza changed.”

A third example of the restated text comes from a transcription of a whole class

discussion of Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998).

Original Text: “Okay, here’s what I thought the book was about. I thought that
with each voice the background and the environment and the colors and the
symbols informed the reader of the feelings for that voice. And obviously there
are repetitive symbols within it, and I think those symbols really speak loudly to
issues of control and power. Like, for instance, um, for my artistic response I, I
compiled like a thing of like, um, I made a little collage of symbols of

power. . ..And, um, each of the symbols represents something I think, so. . .a
repetitive symbol that I keep finding is the uh, the hat....in Charlie’s. . .little
world. . ..You keep seeing the mom’s hat over and over, again. . ..I think of the hat
as a symbol of the control the mom has over him” (Jill, 3/1/05) became “artistic
response displays repetitive symbols of power and control.”

In this manner, key phrases were identified in each data source.

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Step 3: Create Code Clusters

After identifying and restating key phrases, I combined those phrases into
conceptually similar categories. In this step I created initial code clusters — hereafter
referred to as initial clusters -- by grouping similar phrases together and giving them
titles. For example, the phrase “make the story a folksong by using the words from the
story almost verbatim” was combined with the phrases “represent the book three-
dimensionally by creating a sculpture” and “the collage represents the story” to form the
cluster “retell/represent the story.”

According to the constant comparison tradition (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) I read
through and compared one phrase to another as I categorized like phrases. While I alone
grouped and labeled these initial clusters, I did discuss some of their titles and
characteristics with other members of the Children’s Literature Team. These discussions
forced me to articulate my interpretations of the data and provided an informal check for
the authenticity of those interpretations. Step three, including the constant comparison of
the coded phrases and the discussions, resulted in the eleven initial clusters, which can be
seen in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 — Initial code clusters and example phrases

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initial Cluster Title Example Phrases from the Initial Clusters

Instructor Comment explain why you chose to represent the
elements you did

Preservice Teacher Comment I drew a similar thing because I also thought
he was upset

Artistic Media the coffee grounds are the earth itself

Text Characteristics many characters in the story took a journey
and had dreams

Text as Tool use of adjectives to describe the monsters

Text Centered contains a quote from a similar part in the
story seen differently through the eyes of
different characters

 

 

 

 

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Table 3.1 — cont’d

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Initial Cluster Title Example Phrases from the Initial Clusters

Retell/Represent the Story keep the story accurate

Document Specific Story Events seven different literary passages symbolize a
hopefiil attitude

Character Experience express abstract thinking of the character’s
thoughts and feelings beyond the words in
the book

Literary Response Connections the symbolic artistic elements are
provocative and explanatory of the author’s
intent

Transformed Perspective it changed the way I read the story

Deeper Understanding interpretation of text depends on previous
exposure

 

 

Step 4: Create Meta-Clusters

After coding the initial clusters, I created meta—clusters using the initial cluster
categories. According to Bulger (2003) “A meta-cluster is a cluster comprised of code
clusters and has a title that involves a general level of abstraction that is distinct from the

context-based underlined phrases in Step One (Miles & Huberrnan, 1994)” (p. 70).

According to the constant comparison method, researchers should write short
documents throughout the coding process. These documents often include summaries of
the ideas researchers have about the codes that have emerged and, later, about how those
codes link together. Called “memos” in the grounded theory tradition, these notes are
tools that help researchers refine and keep track of ideas as they compare data sources
and identify themes (categories) that help them figure out what is going on in their data.

In Step Four, I coded for meta-clusters by returning to the data (including
discussion transcripts, artistic response papers, and field notes) and looking at passages
marked as belonging to particular initial clusters. I then closely examined those clusters

for commonalties and differences in order to identify themes that directly addressed the

66

research questions concerning how preservice teachers come to understand artistic
response and the factors that influence that understanding. New meta—clusters began to
emerge within some of the initial clusters at this point, and other initial clusters fell away.
I color coded the passages that characterized emergent themes and wrote memos detailing
the creation of the meta-clusters, noting the identifying elements of the themes.

The first major theme to arise had to do with attention to text. In identifying and
labeling Attention to Text as a meta-cluster I highlighted passages in the initial clusters
where there was language that indicated whether or not the participants’ comments about
artistic response were associated with the text being discussed (one of the criteria
established for artistic response in class discussions and in the description of the
discussion assignment). This process was further explicated in Meta-Cluster Memo One,
where, for example, I wrote:

If the teacher candidates or I were writing, creating, or discussing in response to

literature in ways that took attention away from the book and onto other things

(e. g., conversations about what we’d done over the weekend), then I highlighted

the passage in red and coded for that with the letters A T. If we were responding in

ways that brought our attention to the literature, I highlighted the passage in

orange and I coded it with the letters TT. (Knezek, 6/10/05)

See Table 3.2 for examples of how attention to text was coded using grounded

theory, along with quotes from the associated passages that exemplify the code.

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Table 3.2: Codes and example quotes for the Attention to Text meta-cluster

 

Attention Code Example Quote

 

Away from text AT I saw Jenny at the library and she was gathering up
other fantasy books. Did you find any you liked, Jenny
(Alison, 3/1/05)?

Toward the text TT And I took, like, some of the important things
throughout it, like the ones that are repeated, like, “And
he sailed off through night and day and in an out of
weeks, and over a year” and then, where “they roared
their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and
rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible
claws.” It says that in there twice, too. So I kind of took
some of the important parts. (Becca, 2/8/05)

 

 

 

 

 

 

I labeled the second major theme that emerged from the initial clusters Preservice
Teacher Engagement With Discussion of Artistic Response. Passages among the initial
clusters that connected with this theme included comments that either encouraged or
discouraged the discussion of the artistic response to the text. A portion of the process I
followed when identifying these passages in included in this selection from Meta-Cluster
Memo Two:

Included in this meta-cluster were passages — highlighted in lavender —
that provided artistic response people with Opportunities to introduce discussion

(ID) of artistic response in connection with the text (including questions about the

artistic response, invitations to share the artistic response, conversations about

topics that could be linked to those addressed by the artistic response person, etc.).

Passages highlighted in gray incorporated comments or questions participants

made that contributed to maintaining the ongoing nature of the discussion (MD)

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concerning the artistic response. If passages contributed to the termination of

discussion (TD) about artistic response, they were highlighted in pink. (Knezek,

6/12/05)

See Table 3.3 for examples of how preservice teachers’ engagements with

discussion of artistic response was coded for inclusion in this meta-cluster, along with

quotes from the related passages that illustrate the code.

Table 3.3 - Codes and example quotes for the Preservice Teacher Engagement With
Discussion of Artistic Response meta-cluster

 

 

 

 

Artistic Response
Discussion

 

 

 

Discussion Code Example Quote

Engagement Role

Introduction of ID You guys just wanna take a break from talking / for a
Artistic Response minute? Do you guys want to see the artistic thing?
Discussion (Steven, 2/8/05)

Maintenance of MD Other similarities, differences in opinion about the
Artistic Response symbolism in the book? (Cathy 3/1/05)

Discussion

Termination of TD Having my group create pictures will give them the

opportunity to artistically and uniquely express how
Max was feeling throughout the book. (Elizabeth,
2/8/05)

 

The third major theme resulting from close examination of the initial clusters

involved characteristics of artistic response and the discourse surrounding it. I labeled

this meta-cluster Patterns in Artistic Response Discourse and highlighted passages

associated with all of the initial clusters where written or oral language indicated

characteristics of artistic response. In Meta—Cluster Memo Three, 1 described the way I

went about coding highlighting and coding this meta cluster:

There seem to be three broad categories of discourse that characterize artistic

response. I highlighted passages associated with the first category, which I coded

as “Tool Discourse”, or TD, in blue. Tool Discourse:

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0 uses the book and the response to “teach something”

0 moves away from the text and is only loosely connected to the text

0 consists primarily of retellings (talk and writing accompanying the artistic
response basically equates to plot summary)

0 focuses on the art object itself, not on the artist or the artist’s thinking in
association with the creation of this response

The second category, “Documentary Discourse,” coded as DD, was

highlighted in green and had the following characteristics:

0 represents specific events for specific reasons, but still does not provide a
new perspective or deeper perspective on the text

0 features themes or a sense of cohesiveness in relation to the text, but is not
too far removed from the retellings found in tool talk

0 focuses on the artist and his or her process, including comments about the
choices the artist made and why he or she made those choices

I labeled the third category of discourse “Expanded Discourse” (ED) and

highlighted passages associated with it in yellow. Expanded Discourse:

o invites readers to “enter” or “experience” the text (e.g., encourages the
readers to better understand what characters might have felt)

0 challenges assumptions that might be in the book/reflects a critical
analysis of the book

0 furthers exploration into the importance of characters, situations, themes,

settings, etc.

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0 focuses on varied topics and includes the art objects and the artist
(including his or her process and choices), but looks more toward the
social — the impact the art (process or product) has on others’ responses to
the book (Knezek, 6/15/06)
See Table 3.4 for codes used in connection with the patterns in artistic response
discourse meta-cluster and quotes from passages that characterize the codes.

Table 3:4 -— Codes and example quotes for the Patterns in Artistic Response
Discourse meta-cluster

 

Discourse Type Code Example Quote

 

Tool Discourse TD The most common adjective used was terrible and I
was interested to see how each person would draw the
word terrible. (Erin, 2/8/05)

Documentary DD Because of my interest in the children and animals in
Discourse the book and dislike for both of the parental figures, I
chose to focus my artistic response on the two kids
and the two dogs. (Peter, 3/1/05)

 

 

Expanded ED Having my group create pictures will give them the

Discourse opportunity to artistically and uniquely express how
Max was feeling throughout the book. (Elizabeth,
2/8/05)

 

 

 

 

 

The coding of multiple data sources and discussions I had with members of the
Children’s Literature Team about these codes (and the coding process) not only helped to
address my research questions, but also served as checks against the misinterpretation of
data. As noted earlier, another way that I worked to establish validity in this study was
by asking another doctoral student who had taught TE 348 to re-code clean copies of the
artistic response, using the codes I had created in Step Four. The process resulted in an

inter-rater reliability of 94%.

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SteLS: Hypothesizing Linkages, Memo-Writing, And Generating Theory

According to Glaser (1992), once no new categories of code can be established,
memos should be gathered up and sorting -- the step where the data is put back together
in new ways -- should begin. At this stage, new ideas emerge and are recorded in more
memos. It is in the sorting of these memos that the generation of connected theory is
likely to occur. Theories can emerge from unsorted data, but might not be as clear or
interconnected as those emerging from sorted data. As a final step, the theories are
written up and then rewritten in final scholarly form, including relevant literature.

Bulger (2003) stated that these final, theoretical memos are written about the
hypothesized linkages between the meta clusters and the codes that comprise them. By
writing about these linkages, I could generate a theory of how preservice teachers come
to understand artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature. This was to be done
by creating theoretical memos that discussed the similarities and differences in the initial
clusters and the meta-clusters, followed by the hypothesizing of the linkages between the
meta-clusters and the initial clusters. The theoretical memos written at this stage were
supposed to discuss the complex relationships between one or more of the initial clusters
and meta-clusters defined in Steps Three and Four. Instead of writing theoretical memos,
however, I chose to describe the complexity of the meta-clusters that emerged in this
study through a telling case format.

Across the telling case, which is detailed in the next four chapters, I will examine
children’s and adolescent literature, preservice teachers’ artistic responses to that
literature, and the different ways artistic response functions within the context of a

children’s literature class. In doing so, I will describe how preservice teachers come to

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understand artistic response, and the factors that influence that understanding. In the next
chapter (Chapter Four) for example, I will address the theme that emerged in the first
meta-cluster (Attention to Text) in connection with the introduction of literature response
roles in my TE 348 classroom. Before I begin the telling case, however, it is important to
briefly note an important event that greatly impacted the way this dissertation unfolded —
an event in which a lens for this work was discovered.

In May of 2005, after spending the previous four months listening to (and
participating in) teacher candidates’ discussions, reading their written rationales, and
considering their artistic creations, I began to revisit this material once again in an effort
to code for answers to the questions: How did preservice teachers come to understand
artistic response and what factors influenced their understanding? What roles did the
preservice teachers and I play in the development of this understanding? Were there
patterns or repeated characteristics/elements of oral and written language used by these
preservice teachers and their instructor when discussing artistic response, and did these
patterns change over time? As I reread papers and transcribed tapes I often thought of the
TE 348 Children’s Literature Team members’ struggle to find a way to keep artistic
responses “text-centered.” It was during this period that I first noted the meta-clusters of
artistic response detailed here. Months followed and I struggled to frame the meta-
clusters in a way that fully captured their most salient aspects. Fortunately, during the
summer of 2006 I attended the dissertation defense of a colleague, Dr. Yonghee Suh. In
her presentation on how secondary educators used art to teach history, Dr. Suh (2006a)
briefly outlined changes in the historical definitions of art. During that presentation I

found myself furiously scribbling notes as I recognized the parallels between the

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definitions she delineated and the artistic response meta-clusters I had identified through

the coding and re-coding of my data. A brief overview of the characteristics of these

historical definitions of art can be found in Table 3.5.

Table 3.5 - Historical definitions of art

 

 

Historical Characteristics
Label
Art as Object The artwork, including its form and representational nature, is

paramount

The artwork is imitative of nature/real life

 

Art as Process

“. . .(1) that a work of art is an interaction between an individual—
the artist—and some means of production, intellectual or material;
(2) that this interaction is the consummation of a specific history of
activity on the artist’s part, funded by the qualitatively diverse
experiences constituting that history; (3) that these qualities are
expressed in the art product; and (4) that through the art product, a
spectator or audience can have an experience that is, to a
significant extent, a ‘reconstruction’ of the artist’s experience.”
(Kelly, 1998, p. 24)

 

Art as
Aesthetic
Experience

 

 

Old Perspective: Art can be something that is not created by
humans — something that was not created with any sort of artistic
intent. Cognitive distance is necessary

New Perspective: Art still involves attending to details that can be
in abstract, but the cognitive aspect is being welcomed back in —
intellectual thought is encouraged

Recognition that the social and contextual nature of the viewers
will impact the way they interpret and respond to art

 

The historical definitions of art outlined in Table 3.5 are incorporated into

Chapters Five, Six, and Seven of this dissertation. In those chapters I will describe the

themes that occurred in the second and third meta-clusters identified in data analysis --

Preservice Teacher Engagement With Discussion of Artistic Response and Patterns in

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Artistic Response Discourse — and the associated elements of historical definitions of art
— Art as Object, Art as Process, and Art as Experience. These historical labels associated
with the definitions of art also serve as the titles of these chapters. In each of them I will
portray how preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic response developed by
detailing what happened with Lari, her peers, and my instruction as the semester
progressed. In Chapter Eight I will further clarify the complexity of the relationships
between the meta-clusters identified here and detailed in Chapters Four through Eight by
theorizing a connection between the forms of artistic response identified in this study and

historical definitions of art.

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CHAPTER FOUR
A General Introduction to Literary Response
Introduction

As noted in Chapter Three, the constant comparison method (Glaser & Strauss,
1967) required that, as I began my analysis, I do multiple readings of the artistic response
papers, transcripts, and field notes collected for this dissertation. As I did so, I found an
initial category emerged to the point of saturation from my coding. I called this category
“Focus on Text,” because I noticed that the writing, creating, and talking people did
about artistic response -- and other forms of response — sometimes had little to do with
the text. As I coded for places where attention was focused toward text (which I referred
to as “TT”) and for places where attention was focused away from text (which I labeled
“AT”), I began to think back to the ways I had introduced my class to the concept of
literature response and the associated types of response (including artistic response)
researched and developed by the Children’s Literature Team. It had always been my
intent to communicate that literature response of any kind needed to foreground text, but
I didn’t know if I had effectively communicated that message in my initial presentation. I
wondered if there was a connection between the way response had been introduced and
the level of attention students later gave to the texts when responding to them.

Goals of the Chapter
The goal of this chapter is to indicate how the preservice teachers featured in this

study were first introduced to the concept of literature response and the response types

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featured in TE 348. In order to clarify the kinds of information students initially
received, the first part of the chapter will include dialogue from transcripts of audio tapes
and information from my field notes taken during the first two class meetings of early
spring semester, 2005. In the next two sections of the chapter I will describe the way
artistic response and the affiliated types of response were introduced during those two
class sessions. In the last section I will discuss what I found, paying special attention to
how the concept of artistic response was established. By closely examining the
introductions of those topics in class, I hope to better understand why students were not
always consistent in focusing their attention on texts when responding to literature.
Session One: Literary Versus Non-Literary Response

Because TE 348 is a response-based course, I introduced terms and definitions
related to reader response theory very early in the semester. At the end of the first day of
class, which took place on January 11, 2005, I focused on the role children’s literature
played in the lives of the teacher candidates, and the role that it might play in the lives of
children today, by gathering the students in a group in front of me and having them take
turns reading aloud with me from Chris Raschka’s (1993) deceptively simplistic text, Yo!
Yes! Through minimal use of large, bold, black and red font and paintings foregrounding
the two boys featured in the story (with washes of varying pastel colors as the only
background), Raschka’s text tells the story of an outgoing young boy who invites a lonely
boy to be his friend. After reading I asked the teacher candidates to share their thoughts
about the book. Two of these initial comments were: “I think children would like this
book because there are lots of bright colors,” and “I could use this book to teach about

friendship.” Noting that these responses focused on how children would feel about the

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book and how the book could be used as a teaching tool, I asked the teacher candidates to
reconsider their comments so that they were focused both on the book itself (not on how
it could be used to teach something else) and their own responses to the book (not the
imagined reactions of their future students). “I want to know what you thought about this
book,” I explained to them, “and I want you to think about why you responded in the way
that you did. What about the book made you react this way? What about your own
personal experiences? Did they impact on how you responded to the book?” I went on
to clarify the reason for my request. I said:
Teachers in classrooms are often expected to know how to guide

students in discussions that require them to respond to literature.

Researchers and instructors who have taught this class have found that

preservice teachers don’t always know what literature response is, and

other researchers have found that most practicing teachers aren’t very

good at guiding response-based discussions. This is a class that focuses

on children’s literature and it will give you first-hand experience

responding to children’s literature and facilitating discussions. It is not a

class that focuses on how to teach with books. There is value in using

literature to teach other things, and you will learn more about that in your

subject matter methods classes. We will touch on it in here, but our focus

will be on the literature itself -- and how and why we read and respond to

that literature in the ways we do. (1/11/05)
I continued this clarification to the class by labeling two general categories of

responses as either “literary” or “non-literary.” Table 4.1 describes the

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characteristics of these two very basic forms of response to literature as developed
by the Children’s Literature Team.

Table 4.1: Literary and non-literary response characteristics

 

Response type Characteristics

Literary response 0 Addresses the text

0 Centers on the text itself

0 Sees the text as valuable in
itself

0 Uses the text as its primary
reference point

I Focuses on the text as a
literary creation

Non-literary response 0 Sees the text as a tool to
accomplish other purposes

0 Uses the content of the text as
a source of information or
instruction (skills
development, academic
instruction, etc.)

0 Considers matters outside of
the text itself

0 Focuses primarily on what the
text can gig to help further non-
literary goals

0 Ignores or backgrounds the
literary qualities of the text

0 Foregrounds the immediate,
practical, or functional value
of the text

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I finished explaining the course focus on text-centered, literary responses, I
again asked for the teacher candidates to share their thoughts about the book. Peter
quickly replied, “I can relate to this book because I’ve had many experiences like the
main character.” When I asked for more information, he responded, “I moved around a
lot when I was a kid and I was really shy. It was hard to make friends; I didn’t know
what to do to make friends. The shy kid reminded me of myself because he doesn’t start

the conversation. The other kid starts it.”

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I thanked Peter for sharing his connection to the book and told him I appreciated
the way he drew parallels between himself and the character in the book. “It’s like
you’ve made a claim about the book and how it connects to your life,” I noted, “but you
didn’t stop there. You gave us evidence for your claim by telling us what aspects of the
character in the book reminded you of yourself. You made the connection explicit.”

Peter’s comments and my accompanying remarks were followed by observations
from several other students who wanted to share how they had responded to the text and
why they thought they had those responses. Lari, the teacher candidate who will be
featured extensively throughout this study, noted that she really “liked the book” because
of the illustrations, which she said were “hugely important in the way they told the story
of emerging friendship between the two main characters.” She stated that she could tell
the boys were becoming fiiends because “. . .their bodies moved closer together until they
faced each other from just a few inches apart. Without the illustrations I wouldn’t have
known that was happening.” Elizabeth said that the story left her feeling “happy” and
that she thought that feeling came, at least in part, from the way Raschka had chosen to
make changes in background colors as the story progressed “from blue, which is a cool,
sad color, to yellow, which is a warm, happy color.”

As each of these students shared their thoughts, I thanked them, often repeated the
connections they had made back to the book, and sometimes prompted them to expand
what they had said. I purposely did not, however, share any labels or discuss terms that
might have defined what they were doing beyond classifying connections as either
“literary” or “non-literary” in nature. My main goal at that time was to have the teacher

candidates walk out of our first class session having been introduced, through interactions

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with the text, their peers, and me, to the notion that responses to literature in TE 348 were
to be text-centered. Because I had taught TE 348 several times before, I was aware that
these future teachers would not necessarily readily accept the importance of their own
text-centered, individual responses. Instead, they were far more likely to value viewing
new concepts through lenses that incorporated the anticipated or imagined responses of

their future elementary students.

Course instructors and researchers have found that preservice teachers enrolled in
courses similar to TE 348 are often resistant to reading and responding to children’s and
adolescent literature in critical ways, and that their own prior experiences with reading,
discussing, and analyzing literature may contribute to that resistance (Apol, 1998; Apol et
al., 2001; Apol, Sakuma, Reynolds, & Rop, 2002). Many teacher candidates come to TE
348 with preconceived notions of what it means to analyze literature (e. g., “writing a
book report that covers essential literary elements like plot, theme, and characters” or
“tearing a book apart line by line to search for symbolism”) and what children can do
when it comes to such activities. Elizabeth, for example, said (after listening to and
sharing several text-centered comments about Yo! Yes!), “It’s cool that we are noticing
and talking about this stuff, but kids wouldn’t read this much into such a simple story.”
Many other teacher candidates were likely unsure about the relevance of text-centered
responses — both for themselves and for their future students — at the end of that first class
session. However, I was quite purposeful in the direct way I introduced the concept of
text-centered response. I led students away from non-literary responses toward literary
responses, and I made that movement explicit by talking about what I was doing and why

I was doing it. By making my intentions known, I intended to help the teacher candidates

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begin to question their own interactions with and around Yo! Yes! Peter, Lari, and
Elizabeth’s comments indicated they were certainly capable of thinking about reading
and responding in text-centered ways, but other candidates’ initial reflections on the text
as a teaching tool were not unfamiliar to me. In fact, preservice teachers’ history of a
lack of knowledge of or interest in literary response was one of the reasons why the
Children’s Literature Team designed TB 348 so that it placed emphasis on reader
response (Apol, 1998; Apol & Rep, 2005; Apol et al., 2001; Apol et al., 2002).
Session Two: Types of Literary Response

During the next class session, which was held on January 18, 2005, I led the
teacher candidates in a more focused dialogue about reader response theory, transactional
reading, and their related course assignments. This discussion was similar to the first in
two ways: 1) The conversation was primarily teacher-directed; 2) Students were asked to
talk about their responses to a piece of literature I read aloud in ways that connected back
to the text. This time, however, the teacher candidates did not participate in the read-
aloud. Instead, I asked them to pay particular attention to (and jot down) any words,
repeated phrases, or illustrations they were especially drawn to or found to be particularly
important. As I read Life Doesn ’t F righten Me, (a poem by Maya Angelou (1993) that
editor Sara Jane Boyers has put into picture book format with paintings by the late artist,
J can-Michel Basquiat), I watched students as they scribbled notes to themselves or
looked intently at the illustrations. Their faces featured varied expressions as they
listened to the lines I read detailing the many things in life the narrator of the poem
recognizes as scary (e.g., shadowy figures, loud dogs, and unfamiliar noises) but asserts

don’t frighten her at all.

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I selected Life Doesn ’t F righten Me (Angelou, 1993) as our second read-aloud
because it is a book of interesting contrasts. While it can be found in the children’s
sections of libraries and book stores, it features illustrations that contain images of
skeletons, violence, and nudity, and a poem that draws attention to many things that
might frighten children. At the same time, the narrator of the poem can be seen as having
great courage in the face of adversity. Another of its interesting attributes is that the
author and illustrator are both famous in their respective fields but did not work together
in the creation of this book. Instead, the Basquiat paintings were paired with the Angelou
poem after Basquiat’s death. Thus, the book provided plenty of material for the class
discussion, and I was able to remind the teacher candidates to focus on their own
responses and to connect what they said back to the book. This allowed me to reinforce
the importance of text-centered, literary responses and it also encouraged widely ranging
reactions. I used the comments students made about Life Doesn ’t F righten Me as
examples of the five different literary response roles (as introduced in Chapter One, Table
2) highlighted and expanded upon in TE 348 class sessions and assignments: personal,
textual, intertextual, critical, and artistic.

Each teacher candidate enrolled in TE 348 during spring semester, 2005, was
required to assume responsibilities for each of the five response roles at least once during
the semester. In the class section examined for this study, the roles were introduced and
discussed in class on multiple occasions before students took them on. I, along with
other members of the Children’s Literature Team, helped to develop written descriptions
of the response roles and their accompanying characteristics. Details about the response

roles were provided to the students in an assignment description for literature discussion

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groups (See Appendix B for assignment description) and on PowerPoint slides presented
during the second class session (See Appendix C for slides).

The role responsibilities included in the assignment description for small group
discussions were virtually identical in all TE 348 classrooms because the Children’s
Literature Team continuously worked together on all assignment guidelines to provide
common information and experiences for teacher candidates. The response definitions
used first emerged when the Team read, researched, and collaborated on the design of TE
348 during the spring and summer of 2003.

Both theoretical perspectives on reader response and transactional reading
(Rosenblatt, 193 8/ 1976, 1978/ 1995, 1994) and practical considerations for
implementation of response-based discussions (Daniels, 1994; McMahon et al., 1997)
were examined. We talked over what we wanted our teacher candidates to know about
reader response, how response-based conversations were formatted and held in actual
elementary and middle school classrooms at that time, and how we might provide our
candidates with opportunities to experience carefully constructed book discussions so
that, before they attempted to facilitate such interactions in the firture as teachers, they
might be better able to understand the purposes of those discussions and their own
strengths and weaknesses as participants (e.g., as respondents, discussants, leaders). Our
goal was to steer students away from talk and activities that were only loosely related to
children’s and adolescent literature or that focused primarily on methods for “using” this
literature in classrooms and that moved, instead, towards rich discussions that promoted

deeper understandings of and new perspectives on the texts they were reading.

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Introducing Personal Response

As shown with the example of initial comments in response to Yo! Yes], teacher
candidates’ first considerations after reading children’s or adolescent literature are often
based on their thinking about how children might connect with books and how they might
use books to teach children. Once asked to focus on the literature itself and their
responses to that literature, many of these same candidates responded in personal ways.
As previously noted, after hearing about the differences between literary and non-literary
response, Peter connected his memories of what it felt like to be a shy, new kid to the
experiences of the lonely character in Y0! Yes! His connection to the book included links
not only to the text itself, but also to his own life -- his memories and his feelings,
essential elements of personal response (See Appendices A, B, and C for characteristics
of personal response). Personal responses are often affective in nature; they tend to
incorporate the first “feelings” students get from reading a new piece of literature.

In defining personal response for the teacher candidates in TE 348, I strove to
provide them with relevant examples by tying some of the comments they made when
discussing Life Doesn ’t F righten Me to characteristics of personal response. Early in that
discussion a student named Erin began to reflect upon her reaction to the book by
discussing her feelings about the illustrations and the written text, and how her feelings
incorporated not only what she saw in the text but also what she knew about how she
herself reacts to similar situations (all of the dialogue featured below occurred on
1/18/06).

Erin: I liked the pictures, because, um, I think like the illustrator was painting,

the “stranger in the dark” (Angelou, 1993), like, that’s what you would imagine.

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You would exaggerate what it would be and it would be ten times scarier than it
really would be...

Suzy: Okay...

Erin: I mean, at least, that’s what I do, with like, stuff like that, you

know.. . .you’re out in the dark and you hear a dog barking, you’re gonna imagine
that it’s this horrible, terrible thing and it’s going to come after you, when really,
you’re not afraid of it. You know that’s not what’s going to happen. . ..I like the
pictures, because I think that’s what you’d think of in your head, like the worst
possible situation.

Suzy: So the, almost the exaggeration of the nature of the words...

Erin: Yes...

Suzy: ...to you, is a positive thing, as it’s reflected in the paintings.

Erin: ...Yes, cause it’s like even though they are that scary, you’re not afraid of
it.

Suzy: Okay. I wonder why you’re saying that, why you’re not afraid of it. Is it
because it seems unreal? Is it because it’s cartoon like?....Is it the paintings? Is it
the words? What is it that’s making you not afraid?

Erin: I don’t know. Just, like, experience. . .if I heard a noise in the dark, I
would imagine it would be something terrible when really it’s most likely
something small like a mouse, or something, which is still kind of creepy, but
like, you know, you would imagine something terrible and you’re, you know,

realistically, that’s not what it is.

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In her dialogue with me Erin is comparing what she does when she is frightened by an
unexplained noise or event to what she sees the author and illustrator doing in the text.
She says that ultimately she knows not to be afraid in real life or while reading the book
because of “experience” which tells her that what she imagines when she is afraid is
likely to be far worse than what is real. I drew upon this example later in class when
expanding upon the notion of response, and, specifically, when introducing the concept
of personal response.
Suzy: I’m gonna stop with the conversation about this particular book, for now
anyway, and just pass it around, um, and I’d like you to take what you’ve just
done, and apply it to the ideas of response that I am going to talk with you about
now. We talked about two major categories of response, literary and non-literary.
What you’ve been doing here involves more than that. . ..There are / five different
categories of literary response that we’ll spend a lot of time talking about in class,
in your discussion groups, and, again, in our large group discussions. The first is
personal, and I’m gonna come back and pick on Erin for a minute. I hope this is
okay. Tell me if I am remembering right. It was either Erin or Kim that were
talking about, um, this idea of things being frightening in your dreams, or at night
/ but knowing that things are going to turn out okay is something that she, um,
assumes. . ..That was you, right?
Erin: Yes.
Suzy: Okay, thank you very much. Um / that would be considered a personal

response. A personal response is ////when you talk about how a piece of literature

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links to your life, your experiences, and how you think about things — that’s a
personal response. . .
After this very brief introduction to personal response, I then moved on to discuss the
other forms of response we would be studying in TE 348, connecting most of them to
examples from our discussion of Life Doesn ’t Frighten Me. I returned to the topic later
in the class session when introducing the requirements for the response roles people
would play during class discussions. After asking students to look over the description
(see Appendix B) for the personal response role, I further elaborated on the concept of
personal response.
Suzy: ...If you are putting yourself in the response role of personal response ////
(voices in the background — footsteps — a door closes), you’re going to be talking
about / connections between your own lived experiences and the text. // Uh, was
there something in this particular text that made you think of your own life?
Were there illustrations that looked like paintings hung on a wall of a museum
you visited, or maybe something you put on your own wall of your dorm room?
Growing up, did you have those moments in the dark, when you were afraid and
there were shadows that you were afraid of? Personal connections come into play
with things like that. When you talk about, “This book made me feel. . ..” We had
some people who said, “You know, I didn’t like it ‘cause it was scary.” That’s a
personal response. /// Um, most of the time, when people have that very first //
emotional / response to whatever it is / it’s, it tends to be personal / Whether it’s
to a piece of art, whether it’s to a piece of literature, to a song / There will usually

be something personal at first, and then you might go somewhere else with it, but

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initially / you tend to have a personal connection. It might be positive, it might be

negative, but, in general, most people, if they’re going to connect with a text, will

do it in this way first.

The term “personal response” is often unfamiliar to teacher candidates at the
beginning of TB 348, but I have found that most find that the actual act of responding in a
personal manner to a piece of text — connecting that text to their own lived experiences -—
feels very familiar to them. After discussing personal response in connection to Life
Doesn ’t F righten Me, reading about the characteristics of the response role on the
PowerPoint slides and assignment description, and listening to my thoughts on the
definition of this response, the teacher candidates indicated they had no questions about
it. As indicated by the comments I made when introducing personal response, I, too, felt
quite comfortable in explaining and demonstrating what personal response entails.
Introducing Textual Response

The level of familiarity both the preservice teachers and I felt with personal
response was surpassed only by our preexisting knowledge of all that is involved with
textual response (see Appendices A, B, and C for descriptions of textual response).
When providing a textual response, most readers are doing what they have done with
literature throughout their careers as students. They participate in the more traditional
elements of literary analysis by closely examining literary elements of a text (including
genre, setting, characterization, plot, theme, style, etc.), asking how the book works, and
reflecting on what the author and illustrator did to make it work. The teacher candidates
are also required to select important passages (e. g., repeated phrases that impact

comprehension, important metaphors, etc.) and provide a rationale for having selected

89

those passages. While they have varying levels of ability to select such passages, discern
theme, discuss the importance of plot, or detail the finer points of a well-rounded
character, almost all the students have experience with identifying and working with
these elements. After I first introduced personal response in connection with Erin’s
comments about Life Doesn ’t F righten Me, I continued our discussion by asking if others
felt as Erin did — that the book was not really all that frightening. Two of the students
who answered my question, Kris and Lari, responded textually.
Kris: I found the book, um, scary...
Suzy: [Okay]
Kris: [. . .um, you know,] the drawings. . ..I found them to be pretty scary and,
like, I had this feeling that this poem was supposed to be uplifting, it was
supposed to be some sort of you know, face for bravery, but in that book form. I
didn’t really feel very brave and actually towards the end when she was talking
about being able to walk on the ocean floor and not being able to breathe and she
had some secret, almost at that exact point, I was thinkin’ in my head, “I wonder
what makes her so brave?” So I thought that was going to be the key and she was
going to tell us what made her so brave, but it never came out.
Suzy: So, _so you feel like there’s this theme, again, of bravery. We’ve had that
come up several times, but it almost sounds like you’re not quite sure if there’s a
real message of bravery here. At least, if there is one, we don’t really have the
key to what it is that might make you brave. So, the pictures are frightening, but
the message seems uplifting / but not really. You see what I’m saying? It’s that

basically, I love that /////. (There is laughter in the classroom as I stumble to find

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the right words.) It’s a really interesting. . . .way of looking at this, you know, and
it’s, um // Am I as sure as I think I am about what’s happening here -- about what
the poet is trying to tell me? What am I getting out of this and why am I getting
it? Yes, Lari?

Lari: It kind of reminds me of, I don’t know, I was thinking, when you first
started reading it that, it was something that was real, because some of the
comments are, like “Mother Goose” quotes about Mother Goose are real, but
really “panthers in the park?” Those aren’t really real, or like being able to
breathe in the ocean underwater isn’t necessarily real. Try it! I guess it just kind
of thought, you know, that they were, that it was, something, that, that maybe
they, um, were nightmares or dreams and that when they woke up, they wouldn’t
be there.

When Kris first spoke up about the contradictions she felt existed between what

the text was saying (be brave) and what the illustrations portrayed (scary images), I

thought she was going to reinforce Erin’s earlier comments about courage and common

sense overcoming all. However, Kris did not do that. Instead, she noted that she was

questioning the text, looking for evidence of what made the narrator of Life Doesn’t

F righten Me so brave. She didn’t find that evidence, so she concluded that the book was

“scary.” Lari also looked closely at the written portion of the text for clues about whether

the text was about a real experience or a nightmare. Unlike Erin, who said that her

conclusions about the book’s overall theme came not only out of what she saw in the

book but also out of her own life experiences with such matters, Kris and Lari cited

important passages from the text when determining what the book was saying, but neither

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specifically related the text to her own life. Instead, they reported asking questions of the
text and seeking answers in what was written there. When later detailing the
characteristics of textual response, I drew upon Kris and Lari’s comments to illuminate
the importance of literary elements, important passages, and composition in textual
responses.
Suzy: A textual response is a response that // really focuses much more on
literary elements, things like. . .the overall theme of the poem, or the (?) main idea
of the poem. Think about Kris and Lari’s comments. Is it, is the main idea that
you shouldn’t be afraid of the things that are scaring you in life / that you should
overcome them? Or is the, the main idea that there are a lot of scary things out
there / and that you can try to manage those things, but they are still scary? That’s
more of a textual response / It goes back to the terms used / um, “Life doesn’t
fiighten me at all.” The number of times the author says that caused people to
think, “You know, she said it so many times, ‘Life doesn’t frighten me at all, not
at all, not at all.”’ Remember how Kris tried to find out why she wasn’t
frightened, how she thought she’d know why when the narrator mentioned “the
key,” but she never really felt like she had her answer? And Lari compared
passages from the book that seemed real to those that seemed unreal in order to
decide if it was all just a dream. . ..What is it within the actual text that’s really
important, that we are connecting to?....You look at how the book works. How do
all of the pieces go together? Does the setting complement the theme? / Um, Kris
talked about the “scary” nature of some of the illustrations in Life Doesn ’t

F righten Me. // That’s kind of the setting of the text. Do they complement the

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words? How does this book, all of it, go together? Does it work or doesn’t it?
We’ve had some folks going, “Yeah, I think it works really well” for Life Doesn 't
F righten Me and others who are saying they see some really jarring disparities.
We needed to talk about why that might happen, and we did. We explored some
things, “Why do illustrations seem to contradict some of the terms? Why do they
seem to complement each other at other times?” // Textual responses are
analytical, evaluative. They tend to focus much more on the cognitive, thinking
about things in established kinds of ways. / What makes a really solid character?
What kind of, urn, story structure is effective? // All of those are kind of
predetermined by your years and years of scholarly work // instead of responding
emotionally, you are responding in kind of set ways /// It’s very different than
personal response.

As was true with personal response, students indicated they understood the textual

response role at the end of this introduction. In this particular case, most students had

basic subject matter knowledge of literary elements and analysis and felt comfortable

with the required elements of textual response. Just to make certain everyone was aware

of the definitions of the most basic literary elements, I did provide the teacher candidates

with a handout summarizing the characteristics of each (see Appendix B) and went over

the handout in class.

Introducing Intertextual Response

One of the most surprisingly beneficial aspects of introducing textual response to

teacher candidates is that they quickly begin to understand that deep comprehension of

literature is dependent on knowledge of literary conventions and contexts. One of the

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best ways for readers to increase their knowledge of those conventions is to study a
particular work and then compare and contrast it to other texts (or other media forms of
text, including movies, CDs, etc.). Those who do this are responding to literature
intertextually (see Appendices A, B, and C for a detailed description of the intertextual
role). They ask themselves what other books (or media forms of text) a certain text
reminds them of. In doing this, they consider many factors, including genre
characteristics, literary elements, artistic elements, and the type of response evoked. As
with personal response, preservice teachers are likely to make intertextual connections
without knowing there is a term for what they are doing. For example, Kim, one of the
first teacher candidates to respond to the book, commented on its appropriateness for
children, which prompted me to re-direct her focus back to her reaction to the book. This
redirection then caused her to make an intertextual connection.

Kim: For me, it looked kind of scary, like, I didn’t really enjoy the pictures at all,

like, / I just thought they were kind of morbid, like, I mean, they’re interesting to

look at, but as far as a child goes, I don’t know if, [it would necessarily connect to

them, cause, well...

Suzy: [Turn back to the previous [comment. ..

Kim: [Oh, oh [okay. ..

Suzy: [Nope, you’re doing great,] but instead of / one thing I want to kind of cut

you guys off with is, “I think children might think this. . . .” and I know that’s a
natural thing to do in TE classes, but instead to continue with, “I didn’t like them”

or “They seemed morbid to me.” Why? What was it that made them seem that

way to you?

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Kim: They kind of reminded me of like the movie, The Nightmare Before
Christmas, when like, the, the plot was good, like it had a good message, like,
everything, but the way it was composed, like threw me off a bit, like it threw me
for a loop a little bit and there was, I don’t know why, just the color choices and
because it was scribbly and, like the dog pictures, red all around it, like it would
have been blood or something. I don’t know. It, it///
Suzy: So that, there are a lot of different things in there. The color choices, the,
the scribbly nature. Um, let me try and find the dog picture. I think it’s more
towards the beginning of the book./// Yeah. There’s red near the dog’s mouth, so
those kinds of things, just, just, didn’t seem to you to match maybe the positive
message, is that kind of what you’re saying?
Kim: Like they went well with the words, but I don’t think they went well with
the message.
Suzy: Interesting. The comp-, composition matched the words, but not the
overall message that you took away from the poem. What was the message that
you took away?
Kim: Just that there are like scary things in the world and there are, things we
should be afraid of, but just stand up and you, you don’t have to be afraid of
anything...
After I asked Kim to switch her focus from speculating on whether or not children
could connect to Life Doesn ’t F righten Me she clarified her own initial response to the
illustrations, along with the disconnect she felt she saw between the illustrations and the

message of the text. In an attempt to provide evidence for this disconnect, as Erin had

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done by drawing on her personal experiences, and Kris and Lari had done by questioning
and citing the text, Kim linked the Basquiat illustrations to the film, The Nightmare
Before Christmas. This connection provided an excellent opportunity to provide a
student-constructed example later in the discussion when I was beginning to define
intertextual response. After reviewing its major characteristics and explaining that when
responding intertextually, “Readers study a book by comparing and contrasting it to other
texts (or other media forms of the text),” I returned to Kim’s comments.
Suzy: An intertextual response is similar to the connection made earlier. Who is
it that was talking about the connection between this and Nightmare on Elm
Street? Was [that you Kim?
Kim: [Nightmare Before Christmas]
Suzy: I’m sorry, Nightmare Before Christmas, the Tim Burton film. Um, that is
an intertextual response, a connection. . ..from this particular text to something that
she’s seen, read outside of this text that it reminds her of it. You talked about the
color choices used and how, um, // there was / the juxtaposition that confused you
in the film, // with it’s / kind of, the message, but then the images didn’t really
seem to fit. And. . .that same thing happened to you here when you were looking
at this book, or listening to this book. // That’s an intertextual response.
Students had questions about what specific types of media could be included in
intertextual connections. They were confused because the guidelines for their intertextual
roles specified that they needed to connect to alternative forms of the original printed
piece only. I clarified my perspective on this question by stating they could connect to

any other forms of media, as long as they had originally existed in print form. Thus, the

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connection between Life Doesn ’t F righten Me and Nightmare Before Christmas was
legitimate because the film had existed in print before it was made into a film. This
question did cause me to reflect upon the wording of the assignment description for the
intertextual role. There are films that are created based on improvisational work. Would
connections between these films and books be invalid because the movie was not created
from a previously existing script? After all, improvisational films still feature plots,
characters, settings, and themes. I decided to take my concerns to the Children’s
Literature Team for clarification on future assignment descriptions. Despite this concern,
I felt I had a clear notion of what to expect from students making intertextual responses,
and the example shared in class proved a valuable means for communicating my
expectations.
Introducing Critical Response

When introducing each of the previous three forms of literary response, I was
quickly able to connect examples from our in-class discussion of Life Doesn ’t Frighten
Me to written and spoken descriptions of roles. When it came to introducing critical
response, however, I did not feel I had a strong example to cite from our discussion.
While I explained to students that critical responses (See Appendices A, B, and C for
characteristics of critical response) asked readers to see texts and responses as
historically, socially and politically situated, I was not certain that I could provide them
with an example that looked not only at the reader and the text, but also at the sub—text
and social context. I did remember, though, that one student, Jill, had not only identified

the author and illustrator of the book (more of a textual response), she had also talked

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about who they were as individuals, and about how what she knew about them influenced
what she thought they were trying to communicate to readers through the book.
Jill: ...When I thought of Maya Angelou I thought of this strong, confident
woman, and I. . ..immediately I guess my brain was programmed to think that
what she was going to say was going to be some sort of positive message, so / I
did that unconsciously, but not, like, thinking that actually did, so that definitely
affected knowing that it was her and knowing that this guy studied under Andy
Warhol, who was like this abstract, crazy man, like, also, like influenced. . ..how I
initially perceived the book.
Suzy: I think this is a really important comment, also, because it gets at questions
of, “Who is the author? Who is the illustrator? What are they trying to say?”
And when you ask questions about those folks, and you already have some
knowledge, it might influence your reading. Like, if you are familiar with
Angelou’s work, then you know that. . .she tends to be quite forceful when she
reads her poetry. She’s survived some incredibly difficult experiences ...She
experienced things that were frightening and really horrible, so the reality of
that. . .is certainly still present to think about, and to consider, and the same goes
for Basquiat. Knowing about them can help you to consider who is represented in
this text and in the illustrations both.
This example does not get at a great deal of the important elements of critical
response. However, it did provide the teacher candidates with an introduction to the kind

of thinking and questioning one needs to do when responding in a critical way. I was

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able to build upon this example when I later detailed the characteristics of the critical

response.
Suzy: ...The question you should be asking yourself when you’re trying to
respond critically is. . ..“What’s missing? Who’s not being represented in this
text; whose voice is not being heard?” You can ask questions about / race, about
politics/, about gender // Many. . ..topics that are considered to be pretty intense
topics, controversial topics come into play in critical response. . ..///// Critical
response / the missing stuff? / This tends to be a piece that feels new to some
folks. If you are a person who has experience with, um, social science course
work, anthropology. . .anything that has to do with culture, you probably have read
a lot and thought very carefully about these ideas. . ..This is where you are talking,
again, about political aspects of the book / controversial aspects. How is the book
politically situated? Remember how Alice (?) talked about who the author and
illustrator were. Oh, it wasn’t you, then who was it? Oops, back to Jill. Sorry,
Alice.
Alice: That’s okay.
Suzy: Um, Jill asked, “Who is the author? Who is the illustrator? What are they
trying to say with this book?” She said she knew Maya Angelou as a strong
woman. Because of that, Jill thought her message would be positive. Jill knew
Jean Michel Basquiat was mentored by Warhol. Was he a creative genius or was
he a heroine addict who was artistically bankrupt? How can we talk about what
he wanted to say when he didn’t even know his paintings would be featured in

this book? How might this knowledge impact your thinking about the book? //

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Both author and illustrator are African American. Does race play a role in this

book? We explore questions about things like this in critical response. This is a

huge area for consideration of social issues: diversity, multiculturalism. / Those of

you who talked about having interest in the area of (Tape Side A finished — when
listen to Side B the conversation has moved on).

I was able to provide student-constructed examples of the forms of literary
response that included textual, personal, intertextual, and critical by referring back to our
discussion of Life Doesn ’t F righten Me. Of these four student- and instructor-generated
examples, the one provided for critical response is probably weakest. This makes sense,
however, when noting students’ familiarity with personal, textual, and intertextual roles
and their lack of experience with critical response. While there is undoubtedly room for
further investigation into this matter, I have far greater concerns about the way I
introduced artistic response to the teacher candidates. When doing so, I had no
references from our recently completed discussion that I could use as examples.
Introducing Artistic Response

At the time I first presented the concept of artistic response to the teacher
candidates in TB 348 there were two factors at work that undoubtedly influenced the
outcomes of this study. I had taught the course at least 6 times prior to this iteration, and,
as a result, anticipated what I saw as possible “wrong turns” students might take or
misunderstandings they might have when creating artistic responses as a part of the
course requirements. I was also deeply aware that, though I was not certain of the focus
my own research would take at the time, there was a good chance that I, or someone else

from the Children’s Literature Team, would carefully examine data gathered from the

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classes I taught. While I attempted to keep my instruction and class environments as
“normal” as possible during the time the data was gathered, these factors are certain to
have influenced the ways I spoke about artistic response, the ways I wrote about it when
reacting to student work, and the amount of time I devoted to the topic both in and out of
class.

Another important aspect of this situation was that, because of my involvement in
the artistic response study, I was highly aware of the factors influencing my practice in
that area. This heightened awareness likely impacted my teaching and must be taken into
account as a factor influencing the research. While this kind of meta-awareness was not
necessarily typical and certainly had an impact, I, along with other members of the
Children’s Literature team, had been questioning the role of artistic response to literature
in TE 348. Because it had long been a problematic area for both preservice teachers and
instructors alike, it was not unusual for me to be questioning and thinking about the
impact of my role in teaching about artistic response, and how my students did or did not
come to understand this form of literary response over the course of a semester.

While factors outside the norm were present when I first spoke about artistic
response in TE 348, I purposefully introduced it in connection with other forms of
response. When speaking about artistic response, I noted that “One of the things we can
do with literature is that we can also respond in an artistic way. It doesn’t have to be a
piece of writing. It doesn’t have to be a character analysis. Instead you might produce
something, or create something, that helps you interpret the book / helps you respond to
what it is that you’ve read.” Along with these brief comments, I also relied on a

PowerPoint slide and the discussion assignment description to delineate the

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characteristics of artistic response, just as I had with the other forms of literary response
(See Appendices A, B, and C for characteristics of artistic response).

After listening to and transcribing tapes of that first discussion of literary response
forms, however, I was struck by the fact that I introduced artistic response differently
from the other forms. Because there was no art work created during or after our
discussion of Life Doesn ’t Frighten Me, I was unable to link the defining characteristics
of artistic response to student comments. As a result, the examples I provided were based
on books the students may or may not have read.

One of my students, um, in TE 849, which was a graduate class last semester,

responded to a book called “Monster,” um, have any of you guys read “Monster”

at all?....No? Um, it’s a book by Walter Dean Myers and the character in the
novel is a boy named Steve and he’s on trial for murder. He’s in jail and the
book, the novel is written in a screen-play format, so it has terms like, “fade-in,

fade-out,” it gives you a list of characters, things like that, but it doesn’t have a

continuous story-line in the same way that we might be familiar with otherwise.

My 849 student read this book and was really captivated by it. . .What he did was

call up a local jail and asked them. . .if he could come into jail and film what he

saw, what he experienced on a Sunday afternoon. So, he went into a local prison.

Um, the jailer there opened the doors for him in the holding area of the prison, so

there were actual inmates there. And he filmed this experience in black and

white. He filmed himself walking down the hallway, filmed himself having to
take his shoes off, he filmed, uh, the door closing. . ..He showed you every piece

of what you would see if you were in that cell. (1/18/05)

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As I listened to and transcribed the tape of this introduction, and as I read back through
the transcript several times, I was struck by the fact that not only had I used an example
based on a book the students didn’t know, making this example less concrete than the
others, I also spoke to them about work done by a graduate student who was a practicing
teacher with several years of experience. Was it an appropriate thing to do? Looking
back, it seems to make artistic response look overwhelming. I seemed to sense this at the
time saying, “I’m not expecting you to get out there with a video camera. I mean, like I
said, he really went to town with this, but do you see how he had a really deep connection
to this character, what this character was feeling and experiencing?”
Why Artistic Response Falls Short

In hindsight I felt a deep sense of unease when I realized the disconnectedness
that made my introduction to artistic response so different from the introductions to other
forms of response. By telling students that I didn’t expect them to create similar
responses, I might have lowered expectations and thereby limited what they might create.
Because of my feelings of unease, I went back to my notes for the original class to see
why I had chosen to present this example. I didn’t find any specific notes about my
reasoning, but on reflection it strikes me that this example is rich in ways that many
others are not. Even now it is difficult for me to think of “high quality” examples of
artistic responses. What constitutes a “high quality” artistic response? (That was a
question that neither I nor my colleagues could clearly answer at that time; thus the need
for this study.) The film example enabled me to speak about many elements of artistic
response I could identify as important. It allowed me to share comments about how the

creator of the film had increased his and other class members’ understanding of the main

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character in the novel, while at the same time making explicit connections between his art
work and the text.

...he brought the film to class and narrated it with what he was thinking about in

class, and what he wanted the rest of us to think about, in connection with the

book. He wanted us to think about how, the main character, Steve, had to live
with the cell walls, day after day, hour upon hour. . .he wanted us to think about
the smells in the air.. . .showed us the toilet, talked about the stench of urine and
feces. . . .All of these kinds of things were things that he did just in connection with
this little, ten, fifteen minute video that he put together for us. Can you see how
that might help us to see more deeply into what Steve’s experience had been like
as a character?....And he brought that to life for the rest of us in the class through
his response. That’s the kind of thing that an artistic response should do. It
should deepen your understanding or in some way help you to connect and

comprehend the literature itself. (1/18/05)

The graduate student’s film also provided me with a chance to talk about how
artistic response could come in various forms. As I have mentioned before, I taught TB
348 many times before and I was experienced with students expressing their concern in
class when artistic response was first discussed. “But I can’t draw,” many would say.
Others would acknowledge their discomfort with the notion of creating art for a grade by
laughing and saying things like, “You want me to paint? You don’t know what you’re
asking for!” or, “I hope you don’t expect me to dance!” No matter what they said, the

message was clear: this was not a comfortable task. I tried to assuage their fears by

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mentioning the film and other examples of artistic responses that did not require the
teacher candidates to be great artists. I assured them they had alternatives.

I’ve had students write plays. . ..I’ve had them write songs and actually perform

them for their groups. Some people have actually come to class and have done

lots of different kinds of activities at their tables, but, again, if they did

activities. . .the ‘activity’ had to be something that helped the other folks in the

discussion group, or. . ..the class as a whole, uh, understand the book better //

connect with the book in a deeper way. (1/18/06)

The film example allowed me to reinforce how important it was for artistic
responses to be text-centered, not activities that were only loosely connected, if
connected at all to the text. It provided a model alternative to stereotypical forms of fine
art, and its creator, and those who viewed it, gained new insight into the experiences of
the main character. It did expand upon many of the elements I had delineated as
important in artistic response. Nonetheless, it did all of these things in abstract ways.
There was no common story that my students and I shared as the basis for this example.
There were no student-generated elements in this example. For all the passion I felt for
it, I was still unsure of whether or not it was a “high quality” artistic response because, at
the time, I was not even certain what an artistic response was — or what it was supposed
to include.

In this chapter I described how I introduced the concept of literature response and
the types of responses that were featured in TB 348. I also explained how I defined the
multiple forms of response and how I communicated those definitions to my students.

Looking back over the data, I noted several problematic aspects about my introduction of

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artistic response, including the lack of a clear definition. The lack of clear definition and
concrete examples in my introduction to artistic response reflected the general confirsion
and uncertainty I felt about that response form. Ultimately, my uncertainty led to
confusion on the part of the students, and thus laid the groundwork for this study. In the
next chapter, Chapter Five, 1 will begin to describe how these confusions played out in

class and how the teacher candidates and I struggled to work through them.

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CHAPTER FIVE
Artistic Response As Object
Introduction

Chapter 4 detailed how personal, textual, intertextual, and critical forms of literary
response were first introduced in TE 348 and noted how those introductions, unlike the
first presentation of artistic response, included clear definitions, lists of characteristics,
and student—generated examples. The finding that artistic response was presented so
differently from other forms provided evidence that, despite my awareness (as the course
instructor) of the challenging nature of artistic response, I had not fully recognized the
paucity of guidelines, definitions, and examples for this response type in my own
knowledge base and teaching repertoire. Over several semesters 1, along with other
members of the Children’s Literature Team, had developed and set parameters for the
artistic response role (see Appendix B) in TB 348. However, after listening to and
transcribing the ways in which this form of literature response was introduced in class,
and after re-reading the way it was detailed in the assignment description the team
created, I found the language used to depict artistic response to be problematic.

In the assignment description the Children’s Literature Team members stated that
we wanted people responsible for artistic response to produce

“a creative, artistic response to the book that has the text at its center and that

promotes understanding and conversation (for example, a collage of literary

passages, a choral reading, a poem, a poster, a song, a drama). This should be

more thoughtful and text-centered than a simple craft or activity that is loosely

tied to the book (No “busy work.”). (Appendix B, p. 227)

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In my oral introduction to artistic response I told students artistic response should
be “text-centered” and promote “deeper understanding of” or “new perspectives on” the
literature read (1/18/05). But was there truly a difference between a thoughtful, artistic
response with the “text at its center” and a simple craft or activity that was only “loosely
tied” to the book? If so, what was that difference? Did artistic responses promote
“deeper understandings of” or “new perspectives on” a text? If so, how could we tell
when those endeavors were successful? Were these distinctions real and recognizable or
were they illusory features that existed only in the minds of TE 348 instructors? As I said
earlier in this dissertation, I, as an instructor, had a strong sense that I knew artistic
response when I saw “it,” but, looking back at the data, I was not effectively
communicating what “it” was — its definition, its characteristics, the way it differed from
a craft or activity, or the kind of thinking it promoted. It is true that I was initially more
aware of the challenges surrounding artistic response than were my students. However,
after reviewing tapes and transcripts of the introductory examples I facilitated, the written
guidelines I provided, and the lack of opportunities I offered for students to engage first-
hand with this type of response before taking it on as a role for themselves, I noted that
the teacher candidates were not the only ones struggling to understand artistic response. I
definitely had questions about it, too.

Analysis of data gathered on how literature response was introduced in TB 348
helped address the main dissertation question, “How do preservice teachers come to
understand artistic response and what factors influence their understanding?” by
determining that, as the course instructor, I likely played a role in the teacher candidates’

beginning understandings of artistic response. Based on the data, any of the initial

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instruction, negotiation, or facilitation I provided students concerning the notion of
artistic response must be seen as inconsistent with the instruction I supplied for the other
forms of literary response discussed in TE 348. While I cannot state that this type of
inconsistency is completely negative, I can say that it is troubling in that it set the stage
for the preservice teachers to feel less connected to and familiar with artistic response — a
response form most of them already found intimidating. Because of this early lack of
connection to concrete examples of artistic response, and because of the questions raised
earlier about the nature of artistic response itself, it is imperative that this chapter
continues to address the main question guiding this study by examining how preservice
teachers come to understand artistic response and what factors influence their
understanding. Here I will begin to attend to this query by breaking it down into specific
areas addressed by the secondary questions associated with the main dissertation
question. They are:
0 Are there patterns to the characteristics/elements of oral or written

language used by students when describing artistic response that I, as the

TE 348 instructor, and the teacher candidates in some way (written

acknowledgement, oral reinforcement, extension, etc.) recognize as

comprising genuine artistic response — one that leads to deeper

understanding/new perspectives?

o What roles did the teacher candidates and I play in facilitating the

development of this deeper/new understanding?

Patterns, characteristics, and recognition are important words in the secondary

dissertation questions that helped guide this inquiry. Characteristics, as defined here,

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include the distinguishing traits, qualities, or properties found in artistic response, while
patterns establish which of those characteristics are repeatedly and predictably
observable. Recognition entails the formal acknowledgement of those patterns and
characteristics.

Goals of Chapter

In a continuing effort to see if my data revealed anything that might address the
overarching research question and the secondary questions guiding this study, I continued
to read, re-read, and code my data according to the constant comparison tradition (Glaser,
1992; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) -— writing research memos of the codes to the point of
saturation (where no new codes emerged) as I went along. After weeks of coding and
writing memos, I identified two more theoretical categories (beyond the category of
“Focus on Text” that I portrayed in Chapter Four): characteristics of artistic response and
engagement with artistic response, details of which will brought to the fore in this case-
based chapter and the two which follow.

This chapter is to tell the story of what happened with artistic response in one of
the six small groups of teacher candidates in my class when we discussed Maurice
Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, the first text the whole class was required to
read and respond to. As I present data from this group, I will meet one of the goals of
the chapter by describing characteristics that emerge from the teacher candidates’ oral
and written discourse involving artistic response. This telling case, which features the
focus student, Lari, will primarily include the artistic response person’s work and

dialogue from the small group setting.

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The first group member responsible for preparing artistic response in Lari’s

discussion group — Group D -- was Erin. (For further information on the responsibilities

of each of the other response people, please see Appendix B.) Though they were

introduced earlier, I have outlined the steps taken for the response roles each week,

especially those associated with artistic response, in an effort to clarify the discussion

process that occurred with each of the pieces of literature featured in this dissertation:

l.

The response people researched, created, and wrote about their roles outside of
class.

The response people discussed the text (and their roles) in a small group.

I called members of the class back together and led a twenty to thirty minute large
group debriefing session, during which the preservice teachers were asked to
share what they had talked about in their groups and their individual comments
about the book, and what they had learned.

Small group facilitators took their group members’ responses home where they
read and included aspects of them in a report they wrote. During class the
following week small group facilitators gave me their reports, along with their
group members’ original written responses.

I gathered all the written responses and reports, read them, and wrote comments
to each teacher candidate.

Two weeks after they shared their responses with group members each response
person received written feedback from me.

In order to continue to examine my own role in the teacher candidates’

developing understanding of artistic response, I will include quotes from and descriptions

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of the feedback I provided as a part of each stage of the telling case, along with
comments about my current perspective on that feedback. Finally, I will discuss any
recognizable patterns to the characteristics found in the art objects, rationales, feedback,
and oral discourse (including elements from both small group discussions and a large
group session held after the first rationales had been graded and returned to the teacher
candidates) as explicated by this initial case.

Introducing the Telling Case

In Group D, four of the five group members gave permission for both their
written and oral coursework to be included in this study: Lari, a European American
female in her mid twenties; Kris, a European American female in her mid- twenties; Erin,
a European American female in her early twenties; and Sara, an African American female
in her early twenties. A fifth group member chose not to participate in this study, so all
comments and writings from that teacher candidate were removed from the data
represented here.

During their first discussion Group D spent a good deal of their time focused on
the illustrations featured in Were the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963). Where most
other groups transitioned fiom discussion topic to discussion topic based on responses to
their roles, Group D’s members brought up their assigned role responses within the
context of a larger discussion about Maurice Sendak’s illustrations. Erin, the artistic
respondent began the discussion about her creation by linking her comments to those
another group member had just made. Lari, who had researched the history of the
making of the book as a part of her role as the intertextual respondent, spoke about how

Sendak (the author/illustrator) had first planned to feature horses in the story.

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Dissatisfied with his drawings of horses, Lari shared, Sendak changed the illustrations of
horses to illustrations of strange-looking monsters. Erin followed up on this comment by
saying, “I think it’s funny you mentioned the drawings cause, um, in the artistic response,
I used a couple quotes about them” (2/8/05).

What Was Created In Response To This Book: Examining Artistic Response Artifacts

The art object.

For her artistic response Erin created a group activity. As an example of the art
objects to be created through of the group activity Erin included a black and white
drawing of a monster (see Figure 5.1), similar to those seen in Where the Wild Things Are
(Sendak, 1963), with an handwritten descriptive quote at the bottom of the page. In
both her written response and her oral comments to her group, Erin expressed she was
impressed with the adjectives used to described the monsters in the story. As a result, she
decided to read some pieces she had previously selected from the book (including,
“yellow eyes” and “The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible
teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws...” (Sendak, 1963))
and then have each person use those descriptions to draw their own version of the
monster. After they had finished drawing their pictures, Erin planned to have the
participants compare what they had drawn and discuss differences and similarities based

on the descriptive terms and illustrations featured in the book.

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(yellow u The wild Win 3
roareA eirlrrrilok Foagomd.
hogtied «their qu (Ti tale. “bee-9n an d
rated heir Jae rrt ble €136 orb
S‘nméhuur £9.ch OWNS--

F 'gi_1re 5.1: Erin’s artistic response featuring a drawing of a monster
created in response to the accompanying quotes from Where the Wild
Things Are (Sendak, 1963).

The written rationale.

In the rationale she wrote about her artistic response Erin described her response

as an activity she had created for “students,” but she did not specify which students she

meant. She wrote, “. . .I realized that any student could be given these descriptions and

come up with relatively different monsters” (Erin, 2/8/05). Erin went on to note that,

even though the monsters in the book were described the same way, they all looked quite

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different. This realization, she specified, is what led her to decide to focus on adjectives
in her artistic response: “The most common adjective used was terrible and I was
interested to see how each person would draw the word terrible.”

Erin also indicated in her written rationale that her artistic response would be
most effective if, “. . .no one has read this book and therefore are not already biased to
what the monsters look like” (Erin, 2/8/05). Her focus seemed to not only be on having
students recognize what adjectives and descriptive phrases are, but also on getting them
to talk about adjectives by holding, . .a small discussion. . .about why people used
certain colors or textures or features and why they thought each person had different or
similar characteristics as the book” (Erin, 2/8/05).

Teacher response to the written rationale — then.

When writing in response to Erin’s rationale and adjective activity, I first noted
that I appreciated the way she intended to have students think carefully about the
language in the book, but I also immediately expressed my concern that she had forgotten
the core reason for the artistic response assignment, which was, “to promote
understanding and conversation about the text as a piece of literature” (Knezek, 2/15/05).
Instead of focusing on how adjectives contributed to an increased understanding of
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), my impression was that what Erin described
in her written rationale sounded, “. . .more like a study of adjectives. . .than it does a study
of the book itself” Knezek (2/15/05). What she had written made it sound like Erin
intended to use the text as a tool to teach adjectives. This contradicted the role response
assignment (see Appendix B), which specified that an artistic response to the book must

have the text at its center.

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Because I was concerned about the focus of Erin’s assignment, I responded to her
by writing some ideas about how she might change that focus to one that was more
literature-centered:

We know the monsters are key in the story, and I think you are beginning to ask

people to think about how we notice that. Talk more about. . “why the monsters

are important. This will lead to a greater understanding of the text - or may

present a new perspective. (Knezek, 2/22/05)

While Erin had created something that her discussion group and/or future students could
do in response to Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), her efforts seemed too
loosely tied to the book.

Teacher response to the written rationale - now.

Looking back at Erin’s response with the benefit of time, I now believe that there
was more to her piece than I gave her credit for. While I focused entirely on what I
perceived to be her desire to “teach” adjectives, I missed that she had noted the word
“terrible” was of particular importance to the text. She wanted to see the ways her group
members envisioned the word “terrible” and then compare what they had created to what
was featured in the text. I might still have considered this effort to get group members to
“visualize” an important term as a “lesson in adjectives” if Erin had simply stopped after
asking group members to illustrate the word. However, I later recognized that she went a
step farther when she asked group members to connect her artistic response back to the

text in a way that I missed the first time I analyzed this response.

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What Happened During This Discussion?: Examininfiroup Reactions to Artistic
Response

Considering the teacher candidates’ ideas.

As mentioned earlier, Erin brought her artistic response to the attention of her
group members by following up on comments Lari had made. Erin noticed that Lari was
focused on Sendak’s illustrations, and those same illustrations had been what had
prompted Erin to think about how Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) could be
used to teach and discuss adjectives. As she began to talk about her artistic piece and
how it connected to Lari’s remarks, Erin seemed unsure about whether she should get her
discussion group members to do the activity she had planned or just tell them about it.

Erin: I think it’s funny you mentioned the drawings cause, um, in the artistic

response, I used a couple quotes about them, “They roared their terrible roars and

gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible
claws.” And so I thought it would be interesting, I don’t really know how much
time we’ve got, but I like got, some, for like you guys to do it, but like, to have
the quote on a piece of paper and then everyone draw their own monster and
ideally you wouldn’t have seen these monsters, but they’d all be different,
because terrible, is kind of an interesting adjective anyway and I liked how all of
his monsters were different but they were sort of the same because they did the
same stuff and it’s just funny that [like. ..

Lari: [Right. ..

Erin: ...he was bad at drawing horses and so he drew, he drew [these...

Lari: [I know...

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As Erin continued to talk she moved away from attempting to get her group members to
participate in her adjective activity and toward describing how she envisioned the activity
would work with a class of students.
Erin: And I also put like yellow eyes, so I don’t know. It would be firn to do
with a class cause they’d all have like yellow eyes [and
Lari: [. . .so many different things. . ..especially if you like read it to them and
didn’t show them.
Erin: I would probably not even read it to them first. I’d probably just give them
that line, the line, and on the page would be that line for them and whatever and
have them draw it and then compare it to the book and compare it to all the other
kids and why they chose, like this as being terrible, you know, why did you think
that this represented terrible, eyes or something, you know? I just thought it was
interesting because everyone would draw terrible in a different way.
As Erin finished speaking about her desire to see the word “terrible” expressed in
different ways, Lari once again entered the conversation and agreed that it would be
interesting to see the different depictions of the word “terrible.” The majority of her
commentary, however, centered on the research she had done on Sendak for her
intertextual response, and she switched from discussing Erin’s response and adjectives to
speaking about the consistency she had seen in Sendak’s illustrations in the various texts
she had examined. After her remarks, there were about four seconds of silence before
Kris asked Sara what she had done for her critical response. There was no further

discussion of Erin’s artistic response after this.

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Considering the ways the teafcher candidates engaged in the process of dialogue.

As Group D discussed Erin’s artistic response (as detailed above), two people,
Erin and Lari, carried the conversation. Interestingly, Erin initiated the conversation
around her response based on what Lari had been talking about. While she never really
invited her group members to participate in the activity she had planned for her response,
Lari interacted with her as she described what she envisioned.

While both Erin and Lari found enough common ground to connect some of their
comments, neither ever seemed to lose focus on her own area of interest as the discussion
moved ahead. Because Erin’s description of her response came out of a link she made to
Lari’s comments, there was a base in place for a rich, detailed building of information
and understanding. That did not seem to happen. Instead, Erin kept coming back to her
focus on the topic of visualizing a descriptive word and Lari continued to speak about
Sendak’s illustrations. They were participating in parallel strands of discourse with some
common elements. For example, Erin talked about the different ways to express the word
“terrible” and Lari connected to the term different as she moved the conversation to a
focus on the consistency of Sendak’s artwork across dijferent titles. Erin had reiterated
that she, “just thought it was interesting because everyone would draw terrible in a
different way,” but none of her group members attempted to actually try her activity. In
the end, her artistic response faded into the background. Because of her interaction with
Erin around the artistic response, however, Lari provided her group with information on
how and why Sendak created the illustrations for Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak,

1963), along with some details about how his artwork was consistently recognizable in

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the books she had investigated. Thus there were two central topics discussed when
artistic response was covered in Group D: visualizing and Sendak’s art.
The Large Group Discussion

After the small groups had discussed Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) I
gathered everyone in class back together and asked them to share how the discussions
had gone. I specifically asked for comments about the artistic responses in relation to
how things went, but no one volunteered to speak about them. In fact, the transcript of
this debriefing session featured a comment I made about how my request to see and hear
about the artistic responses in the large group setting had made one teacher candidate
look “horrified.” Instead, the large group discussion centered on the importance of the
role of facilitator in the groups. After class ended I wrote in my journal that I was
disappointed no one had chosen to share their artistic responses, but that I understood
why, for many of the teacher candidates, sharing their art felt much riskier than sharing
their verbal comments. Most were not used to creating art for a college class and I felt
they were nervous about showing others what they had created. I decided not to push
them to do so because they were still new to the classroom environment and the people it
contained. I wrote, “I think they will be willing to share their artistic responses once they
begin to trust each other a bit more — after all, this was their first time discussing books in
this way” (2/8/05).

Returning the Responses

Two weeks after the teacher candidates turned in their initial response to Where

the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) I returned their written papers and shared some of

what I had noted they had done successfully and unsuccessfully across all response roles.

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I spoke to them about things that I had read that struck me as being exceptionally
insightful and well done, and I spoke to them about difficulties I had come across for
each type of response. I did this by reading anonymous examples from work done in
class (only after asking for the teacher candidates’ permission to share what they
produced) and the comments I had made in response to those examples.

When it came to artistic response I focused on several different topics in order to
help both the preservice teachers and me clarify the elements of that role. In the
beginning of that discussion I noted how a couple of students had mentioned the art of the
book early in their papers. I explained that this had made me nervous because, “. . .that’s
not what the artistic response person is supposed to do -- she’s supposed to create
something — not analyze the art in the book” (2/22/05).

I continued on to explain that a high quality artistic response paper I had read
contained not only a description of the art object that had been created (not the art in the
book), but also a detailed reflection on why the object had been created in that way. The
author of that paper, Claire, was a member of Group B, so her work was not profiled in
this chapter. However, elements found in her paper helped me outline how one artistic
respondent had both described her creation and explained why she chose to form it as she
did: “The forest is central to Max’s adventure, so (leaving any in-depth discussions of the
forest primeval to another paper) I decided to structure my project in the shape of a tree”
(Claire, 2/8/05).

Along with praising Claire’s explanation for why she formed her artistic response

in the way she did, I also noted the attention Claire paid to the story itself. I stated,

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She’s not talking about trying to teach cause and effect, she’s not trying to teach
about what. ...language you might use. . .to write about monsters yourself. She’s
talking about the book, and how she responded to the book, and she keeps coming
back to key things in the book -- the energy, the sense of imagination, what was

central in this forest connection. (Knezek, 2/22/05)

One final area of concern I mentioned on the day I returned papers was the
teacher candidates’ goals for the artistic responses. I explained that some of the
responses I had received had basically attempted to retell the story verbatim, used the text
as a tool to teach about something that really had nothing to do with comprehension of
the text, or focused almost solely on students having fun as a result of the artistic
response to the text. I explained that, while I appreciated the effort each person had put
into their creations, “The thing that I would remind you of over and over again is that the
point of this particular type of response is to promote deeper understanding of the text, to
get new perspectives on the text. Those are the things that are really central to artistic
response” (Knezek, 2/22/05). While this was not necessarily a bad description, it
repeated the same things I had said when I first introduced the concept of artistic
response, proving that I kept reverting to the same ways of talking about it. I did not
know what else to say and, at that time, could give no further insight into what artistic
response really was.

Looking Bacfik

The telling case begun here offers a good illustration of the findings that emerged

from the data gathered for this study. As I coded my data I noticed several common

factors I was able to highlight. First, the students were often unsure about who was

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supposed to “do” the artistic response if it was designed for a group. Erin had created an
activity in which she planned on having her group members illustrate their visualizations
of important words from Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), but, when she
interacted with her group, she did not ask the participants to engage in the activity.
Instead she described how she thought the activity could be done, and, as a result, her
group members had no real concrete experiences with her artistic response.

Second, artistic response can be confused with responding to or reproducing the
art in the book (e.g., the illustrations). Lari’s comments about the illustrations in
Sendak’s book gave Erin the chance to talk about her artistic response, but there was
never any clear division made between the topics. It was as if Lari and Erin thought that,
if they were talking about the art of the book or if they reproduced the art in that book,
those responses constituted with artistic response.

Third, the initial discussions that many group members had about artistic response
never really evolved into full discussions. Instead, like Erin and Lari, most of the teacher
candidates “reported” on what they had done as an artistic response and their group
members responded with evaluative comments like, “That’s great!” Once the artistic
response person had presented his or her role the conversation moved on to other topics.

Fourth, the conversation about artistic response was rarely integrated with the
other responses group members discussed. In the case involving Erin and Lari, Lari kept
speaking about her intertextual role response the entire time Erin was talking about her
artistic response. While Erin made some connecting comments to Lari’s discussion of
the text’s illustrations, she mostly summarized what she, Erin, had done. As was true in

most of the discussions, there was no real sense of how to close the artistic response

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portion of the dialogue; instead the comments of the artistic response person just faded
away and were unlikely to resurface.

Clearly, the teacher candidates and I were wrestling with the concept of artistic
response as the semester began and multiple factors contributed to that struggle. Most
prominent were our confusions about the characteristics of artistic response and the ways
in which we were supposed to talk about it. In the next chapter I will continue to follow
what happened with Lari and some of the other members of Group D as the semester
progressed. In doing so I will describe how preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic
response developed as time passed and they interacted with each other and with me in the

social context of a classroom.

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CHAPTER SIX
Artistic Response As Process
Introduction

Early on a Sunday afternoon, two days before the teacher candidates in TE 348
were scheduled to hold their first discussions, I received a panicked phone call from Lari,
a member of Group D. Lari was upset because she thought she was supposed to create an
artistic response for Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), and while she and I
quickly established that she was actually responsible for producing a textual response to
the book, Lari was still eager to talk about her confusions surrounding the artistic
response role. According to the notes I took on that day, Lari stated, “I don’t get what I
am supposed to do for artistic response. I know I’m supposed to create something, but
I’m not good at art...” (2/6/05).

Lari’s phone call captured the main problem many other preservice teachers first
expressed when introduced to the concept of artistic response. Her willingness to talk
through her concerns, however, was not common, and was, therefore, one of the qualities
that made her the central figure in this dissertation. Her verbal contributions to the first
large group discussion about the different forms of literary response, along with her
comments concerning the artistic response to Where the Wild Things Are (shared in her
discussion group -- Group D), were included in Chapters Four and Five. It is in Chapter
Six, however, that I will begin to look more closely at Lari’s development within the
context of her discussion group as an example of how one TB 348 preservice teacher

came to understand artistic response.

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Goals of Chapter

The goal of this chapter is to continue the development of one telling case
introduced in Chapter Five — primarily featuring Lari and members of Group D — in order
to describe how artistic responses to literature can move beyond the surface level types of
responses detailed in that chapter. Those responses, which included an art object that
attempted to represent the story or use it as a teaching tool, did not meet the course-
described expectations for a response that “promotes understanding and
conversation. . .more thoughtful and text-centered than a simple craft or activity that is
loosely tied to the book. . .(Appendix B, p. 227). In this chapter, therefore, I will begin to
explore whether or not one of this group’s responses created later in the semester was
more thoughtful and text-centered than the one detailed in Chapter Five. I will do so by
telling the story of what happened with artistic response when Lari shared her artistic
response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) with the other members of her discussion
group (Group D). Voices in the Park features four short first-person narratives, with
each of the characters recounting a concurrent outing to the same park from a different
perspective. In it a haughty, upper-class mother visits the park with Charles, her bored
and lonely son. An unemployed, melancholy father visits the park with Smudge, his
independent and outgoing daughter. The illustrations, which tell the tale in far greater
detail than the text, feature many hidden images and relevant symbols. Through this
account of Lari’s interactions with her group members about her artistic response to
Voices in the Park, and the descriptions it provides, I will continue to address the

following dissertation questions:

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o Are there patterns to the characteristics/elements of oral or written language
used by students when describing artistic response that I, as the TE 348
instructor, and the teacher candidates in some way (written acknowledgement,
oral reinforcement, extension, etc.) recognize as comprising genuine artistic
response — one that leads to deeper understanding/new perspectives?

o What roles did the teacher candidates and I play in facilitating the

development of this deeper/new understanding?

As in Chapter Five, I will relate the characteristics of artistic response that emerge
from the oral and written discourse produced by Lari and her group members. I will also
continue to foreground the ways that preservice teachers engage with artistic response.
This telling case includes data from my field notes, Lari’s written work, my written
response to that work, and the transcribed dialogue from Group D’s discussion
concerning Lari’s artistic response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998).

“It’s a deeper kind of thinkingl”: The Struggle Continues

In the previous discussion Lari and members of Group D had had about Where the
Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), Lari proved to be an active discussant. She was the
group member who engaged most readily with Erin in a conversation about Erin’s artistic
response. In fact, comments Lari made about the illustrations in Sendak’s book provided
Erin with a way to introduce her response. Throughout their exchange, however, Lari
never seemed to truly invest in Erin’s idea. Instead, she kept coming back to the
information she had found out about Sendak’s illustrations. Indeed, as she continued to
return to that information, Erin seemed to give up attempting to interest her in visualizing

terms associated with Sendak’s monsters. I found this interesting, especially when

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considering how concerned Lari had been with artistic response prior to class being held.
When Lari called me on the Sunday before the groups discussed Were the Wild Things
Are (Sendak, 1963), she admitted her confusion about artistic response and went on to
ask, “Why couldn’t I just ask my group members to do something like draw pictures of
monsters they might have imagined as children?” Even though it turned out she was
actually responsible for the textual response to this book, I spoke with her for about thirty
minutes, beginning with a question about how she thought asking her peers to reflect on
their own childhood experiences in that way would help them to better understand or
discuss the book. I did not want to discourage her, but I also wanted to hear evidence that
she had considered the kind of thinking and discussion her artistic response would inspire
in connection to the book. When she had no ready response to my question, I encouraged
her to reflect upon what it was she was trying to accomplish with such an artistic
response. We ended the conversation at that point, but I could tell she was still not at all
sure about what artistic response was and she was frustrated by that fact. I, too, felt
frustrated and spent the afternoon thinking and writing about the exchange and possible
ways in which I might be able to more clearly express my own expectations for artistic
response. About three hours later my phone rang again. Lari was on the other end of the
line. “I get it now, Suzy, I get it! It’s a deeper kind of thinking! I just had to call and tell
you. I get it. It’s a deeper kind of thinking about the book...” Even though her
comments were very like my own, I was thrilled with Lari’s definition of artistic response
as “a deeper kind of thinking about the book. . .” and was truly excited to see what she
would produce when she created something in response to Voices in the Park (Browne,

1998).

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What Was Created in Response to this Book: Examining Artistic Response Artifacts
The art object.

The art object Lari created in response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) was
a picture book. She took “the words out of the text...” and created her own story,
“. . . Voices from Each Season... ,” a new version of the text that, she wrote, told, “. . .a
story of four different seasons, and four different attitudes” (Lari, 2/27/05). The book
was made out of five pieces of white cardska that were bound together by three red
ribbons. Each page, including the cover, featured a copy of an illustration from Browne’s
book. The title, Voices from Each Season, was featured on the cover of the book along
with an illustration of a flower in a mug (see Figure 3). Each of the following pages
featured the name of one of each of the four seasons handwritten across the top of the

page in large black letters. Under the name of the season Lari placed an illustration

copied directly from Browne’s book (see Figure 6.1.).

 

Figure 6.1: Lari’s artistic response, a picture book with illustrations copied from
Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998).

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The written rationale.

Lari began her written rationale for her artistic response by relating her conviction
that Anthony Browne’s illustrations were, “. . .deep, insightful and emotional...” (Lari,
2/27/05). She wrote that the illustrations worked to support the text in such substantial
ways that she began to wonder what would happen if the text had no words. She was
curious about what kind of story would be told if the words were removed. As a result,
Lari decided to,

....take the words out of the text and create my own story, Voices from Each

Season. This new version of the text tells a story of four different seasons, and

four different attitudes. Each character brings life to a different season. (2/27/05)

Lari continued to describe her reasoning for creating her artistic response in her
written rationale. She described how the original story described the attitude of the
characters with words in the text.

For instance in the first voice, an elderly mother character states, “I let Victoria

off her leash.” She goes on, “Immediately some scruffy mongrel appeared and

started to bother her. I shooed it off, but the terrible thing chased her all over the
par ” (Browne, 1998). In this quote, the mother, who you would think would be

a warm character, like the colors of the fall, adds bitterness to the temperature

with her cold words towards the other animal. If you take the words away from

the illustrations there is still the sense of a chilly fall. (2/27/05)

Lari continued on to describe how illustrations of each season highlighted the
personalities of each of the main characters and how, by removing the words, her version

of Browne’s story, “still unveiled itself with each turning page.” She stated that she

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found it fascinating that the book told a similar story with or without words and went on
to describe why she chose each of the images she placed in her book. By closely
examining those images alone, Lari argued, she could clearly see that,
Anthony Browne describes the voice of each character with different colors and
images. Each character has its own attitude, each voice in this book fits its own
season...The color used in each voice portrays a clear image of what season
depicts each character’s attitude, with or without words. (2/27/05)
Instructor response to the written rationale - then.
Lari stayed after class on the day her group discussed Voices in the Park.
Because of our earlier conversations about the nature of artistic response, I was excited to
talk with her about how things had gone. My excitement quickly abated when I saw the
drawn look on her usually animated face. My field notes recorded what we talked about
in the short conversation we had on that day. I wrote,
Lari said she still doesn’t get artistic response. She thought she did, but she
couldn’t think of what to do. She couldn’t stay and talk about it, but warned me
that I would ‘understand’ when I read her rationale. I wonder what went wrong.
Was there a problem with the response itself? Did her group members not
engage? She had been so excited and really seemed to understand what artistic
response was all about when she said it was “a deeper kind of thinking.” (Knezek,
3/1/05)
After reading through Lari’s written rationale for her response, I had some insight

into what I thought must have troubled her. In my comments to her I wrote,

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I see what you are saying about the “story” being told without words, but I am a
bit puzzled about why this is so important. I see how you connected seasons,
characters, and voices, but I am not certain how you would talk about this
response in a way that would add greater understanding of, or a new perspective

on, the text. Am I missing something? (Knezek, 3/22/05)

Lari’s rationale focused very heavily on how the illustrations in Browne’s text fully
complemented the words. She saw this as an exceptional quality and wanted to draw
attention to what she had noticed. Nevertheless, despite the considerable effort she put
into thinking about what she wanted to portray, selecting particularly relevant
illustrations and writing in detail about the process she went through in order to
accomplish this task, Lari’s response and rationale failed to bring her any new insight
into the book. After realizing this, I was deeply curious about what had happened when
she shared her artistic response with the other members of her discussion group.

Instructor response to the written rationale — now.

After reviewing Lari’s response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) with the
benefit of hindsight and data analysis, I still feel that her response does little more than
focus attention on one particular aspect of the book — how its complex illustrations tell
the story in as great, if not greater, detail than the text itself. That, however, is not an
unimportant thing. In order to choose to do this response she had to pick what aspect of
the text she wanted to highlight and by doing so she went beyond just retelling the tale
verbatim. She was saying, “Pay attention to the illustrations. They matter.” Certainly
her effort is “text-centered” in that respect, but it does little to expand understanding or

make meaning with the text.

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What Happened During This Discussion?: Examinig Grog) Reactions to Artistic
Response

Considering the students’ ideas.

Erin, the person who had created an artistic response for Where the Wild Things
Are (Sendak, 1963), was the facilitator for Group D’s discussion of Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998). She began the group’s consideration of this book by asking everyone to
share what they thought about the book and whether they liked it or not. Early in the
discussion, group members began to share insights and all agreed they really enjoyed the
book. When they started to discuss what was especially likable about Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998), most of the teacher candidates in Group D began to talk about the
illustrations in the text and how they found them to be intriguing. Lari soon joined in this
discussion, tying her artistic response to their comments about Browne’s illustrations. I
am quoting this at length below because it clearly shows how artistic response people
tried to find ways to join the conversation about a text and how important their group
members were in supporting and extending the contributions of the artistic response.

Sara: Yeah, I was just going to say, um, I initially read it. . .before we even

started class, when I got my books, and I thought it was really weird. I was like,

okay, but when you go back and read it again, you do find all these hidden things

in the pictures and you really like start to understand the characters. . .I really liked

the book.

Erin: Yeah. I thought it was exciting. I kept finding stuff and showing my

roommates. I’d be like, “What do you see on this page?” They’d be like, “Oh, let

me find it.” I liked how, um, a whole bunch of stuff is hidden. . .I just kind of

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went through and, uh, noticed certain characteristics of each voice, and, uh, one of
the things that I was wondering was, if you look through the pictures, uh /// (Erin
turns pages in the book) this one, like, second to last one, this one and then, um,
///.. . .It’s the exact same picture except completely different, because one is
through Smudge’s point of view and one is through the mom. And I was just kind
of wondering what you guys thought about what that said about each different
character, like the fact that they’re so different.
Lari: Actually, that’s what my artistic response was about, is about, um, how
each character depicts. . ..What the season’s like in their voice. So like the mother
character is supposed to be like a warm mother figure, but she’s kind of chilly
with the words that she uses. The little girl is more like a summer, upbeat, she
looks on the brighter side of life. The father’s. ...depressed, he shows signs of
winter, and, so, that’s actually what my artistic response was.
Notable here is the fact that Lari was not the only one who had focused on the
illustrations in the book and on the notion that those illustrations were connected to the
portrayal of each character’s voice. Erin encouraged Lari to say more about this by
inviting her to share her creation.
Erin: Well, why don’t you go ahead and share with us what you did.
Lari: Um, I created a book called, Voices from Each Season and I color-copied
all the pictures. And what I did was I just created each voice, it has a different
season, so, the mother was fall, because all the pictures that relate to her voice,
urn, are in a fall-like sense, and I just cut them out and pasted them on

pages. . ..And I just thought it was interesting how, if you take the words away, it

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still has the same meaning with each picture. Like, as far as the personality of the
character, the illustrations show that, so. . ..I copied each page without the words.
So that’s pretty much what it is./// It’s just how it’s a pretty similar story and how
the. . .illustrations relate to the particular character in which that point-of—view and
that perspective is taken from. So.
Lari’s verbal description of her artistic response was followed by about eight seconds of
silence. This made it seem, initially, like no one had anything to say in response to Lari’s
picture book and her rationale for creating it, but then her fellow group member, Kris,
followed up on Lari’s artistic response by connecting it to her textual response.
Kris: I had hit on that too with my textual response. I kind of got caught up in
the pictures ‘cause it’s really hard to ignore that, but, um, I also noticed, which
I’m sure you guys all did too, the different fonts that go through the different
voices. . ..And that really tells a lot, about, um, the characters. What I did in my
paper, is I actually tried to find a font that matched up with the different voices,
and I talked about how some of them are bold, which, you know, like, um, I think
the father and Smudge are both [very bold. ..
Sara: [Uh-huh. ..
At this point the group’s discussion veered away from Lari’s artistic response as Sara
began to share her intertextual response and what she had found out about Anthony
Browne. They spoke for a while about a particular illustration in the book which showed
a gorilla falling off of a building and how that may symbolize Browne’s father’s death,
but no one had any specific information about whether or not this interpretation was

correct. They then went on to talk about possible racial and socioeconomic issues

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highlighted by the book in connection with the critical response. This led to other
conversations about interpretations and what research they had found on the author and
the book. Near the end of this discussion, and after a lengthy silence, Erin redirected the
group back to the topic of illustrations and the portrayals of voice.
Erin: Well, is there anything else anyone wants to add, I mean?/////You all got
the overall feel of everyone’s voice and what the pictures meant?
Erin’s last question was followed by another three seconds of silence. Then Kris
reentered the discussion by noting that the theme might have had something to do with
equality, and that, while readers might have initially gotten the idea that all the characters
in the book were equal, they also had to notice how the mother doesn’t learn anything
over the course of the story. She stated that the mother was consistently played as a
domineering individual, so she appreciated the way Lari’s artistic response portrayed the
hard nature of the mother’s persona through the diamonds included in the comers of the
page which featured an illustration of the mother. Lari agreed that this move had been
purposeful, though not necessarily in the way that Kris had interpreted it.
Lari: Thanks. I tried to do that. I had snowflakes and I had the little suns, but I
didn’t have any leaves, so I just had to use just the diamonds in the spring and
fall. That’s my way of like, you know, doin’ the Anthony Browne
thing. . ..throwin’ something in there that’s not expected, but that illustrates the
character.
There were about ten seconds of silence that followed Lari’s comment, but this time she

did not let conversation about artistic response fade away. Instead of speaking about the

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object she had created, or her rationale for that object, Lari instead began to talk about the
difficulties she had had with the process of developing the response.

Lari: I really had a hard time with the artistic response, it’s [like. ..

Erin: [I think] it’s, // I had it last time and I think it was really [hard

Lari: [. . .It was] difficult for me, I just////I spent a lot of time on that project and,

in fact, I expected it to turn out totally different and when I got done, with the

amount of money that I spent in color copies and all that work I put into cutting

each page, and like, I just wanted to cry, cause it did not turn out the way I

expected. You know what I mean? Just, I don’t know. After I did my analysis of

it and, I don’t know. It just wasn’t the impact I was going for. I wanted it to

touch a little deeper, and I go into that somewhat in my writing, but I guess -- I

don’t know. It was kind of frustrating. My fiancée’s like, “It’s great.” I’m like,

“It sucks! What are you talking about?”

Kris: That’s how most of my art projects turn out.

Kris’ final comment in this section of dialogue was an important one. From what
she said here it can be reasoned that she equated artistic response with an “art project.”
While it is not clear from this data exactly what she thought an “art project” was, it
clearly had laughable and negative connotations for her and for many members of her
discussion group. Kris’ comment about how “all” of her “art projects” turned out the
way that Lari’s artistic response did provided evidence that there was still confusion
about what artistic response was supposed to be and that prior experience likely played a

role in determining the fearful way teacher candidates approached artistic response.

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After Kris’ comment the whole group burst into laughter, my voice was heard
announcing that I wanted everyone to finish up their discussions, and the tape recorder
was turned off. Before the end of the session, however, Lari had gotten a chance to begin
describing her frustrations with artistic response. Most importantly, she had expressed
her concern that her response did not have the impact she had hoped for -- that it hadn’t
been as deep as she had wanted.

Considering the ways the students engaged in the process of dialogue.

In Group D’s first small group discussion only Erin and Lari were active
participants in the conversation about artistic response. In this second discussion,
however, all group members (minus comments from the group member who chose not to
participate in this study) contributed remarks that connected in some way to Lari’s
response. Erin’s original open-ended question about her peers’ impressions of the book
led to a discussion of the illustrations and to Sara’s comments about how they helped her
“understand the characters.” This created a perfect opening for Lari to express how her
picture book focused on that very topic. Lari’s comments then allowed Kris to bring in
one aspect of the textual response and the fact that it had also caused her to focus on
differences between the characters’ voices. Lari did not expand upon this topic, however,
and, when Sara moved the conversation away from the artistic response and on to what
she had found out about Anthony Browne, neither Lari nor any of the other small group
participants protested. It was the facilitator of the group, Erin, who later brought the
group’s attention back to characterization and illustrations when she asked if all of them

had gotten the, “overall feel of everyone’s voice, and what the pictures meant?”

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Erin’s question prompted Kris to discuss how the artistic response had reinforced
the notion that her initial impressions of the characters had been wrong. At first, Kris
noted, she thought Browne was trying to show that all the characters were equals, but she
realized that her own assessment of the dominant nature of the mother’s character
contradicted that notion of equality. Then Lari’s artistic response reinforced her new
notion that the mother was consistently hard throughout the book and that she thought
herself above the others.

Through her comments about Lari’s book and its representation of the mother in
Voices in the Park, Kris emphasized an aspect of the book that Lari had not discussed in
either her written response or her oral comments concerning the response. By connecting
to this previously unnoticed aspect of Lari’s artistic response, Kris did two things: she
created a space for Lari to expand upon her comments and, in effect, she forced Lari and
her response back to center stage in the discussion. While Kris’ interpretation of the
diamond cutouts (they represented the consistently hard nature of the mother portrayed in
the book) proved to be different than Lari’s reasons for including them (she wanted to
represent the season but had no leaf-shaped cutting tool), this exchange removes doubt
that artistic responses can inspire detailed and insightful discussions. In this case,
however, comments about the art object caused Lari to reflect on the difficulty she had
moving through the process of creating an artistic response. While Lari’s thoughts did
not prompt talk about new perspectives or deeper meanings in the text, they did allow for
insight into the way Lari viewed artistic response and what she thought about as she tried
to create something that fulfilled that vision. It was unfortunate that the tape and

discussion session ended so soon after Lari had begun to discuss these topics.

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Looking Back

 

By continuing the telling case begun in Chapter Five I have been able to illustrate
how the findings that emerged from the data gathered for this study showed a
developmental progression in how some preservice teachers came to understand artistic
response. In Chapter Five I highlighted some of the characteristics of artistic response
and the ways that preservice teachers (along with their instructor) initially engaged with
artistic response. In this chapter I begin to show how those characteristics and kinds of
engagement evolved as the teacher candidates and I continued to interact with and around
artistic response and each other.

As with Chapter Five there are several common factors identified in the coding of
my data that I was able to feature here. First, once the students began to comprehend that
their artistic responses were supposed to do more than simply represent the story, they
attempted to find ways to show “deeper meaning” or “new perspectives” concerning the
text. Still unclear about what those terms really meant in connection with artistic
response, they were more reflective but still confused about what the end product of an
artistic response should be. Lari spoke on several different occasions about how she
wanted her artistic response to reflect a “deeper kind of thinking.” When she attempted
to create something that showed that kind of thinking, however, she seemed to lose focus
on what she thought was important about the text. She got across the idea that she
thought illustrations were vital, but she couldn’t communicate why that was such a
critical point for her to make.

Second, as the preservice teachers began to think more carefully about the reasons

why they were creating their responses, they became more focused on the process of

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creating the artistic response than they were on the art object itself. Lari spoke in detail
about the challenges she had faced as she gathered materials and purposely set forth to
create a wordless variant of Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998). While her creation fell
short of her goal, it is important to note that she had a goal and could inform others about
how she had attempted to meet it through the making of her artistic response.

Third, other group members played important roles in initiating and maintaining
engagement with artistic response throughout the course of a group discussion.
Interestingly, it was Erin, the person who had been responsible for artistic response for
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), who invited Lari to share her artistic
response for Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998). Later, Erin, by making a comment
about how she had found artistic response difficult, enabled Lari to talk about her
struggles with artistic response and why she was dissatisfied with her art object. It was
Kris, however, who played the biggest role in keeping engagement with artistic response
alive. By commenting that she had appreciated the way Lari’s artistic response portrayed
the mother in the book, Kris invited Lari back into the discussion. Lari then remained in
the conversation, speaking about the artistic response role until the time allocated ran out.

Looking Across: From Discussion One to Discussion Two

In both Chapters Five and Six 1 have carefully delineated the patterns of
characteristics and engagement found in the oral or written language used the by teacher
candidates and myself when we described or reacted to artistic responses. Through
considering these patterns I hoped to determine if there were ways that both the students
and I (through written acknowledgement, oral reinforcement, extensions, and

connections) would recognize “genuine” artistic responses. This step of noting how and

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when artistic responses are considered genuine and recognizable is a vital one in
answering the research question guiding this study (How do preservice teachers come to
understand artistic response and what factors influence their understanding?)

In Chapter Five, Erin’s artistic response was originally intended to get group
members (or her future students) to visualize key words in Where the Wild Things Are
(Sendak, 1963). While she did not get members engaged, perhaps because of her
confusion about how to accomplish that engagement, it was clear that her original intent
was to require hands-on participation from group members. She wanted her peers to
draw and visualize in order to fully experience her artistic response. In contrast, Lari’s
picture book, representing the four seasons and four characters found in Voices in the
Park (Browne, 1998), did not require any active physical participation from group
members — beyond the turning of pages -- but she definitely wanted them to engage with
her verbally. She wanted her response to have an “impact.”

Chapter Five indicated Erin received little commentary fi'om her group members
when she introduced her artistic response to Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963).
Lari was virtually the only person who spoke with Erin about her visualization activity
and only seemed to do so in an effort to continue to speak about the illustrations in the
book, effectively ending Erin’s efforts. Meanwhile, in this chapter Lari began the
discussion on her artistic response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) in much the
same way Erin had. She connected her comments to those made by group members Sara
and Erin and spent time talking about how she found the illustrations to be descriptive of
every voice in the book. Kris built upon Lari’s comments by noting that the text did the

same thing through font. Sara then turned the conversation away from the artistic

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response, and it was not until Erin asked about illustrations and voice, and Kris pointed
out ways the artistic response reinforced her interpretation of the text, that Lari reentered
the conversation and said more about the artistic response. At that point, however, she
ceased talking about the object she had created and began to focus more on the process
she went through in creating it and how difficult that process had been. Because time ran
out there is no way to predict what might have been discussed in connection with Lari’s
process-oriented comments.

In Chapter Five there was some evidence that Erin’s artistic response connected
back to the text in ways that would expand or create meaning. While I initially thought
her artistic response had actually moved away from the text in that it used the text as a
tool to teach about adjectives, I later noted that I had overlooked the visualization aspect
of her response. In the current chapter, however, there is evidence that Lari’s response to
Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) accomplished something Erin’s response did not.

Lari selected particular portions of the story to represent to her peers, and she both wrote
and spoke about why she had done so. While her response fell short of her expectations,
she exhibited a desire to do more and understand more.

This chapter began with Lari’s phone call and followed her as she moved through
the difficulties she had clarifying what artistic response was and what she needed to do to
produce one. Her distress at her response’s failure to meet her expectations was palpable,
and it was not a failure she alone experienced. While some preservice teachers had, like
Lari, come to the conclusion that they needed to reflect carefully on how and why they
were creating art in response to literature, few had found ways to make their new

understandings public. The students and I were still working our way toward something

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more concrete, more universally clear. In the next chapter I will follow what happened
with artistic response as Lari and the members of Group D discussed their first novel. In
doing so I will continue to describe how preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic

response was developing over time.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
Artistic Response as Social Experience
Introduction
Before she attempted to create an artistic response Lari had told me she
understood that type of response as a “deeper kind of thinking.” This statement fit well
with my own notion of what the objectives for artistic response should be: to promote a
new perspective on the text or to further a deeper understanding of the text. One notable
difference in how we were speaking of this response type was that Lari defined the
response itself as a deeper kind of thinking. I saw the response as an art object that would
promote discussion and, as a result, an in-depth or new understanding of the text. These
differing definitions once again illustrate how, almost half way through the semester, the
teacher candidates and I were still not thinking of artistic response in the same way. Why
hadn’t I picked up on this confusion and made it visible to the teacher candidates?

When Lari described artistic response as she did, I never asked her to tell me what
she meant by “a deeper kind of thinking.” I never asked her how she would know when
she had created a response that represented that kind of thinking. I simply assumed she
got it — whatever “it” was. The formal description of the artistic response role Lari had
received in class (See Appendix B) asked for a thoughtful, text-centered response that
promoted understanding and conversation. In my oral introduction to the response I
noted again and again that I was looking for responses that promoted deeper
understanding of, or new perspectives on, the text. But what did I mean when I said I
wanted to see evidence of a “deeper understanding” or “new perspectives,” and how

would both the teacher candidates and I know either had been achieved? This was a

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fundamental part of my dissertation question, but I still did not ask Lari to clarify what
she thought of as “deeper” thinking. Why? Was it possible that I did not push her to say
more because I still didn’t know how to clearly share my own thinking on the topic?
This was the type of dilemma that led me to believe inquiry into the nature of artistic
response was necessary. After I finished teaching the course and began to analyze the
field notes, transcriptions, art objects, written rationales, and remarks made in response to
those rationales, I knew I needed to find a way to code for evidence of the “deeper
understanding” or “new perspectives” artistic response was supposed to promote. Before
I could do that, however, my dissertation questions made it clear that I should be able to
ascertain factors both the preservice teachers and I identified as being associated with
“real” or “successful” artistic responses.

As I moved through the data associated with the discussions of Where the Wild
Things Are (Sendak, 1963) and Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) and decided which
artistic responses best exemplified the repetitive characteristics and patterns I was seeing,
I began to identify “deeper” understandings as those which went beyond surface-level
retellings and summaries, past using the text to teach topics (including those topics
loosely related to the story), and even further than more advanced summaries or retellings
that explained why it was important to pay attention to specific events in the story. All of
these elements were evident in the data I analyzed and included in this dissertation for the
first two discussions. However, I was definitely looking for something more.

Along with my desire to see “deeper” understandings of the text reflected through
art and the discussion of that art, I repeatedly told the preservice teachers that artistic

responses could also offer “new perspectives” on the books. In planning for the analysis

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of the data I had collected, I assumed it would be easy to recognize when discussants and
respondents were moved to see texts in new ways. I anticipated they would say things
like “I never thought about it that way before,” and I would then code for a new
perspective having been reached. As I searched through the discussion transcriptions of
the first two books, however, there was no evidence of artistic respondents or their group
members reacting in this way. Instead, they either complimented the work or they noted
how the “assigned” responses were similar to their own. They did not claim to have
changed their minds about anything or to have seen things differently.

Therefore, as I proceeded with the description of the third group discussions, I
had already noted how most preservice teachers in TB 348 initially interpreted artistic
response as a way to represent or reproduce the story they read. I had also found in Lari a
teacher candidate who exemplified how, after initial artistic responses were shared, some
preservice teachers moved beyond a notion of basic reproduction and focused more on
what the artistic response, and the process of creating that artistic response, meant to
them in connection with the text. Most importantly, Lari had pointed out that her focus
on product was not enough. She stated that she had analyzed her response and found that
it didn’t “touch deeper” and that it didn’t have the “impact” she had hoped for. When I
had searched for evidence of the deeper thinking and understanding I spoke about in
Chapters Four, Five, and Six, Lari’s comment about impact made me question whether or
not artistic response could be considered successful until it impacted the thinking of
others. Lari had certainly indicated this was the case. She initially felt that she had
command of how artistic response and its associated process could help her think in more

complex ways about a text, but that she had failed in her attempt to inspire this type of

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reaction in her peers. Later, she didn’t seem to realize how much peer interaction had
helped her, either. Lari did not seem to recognize the way that Kris responded so
accurately to her distress by equating artistic response to an “art project.”
Goals of the Chapter

As with Chapter Six, the goal of this chapter is to continue following and
exploring one of the cases introduced in Chapter Five — the Case of Lari (and Group D) —
in order to describe how artistic responses to literature can move beyond surface level
and process-oriented types of responses. This chapter focuses on data gathered in
association with the third book discussed in TE 348, Esperanza Rising, by Pam Munoz
Ryan (2000). In this book, set during the Great Depression, a wealthy young Mexican
girl, Esperanza, loses everything of monetary value upon her father’s death. Esperanza
and her mother, Ramona, are forced to leave their home and accept an invitation to move
with their former servants (Hortensia, Alfonso, and their son, Miguel) to California.
There Esperanza, who grieves for the grandmother (Abuelita) she left behind, struggles to
quell her expectations for privileged treatment as she leams to become a migrant laborer.

I approached data gathered in connection with Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000)
with the same dissertation questions that I had for the previous two discussions. I was
looking for patterns and characteristics that helped to delineate artistic responses that
promoted new or deeper ways of thinking about the book. I was also watching for factors
that influenced those responses, including my own role as a TB 348 instructor. There was
a difference, however, in the way that I thought about the data based on Esperanza
Rising. In a large group discussion of the book, Lari, who was featured in Chapters Four

and Five, and who acted as the artistic respondent of record for Group D in Chapter Six,

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noted that the artistic creation from her group had been special. She asked the
respondent, Sara, to share the poem she had created with the whole class. After Sara did
so, the class burst into spontaneous applause and many people were in tears. Because I
remembered these events and saw them as especially interesting, I hoped that I would see
evidence of deeper or new ways of thinking about Esperanza Rising, and that these
would be reflected in the transcriptions, written rationales and responses to those
rationales, field notes, and art objects associated with the story. Knowing that this hope
might influence what I would see in the data, I approached it with the same set of
questions I had previously coded for, and I verified my findings by having another former
instructor establish an interrater reliability rate of 94% agreement on the coding included
in this study. It was important that I guard against my memories of the Esperanza Rising
discussion interfering with the accurate coding and interpretation of its associated data.
In their written rationales for, and discussions of, Where the Wild Things Are
(Sendak, 1963), in Chapter Five group members represented in this study presented
surface-level responses to the text. In the case presented in Chapter Six, Lari had begun
to work beyond the surface level. In this chapter I explore a response created later in the
semester and discuss whether it was more thoughtful and text-centered than those
detailed in Chapters Five and Six. I recall the incident that happened when Sara, a
member of Group D, shared her artistic response to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) in
both small and large group settings, and I focus specifically on how Lari reacted to Sara’s
response. In doing so, I plan to describe the way one preservice teacher, Lari, came to

understand artistic response within the context of TE 348.

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Deeper Understanding thwh Poetry: The Telling Case Continues

As we approached the time set aside for discussions of Esperanza Rising (Ryan,
2000), Lari had already emerged as a teacher candidate who was deeply engaged with
children’s literature and the concept of artistic response to literature. Because of her
consistent efforts to understand that concept, and because I remembered her role in an
exciting large group reaction to an artistic response, I was eager to see if there was
evidence for how her understanding might have grown and changed as Group D moved
on to discuss Esperanza Rising. During that discussion Lari was the group facilitator and
was in charge of bringing in a personal response to the text. Sara was responsible for the
artistic response to Esperanza Rising in Group D.

What Was Created In Response To This Book: Examining Artistic Response Artifacts

The art object.

As her artistic response to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), Sara created a poem
entitled Esperanza Rises. Inspired by Maya Angelou’s (1978) poem And Still 1 Rise,
Sara’s piece traced the life of Esperanza as she moved from her privileged life to one
filled with challenges. Esperanza Rises was written in the first person so the narrator of
the poem was Esperanza herself. Sara had noted that this was a deviation from the novel
which is voiced by an outside narrator. The first person viewpoint expressed in Sara’s
poem asks readers to see directly from Esperanza’s perspective, whereas the novel allows
them a more distant view. While the arch of her poem followed directly the plot of the
novel, Sara not only retold important events, she also clarified why those events were

significant and noted their impact on Esperanza (see Figure 7.1).

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Esperanza Rises
Inspired 6y Maya flugeibu’s flnfitrff I Rise

(Viewed as a young queen and adored 6y every one who surrounds nty hfi
Living on 151' Rancho (De ht Rpsas, which would one day he mine

I know not of mountains and valllzys with their lows and highs

Carefree, young, and fight-hearted like a 6eautifuf hird in the spring skies, I rise

Wothz'ng could go wrong in these ditys to come

I dream of the day when I can become [21 patron

Life is great and my family is healthy, wealthy and wise
I fee[ [ike a feather in the wind, because ofit I rise

I never thought things couhf have 6een too good to he true untiIQ’apa died
Suddenly my house went up t'njlames as I wondered, why this couldn't he a he
My [zfe is in shamhhzs and all I have are roses, dolls and memories of my father to
cherish

Like air in the atmosphere I rise, and not perish

(You thought my life was over and so did I

Because the person who wants to take my mom ’s hand in mam'age is an uncle I
despise

I wish I cou[d wake up from this nightmare, I wish I could just go hackin time
Nothing couhfhe worse than this so stiiI I rise

On the ride to America I gain a vafuahle [lesson from making a small'girfcry

r[hen I ham to cookandcfearz, mama gets sick and I [ong to hear her laugh and see

her eyes

(By Our Lady 's grace mama comes home, afthough weakher strength is revived

I am lizaming that I too now am a peasant and although I seem hrw, I rise

fihueh'ta reunites with us and 911ng s prophecy seems so right

He and I lay and h'sten with our ear to the earth as day returns from night

fls a kite set those in the sky I allow myself to he taken away and fly

Who woufd have known that hope afone couhf make Esperanza rise
Figure 7.1: Sara’s artistic response, a poem about Esperanza’s life inspired by Maya
Angelou’s (1978) And Still I Rise.

The written rationale.

Sara began the written rationale for her poem by stating that she thought of

Angelou’s poem before she even read Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000). She noticed that

the titles of both works utilized the word rise and so approached Ryan’s novel with the

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prediction that she would see similarities in the themes. Upon reading the novel, she
found reasons to conclude her expectation had been correct.

As I read the book it became more evident to me why this poem was the first

thought that came to mind. The story took me (as the reader) through many

mountains and valleys, just as it did Esperanza. Yet, I still had a feeling that in
the end she and her mom would prevail through all of their hardships. Maya

Angelou’s poem, And Still I Rise, lingered in the back of my mind throughout the

entire book and it was the inspiration for the piece that I wrote for my artistic

response. (Sara, 3/22/05)

Sara did two things in this portion of her rationale that added to the complexity of her
artistic response. She included an intertextual element, connecting the novel to a familiar
poem through common terminology. Because this connection was initially based on
titles and the sense that there would be a happy ending to the novel, it may have seemed a
superficial move, but Sara then went on to see if her predictions about happy endings and
common themes were correct. She wrote, “Due to the suspense that I was kept in by
Ryan, I often had to question if I was I right in thinking that in the end things would be
fine” (Sara, 3/22/05).

As suggested in the description of the art object, Sara’s poem is written in a way
that gives readers insight into the main character’s thoughts. In her written rationale Sara
discussed her reasons for narrating the poem in this way.

I have written it as if I am writing from the perspective of Esperanza through a

narrative poem. The order in which events occur in the story are organized the

same way throughout the poem. I brought in important thoughts, perceptions, and

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feelings in addition to the events in the book. I also decided to weave in my own

interpretations of some of the thoughts. (3/22/05)

Sara’s intent was to highlight Esperanza’s perspective by detailing what she saw as key
elements of the story.

In her description of the process she went through creating her poem Sara also
noted that she had included her own perspective. She went on to say that her choice of
poetry for the creation of the art object had a great deal to do with the fact that it was a
medium that allowed her to include her own explanations and emotions in connection
with the text.

...for my response I could have interpreted my thoughts through pictures, a

collage, a model or many other forms. But, for my artistic response I chose to

write a poem because when I am deeply affected by something, whether good or

bad, the best thing I have found for me to do is to get it out on paper. I am not a

person who can just sit down and write because there has to be much emotion

associated with it in order for it to allow me to become “poetic”. This book
definitely grabbed and held my attention from beginning to end. I laughed, cried,
was relieved, felt pride (for Esperanza) as well as went through her mountains and
valleys with her. In the end I gained a valuable lesson: Do not ever be afraid to

start over. (Sara, 3/22/05)

In this portion of her analysis, Sara once again referenced another form of response. She
wrote about her personal response to the poem — how she reacted to it in emotional ways.
She stated it was her personal connection to Esperanza’s journey, and the feelings that

accompanied that journey, that allowed her to write her poem.

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After reflecting on her strong affective response to the story, and how that
response triggered her choice of medium for her artistic response, Sara wrote about how
the intertextual connections she saw between And Still I Rise and Esperanza Rising did
not end with the titles and happy endings. She included references to specific lines from
Angelou’s poem which inspired the writing of her poem by helping her to connect more
deeply with Esperanza and her story.

“You may trod me in the very dirt but still, like dust, I’ll rise” (Angelou,

1978). This particular quote from Angelou’s poem gives me a sense of how

Esperanza may have felt when her house burnt down or when her mom had

Valley fever. The dirt symbolizes the ashes from her burnt house and its contents

or the dust that settled in her mother’s lungs after a dust storm. The

quote. . .motivated me to write the entire fifth stanza of my poem. The dirty

peasant girl on the train, the dust Esperanza learned to sweep, and the dust that

caused Ramona’s sickness -- all have an association to dirt and dust -- but dust
rises above its circumstances.

Sara went on to describe how, like the narrator of Angelou’s poem, and like the dust in
Ryan’s novel, Esperanza found ways to move through terrible difficulties and then rise
above them. Sara explained that even the most drastic circumstances could not stop
Esperanza from moving forward. In her final written comments, she reflected on how
Angelou’s poem, Ryan’s novel, and her own poem all communicated the same message,
but that they did it in different ways. Her poem, unlike the novel, included intimate, first-
hand perspectives similar to those she saw in Angelou’s poem. Sara wrote that she hoped

by sharing her poem she would provide others with direct access to Esperanza’s thoughts

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and feelings so that they could better understand her determination that “nothing was
going to stop her from flourishing. . .that is the sense that I would like others to gain from
my piece” (Sara, 3/22/05).

Instructor response to the written rationale.

My written remarks to Sara’s poem focused on two things. I noted the way her
response had impacted both me and the other students in class by writing, “Your poem
took my breath away - and it was obvious when you read it aloud in large group that
many others were similarly affected” (Knezek, 3/29/05). While I wasn’t exactly sure
why we had all reacted to Sara’s poem as we did, I did indicate that the way she
incorporated other forms of response into her artistic piece had caught my attention. I
wrote that she had created an art object that contained, “a beautiful combination of
personal and intertextual responses,” but did not include any comments about why I
thought that was important or whether or not I saw inclusion of other forms of response
as indicators of a high quality artistic response. My written comments to Sara were quite
brief and offered mostly praise.

What Happened During The Small Group Discussion?: Examining Group Reactions to
Artistic Response

Considering the students’ ideas.

Lari was the facilitator for Group D during their discussion of Esperanza Rising
(Ryan, 2000). Early in their conversation Lari asked group members how they felt about
Esperanza’s journey over the course of the novel. She stated that she felt Esperanza had
started out as a “spoiled brat,” but that by the end of the story Esperanza had truly

changed (3/22/05). Several group members, including Erin and Sara, responded that they

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perceived Esperanza had changed, too, and they thought there were specific reasons for
those changes. Sara spoke about how Esperanza had strong role models in her mother
and grandmother. She pointed out they were never cruel to others and that they did not at
all shy away from hard work in the ways that Esperanza did. She noted that they were
role models who rose above their change in circumstances. Erin discussed how another
female character, Marta, had pushed Esperanza to do things Esperanza thought she could
not do. Erin felt that Marta, while not a true friend to Esperanza, was an example of how
strong and brave women can be and thus served as another kind of role model for
Esperanza.

As this discussion of Esperanza’s personal journey continued, Lari posed another
question to the group in reference to Sara’s comment about Esperanza’s mother and
grandmother rising above their difficulties. This question provided Sara with an
opportunity to introduce her artistic response to the book, and Sara took that opportunity.

Lari: Um, you had brought up the question about the mother and grandmother, or

you had mentioned something about them rising. . .I was wondering if Esperanza

Rising -- the title -- actually meant Esperanza rising as a person from being a

selfish little girl to being this more mature and understanding, family-oriented

person or if it actually meant rising in her status. . .////

Sara: For [me. ..

Lari: [. . .in society?]

Sara: ...Well, for me,] I wrote a poem for my artistic response and like the first

thing I thought of when I read the um, the title, was, Still I Rise, by Maya

Angelou, so. . .I took that poem and I kind of like, took a verse from that poem and

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wrote my poem. And it takes a lot for me to actually write a poem. I have to be
very upset. I have to be overcome with some sort of emotion to write a poem, so I

thought this book was really good because I wrote a poem about it.

As Sara spoke her voice shook and she ended up laughing. Her group members

responded initially by laughing along with her, but they quickly stopped and they

encouraged her to share her poem, even though they recognized it was emotional in

nature.

Lari: Share it!

Erin: I’d like to hear it.

Sara: [Okay. It might not be that good]

Lari: [If you’re going to cry, I’m going] to [cry.]

Kris: [If you cry, I’m going to cry.]

(This exchange was followed by more laughter.)

Sara: Okay, Esperanza Rises. . ..(Sara continued on to read her entire poem
aloud to her group members.)

Lari: That’s beautiful. That’s awesome...

Erin: [Yeah]

Lari: [. . .That rocks]

(Loud clapping was interspersed among the comments of group members found
above and below.)

Sara: [Thank you.]

Kris: [Can I have a] c0py of it?

Sara: Are you serious?

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Kris: Yeah, no, I am.

(Talking overlapped here and was indiscernible.)

Sara: Sure. I’ll email it to you.

( Talking once again overlaps and was indiscernible. This talking was followed by

laughter.)

Lari: Any other points anyone wants to bring up? No? I have one more question

for you. So if you do, bring them up, if not, then I’ll just ask my question.

After Sara read her poem and her group members responded with praise,
applause, and laughter, the conversation moved away from the poem. When Lari, as
facilitator posed her question about whether or not anyone had other points they wanted
to bring up, Kris responded that she wanted to talk about power, race, and gender in the
book. For the last few minutes of the discussion the group members delved into those
topics and Sara’s voice was not heard again, except when she briefly agreed with a point
Lari made. The conversation ended when Lari said, “Nice job ladies. High fives
everybody!” 'Just before the recorder was turned off the group members could be heard
slapping hands together in high fives and making cheering noises.

Considering the ways the students engaged in the process of dialogue.

As facilitator, Lari played a key role in initiating the discussion of Sara’s artistic
response. By asking about what the title Esperanza Rising meant, Lari provided Sara
with a perfect segue for explaining her artistic response. Lari based her question on
something she had heard Sara say earlier in the discussion. She noted that Sara had
spoken about how Esperanza’s grandmother and mother had risen above their trials and

tribulations by accepting their new status, but she wanted to know what Sara thought

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about how Esperanza changed over time. She even directed her question to Sara by
saying, . .you had brought up the question about the mother and grandmother, or you
had mentioned something about them rising...”

Sara immediately responded to Lari’s prompt by stating that her artistic response
was related to the notion of “rising” because it was inspired by Angelou’s poem. She
also told group members that, as a result of reading the book and feeling very connected
to Esperanza’s journey, she had been in an emotional place when she wrote the poem.
Her group members’ responded to Sara’s comments with laughter and supportive
remarks. They encouraged her to read the poem and let her know it was safe to do so by
telling her they would cry with her if she cried. This turned out to be unnecessary, as
Sara did not cry as she read the poem, but her group members once again let her know
they appreciated her response when they reacted to the poem with applause and a request
for a copy.

There is not doubt that Sara’s peers were supportive of her artistic response, but
no one went on to question her more about why she had created it or what she thought it
offered in terms of understanding the book in new or deep ways. Sara did not offer any
dialogue about these elements either, even though she had written extensively in her
rationale about the choices she had made and how she hoped the resulting piece would
impact her group members. As with the group’s early discussion of Where the Wild
Things Are (Sendak, 1963), discussion of the artistic response died quickly and, unlike
the discussion of Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998), no one brought it back up again,
even in an indirect way. If the class had ended at that point, it would be impossible to say

that Sara’s multi-layered artistic response had impacted her group members in any

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significant way. However, class continued with a large group discussion of Esperanza
Rising (Ryan, 2000), during which members of Group D reintroduced the topic.

What Happened During The Large Group Discussion?: Examining Group Reactions to
Artistic Response

Considering the students’ ideas.

Previous attempts I had made at trying to get the teacher candidates to talk about
artistic responses in large group had fallen rather flat. I reflected in my field notes after
our large group discussion of Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) that in that class I had been
“determined to get them talking about those responses, so I used the work of the artistic
respondent in the group I had sat in on, Group C, as an example for the others to look at.
I also called on the respondent, Carrie, to clarify the meaning behind her art object”
(Knezek 3/23/05).

Suzy: Um, so we’re going to talk for just a second about Esperanza Rising and

what you thought. One of the things that I was able to see today was this artistic

response. . .made for the group that I was sitting in on. And in this particular piece

...we see a blanket in the background that represents the one Esperanza was

crocheting. . .And we see this path almost throughout her life which. . .Can you

describe what you told us before?

Carrie: Um, well um, I started off with the grapes and how her initial life

revolved around the grapes, her and her family. It was all about the grapes and, in

a sense, it was all about Esperanza, ‘cause she’s an only child and she’s self-

centered. . .And then she starts, it goes through. . .her life and... she works with the

potatoes, but it’s still just about her. She works with the potatoes so she can make

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money to save her mother, not necessarily to support the rest of her new family.
And as she goes on through. . .each season, it becomes more and more about the
whole community and her new family.
Suzy: So what we have here is a representation of Esperanza and the changes that
she goes through, basically, in the book, um, from a spoiled self-centered person
to a person who is much more aware and mature by the end of the book. One of
the things that I really liked, though, and I wanted to ask you about was about
when we were having a conversation about this and your description included the
fact that it wasn’t////simple, that it was a messy journey.
I went on to describe how Group C had discussed Carrie’s collage and found it to be
symbolic of Esperanza’s journey in many ways. Carrie, I stated, had pointed out how
Esperanza’s life was very neat in the beginning, but that things began to get messy as
time passed. She had said that she deliberately chose to portray the blanket Esperanza
was crocheting as one that contained clashing colors and imperfections because she
noticed that Esperanza bad choice taken away from her in many ways, so she was
putting together this blanket that was her life in the best way that she knew how.
So, lots of colors are thrown together in a really haphazard way. (Carrie, 3/22/05)
I went on to say that I thought Carrie’s collage, and her focus on the blanket’s imagery,
did an exceptional job of describing Esperanza’s journey. After pausing for a few seconds
to see if someone would respond to what I had said, I continued by saying, “I’m
wondering if other people had similar conversations where people talked about Esperanza
as the focus. . .Could you share with us a little bit?” Right after I posed my question Lari

entered the conversation by saying, “ We had a great discussion. I just want to say our

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group rocks.” There was a great deal of laughter in the class and I commented that I had
noticed the high fives and heard the applause. I asked Lari to tell us what had gone so
well. She replied, “It was just, it was a great discussion about this text and we all enjoyed
it. We talked about power, the gain of power, the loss of power.”

While I encouraged Lari to tell more details about the discussion, I wrote in my
field notes that

I was disappointed that her reaction was not about an artistic response, but I

hadn’t asked specifically for information on artistic response, so I didn’t feel like I

could cut her off — especially since I was really curious about what had gone so

well. (Knezek, 3/23/05)
Because I didn’t push for the focus to be on artistic response, Lari encouraged her group
member, Kris, to speak about the critical response she had created. Kris did so, noting
how Esperanza Rising featured some characters who experienced both the loss and gain
of power. I asked her to clarify whether she was talking only about socioeconomic
power, or if she also meant personal power, but Kris had no response. There were
several moments of silence in the large group discussion following my question, and in
my field notes I wrote that I was “just about to try to clarify what I meant by personal
versus socioeconomic power,” (Knezek, 3/23/05) when Lari entered the discussion again,
this time noting that her group had also had a great artistic response. In my field notes I
wrote that while I hesitated to drop the idea of asking Kris to clarify her point, I was so
eager to hear about artistic responses I let it go. Lari went on to prompt Sara to share her

artistic response with the large group.

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Lari: If Sara feels like sharing, I would really like everyone to hear this because
it’s beautiful.

Suzy: I would love to see it Sara, [but only if...

Sara: [It’s a poem.]

Suzy: Would you. . .feel comfortable reading, because [if. . .]

Sara: [1 mean] I can read it, but I tend to read fast when I’m nervous, so I’m
going to try to slow down, but it was inspired by Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise.
Um, (Sara proceeds to read her poem.)

Lari: Isn’t that, beautiful?!

(The class burst into spontaneous applause. My field notes from the day after this
discussion, 3/23/05, indicated that at leastfive students were in tears.)

Suzy: Okay, all I am going say is, when I talked about artistic response, people
said, but I can’t paint, or I can’t draw. Do you see? Looking at these pieces, do
you see how important this response is?...Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about this.
Why did this affect your group in the way that it affected them? (There is a three
second pause here.) Or maybe. . .why did it make people applaud for the first
time in class? Talk to me about it.

Sara: Well, I can only write poetry when I’m really, really overcome with
emotion. I can’t just sit down and okay, write. It doesn’t work like that. I have
to be very upset, very happy, you know, just something has to really overpower
me.

Suzy: I’m going to push you though, because I want to know what it was...

Sara: [Umm. . .]

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Suzy: [. . .what was] it that overpowered you, what connected with [you?]

Sara: [In the] beginning, like I was, I was thinking, she’s going to overcome
everything, but, as I kept reading, I was like, is she? And at the end you hear her
tell Isabelle don’t ever be afraid to start over again. It’s like, it just kind of
brought the whole story together.

Suzy: So. . .the feelings, those emotional feelings that you had about what was
going to happen to her as she. . .pulls through. . .impacted you? // One of the things
that I think is interesting about this book is that Esperanza pulls through, but she
doesn’t pull through the way Cinderella does. She doesn’t get the prize, in terms
of the rich prince. But she’s got an inner strength that. . .is priceless. . ..I think I’ve
heard a few of you reflect on this. . .and what I’m hearing you talk about now is
that, in the end, she’s in that place where she can now see herself in a whole new
way. And it’s, I think, a lot stronger and more powerful than maybe it would
have been if she’d stayed in Mexico. Don’t you think?

Multiple Voices: Yeah!

Lari: When I first started reading and I looked at the title and I thought that it
was about her, going through these hard times, and then rising above it in her
culture, um, in America. I thought she was going to rise and, and be a political
leader or something. And in the end... when Sara read that poem it made me
realize that she was rising as a person — morally, in her values, and in who she
was and what she believed in. And I /// I thought that that was extremely
powerful. And so when Sara read that, it really touched on. . .my misconception

in the beginning. /// It changed what I ended up with.

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Suzy: Nice clarification. It’s sort of a journey. Let it happen. In the ways that

Esperanza experienced life, in the ways that you thought that it was going to go,

but let Sara’s artistic response impact your thinking. All of that comes out.

Lari: I mean what she wrote, summarizes this entire experience. I could have

read that. . .(T here was some laughter here). . .[and then known pretty much

Esperanza’s experience, you know what I mean?

Suzy: [Yeah I do, I do.] Other people? In terms of what you connected with or

what you didn’t, in your groups? Maybe ideas that you think were interesting to

talk about?
After my question about connections that other groups had made, a member of Group B,
Jessie, began to discuss the ways members of her group had spoken about issues of power
and gender. She talked about how Esperanza, her mother, and grandmother had left
Mexico, a place where, during that time period, women had little power. Jessie stated
that she and the members of her group had questioned whether or not the women in the
story had actually gained power when they moved to the United Sates. The large group
discussion continued on from this point into a more detailed conversation about power
and gender, all in connection with the personal power Esperanza achieved through her
journey. While this dialogue was more loosely connected to Sara’s poem and Lari’s
comments about the impact of Sara’s response, the impetus for this new direction and
further deep discussion was set in motion by what had been said in connection to an

artistic response.

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Considering the ways the students and their instructor engiged in the process of

dialogue.

Looking back over the ways that the teacher candidates and I engaged in an
exchange about Sara’s artistic response, I was instantly struck by two things. First,
during this portion of the discussion only four students and I participated in the
conversation. Secondly, Lari, as small group facilitator, was responsible for drawing her
group members into the large group discussion of Esperanza Rising. In much the same
way, I brought Carrie into the limelight with positive comments about her artistic
response. Lari encouraged Kris and Sara to share their responses. She made it clear that
she felt her group had done a wonderful job and she used that, along with compliments
for individual members’ work, as a way to get them talking about what they had done.
Whether or not this involvement was a result of her genuine enthusiasm for her group
members’ contributions, her notion of the responsibilities of the group facilitator, her
observations of my own attempts to get people engaged in the discussion -- or some other
factors -- was unclear. What was clear was that her efforts helped instigate the type of
discussion that changed individuals’ perspectives, including her own.

After Sara read her poem everyone reacted strongly. The teacher candidates
applauded, Lari commented on the poem’s beauty, and I spoke about how important the
moment felt. I questioned how the artistic response had caused us all to react in the ways
we did. I moved the discussion in a related direction when I encouraged Sara to say more
about how she had created the response and to describe the emotional connections she

felt to the main characters’ journey. Sara shared how the storyline had kept her

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wondering about Esperanza’s fate and that, in turn, had kept her emotionally engaged in
the story.

After Sara finished speaking I commented on the ways I saw Esperanza’s journey
bringing her to a place of great strength. In my remarks I referenced Carrie’s comments
about the joumey’s messy nature and Kris’ ideas that Esperanza experienced growth in
power over the course of the novel. I noted that others had talked about Esperanza’s
experience, also. This comment was followed by Lari’s explanation of how Sara’s poem
had changed her conception of the kinds of changes Esperanza had experienced. Instead
of seeing Esperanza as someone who had become an “American,” as a person who was
experiencing social success, Lari began to view Esperanza as possessing stronger morals
and a more powerful sense of self. Lari also noted how she felt she could have
experienced what Esperanza had gone through simply by reading Sara’s poem. I
confirmed these comments and used them to ask if anyone else had talked about
connections to Esperanza or her journey. This led to a detailed discussion of the critical
response perspective, with a focus on the issues of gender and power. The discourse that
ensued remained loosely connected to the ideas the artistic response dialogue had
generated until the end of the large group session.

Looking Back

While the past two chapters brought to light several main characteristics of artistic
response and preservice teachers’ engagement with artistic response, this chapter focused
almost completely on the importance of the social setting in connection with artistic
response. While the significance of group members’ engagement with artistic response

can once again be seen when the members of Group D did little more than applaud Sara’s

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poem in the small group setting, it was in the large group setting that the truly
transformative power of artistic response was felt.
Looking Across: Discussions One, Two, and Three

In Chapter Six I discussed how the representational and instructional
characteristics of the art and rationales produced in response to Where the Wild Things
Are (Sendak, 1963) were different from the more thoughtful, process-oriented elements
found in the picture book and written piece Lari created in reaction to Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998). By contrast, Sara’s poem and its accompanying rationale took self-
reflection to a new level. Sara wrote about the personal and intertextual connections she
made as she constructed her poem. She also explained why she included only certain
parts of the story in her poem, writing of her desire to see the story told from Esperanza’s
perspective so that she and others could share Esperanza’s experience in a more intimate
way. This expressed desire for her peers to perceive the book in a new way also
distinguished her response from those included in previous chapters.

Sara was not the first artistic respondent who stated that she intended to influence
others with her artistic creation. Erin, the artistic response person for Were the Wild
Things Are (Sendak, 1963), described her art object and shared how that object would
communicate her objectives to her peers. Lari focused more on how she thought creating
her artistic response would help her to experience Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998)
more profoundly, but found that her creation and her written rationale had fallen short of
her goal. Part of the reason she decided was because her response didn’t have the impact
she had hoped for. While she didn’t specify whom she had hoped to affect, the

implication was that her response was not intended solely for her own purposes. Of these

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examples, Sara’s response was most clearly intended to cause others to consider a new or
deeper outlook on the book. She was the only one who expressed how she had planned
for a new perspective to be introduced by writing about how she had intended for her
poem to tell the story in Esperanza’s own voice.

Erin and Lari both initiated discussions about their artistic responses by
connecting their introductory comments to remarks made by other group members.
While the methods in which these conversations were initiated were quite similar, the
types of feedback received during the discussions differed. Erin experienced very little
feedback outside of Lari’s parallel commentary about her intertextual response.
However, Kris, the facilitator for the week Group D discussed Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998), built upon artistic respondent Lari’s comments by noting that the font
used in the story distinguished the voice of each character in much the same way that Lari
had perceived in the illustrations. Kris later pointed out ways the artistic response
reinforced her interpretation of the text, thus allowing Lari to reenter the conversation and
say more about the process of creating that response.

During the discussion following the reading of the next book, Esperanza Rising
(Ryan, 2000), Lari provided the artistic respondent in her group, Sara, with an
opportunity to transition very smoothly into her role. She asked Sara a question about
something Sara had said earlier in their small group. Sara took advantage of that
transition, but what she said gave little indication of the complex thinking evident in her
written rationale. Instead she focused upon the emotion she felt when creating her
response, a poem. Her group members reacted to this description of her emotional state

by telling her they would cry with her as she read the poem, and then by declaring it

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awesome when she finished reading. As with the artistic responses to Where the Wild
Things Are (Sendak, 1963), Sara’s small group peers responded with warmth and
encouragement, but their exchanges did not prompt any further discussion about how
Sara’s piece promoted new or deeper understandings of Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000).

The large group discussion about Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) yielded very
different results. In that exchange Lari encouraged Sara to share her poem with
everyone, and the ensuing reading prompted a detailed dialogue about Sara’s artistic
response and how it connected to the text. Sara explained how she had related to
Esperanza’s emotional journey, and I noted that others had also mentioned the
importance of this journey, but with an emphasis on how it had led Esperanza to a place
of newfound personal power and strength. Lari then discussed how Sara’s poem had
helped her to change her understanding of Esperanza’s journey and what it meant in
terms of who Esperanza had become.

As noted in Chapter Six, there was no real evidence that anyone represented in the
telling case presented understood the text more deeply or saw it in new ways, based on
their experiences creating, writing about, or discussing artistic responses to Where the
Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963). Lari’s artistic response to the next book, Voices in the
Park (Browne, 1998), did inspire some thoughtfiil discussion and writing, but she herself
concluded that it fell short of the impact she had desired.

In the case presented in connection with Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000),
however, there was evidence that the poem written and read by Sara had prompted Lari to
change her thinking about the book. In the large group discussion Lari specifically stated

that the poem made her realize that Esperanza hadn’t risen in the politically powerful way

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she expected but instead had evolved, “. . .as a person — morally, in her values, and in who
she was and what she believed in” (3/22/05). Lari went on to clarify how the poem had
helped her understand the book more clearly by saying, “And so when Sara read that, it
really touched on. . .my misconception in the beginning///. It changed what I ended up
with.” The socially situated nature of Lari’s shift in perspective seems particularly
important here. It indicated that, along with the premise that a “real” artistic response
must impact the ways in which people comprehend the text, it also must do so in socially
constructed ways. In short, an artistic response, and the thoughts behind it, must be made
public and open to scrutiny in order for it to impact the thinking of others. The roles of
the discussion group members, large and small, were critical in the development of Lari’s
understanding of Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) following Sara’s artistic response.

In Chapters Five and Six I noted that evidence presented in most of the cases
included in this study indicated that group members who prepared other response roles
sometimes connected what they have learned or discovered to the artistic piece, and vice
versa. This pattern continued in the discussions held about Esperanza Rising (Ryan,
2000). For example, as the facilitator of her small group, Lari posed a question about
how her peers thought Esperanza rose in the novel, saying,

I was wondering if Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) -- the title -- actually meant

Esperanza rising as a person from being a selfish little girl to being this more

mature and understanding, family-oriented person or if it actually meant rising in

her status? (3/22/05)

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Later, during the large group discussion of the book, Lari connected to Sara’s artistic
response in answering her own question. In doing so her perception of the main
character’s identity was permanently altered.

Chapters Five, Six, and Seven all featured the telling case which elucidated the
experiences of Lari and the members of Group D. As the chapters progressed, Lari, the
rest of the preservice teachers, and I all struggled to understand artistic response, and
though there were many moments of frustration, confusion, and distress there were also
moments of clarity and recognition. In the next chapter I will discuss the findings of this
study in connection with the literature that grounded it: reader response theory and
socially situated learning. I will also use the lens of art history and the changing

definition of art over time to frame the findings in a comprehensive way.

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CHAPTER EIGHTZ
Conclusion
Introduction
This dissertation began with a problem of practice — the challenge preservice
teachers and their instructor were facing as they struggled to reach an understanding of
artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature. Building from my role as
instructor in one section of a children’s literature course, I designed and completed a
study that considered the ways that the teacher candidates in that class came to
understand artistic response and the factors that influenced that understanding. I also
investigated the roles that the students and I played in the development of that
understanding. Across chapters four through seven I demonstrated how the students and
I engaged in creating, writing about, and discussing artistic response. When I later
examined the data from the class sessions I found three guiding concepts, which I will
call the levels of artistic response, to explain how the preservice teachers and I came to
understand artistic response within the context of our children’s literature class: artistic
response as object, artistic response as process, and artistic response as social
experience.
In this concluding chapter I will pull these three concepts together with an
overarching frame: the definitions and theories of art throughout history3. In doing so I

will provide readers with a lens for viewing this study and a framework for reflecting on

 

2 The author wishes to acknowledge the generous contributions of Dr. Yonghee Suh to this chapter. Dr.
Suh’s work in her dissertation, Using The Arts To Teach History: The Role Of Teacher Knowledge And
Beliefs (2006), first provided the author with insight as to how the evolution of the definition of art
throughout history might serve as a lens for viewing preservice teacher artistic response to children’s
literature. I relied heavily on her work when developing the structure and content of this chapter.

3 While this portion of the dissertation will examine three important historical art definitions and their
associated theories, it is important to note that this analysis is largely limited to broad overviews of the art
of Western cultures and is by no means definitive.

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the story of how the study progressed over time.

(Table 8.1 displays parallels between

historical definitions of art and the levels of artistic response that will be discussed in this

chapter.)

Table 8.1 - Parallels between historical definitions of art and levels of artistic

response

 

Historic Definitions of Art

Levels of Artistic Response

 

Art as Object

The artwork, including its form and
representational nature, is paramount
The artwork is imitative of nature/real life

Artistic Response as Obiect

Uses the book and the response to “teach
something”

Produces a craft-like object that moves focus away
from the text — is only loosely connected to the text

Consists primarily of retellings (talk and writing
accompanying the art that basically equates to a plot
summary)

Focuses on the art object

 

Art as Process

(1) ...A work of art is an interaction between
an individual—the artist—and some means of
production, intellectual or material; (2) that this
interaction is the consummation of a specific
history of activity on the artist’s part, funded by
the qualitatively diverse experiences constituting
that history; (3) that these qualities are expressed
in the art product; and (4) that through the art
product, a spectator or audience can have an
experience that is, to a significant extent, a
‘reconstruction’ of the artist’s experience”
(Kelly, 1998, p. 24)

Artistic Response as Process

Respondent represents specific events from text
for specific reasons

Features themes or a sense of cohesiveness
emerges (not too far removed from the visual
retellings)

Focus moves to the artist/artistic respondent and
her process, including the choices she makes, the
reasons for those choices, and the effects of those
choices on the artist/artistic respondent

 

 

Art as Aesthetic Experience

Old Perspective: Art can be something that
is not created by humans - something that was
not created with any sort of artistic intent.
Cognitive distance is necessary

Newer Perspective: Art still involves
attending to details that can be in abstract, but the
cognitive aspect is being welcomed back in —
intellectual thought is encouraged

Recognition that the social and contextual
nature of the viewers will impact the way they
interpret and respond to art

 

Artistic Response as Social Experience

Invites people to enter into the experiences of
characters in the books

Challenges assumptions that might be in the
book/reflects critical analysis of the book

Furthers exploration into characters, situations,
themes

Focus includes the art object, the artist/artistic
respondent (her process and choices), but looks more
toward the social -- the impact the art (process or
product) has on others’ responses to the book.

 

I have found these historic definitions and theories correspond in many ways to the

journey my students and I took as we struggled to define, enact, recognize, and evaluate

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artistic response and, by utilizing them as a lens for this study, I hope to describe the
development of our perception of artistic response, what I make of that development, and
how I now understand it. Finally, I will reflect upon what undermines and complicates
the use of that lens in my effort to describe how preservice teachers come to understand
artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature.

Background: Definitions and Theories of Art

No discussion of the art of Western cultures would be complete without an
examination of how the definition of art has evolved throughout history. Because debates
concerning the definition focus on the nature of art, including its significance and value
(L. E. Beyer, 2000; Suh, 2006), it is also clear that any art descriptions would be
incomplete without acknowledgement of the accompanying theoretical stances on what
the nature of art entails.

The three definitions of art highlighted in this chapter have been at the center of
numerous debates across time. The first focuses on the “art object” itself. In this
approach, the product of artistic creation, such as a piece of sculpture or a photograph, is
emphasized and examined. The second definition differs from the first in that the
process of creating art is considered more important than the end product. The art object
is still recognized, but it is the manner in which the object is made that, along with the
intent and emotional engagement of its creator/artist, is considered paramount (Kelly,
1998).

More recently, Western art philosophers have come up with a third definition for
art, termed the “aesthetic experience.” The focus of this definition continues to evolve

but has at its center the quality of the empirical experience that art objects create for those

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who view or interact with them. As with the definition of art as object, those who regard
art purely as an aesthetic experience value the product of artistic creation, but only in its
ability to inspire an emotional response from viewers. Early aestheticians considered the
process of artistic creation and any involvement on the part of the artist to be of little
importance. Within recent history, however, many of those defining art as experience
have begun to note the importance of not only the process and the artist, but also of the
larger, socially-situated nature of the context in which the art object is encountered.
Current trends indicate that the emphasis in the history of the philosophy of art in
Western culture has been moving away from an object or process definition toward one
that stresses art as experience (L. E. Beyer, 2000; Dickie, 1971).
Changing Definitions, Theories, and Understandigs: Art and Artistic Response

Level One

As I coded the data gathered for this study I noted there was a pattern in the initial
artistic responses created after reading Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) and in
a few that were created in response to other books as the semester progressed. As stated
in Chapter Three, I wrote a memo about this pattern, pointing out that many of the early
responses — and a few that came later — seemed to reproduce the text or its illustrations
(Sendak, 1963). Earlier in the semester I had written about this phenomenon in my
instructor’s journal and reflected briefly on why it troubled me:

I noticed that I have been struggling with how to respond to artistic responses that

seem to “retell” the story. While this is different than using artistic response and

the books as tools to “teach something,” it doesn’t seem to meet our stated goals

of developing deeper understanding or new perspectives. (Knezek, 3/10/05)

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I later came to realize that this initial noted pattern shared common characteristics with
the historical definition of art as object.

Art as object.

“mi-me-sis” noun

1. The imitation or representation of aspects of the sensible world. . .in literature

and art.” "mimesis," 2004, 2000)

Philosophers who focus primarily on the analysis of art products have often
attempted to define art by what might be considered its most universal qualities. These
qualities, especially those that are “exhibited” (perceived characteristics of the work
itself), are thought to define what is unique and significant about artworks. “Exhibited”
characteristics favored within this definition tend to be those qualities that emphasize the
representational quality of art.

What is most important in art according to these views is the way in which the

work represents the subject matter. The use of proper art media and rules which

govern the patterns or the formal structures an artist employs are also important.

But, according to these theories, the idea of representation or mimesis is the most

essential feature in defining and evaluating art. (Werhane, 1984, p. 5)

Ancient Greeks, including both Plato and Aristotle, were among the first
philosophers to search for definitions of art. Plato was not a proponent of the arts in
society and felt that art was mimetic -- that the artist “reproduces nature in works of art
just as the fine craftsman reproduces almost perfect chairs or beds” (Werhane, 1984, p.
6). In the Republic, Plato claims that the artist procures images straight from nature and

thus is less creative than the craftsman who conceives of a mental ideal for what he crafts

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(Conford, 1941). The artist only imitates the essential nature (form) of the reality and,
therefore, has very little to contribute to society.

As a pupil of Plato, Aristotle also subscribed to the idea that an art object was
essentially a replication of the mental and physical world. In The Poetics, however, he
argued that the artist does not merely imitate particular phenomena or report experiences.
Instead, the artist depicts general types of human character and human nature (Fyfe,
1932). The artist represents nature not as it is but as it should be (Werhane, 1984).
Aristotle claimed that, by imitating nature (which included human emotions), art placed
nature (and those emotions) at a distance. This distance allowed people to both purge and
purify their emotions through art -- in a way deemed safe for society (Kelly, 1998).

Like Aristotle, philosophers Clive Bell (1914) and Suzanne Langer (1953)
supported the notion that art objects can represent human feelings and emotions. Bell
argued that “significant form,” which features particular combinations of lines and colors,
depicts human emotions -- a quality shared by all artworks. Langer further argued that
works created for utilitarian purposes can actually be defined as art when their form
represents human feelings and emotions. Despite their emphases on the emotive aspects
of the definition of art, like Aristotle, Langer and Bell continue to fundamentally
conceive of art as imitative objects.

Artistic response as object.

Just as the definitions of art have changed over time, the definition of artistic
response in TE 348 evolved as the semester progressed. Prior to and throughout this
study I had difficulty defining artistic response for my students and my colleagues.

When attempting to explain what artistic response was I often ended up naming things

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that it was not. It was not a craft-like activity loosely tied to the text, a tool used to teach
a topic unrelated to the text, or a fun form of “busy work.” So, what was it? In attempting
to describe what I thought it was - or what I thought it should be -- I returned again and
again to the written terminology the Children’s Literature Team had produced, which
described the role of the artistic response person as someone who fashions a “text
centered” artistic creation. Verbally I added that artistic response should promote
“deeper thinking” and/or “new perspectives” on the text, but I never gave concrete
examples of what I meant by those terms.

As the teacher candidates in TE 348 first attempted to create artistic
responses after having read Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) the majority of
their art objects, their writing, and their discussions reflected an understanding of artistic
response as object - much as Plato originally defined art as object. Most of those early
artistic responses were reproductive in nature. For example, in the written rationale he
provided for a song he had written and recorded as his artistic response to Where the Wild
Things Are, Steven stated that he wanted to

capture the adventure and story of Where The Wild Things Are by retelling the

story just about verbatim, word for word, in a folksong ...to give the story a new

but accurate life in another medium. (2/8/05)

Others at this level attempted to retell the story through the illustrations found in
the book. Becca, for example, created a collage poster that consisted of copies of
Sendak’s original artwork from the book and found objects. The poster she created
depicted four separate scenes from the story: the main character in Where the Wild

Things Are, Max, alone in his bedroom, wearing a wolf suit; Max seated in a sailboat on a

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wave-filled ocean; the wild things featured in the book in the middle of their “wild
rumpus”; and Max commanding a wild thing to do his bidding. In each of these pictures
at least one part has some sort of texture-filled item incorporated into it: a soft fabric
blanket on Max’s bed; rough canvas sails on Max’s boat; sofi curls and feathers on the
wild things’ heads; and silky fur on Max’s tail. Becca expressed why she felt it was
important to make the illustrations of those scenes more realistic by using the found
objects in her artistic response paper. She wrote,

By taking these small aspects of each picture and highlighting them

realistically Max's world grew more authentic for me. It was no longer an

idea in Max's head, but it began to be more of an actual world. Through

the project it became easier to imagine going from inside Max's bedroom

to the land where the wild things are. (Becca, 2/8/05)

Becca, it seemed, had achieved a text-centered goal for herself by focusing on and
reproducing illustrations from the book. She had found a way to realize Max’s world. At
the same time, she did not provide details about why she chose the scenes she did in her
artistic response paper or in the discussion of the artistic response with her peers. As a
result, what was obviously important insight to her was lost to her discussion group
members and me. Therefore, her artistic response was interpreted more as a retelling of
the book through its own illustrations. Because of this, I began my written response to
Becca by asking her to specify why she chose the scenes depicted on her collage. I
explained that I felt like she was on the brink of helping me to comprehend the book in
new ways, or that at least I thought she was going to offer me a new perspective — her

perspective — on what was important in the book, and why those parts were important.

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Instead, I wrote, I came away from her response feeling like I had simply read the story
again and that she held secret insight that I could not access.

Along with responses that retold the story, others whose responses fell into the
category of “artistic response as object” created art as instructional tools for teaching
topics which, at best, were loosely connected to the story. Chapter Five featured Erin’s
artistic response as a part of the telling case because it displayed a number of the “artistic
response as object” characteristics. The group activity she designed required participants
to create drawings that illustrated monster images based on particular terms or phrases
from the text. She wanted to “use the descriptive words of the text to enlighten the
students of the certain characteristics that the monsters should [italics added] have” (Erin,
2/8/05). By drawing attention to descriptive terms, how students visualized those terms,
and how Sendak portrayed them, Erin set up a representational scenario in which
visualization among the students would lead to varied portrayals of “terrible” monsters.
Erin’s own drawing of a monster, provided as an example for the activity, looked quite
similar to monsters in the text and thus was largely representational. The goal of this
activity was not to expand students’ thinking or their meaning-making. Instead, Erin
hoped that talking about the similarities and differences between monsters in the text and
monsters created by the students would help the students see that the word “terrible” can
be portrayed in many ways and that, “even in this book, all of the monsters are described
the same and yet they are so different” (Erin, 2/8/05). In her artistic response Erin
planned for students to imitate -- as Plato thought artists did -- images and concepts that

were already present in the book, leaving little room for expanded thinking.

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Initially I saw Erin’s artistic response as an activity that used the text as a tool to
teach adjectives. With hindsight, however, I noted that she intended to connect the
activity back to the text by having participants compare the images they drew to those in
the book. This added a visualization element to her activity and made it seem more text-
centered. That tie to the text was underdeveloped, however, as Erin did not indicate how
her artistic response activity might create meaning or increase understanding of Where
the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963). And, because her group members did not engage in
the activity she prepared and interacted very little with her as she talked about that
activity, Erin’s artistic response instead, as previously stated, followed Plato’s description
of an art object. It was largely representational and the focus was centered on the art
objects (what the students were to create) themselves.

Another aspect of Plato’s definition of art as object was that he saw the object as
contributing little to society. Erin’s artistic response followed Plato’s description even
though she originally had planned for it to involve social interaction. The social (and
imitative) nature of the learning associated with Erin’s response corresponds to the
concept of appropriation, the process by which learners adopt ideas, strategies, and
language that have been introduced and shared in the public-social quadrant of the
Vygotsky Space (see Figure 1.1) (Gavelek & Raphael, 1996; Harre, 1984; Vygotsky,
1978). Erin’s artistic response required learners to take part in public and social
transactions with one another in ways that would allow them to adopt language (e. g.,
“terrible”) and concepts (e. g., “terrible” can be portrayed in many different ways).
Interestingly, however, the artistic response was never truly enacted. Erin introduced and

described it to her discussion group members, but, because they had little to say in

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response, there was actually minimal opportunity for appropriation to occur and no real
evidence that it took place or that it had any impact on her peers.
Level Two
A short time after I had noted the pattern of retellings (which I later categorized as
artistic response as object) that occurred primarily among the early artistic responses to
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), I realized I was seeing something else in a
number of the responses that followed. I knew that some of them went “beyond” the
reproduction of the texts and a focus on the art object itself, but I was not certain how to
define the ways in which they did so. As I struggled to understand what I had noticed in
my data, I was also searching various sources to see how others had written about artistic
response. I came across an interesting article in the New York Times (Gussow, 2001)
discussing artists’ responses to horrific events (e. g., 9/11, the Holocaust, etc.) and how
artists’ first responses to such events were often documentary in nature:
How do artists respond to momentous acts of violence? Some are stunned into
silence, others rush forward to express their feelings with a poem or a painting.
But many allow for a time of reflection until they can begin to grasp the meaning
and approach it within a creative context. . ..In the short term the artistic response
to horrific events is not a deep one, said Detlef Hoffmann, a German art historian.
"You can have documentary pictures from Auschwitz," he said. "But they really
don't reach the second level, to feel what has been destroyed.” (Gussow, 2001)
As I read this article I began to reflect on how I felt it connected to what I was seeing in

my data. In response to the article I wrote in my journal:

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The idea was that the artists are too close to the events, and to do more than just
document would be too difficult. It’s only with time that artists can get into the
deeper emotional aspects of these tragedies. That started me thinking about the
documentary nature of the responses I got in class and how I was confused about
their place in our conception of artistic response (as TE 348 instructors).
However, I also started to really reflect on the idea that documentaries don’t just
retell. They are usually planned around themes of some kind. You are supposed
to walk away with some distinct message ....I started wondering about what kinds
of talk I heard in my own class around artistic response, along with the written
responses I have seen that accompany the art. Here’s what I have in mind so far —
there might be “levels” to this talk/these responses. (Knezek, 4/14/05)

This notion of levels existing within oral and written talk about artistic response to
literature — levels that went beyond retellings where the focus was on the art object — was
not one I had considered before. However, I knew that some of the responses I had seen
in my data — especially those connected with the second book we discussed, Voices in the
Park (Browne, 1998) — were documentary in nature. In many ways they still reproduced
the book, but they did so in ways that took stances on the stories, and they contained
references to the processes artists experienced as they created their works.

Art as process.

 

“Art is not a copy of the real world. One of the damn things is enough.”

(Goodman, 1984)4

 

4 Goodman reported this quote might have occurred in an essay on Virginia Wolf. However, he was unable
to locate the source.

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George Dickie (1971) claimed that a work of art was an artifact, which places his
definition of art clearly in the category of “art as object.” He began to break out of that
category, however, when he also argued that something becomes a work of art only when
it has been located in an artworld context. Dickie’s emphasis on institutional context
came from his observation that whether or not a piece of work is regarded as art is
decided by the art world. According to this perspective, “art is a matter of collective and
constructed taste” (Suh, 2006).

John Dewey also located the roots of art in collective experience, but he departed
from Dickie’s views when it came to who he believed participated in that collective.
Like Dickie and several other philosophers who defined art as artifact, Dewey claimed
that art is a reflection of emotions and ideas that are both personal and associated with
society in general. Unlike Dickie, however, Dewey argued that, historically, the arts of
drama, music, painting and architecture were created not for theaters, galleries and
museums. Instead, paintings, sculpture-decorated buildings, music and songs were
inseparable from the ceremonies and rites used to memorialize people’s communities,
traditions, and lives; drama celebrated and reenacted the legends and history of a group’s
experiences (Dewey, 1934). For Dewey the collective was cultural, and he considered art
as a cultural practice (Suh, 2006). Like Dickie, he had begun to look beyond the art
object toward the people who were creating the art.

As Dewey (1934) expanded upon his definition of art, he “worked to restore the
continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art

and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings recognized to constitute experience”

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(p. 1). In his view, art was literally a form of experience. The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
(Kelly, 1998) indicated that Dewey’s definition of art implies:

...(1) that a work of art is an interaction between an individual—the artist—and

some means of production, intellectual or material; (2) that this interaction is the

consummation of a specific history of activity on the artist’s part, funded by the
qualitatively diverse experiences constituting that history; (3) that these qualities
are expressed in the art product; and (4) that through the art product, a spectator or
audience can have an experience that is, to a significant extent, a ‘reconstruction’

of the artist’s experience. (p. 24)

Like Dewey, other art philosophers have focused more heavily on the activities
involved with creating art, rather than on a resulting finished artifact. Further, they found
this definition recognized the feelings, emotions, and intent of those involved in the
creative process by giving those emotions a definite form (Collingwood, 193 8b; Croce,
1953). Collingwood, for example, argued that artistic creation comes from the artist’s
imagination and Croce emphasized the role of artistic intuition as the artist’s motivation.
For these philosophers, making art can be a process, performance, or action that blurs the
boundaries between visual art, dance, media art, and theater. This is sometimes referred
to as performance art or process art (Center, 2004).

Artistic response as process.

The first artistic responses in TE 348 were created in connection to Where the
Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), and the majority of them were representational in
nature. The second round of artistic responses were inspired by Voices in the Park

(Browne, 1998) and, in many ways, the majority of them also reproduced the book. As

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stated earlier, however, these teacher candidates reproduced the text in slightly different
ways than those who had generated the first round. Nina, for example, noted that she had
portrayed certain images from the book in a poster that illustrated the main setting of the
book -- a park. Her illustration portrayed the park much as it was seen at different times
throughout the book when each of the four main characters encountered it. One
difference between Nina’s renditions of the park and those found in the book, however,
was that hers featured pairs of eyes dispersed throughout the trees. In her artistic
response paper, Nina wrote,

After reading Voices in the Park, what really seemed relevant to me was how

different the world looked through each of the characters eyes. This idea is what I

based my project on. (3/1/05)

Nina went on to describe how she chose elements of the park scenes and quotes
from the text in order to reinforce her notion that the world looked different to each
character. In some ways Nina’s response is similar to Becca’s, which is described earlier
in this chapter. She focused on how the artistic response was relevant to her and she used
reproductive images of the text — with slight variations -— to retell the story. What makes
Nina’s response different from Becca’s, and defines it as artistic response as process, is
that she gave reasons why she chose to depict certain images in the way that she did. She
described her interpretation of one aspect of the text when she wrote:

Something caught my eye after I had already read the book many times. When

Smudge and Charles first meet, the dogs are running past a light pole. The picture

shows as if both dogs are one, half-black half-white. When both Smudge and

Charles tell their point of view, they talk about how the dogs are having fun as

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well as themselves. They do not see themselves as different from one another. I
put this picture of the half-black half-white dog as the pupil of a single eye. To
me, Smudge and Charles seem to see the same world, and to see that world
through the same eyes. (Nina, 3/1/05)
Like Dewey (1934), Collingwood (1938), and Croce (1953) suggested, Nina’s focus was
no longer centered on the art object she was creating, but was, instead, centered on
herself as artist and her interpretation of the text through art, including the choices she
made (her creative process).

In Chapter Six Lari’s artistic response, a wordless picture book based on Voices in
the Park (Browne, 1998), was presented as a part of the telling case because it featured
some of the qualities of “artistic response as process.” The book she created featured
images taken right from the text, so it did have representational qualities. However, Lari
put the book together in such a way that she highlighted the importance of the
illustrations in the book, and, more importantly, she drew attention to the way the seasons
in the book complemented the voices of each character. For example, she noted that
scenes involving a chilly, upper-class woman took place in fall, while scenes involving a
cheerful, optimistic girl were set in summer. By virtue of her choosing to represent one
aspect of the story, Lari’s response had the potential to focus her discussion group
members’ attention on the book in a way that might have been new to them. The thought
and care Lari put into choosing to represent a particular aspect of Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998) was one of the reasons why I found her artistic response to be distinct

and more expansive than those that centered only on the art object.

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Another reason Lari’s response falls into the category of artistic response as
process is because of the way she spoke about her angst in planning for and executing her
piece. While she did not show evidence of interacting with the creation of her artistic
response in a way that drew on her prior life experiences, as Dewey (1934) might have
expected, she did recognize that her artistic response was supposed to represent and
inspire “a deeper kind of thinking” (Lari, 2/6/05). She struggled with what that actually
meant, thinking she had a good grasp on it after she had called me, but later concluding
that she did not “get” artistic response after all. Lari paid attention to what she created,
but her focus was more on how and why she created her artistic response and what it
meant to her. In this way her experience aligned most closely with the perspective of
philosophers and scholars who believed that the feelings, emotions, and intent of the
artist should be included in the definition of art (Collingwood, 1938; Croce, 1953;
Dewey, 1934).

Lari’s artistic response was not planned to be social in the same way as Erin’s.
She did not intend for her discussion group members to participate in an art activity with
her. As noted before, however, she wanted her response to have more of an “impact” and
to “touch deeper,” a goal she felt had not been attained. Her artistic response did
instigate some discussion among her group members, though in an unintentional way,
when Kris noted that the diamond-shaped cutouts in the corners of one of the pages of
Lari’s book had really captured the hard edge of one of the book’s main characters. Lari
had not planned that the diamond images would reflect a character, but she was able to

build on this comment to make her dissatisfaction with her artistic response known.

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As with Erin, Lari’s artistic response displayed some of the elements of learning
by appropriation. She had adopted some of my language in stating that she wanted her
response to relate a “deeper kind of thinking” about the text and she shared her thinking
in the public-social quadrant of the Vygotsky Space (see Figure 1.1) (Gavelek &
Raphael, 1996; Harre, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978). However, Lari’s artistic response also
indicated that she had privately struggled to transform her thinking, by making the
concept of “a deeper kind of thinking” her own. Though her artistic response fell short of
her expectations, her group members’ engagement with her about her efforts added a
public dimension to her artistic response that Dewey hinted at when he noted that,
through the art object, the viewer can have an experience that is, to a significant extent, a
“reconstruction” of the artist’s experience (Kelly, 1998). While Lari’s art object did not
fully recreate her experience for her group members, her comments during the group
discussion certainly gave them insight into what she had done and what she had tried to
do.

Level Three

As I considered the nature of the group interactions around both Erin’s and Lari’s
artistic responses I realized that, once again, the data gathered for this study indicated a
pattern that had not yet been distinguished. When looking at the data gathered in
connection with Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) and Voices in the Park
(Browne, 1998) I noticed two artistic responses that both actively engaged students in
discussion in particular ways and expanded their thinking about those texts. Because
there were just two responses that displayed these characteristics, I was initially hesitant

to identify the commonalities I saw in them as patterns. As I read the data collected in

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association with Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), however, and compared it to what I had
seen previously, my attitude changed. As the semester progressed teacher candidates
began to produce more artistic responses that focused not only on the art object, the artist,
and/or the artistic process, but also on the socially-situated context in which these
responses were shared and discussed. Their understanding of artistic response began to
include that context in new and poWerful ways that once again corresponded to a historic
definition of art.

Art as aesthetic experience

The artists may not know in advance the exact outcomes of their activity and

chance occurrences or unpredictable events that become an important part of their
works. (Center, 2004)

Plato’s notion of “art as object” focused almost entirely on the art object itself
and its imitative qualities, and, while Dewey liberally used the phrase “art as experience”
when capturing his notions of the nature of art, his definition of art centered on the artist
and his or her artistic process. Dewey’s idea of “art as experience” is thus very different
from the historical notion of “art as an aesthetic experience” as defined by Landon Beyer
(2000), which places great importance on the viewer ’s attention and intent when viewing
art objects and considering the process used by those who created them.

What is required of those who take part in aesthetic experiences is the separation
of the affective tendencies and responses from their perceptual understandings, so
that the objective properties of the object can become manifest and, in a

significant way, control those experiences. (Landon E. Beyer, 2000)

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Beyer (2000) noted that the early philosophers (Baumgarten, 1954; E. Bullough,
1912; Kant, 1972) who originated the idea of aesthetic experience argued that, in order to
view an aesthetic object objectively, the audience must cognitively distance themselves
from their affections and normal responses. Emergent renditions of this definition
became widely associated with the phrase “art for art’s sake,” because those who
championed aesthetic experience saw the act of viewing the arts as inherently valuable —
an end in itself.

Beyer’s definition of “art as aesthetic experience,” which incorporates both the art
object and the artist, moves one step farther than those that came before it: it centers on
the art audience and how they experience the art. In this study, therefore, the definition
that incorporates the art object and the artist, but focuses primarily on the impact art has
on individuals who view it, is called “art as aesthetic experience.” By incorporating
elements of the prior definitions, art as aesthetic experience exemplifies an additive

structure that can be found in historical definitions of art. This structure is depicted in

 

 

 

figure 8.].
Art as Object
Art as Object Art as Process
Art as Object Art as Process Art as Aesthetic Experience

 

 

 

 

 

F iggre 8.1: The additive nature of the historical definitions of art. The top row
represents the definition of Art as Object, which focuses attention entirely on the art
object itself. The second row portrays the definition of Art as Process,'which focuses on
the artist and his or her creative process, while also noting the importance of the art
object. The third row depicts Art as Aesthetic Experience, which focuses on audiences’
responses to art, while also incorporating the key characteristics of art as object and art as
process.

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Some philosophers have tried to identify the qualities needed to turn artistic
experiences into “aesthetic experiences.” Maxine Greene (1991), for example, discussed
meanings the arts can create by aesthetic experience. She departed from the original idea
of the need for cognitive distance between art viewers and their affections and normal
responses, however, when she argued that when people see, hear, and interact with
artwork, they do not passively accept what the artists express through their artwork. She
noted that since artifacts do not tell stories, the viewers have to participate in
understanding the art.

The movement of the definition of aesthetic experience toward a recognition of
the significance of audiences is important, but it also seems too closely aligned with the
fourth tenet of Dewey’s definition of art, “that through the art product, a spectator or
audience can have an experience that is, to a significant extent, a ‘reconstruction’ of the
artist’s experience” (Kelly, 1998). The aesthetic experience is supposed to be based upon
people paying particular attention, at times to the point of abstraction, to certain aspects
of an art object. Instead of reconstructing the artist’s experience, there should be a
recognition that people focus on different elements of the object or bring to bear distinct
preferences or points of reference. To that end, more recent art philosophers have argued
that,

in order to understand the value and meaning of the arts, we must situate them

within the cultural, social, political, economic, and ideological contexts out of

which they emerge and from which a significant part of their meaning is derived.

This perspective places the arts within a complex, oflen contradictory set of

tendencies and valuations, making the understanding of any particular work of art

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much more complicated than its meaning when filtered through, say, theories that

hold significant form or beauty as the center foci for artistic appreciation.” (L. E.

Beyer, 2000)

Therefore, audience experiences are situated experiences, and the people who undergo
them bring along their prior experiences, beliefs, and knowledge. This brings the
definition of art out of its formerly representational, institutional, or procedural contexts
and straight into the complex, messy real world: the world in which most schools exist.

Artistic response as social experience.

As chapters five and six noted, the majority of artistic responses created by
teacher candidates in TB 348 became increasingly complex as the semester progressed.
The early artistic responses were largely representational in nature but later creations
began to show individual perspectives on texts and a focus on both the artistic response
person and the process he or she had gone through creating the artistic response. A few
of these responses, however, accomplished something more, and as students read and
responded to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) I began to see more artistic responses that
not only invited students to experience texts in new and interesting ways, but they also
brought to light the importance of the socially situated nature of the classroom in
meaning-making with texts. For example, Trish created a collage that contained imagery
she saw as important in illustrating the way the author (Pam Munoz Ryan) developed
both the secondary characters and events in the story to show the main character’s
growth. Trish portrayed different symbols in her collage and then asked her group
members to speculate as to why they thought she had included those symbols. In her

artistic response paper Trish wrote,

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Ryan’s book for me was very successful in showing the audience Esperanza’s

growth and development. As a reader, I grew attached to the characters and felt

like I was part of the story experiencing their difficulties. With this in mind, for
my artistic response I gained inspiration from the characters who influenced

Esperanza and wanted to try and demonstrate her character‘s growth. The

question I kept asking myself, and wanted to prompt others to ask, was how did

the author show us that Esperanza was able to “rise” (3/22/05)?

Trish’s response described not only the art object she had created and why she created it
in the way she did. It also purposely attended to the ways that others would interact with
the art in connection with the text. As Beyer (2000) suggested in his definition of art,
responses like this one clarified that, in order to understand the value and meaning of
artistic response, we must situate it within the context from which it emerges and from
which a significant part of its meaning is derived.

In Chapter Seven I told the story of what happened when Sara shared her poem,
created in response to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000), with both her discussion group
members and with the entire class. Based on the experiences Sara, Lari, and several other
students had in connection with the poem, I included this story as part of the telling case
because it featured some of the qualities of “artistic response as social experience.” The
poem Sara created was inspired by Maya Angelou’s (1978) poem And Still I Rise and
was written in a similar style. Though it might have initially been interpreted as
representational because of the way it related many of the same events found in
Esperanza Rising, Sara had deliberately written the poem using a narrator with the first

person perspective. (The book was written in the third person, allowing readers to feel

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removed from Esperanza’s experiences.) By telling the story directly from the main
character’s (Esperanza’s) perspective, Sara invited readers to experience what Esperanza
did in more intimate ways. In her artistic response paper Sara wrote,

I am writing from the perspective of Esperanza through a narrative

poem. . ..bringing in important thoughts, perceptions, feelings. . ..that. . .I would

like others to gain from my piece (3/22/05)

Sara’s acknowledged forethought of the ways her group members might feel the
character’s experiences as they read her poem put Sara’s artistic response into the
category of artistic response as social experience. Not only did she consider her
audience, she considered how her artistic response might influence their perceptions of
the main character, and thus, the book itself.

Another important reason why Sara’s artistic response falls into the category of
artistic response as experience is because of the way Lari reacted to the poem within the
socially situated context of the classroom. Lari had been quite verbal throughout the
semester about her struggle to understand artistic response. She had recognized that the
piece she produced after having read Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) did not impact
others the way she wanted it to, and that it did not promote the deeper kind of thinking
she had sought to initiate. After she invited Sara to share her poem with the whole class,
however, Lari stated that,

When I first started reading and I looked at the title and I thought that it was about

her, going through these hard times, and then rising above it in her culture, um, in

America, I thought she was going to rise and, and be a political leader or

something. And in the end. . ..when Sara read that poem it made me realize that

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she was rising as a person — morally, in her values, and in who she was and what
she believed in. And I///I thought that that was extremely powerful. And so when
Sara read that, it really touched on. . .my misconception in the beginning./// It
changed what I ended up with. (3/22/05)
While Lari herself did not create an artistic response that she felt would alter or deepen
thinking about the text, she was able to realize and verbalize when Sara’s artistic
response had helped her to reach that goal. Sara had planned for her group members to
experience the text from a different perspective. Because of this, Lari was able to
transform the way she thought about the text by connecting Sara’s response with her own
prior thoughts about what had occurred, based on her reading of the book. The
connection she made changed both her individual knowledge of Esperanza Rising and the
ideas and concepts she originally appropriated while reading and responding to that text —
both on her own and with her discussion group. Lari then went a step further and made
her new knowledge about the text public in an explicit way. In doing so, she moved
through all four quadrants of the Vygotsky Space and conventionalized her new
understanding by acknowledging her transformed thinking publicly (Gavelek & Raphael,
1996; Harre, 1984; McMahon & Raphael, 1997; Vygotsky, 1978). As Maxine Greene
(1991) might have argued, when Lari saw, heard, and interacted with Sara’s artistic
response, she did not passively accept what Sara expressed through her poem, but
instead, because of Sara’s artistic response and because of the people around her,
converted her own thoughts and, in the process, achieved a new and deeper

understanding of the story.

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The examples provided in this chapter, and in the previous three chapters, show
that, as with some the historical definitions of art used as a lens in this study, artistic
response has an additive structure. In some artistic responses, such as Erin’s adjective
activity, the art object can act as an endpoint and no expanded talk occurs about the text
as a result of the response. In other artistic responses, like Lari’s, both the art object and
the process the artistic response person went through to create the object can provide
insight into the text — and how it connects to his or her experiences and knowledge -- for
the artist. In these examples specific events are highlighted and purposefully
emphasized, but talk about the text doesn’t really go much farther than basic retellings.
Finally, artistic responses like Sara’s not only acknowledge the importance of the art
object and the artist and his or her process, they also provide evidence of intentional
impact on the those discussing the book. In these instances, talk around the text may
include new and thought-provoking interpretations. The additive configuration as

indicated by these levels of artistic response is depicted in Figure 8.2.

 

 

 

Artistic Response as

Object

Artistic Response as Artistic Response as

Object Process

Artistic Response as Artistic Response as Artistic Response as Social
Object Process Experience

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 8.2: The additive structure of artistic response. The top row represents the
definition of artistic response as object, where the art object is a means to an end. The
second row portrays the definition of artistic response as process, which focuses on the
artistic response person and his or her creative process, while also noting the importance
of the artistic response as object. The third row depicts artistic response as social
experience, which focuses on audiences’ experiences in connection to artistic response,
while also incorporating elements of artistic response as object and artistic response as
process.

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Reconsideringthe Historical Definitions of Art as a Lens for Artistic Resmnse

While I have found historical definitions of art to be a helpful lens for viewing the
various levels of artistic response and their associated characteristics, I have also realized
those definitions are limiting in several important ways. First, the use of historical
definitions of art implied a linear progression to the levels of artistic response teacher
candidates experienced in TB 348. Like Lari, many of the students in the class did seem
to progress through these levels of understanding in fairly linear ways. However, there
was one student who created as artistic response that fit into the level of “social
experience” in connection to Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), and there were
several students who created artistic responses at the “object” and “process” levels all the
way through the semester. Using the format of a telling case did not allow for any
serious discussion of these discrepancies and the complexity they added to the
understanding of artistic response through developmental levels.

A second limitation was that I did not always have telling case examples that fit
the characteristics of the lens in specific ways. For example, once I placed Lari’s artistic
response to Voices in the Park (Browne, 1998) into the level of artistic response as
process category, I could see that her response did not have the focus on process that it
should have had to be in that category. When I initially planned for the presentation of
the telling case and the use of the art definitions as a lens, I viewed Lari’s artistic
response as one that was quite reflective because of all the comments she had made about
her struggles to understand and create something that reflected “deeper” thinking and that

had “impact.” Once I tried to present her response as one that brought in the prior

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knowledge of the artist or one that showed how the artist had interacted with the artistic
response, I quickly saw that hers was a weak example for the lens I had chosen.

A third limitation of using the lens of historical definitions of art was that the lens
sometimes felt too restrictive and artificial when I used it to describe the social nature of
each of the different levels of artistic response. While both of the stories I told in order to
describe artistic response as object and artistic response as process featured limited
engagement on the part of discussion group members, I did consider how the lens might
applicable if the levels of engagement around these responses had increased. I was
especially concerned about this at the level of artistic response as object, where the art
object was to have little to no impact on people who viewed that object. I wondered what
might happen if people found aspects of these artistic responses that connected to their
own prior knowledge or their own response roles in powerful ways. It seemed to me that
there was always the possibility that an artistic response involving the most reproductive
of art objects might meet with an especially inspired, thoughtful, or skillful group
member who could have taken the discussion to another level of meaning based not on
the artistic response person’s objectives, but on that group member’s ability to make
connections. While this concern never came to fruition in the data gathered for this
study, I still see it as something that could occur but not be accounted for in the use of
historical definitions of art as a lens for understanding artistic response.

After examining, in this chapter, these three major approaches to thinking about
the nature of art (art as object, art as process, and art as social experience) and three
parallel levels of understanding of the nature of artistic response to children’s and

adolescent literature (artistic response as object, artistic response as process, and artistic

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response as social experience), it is clear that the boundaries between these approaches
can get quite blurry. However, by debating and acknowledging these three approaches,
this chapter has also attended to many educational features of art and artistic response.
As I have noted here, both art and artistic response can be simply defined by an art
object’s visible characteristics. Conversely, they can also be defined in complex ways
that include analysis of the artist, the artist’s creative process, art objects that represent a
multitude of human emotions, thoughts, interpretations, and understandings, and the
context in which the art or the artistic product is viewed. Not all elements of the
historical definitions of art, used as a lens in this chapter, were clear or fully applicable,
but I found that utilizing those definitions helped me clarify several levels in preservice
teachers’ developing understanding of artistic response.

In the next chapter I conclude this dissertation by revisiting and clarifying the
definition of artistic response and the differences between post-reading “activities” and
artistic response. I will also explain how the findings in this study can be helpful to
students and educators at several different educational levels and I will close the chapter

by discussing possibilities for future research.

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CHAPTER NINE
Implications
Introduction
The research reported in this dissertation grew from a problem of practice that my
colleagues and I experienced as we attempted to teach preservice teachers about artistic
response in a children’s and adolescent literature class. Because we, as instructors,
struggled to find common ways to define and talk about artistic response over the course
of several semesters, we considered dropping it as a form of literary response covered in
class. What stopped us was the knowledge that artwork can give students a wider range
of ways to represent their understanding of a text and can lead students to “more
reflective responses on more abstract levels,” because it can provide them with “a
concrete reference and anchor fiom which to engage in more risky explorations”
(Wilhelm, 1997, p. 142). Though we were often troubled by the surface-level
explorations of texts that occurred in connection with artistic response, we also noted
moments in our classes when students created artistic responses that deepened and
changed the ways books were read and understood by both the readers and their peers.
The dissertation asked these questions:
0 How do preservice teachers come to understand artistic response and what
factors influence their understanding?
0 Are there patterns to the characteristics/elements of oral or written
language used by students when describing artistic response that I,
as the TB 348 instructor, and the teacher candidates in some way

(written acknowledgement, oral reinforcement, extension, etc.)

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recognize as comprising genuine artistic response — one that leads
to deeper understanding/new perspectives?

o What roles did the teacher candidates and I play in facilitating the
development of this deeper/new understanding?

In order to determine what this research tells us about artistic response, beginning
teachers, and teacher education, this chapter is arranged as a set of questions that are
pertinent to discussions about the meaning of artistic response and about preparing
teachers to teach with literature. Possible answers this research contributes to those
questions are then considered. The questions include:

o What can this research tell us about the nature of artistic response?
0 How are the findings in this study relevant to TE 348 students and
instructors, elementary teachers, and teacher educators?
o What are the methodological implications for this research?
0 What are the possibilities for future research?
What Can This Research Tell Us About the Nature of Artistic Response?

As noted in Chapter One, one of the reasons I initially decided to develop this
study was because my colleagues and I had experienced difficulty finding ways to
communicate to preservice teachers the difference between craft-like activities and
artistic response. These craft-like activities were often loosely tied to the text and
involved the use of varied artistic mediums, and while we did not see them as “bad”
activities, we noted that they usually did not engage students in ways that expanded their
understanding or helped them to view literature in new ways. Artistic response, on the

other hand, was supposed to help students make meaning with texts. Chapters four

203

through seven provided multiple examples of how I struggled to communicate the
difference between craft-like activities that had little to do with the text and artistic
response that clarified and deepened understanding of text. I often attempted to do so by
telling the teacher candidates what artistic response was not or repeating that artistic
response was supposed to lead to “deeper understanding” or “new perspectives on the
text.”

As a result of the work done for this study I now have access to language that
better enables me to define artistic response for myself, my students, and my colleagues.
The research and analysis completed for this dissertation resulted in the following
definition.

Artistic response is the creation of an art object in response to literature in order to

promote understanding of that literature. It is:

0 art in a broad sense — it can involve virtually any art form (e.g., painting,

sculpting, drawing, drama, dance, music, poetry, etc.)
o a literary response -- it should always move readers “toward” text, instead of
“away” from text

0 a means toward expanded or transformed understanding of text on the part of
both the producers of the artistic response and the audience who views and
interacts with the response, the artist, and/or the socially situated context

0 a way to stimulate rich conversation around the text

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How Are The Findings In This Study Relevant To TB 348 Students and Instructors,
Elementary Teachers, and Teacher Educators?
TE 348 Students

Perhaps because I was unable to provide a clear definition of artistic response at
the beginning of the semester, my students started out with a number of questions about
expectations and how they would be “graded” on their artistic responses. Most were not
sure of the difference between a response activity that led “away” from the text and one
that enriched and led “toward” the text. They were, however, pretty certain that to be
successful at artistic response, they needed to be able to draw. As Lari put it, “I don’t get
what I am supposed to do for artistic response. I know I’m supposed to create something,
but I’m not good at art...” (2/6/05).

As the instructor I was not as concerned about the artistic abilities the teacher
candidates in my class possessed as I was about how well they could respond to and
discuss literature. Teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms are not
necessarily engaging their students in “meaningful” and “educative” discussions or
activities when responding to literature (Apol, 1998; Apol et al., 2002). For example,
Taylor, et al (2002) found that literacy teachers in highly effective schools more often
facilitated literature discussions in their classrooms and asked higher-level
comprehension questions about the stories students had read than did teachers in
moderately effective schools. However, the same researchers discovered there was a low
rate of more cognitively challenging comprehension activities presented in all fourteen

(including the most effective) of the geographically widespread schools they studied.

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Teachers at all levels need to be able to connect their students with texts in
meaningful ways. It appears, however, as mentioned above, that many are not doing so.
Perhaps this is because, traditionally, their own experiences as students who interacted
with literature in classrooms were teacher-centered instead of student-centered. In such
settings teachers would have directed any conversations about texts, and those
conversations might often have taken place in a directed question-answer format (Mehan,
1979)

The teacher candidates in TE 348, however, experienced firsthand the deepened
understanding that can come from the student-centered nature of artistic response — either
through creating and talking about their own artistic responses or by interacting with an
artistic response created by someone else and talking about that response in a socially
situated setting. They were able to create artistic responses and participate in discussions
about those responses in student-centered ways. In short, by participating in literature
discussion groups themselves, teacher candidates were learning how to be discussants.
They were learning what it meant to listen thoughtfully, but they were also learning what
kinds of dialogue and material they could contribute in order to impact the thinking of
others.

Because the preservice teachers in TE 348 had these direct experiences with
artistic response and were involved with the concept of artistic response throughout the
semester, it is possible that those featured in this study will go into classrooms and ask
their own students to engage in artistic response that is educative, student-centered, and

meaningful. Such interactions are more likely, however, from future teacher candidates

206

who, because of the findings of this study, might have the opportunity to become familiar
with a clear definition of artistic response and the levels of artistic response.

While it is exciting to speculate about how teacher candidates who have firsthand
knowledge of what it means to create artistic responses will engage their students with
the creation of art in connection with text, it is equally worthwhile to reflect on the ways
in which artistic response has already transformed the textual understanding of many of
the teacher candidates. As Lari said, Sara’s artistic response touched on misconceptions
she had about a text and changed her understanding of the book. Lari’s altered
perspective is evidence that artistic response changed the ways some preservice teachers
perceived the books they read. It also serves as evidence of the likelihood that some of
those teacher candidates recognized the transforrnative power of such responses.

The level of recognition the teacher candidates had about the transformational
properties of artistic response has another interesting implication. It implies that
preservice teachers responsible for providing artistic responses to children’s and
adolescent literature might not only need to consider how those responses could help
others comprehend the literature in new and substantial ways, but that they should be
expected to plan for such results — that they should realize they are responsible for
envisioning and assessing for these possible outcomes. Sara’s artistic response paper
stated that she intended for others to experience Esperanza’s important feelings and
perceptions through her narrative poem. Evidence of this level of recognition of the
social nature of artistic response speaks to the ways in which TE 348 students can and

should consider the impact of this role on others’ understanding of a text.

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TE 348 Instructors

As I have noted throughout this work, I, along with other members of the
Children’s Literature Team, had endeavored for several semesters to reach a shared
understanding of artistic response with our students, our colleagues, and even among
ourselves. The findings of this study have the potential to refine our understanding of
what we are expecting preservice teachers to do when we ask them to create an artistic
response to literature, and they can also provide some insight into how we can talk about
artistic response. One example that shows these findings have already impacted the
language and practice of TB 348 instructors can be found in how the fall of 2005
explanation of the artistic response assignment (see Appendix B) changed after this study
took place (spring semester, 2005). Table 9.1 shows that the description of fall, 2005,
contains two significant differences from the spring description.

Table 9.1 -- Original (Spring) and Revised (Fall) 2005 TE 348 Discussion
Assignment

 

 

 

 

TE 348 Spring 2005 syllabus TE 348 Fall 2005 syllabus
The person responsible for artistic As the person responsible for artistic response,
response: you will NOT write a one-page paper ahead of
0 creates a creative, artistic response time. Instead, you will:
to the book that has the text at its 0 create an artistic response to the book that
center and that promotes has the text at its center, (for example, a
understanding and conversation collage of literary passages, a choral
(for example, a collage of literary reading, a poem, a poster, a song, a drama).
passages, a choral reading, a This should be a thoughtful, text-centered
poem, a poster, a song, a drama). response -- more than a simple craft that is
This is more thoughtful and text- loosely connected to the book. Whatever
centered than simply a craft you create should work toward helping all
0 presents this response to the group group members, including yourself,
or guides the group in creating it understand the book in new or deeper
(though it should not take up more ways. This isn’t a piece to show what a
than a fifth of the allotted terrific artist you are; it’s to show what a
discussion group time) terrific thinker you are. The best artistic

 

 

208

Table 9.1 — cont’d

 

TE 348 Spring 2005 syllabus

TE 348 Fall 2005 syllabus

 

 

0 includes (in the write-up) a
rationale and explanation for her
chosen artistic response, and hands
in whatever artistic product she has
created

 

responses are those which provoke richer
conversation around the text, perhaps
prompting a group member to say, “Ah-
ha! I never thought about the book that
way!”

present this response to the group or guide
the group in creating it (though it should
not take up more than a fifth of the allotted
discussion group time)

After the discussion, you will:

complete a l-2-page write-up in which you
include an explanation for your chosen
artistic response and a description of how
your group responded to its
creation/presentation

submit this write-up and your artistic
product the week following the
conversation.

 

First, the new fall syllabus expands upon language created in the spring syllabus to try to

move students away from craft-types responses. The original description states that the

artistic response “. . .is more thoughtful and text-centered than simply a craft.” Because

the initial findings of this study indicated that students had difficulty discerning just what

an artistic response was and were concerned that their limited artistic skills would

undermine their abilities to create artistic responses, the revised description gives

examples of the impact artistic responses should have and states that it is not necessary

for students to be skilled artists in order to produce a quality response. It says that the

artistic response

...should be a thoughtful, text-centered response -- more than a simple craft that is

loosely connected to the book. Whatever you create should work toward helping

all group members, including yourself, understand the book in new or deeper

209

 

 

ways. This isn’t a piece to show what a terrific artist you are; it’s to show what a
terrific thinker you are. The best artistic responses are those which provoke richer
conversation around the text, perhaps prompting a group member to say, “Ah-ha!
I never thought about the book that way!”

The fall description is also different from that of the spring in a second important
way. The spring version required teacher candidates to turn in a written rationale for the
artistic response on the day that response is discussed. This study found that, while some
of the teacher candidates considered how their group members’ might experience
deepened knowledge of text by interacting with their artistic responses, others did not
show any evidence of having considered this possibility. Because of this, TB 348
instructors realized that the spring assignment did not require candidates to be explicit
about the ways in which their artistic responses might help either them or their peers to
connect back to the text. Instructors also realized that, even if students were required to
show evidence (in their written response papers) that they had considered the social
impact of their artistic response, the spring assignment description offered no
opportunities for them to report results of their shared response because their written
responses were due on the day the books were to be discussed. As a result, the updated
fall description requires them to, after the class when the response was discussed,

0 complete a 1-2-page write-up in which you include an explanation for your chosen
artistic response and a description of how your group responded to its
creation/presentation.

0 submit this write-up and your artistic product the week following the conversation.

210

By adding these elements, the Team members hoped to prompt students to think about
the impact of their responses before and after they brought them to class.

Along with the changes made to assignment descriptions, the findings from this
study could prompt TB 348 instructors to speak about artistic response in a more clearly
defined way and provide them with scenarios (from the telling case) they can share with
their students in order to delineate the characteristics of the various levels of artistic

response.

To Elementary Teachers

This research focused on preservice teachers’ understanding of artistic response to
children’s and adolescent literature, but its findings also have a great deal to offer when it
comes to the work of practicing teachers. Because almost all the prior research done in
this area has focused on students in elementary through high school, there is little known
-- beyond the craft-driven nature of their applications -- about how practicing teachers
think of artistic response to literature. The findings of this study could assist them by, at
the very least, introducing them to the notion that artistic response can promote higher
level thinking among their students. Once they are exposed to the idea that it is important
to ask students (of any age) for meaningful artistic responses, not just those activities or
busy work that are loosely tied to text, they will be more likely to question their own
practices and intents in connection to this topic. Similar to TB 348 instructors, practicing
teachers who come in contact with this work, and who are interested in providing their

students with a variety of ways to make meaning with texts, will encounter terms,

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phrases, and assignment descriptions they can utilize when describing artistic response to
their students.

This work also has the potential of providing new information to practicing
teachers about how they might merge literary understandings of literature with the
practical, day-to-day aspects of their teaching. It provides examples of response roles
that are closely tied to the responses themselves and asks teachers to carefully consider
the purposes behind each of those forms of response. This might seem like something
that teachers are likely to be doing already, but the study illustrates how complex
different forms of literary response can be. It also shows how teachers and students alike
are more apt to focus on tasks (e. g., the creation of monster masks in response to Where
the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963)) in association with literary response, rather than the
reasoning behind those tasks (and how they might bring about greater and more varied
understanding of text). This study implies that elementary and middle school teachers
need to be made aware of the differences between craft activity and artistic response, so
that they can correctly recognize literary response roles that are more task-driven than
concept —driven.

The work done here provides elementary and middle school teachers with a clear
definition of artistic response that they can share with their students. These teachers
could also use the descriptions of the different levels of artistic response provided here to
help students realize what kind of artistic responses they are creating. If students are
primarily creating artistic responses that retell the story, then teachers could describe to
them how these responses fall into the category of “artistic response as object” and do not

do much to increase or inspire others to comprehend books in meaningful or inspired

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ways. Teachers could use Lari’s and Sara’s to explain why it is important for students to
take responsibility for each others’ learning when describing artistic response as social
experience. Finally, both teachers and students could take the characteristics of the
different levels of artistic response described here, just as the TB 348 instructors did, and
use them to create or modify assessments for artistic response. For example, teachers
who wanted to make a real effort to ensure that their students’ artistic responses would
instigate engaging and evolving discussions about a piece of literature might have those
students write explicitly about the ways their artistic response could inspire such
discussion. For assessment purposes, teachers could then have both the artistic
respondents and their group members write about the impact of the artistic response on
members’ interpretations of the text and the quality of the group’s discussion.

I began this study with the desire to learn about how preservice teachers come to
understand artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature. What I found,
however, also has implications for practicing teachers who are interested in helping
students to: 1) expand their thinking about literature and, 2) to respond to literature in
ways that might increase their abilities to share those responses with others. One final
way this study might impact the thinking and practice of elementary and middle school
teachers is by offering them insight into the importance of the many layers of literary
discussions. In this study preservice teachers reflected on their own personal interactions
with the text, and shared their thoughts in small discussion groups; after small discussion
groups, those ideas were or were not expressed within the context of the larger group
setting. Each of these configurations had something to offer artistic response people in

connection with text comprehension, but what comes through most clearly is the

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importance of offering all of them and providing students with modeling and instruction
about how to function within each of the settings. Sara developed her poem in response
to Esperanza Rising (Ryan, 2000) alone in her room. She then read the poem in her
small discussion group, which prompted Lari to share it with the class as a whole. As a
result of that whole-group sharing session, Lari expressed the importance of the poem
and gave the entire class opportunity to see the book in a new light. While there is a good
deal about the construction of these varied group sizes that went unexplored in this study,
the examples it provides speak to the importance of multiple literature discussion
configurations and offer teachers insight as to how they might design and implement
discussion groups in their own classrooms.
To Teacher Educators

The findings of the study are relevant to teacher educators in several ways. Like
TE 348 instructors, TE 348 students, and practicing teachers, teacher educators who are
interested in sharing artistic response with their students can look to this study for
language that could prove helpful in talking about that response. While classes and
teaching experiences can vary widely from semester to semester, this research indicates
that having clear definitions and effective examples is important when introducing artistic
response to preservice teachers. It also points out that teacher educators and their students
can challenge and support one another in the building of knowledge when a common
language or definition is missing.

By reading about how the Children’s Literature Team, the teacher candidates, and
I struggled to understand, define, and discuss artistic response, teacher educators might,

in addition, gain insight into how preservice teachers comprehend complicated aspects of

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literature response. When Lari told me that she “got” artistic response, that she knew it
was a “deeper kind of thinking,” I did not push her to explain what she meant. Instead, I
accepted that she knew what artistic response was because she had adopted some of my
language in describing it. The result of my easy acceptance of her interpretation was that
Lari created and wrote about a response that she knew did not fulfill the criteria for
artistic response. Her thoughts about artistic response were too undeveloped and
confused for her to be successful in her endeavor. This portion of the telling case
highlights the importance of the teacher educator’s role in helping students to work
through those difficulties. While I did not ask Lari to share what she meant when she
said artistic response was a “deeper kind of thinking,” I did prompt her to talk about why
she had responded so strongly to Sara’s poem. In doing so I provided her with the time
and place to make her transformed learning public.

Like elementary and middle school teachers, teacher educators may not
necessarily be familiar with the idea that artistic response can be valuable in transforming
not just a respondent’s understanding of the text, but also the understanding of the group
(large or small) of which that respondent is a member. In lecture halls with chairs nailed
to the floor, teacher educators can easily fall into teacher-led discussions of literature. As
I stated in the implications for practicing teachers, Lari’s and Sara’s interactions with
multiple group configurations show how very important varied social settings can be to
the development of concepts about a book — especially in connection with artistic
response to literature. By providing teacher candidates with varied group environments

and instruction and modeling as to how those groups can and should interact, teacher

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educators can help new teachers become better prepared to facilitate such groups in their
own classrooms.

As with practicing teachers, this study also affords teacher educators with
opportunities to discover new ways to combine literary understandings of literature with
their daily responsibilities as professionals. In my own experience as a teacher educator
the importance of reading and responding to literature as literature was sometimes lost
when I spoke about how I might use a piece of literature to teach a particular topic. By
bringing literature into the classroom setting in ways that encourage many types of
response, I have found that important topics may surface during discussion, but that those
topics can then be related directly back to the text and picked up later for expansion,
when the literary aspects of the text are no longer the center of attention.

What Are The Possibilities For Future Research?
My work on this dissertation has left me with many questions and a desire to do
additional research. As this study concludes I have plans to follow some of my former
TE 348 students into their own classrooms, as I am interested in discovering whether or
not they will teach any forms of literary response. If they do, I would like to observe
their practice as they proceed: What types of response do they include? How do they
introduce response forms? If they choose to teach artistic response, what motivates them
to do so? How do they define artistic response to their students? How do they evaluate
their own students’ artistic responses? How do they measure whether or not an artistic
response is successful? How do their students come to understand artistic response? I

believe there is a definite need for research on how beginning teachers teach artistic

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response and how children in elementary classrooms perceive it — especially since they

are often heavily oriented toward craft activities.

 

Another potential area of inquiry involves expanding this type of investigation
into other kinds of responses. While the students in TE 348 seemed most confused about
artistic response, I am curious about whether or not there are levels in their developing
understandings of the other types of responses as well. I am also interested in finding out
more about how preservice teachers understand each of these responses. Do their
definitions match those of their instructors? What role do their discussion group and
class members play in developing their understanding of the other responses? What role
does their instructor play? Are there parallels between how teacher candidates come to
understand artistic response and the ways they come to comprehend other forms of
response?

This study regards children’s and adolescent literature seriously. The research
discussed here is based on the premise that children’s literature, long valued as a part of
the K-12 curriculum, has literary and scholarly value as well. If that is the case, then
instruction in children’s literature should be a part of all literacy training for elementary
and middle school teachers, and teacher educators should be investigating the best ways
to include it in the curriculum. How is it being taught in teacher education programs
right now? Is it treated as a completely separate topic or is it integrated into literacy
curriculums? In what ways are teacher educators approaching children’s literature as it
connects to all aspects of literacy learning, including reading, writing, speaking, listening,
and viewing? Are there ways to use children’s literature as a tool to teach content areas

while also managing to teach the literary qualities of books?

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Conclusion

Does art have a role to play in the making of meaning? As Beyer (2000) put it,
“The arts can, through imaginative rendering of people, events, values, places, feelings,
and ideas, help to disclose worlds that are not yet in place, and thus serve as a force to
bring about their creations” (p. 85). Seeing artistic responses to literature bring about
transformed understanding of texts in socially situated settings speaks to the power of
artistic response, literature, and community in the construction of meaning. The
preservice teachers and I collectively learned with and from each other as we explored
the multifaceted interactions between readers and texts, the importance of public
engagement with literary ideas, and the complexities involved with coming to understand
artistic response to children’s and adolescent literature.

The telling case format and the lens of historical definitions of art offer a
conceptual framework for describing how preservice teachers came to understand artistic
response in one section of TB 348, yet the aim of this dissertation was not to offer narrow
views of artistic response perspectives and practices. Instead, I intend for this
dissertation to encourage educators to incorporate artistic response into the teaching of
literature in reflective and provocative ways.

In the culture of No Child Left Behind, the focus of educators has had to turn to
the learning product and what can be measured. By contrast, artistic response focuses on
the process and experience of engaging with literature in socially situated ways. It is one
of an array of responses to literature and, while it is often misunderstood, it allows for
both creative and intellectual interaction around text. My work will help teachers and

teacher educators better understand and implement this type of literature response.

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APPENDIX A

Syllabus

 

TE 348 - Reading And Responding To Children’s Literature

Spring 2005
Section: 006

Instructor: Suzy Knezek
Home Phone: 517—333-8280
Email: knezeksu@msu.edu
Office hours by appointment

Class Sessions: Tuesdays, 6:10-9:00
Location: 107 Erickson Hall

COURSE OVERVIEW

Welcome to TE 348 - Reading and Responding to Children's Literature. This
course focuses on literary understanding and genres in reading and teaching children's
literature. We will discuss critical and theoretical perspectives in evaluating children's
literature. We will also concentrate on the literary, social, and pedagogical issues
encountered in the study of children's literature. Our course readings, activities and
projects are designed to help you explore and learn about the following key ideas:

0 Evaluating and selecting materials -- Looking at, Evaluating, and Talking About
Children’s Literature

0 Taking a literary stance -- The Differences Between Literary and Curricular Uses of
Children’s Literature

0 Appreciating genre elements — Picture Books, Folklore, Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Contemporary Realistic Fiction, Nonfiction, Historical Fiction, Biography, and Poetry
This is primarily a discussion-based course and was planned to encourage dialogue

and an exchange of views. This sharing process will require you to read, purchase, and

bring in a variety of books that you will use to demonstrate and support your developing

knowledge. You will be required to purchase both course texts, including the overall text

and discussion literature (which can be found at local college bookstores), along with

eight children’s books that will comprise a text set.

COURSE TEXTS & LITERATURE

Course Text: Literature and the Child (fifth edition) — Cullinan and Galda
Discussion Literature: Where the Wild Things Are — Sendak

Voices in the Park — Browne

Esperanza Rising -- Ryan

City of Ember — Duprau

Group Choice (this can be a library book)

 

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Text Set: You will be required to select eight children’s books (some will be picture
books; others will be young adult novels) in addition to the books already detailed in the
course literature and course text sections above. These eight books, one representing
each of the eight genres covered in this course, will comprise the literature used in your
text set assignment (see assignment section below).

COURSE ASSIGNlVIENTS & EXAMS

Library/Bookstore Visit — 10 Points Total

We will not meet in Erickson for class on Tuesday, February 1". Instead, you
are to visit a bookstore, and either a public or school library. Spend some time observing
in the children’s section at each location. While you’re at each location, make notes (we
will provide a description of the note-taking format in class), draw a sketch diagram of
the children’s section at each location, and write a 1-2 paragraph piece in which you
discuss what assumptions about books, children, and reading are reflected by your
observations. The notes, diagrams, and written pieces will be due on Tuesday,
February 8th. The goal of this assignment is for you to focus on how books are
presented for “consumption.” By looking closely at the places where readers go to find
children’s books, we learn something about assumptions about books, children,
reading... and marketing. You will receive a handout detailing expected review contents,
along with a rubric summarizing evaluation information, later in the semester.

Text Set— 25 Points Total
In this course we wish to encourage aspiring elementary school teachers to begin
constructing their own hi gh-quality libraries of children’s literature. Schools today have
limited budgets, and though we may wish that teachers did not have to spend their own
money to supply their classrooms, the reality is that many must do so. The text set
assignment is designed to help you begin your own collection. It is also designed to help
us make certain that you have quality books that represent each of the genres presented in
the Cullinan and Galda text. Because TE 348 has become a required course for
elementary education students at Michigan State, instructors who teach junior- and
senior-level courses can now expect that students will have these text sets to use in lesson
planning and actual classroom instruction in TE 301, 401/402, and beyond.
In compiling your text set you will be required to:
0 Select eight children’s books, one representing each of the eight genres
addressed in Cullinan and Galda
You will be reading about and discussing genre elements in class. Please do
not select or purchase books in advance. You will be expected to bring in
library books as you read and discuss the Cullinan and Glada chapters (as per
your instructor’s directions). You are to select your text set books after you
have explored a particular genre in class.
I Select books that reflect an awareness of multicultural perspectives and
issues in children’s literature
Your overall text set should include books that indicate your awareness of the
importance of multiculturalism in children’s literature. This means that we expect to

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see books in your collections that include realistic and positive portrayal of people
who have traditionally been underrepresented in children’s books.

I Choose four of the eight books you selected and write critical reviews
about those books (based on genre criteria, literary elements, and artistic
elements) — 5 Points/Review; 20 points total

Portions of these reviews will be due three times during the semester. You will write
reviews with input from a peer review partner. You and your partner will be given
time in class to decide which of you will write reviews for each genre. Your first two
reviews, along with bibliographic information for the other two books you selected,
but are NOT writing about, will be due Tuesday, March 1", and should represent
two of the following genres: picture books, folklore, fantasy or science fiction, and/or
contemporary realistic fiction. Your partner will write two reviews, also. Between
the two of you, you must have a set of reviews that covers all four genres. This
means that if you write reviews of your picture book and science fiction selections,
then your partner must write reviews on her folklore and contemporary realistic
fiction selections. The same system will apply to the second set of books, including
your historical fiction, biography, poetry, and nonfiction selections. Your second set
of two reviews (and bibliographic information for your other two books) will be due
on Tuesday, April 12‘”. You will receive a handout detailing expected review
contents, along with a rubric summarizing evaluation information, later in the
semester.

0 Write a short reflection paper about what you have learned from the
selection, review, and partner writing processes - 5 Points Total

In this paper, you will be expected to detail your current understanding of children’s
books as response-worthy literature. You should use this piece to take stock of your
thinking and learning throughout the course. This final reflection should include
your list of the eight books you selected, along with the four completed and graded
reviews. It is due Tuesday, April 26’”. You will receive a handout detailing
expected reflection topics, along with a rubric summarizing evaluation information,
later in the semester. You must bring in the text set itself for class examination
and discussion on April 26"”

Book Discussion — 30 Points Total

Throughout this course, you will be participating in discussion groups. Similar to

literature discussion circles found in many elementary classrooms, these groups will
discuss the four books that you are required to purchase, along with one book your
discussion group selects, for this portion of the course. You will be discussing five books
in all. Each group will read and discuss Where the Wild Things Are, Voices in the Park,
Esperanza Rising, City of Ember, and a group choice text.

The book discussion groups will be comprised of five students and will meet five

times during the semester. Each student in a discussion group will be expected to be
particularly responsible for responding in one of five ways in each meeting:

1. Group F acilitator/Personal Response — 10 points
2. Literary Response — 5 points
3. Critical Response - 5 points

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4. Intertextual Response — 5 points

5. Artistic Response — 5 points
Each student in a group will be expected to take on each of the five roles by the end of
the semester. For example, the first time a group meets a student may be responsible for
a critical response, the next time she may be responsible for an intertextual response, etc.
Four of the five responses (literary, critical, intertextual, and artistic) will be written up
before class and turned in to the group facilitator/personal response person on the day of
the discussions. These responses will each be worth 5 points. When students take on the
group facilitator/personal response role, however, they will provide their response the
week after the group meets, and her response will be worth 10 points.

The group facilitator will come to class with a list of discussion questions and a
personal response in mind. During the discussion, the group facilitator will take notes.
She will then collect the other papers in the group on the day the discussion groups
meets, read the l-page papers from the other group members at home, and then complete
a 2-page write-up summarizing what was discussed (and whether there were significant
differences between the group members writing and the discussion), as well as what went
well and what might have gone better in the group, noting the individual members
participation. The summarizer will turn in her responses, along with those of her
colleagues, the week after the discussion takes place. The notes made by the summarizer
will be taken into account when I calculate the participation/attendance grades for each
member of the class.

You will receive a handout describing each of the discussion group roles later in
the semester. The dates of the discussion meetings (and most response due dates) are
as follows:

*February 8‘” " Role Response & Discussion I

* March 1St - Role Response & Discussion 11

* March 22"d - Role Response & Discussion 111

* April 5’“ - Role Response & Discussion IV

*April 19th - Role Response & Discussion V
(*Please remember that when you have the group facilitator/ personal response role, your
response will be due the week following the discussion.)

Midterm/Book Talk — 10 Points Total

During this semester you will be engaged in a variety of experiences that will
inform your thinking about children’s literature. One of the important ways that teachers
and librarians share their interest in particular books with children is through book talks.
Book talks usually include critical review-based recommendations about whether or not
the book presented should be read by others. On Tuesday, March 15’", each of you will
be expected to present a book talk to our class about a book that you have read outside of
those required for the course. This talk may focus on a library book, but it cannot be
centered on a book you have purchased for any other portion of the course. You are
expected to be both creative and critical in your presentation. Later in the semester you
will receive a handout that will detail the critical elements of a book talk for this course.
You will also receive a rubric with evaluation information on the topic.

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F inal/Book Critique — 10 Points Total

For your final exam in this course you will be given a children’s book to evaluate.
The book could be from any of the genres covered in Cullinan and Galda and will be
provided by your TE 348 instructor. You will be expected to critically evaluate the book
using the criteria (genre, literary elements, critical elements, artistic elements) you have
read, written, and talked about during the semester. This final exam will take place on the
final day of class.
Final Exam: Tuesday, April 26‘”.
Sharing Text Sets: Tuesday, April 26‘”.

Attendance, Preparation, & Participation - 15 Points Total

It is essential that you not only attend each class session (and be on time!), but
that you are also prepared to be an active class participant. An important aspect of any
classroom learning community is the active engagement of students and teachers around
worthwhile content. Your contributions to class discussions and activities are essential to
your learning as well as to the health and learning of our own classroom community. It is
your responsibility to attend all class sessions, prepared to be an active participant by
having completed the assigned readings and related written assignments prior to class.
Additionally, you will be expected to be an active class participant who raises relevant
questions, makes contributions that promote discussion, is sensitive to eliciting the ideas
of others in the class, and actively engages in small group work. Your attendance,
preparation and participation will contribute 15 points to your final grade. Please see the
course policy section of the syllabus below for details.

COURSE POLICIES
Your final grade for the semester will be based on written assignments and your class
attendance and participation.

0 Class Attendance: Your attendance and class participation are vital to your
development as a teacher. Your colleagues depend on you to share ideas,
experiences, classroom observations, etc. Tardiness and early departure from class
will be noted and documented. This is a dynamic learning environment. You
need to be here.

0 Absences: One unexcused absence in this course is allowed for unexpected
occurrences. After the one absence, each unexcused absence will reduce your final
grade by 0.25 points on a 4.0 scale. If you are unable to attend a class session, you
should call or e-mail your discussion group members and me in advance.

0 Attendance Policy: In accordance with the Teacher Preparation Program’s
Professional Conduct Policy, attendance and punctuality in class meetings is critical
to your success in this course and the program. More than a total of 2 unexcused
absences (e. g. absences without timely communications with your instructor) in class
will affect your grade and may result in a grade of 0.0 for the course.

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Incompletes (University Policy)

When special or unusual circumstances occur, the instructor may postpone
assignment of the student’s final grade in a course by use of an I-incomplete. The I-
incomplete may be given only when: The student (a) has completed at least 12 weeks of
the semester (6 weeks in the summer session), but is unable to complete the class work
and/or take the final examination because of illness or other compelling reason; and (b)
has done satisfactory work in the course; and (c) in the instructor’s judgment can
complete the required work without repeating the course.

Written Work

The written work that you hand in should be quality work, both in its content and
form. The content of your written work should reflect your careful and thoughtful
consideration of the ideas we are exploring in the various readings and activities that we
use — and you should refer to these where this serves to support your ideas. This does not
mean you need to write pages and pages for these assignments, but it (1&3. mean you
should carefully craft what you write - be clear, succinct, and support what you say. Your
work should be typed, double-spaced, and presented in an edited format (you have
checked it for spelling and grammar.
The grading scale will be approximately as follows:

94-100% 4.0

88-93% 3.5
82-87% 3.0
77-81% 2.5
70-76% 2.0

Each assignment will be graded separately and the graded assignments will be combined
to reach a final grade for this section. At any point, any attendance deductions will be

taken. Please note, a grade of 4.0 is considered exceptional work, a grade of 3.5 is
considered strong work, a 3.0 is considered good work and a 2.5 is considered to be
adequate work. It is the responsibility of each student to obtain class notes, handouts and
assignments from a fellow student in the event of an absence.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: The Value of Children’s Literature
Tuesday, January 11

0 Introduction to the course

0 Reading/literature memories

0 Sharing books (Yo! Yes! and others)

Week 2: Categories of Literature/ Overview of Genres

Tuesday, January 18

0 C&G Chapter 1 (Children 's Literature Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow)
0 C&G Chapter 12 (Developing Responsive Readers)

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Week 3: Learning to Talk About Books (Literary and Artistic Elements)/Genre: Picture
Books/Introduction to Response

Tuesday, January 25

' C&G Chapter 3 (The Art of Picture Books)

' C&G Chapter 4 (The Content of Picture Books)

' Bring in a picture book

Week 4: Where to Find Children’s Literature
Tuesday, February 1 - We will not meet this week!
' Individual visit to local public or school library
0 Individual visit to local book store

0 Create maps, notes, and connection pieces

Week 5: Book Discussion I (Where the Wild Things Are)/Genre: Folklore

Tuesday, February 8

C&G Chapter 5 (Folklore)

Bring in Folklore text

DUE: Role Response I - be prepared to discuss Where the Wild Things Are
DUE: Library/Bookstore maps, notes, and connection piece

Week 6: Genre: Fantasy and Science Fiction

Tuesday, February 15

0 C&G Chapter 6 (Fantasy and Science Fiction)

0 Bring in Fantasy text

0 Bring in Science Fiction text

0 DUE: Group Facilitators ONLY — Response for Where the Wild Things Are

Week 7: Genre: Contemporary Realistic Fiction
Tuesday, February 22

0 C&G Chapter 7 (Contemporary Realistic Fiction)
0 Bring in Contemporary Realistic Fiction text

Week 8: Book Discussion 11 (Voices in the Park) /Genre: Historical Fiction
Tuesday, March 1

C&G Chapter 8 (Historical Fiction)

Bring in Historical Fiction text

DUE: first four text set book reviews

DUE: Role Response 11 - be prepared to discuss Voices in the Park

Week 9: SPRING BREAK — NO CLASS
Tuesday, March 8

Week 10: Midtemr/Booktalks
Tuesday, March 15
o Midterm — Booktalks

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o DUE: Group Facilitators ONLY — Response for Voices in the Park

Week 11: Book Discussion III (Esperanza Rising) /Genre: Biography
Tuesday, March 22

0 C&G Chapter 9 (Biography)

0 Bring in biography text

0 DUE: Role Response 111 — be prepared to discuss Esperanza Rising

Week 12: Response Review/Genre: Nonfiction

Tuesday, March 29

0 C&G Chapter 10 (Nonfiction)

0 Bring in nonfiction text

0 DUE: Group Facilitators ONLY — Response for Esperanza Rising

Week 13: Book Discussion IV (City ofEmber)/Genre: Poetry

Tuesday, April 5

0 C&G Chapter 2 (Poetry)

0 Bring in book of poetry

I DUE: Role Response IV - be prepared to discuss City of Ember

Week 14: Culturally Diverse Literature

Tuesday, April 12

0 C&G Chapter 11 (Building a Culturally Diverse Literature Collection)
0 DUE: second four text set book reviews

0 DUE: Group Facilitators ONLY - Response for City of Ember

Wei 1 5: Book Discussion V (Group Choice)/Literature-Based Instruction

Tuesday, April 19

0 C&G Chapter 13 (Literature-Based Instruction in Preschool and Primary Grades)

0 C&G Chapter 14 (Literature-Based Instruction in Intermediate Grades and
Middle School)

0 DUB: Role Response V -- be prepared to discuss Group Choice text

Week 16: Final Exam

Tuesday, April 26

I Final Exam

I DUE: Summarizers ONLY — Response for Group Choice Text

I DUE: Text Set Reflection

I DUE: Text Set (bring in your text sets and be prepared to share them)

Final Exam Week

Tuesday, May 3, 8:00-10:00 pm. (We will not meet, unless we have to cancel a class
earlier in the semester.)

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APPENDIX B
Discussion Group Assignment: Roles

There are 5 ”roles” that will take place in each literature discussion group, based
on five different ways of responding to literature. For each book, one of you will
be responsible for each type of response on a rotating basis. By the end of the
semester, then, you will each have been responsible for each role and will be
better prepared as a teacher to facilitate literature discussion groups in your own
classroom.

When you come to class for a literature discussion, you should bring your copy
of the book (already read!) If you are responsible for textual response, critical
response, intertextual response, or artistic response, a 1-page write-up in which
you respond to the book according to your assigned response is due at the start of
class on the day you talk about the book. This l-page write-up will be worth 5
points. If you are the Group Facilitator for the day, you will have extra
responsibilities and will receive 10 points for your role that day. You will lead
your group’s discussion and write up a summary of the discussion afterwards,
turning it in the following week. Specific responsibilities are outlined below.

The five roles, based on five kinds of responses to literature, are outlined below:

1. Textual response
The person responsible for textual response
I finds and shares significant literary passages, explaining their
significance
I talks about the genre of the book
I brings literary elements into the conversation (setting, plot,
characters, theme, style)

2. Critical response
The person responsible for critical response

I explores questions about issues of power surrounding race, class
and gender (who has power in this book and who does not) and
voice (who is heard in this book and who is not)

I talks about the book’s expressed and implied beliefs

I talks about what the author might want readers to believe, how the
author works to make that happen and what the author seems to
assume about readers and about the subject

3. Intertextual response
The person responsible for intertextual response

227

I reads and connects one or two other works by author or another
author (picture books, novels, poems, biographies, non-fiction, etc.)

I finds and discusses articles, reviews, or interviews

I may find and discuss other media forms of the text (movies, CDs,
etc.)

4. Artistic response
The person responsible for artistic response

I creates a creative, artistic response to the book that has the text at its
center and that promotes understanding and conversation (for
example, a collage of literary passages, a choral reading, a poem, a
poster, a song, a drama). This should be more thoughtful and text-
centered than a simple craft or activity that is loosely tied to the
book (No ”busy work”).

I presents this response to the group or guides the group in creating
it (though it should not take up more than a fifth of the allotted
discussion group time)

I includes (in the write-up) a rationale and explanation for their
chosen artistic response, and hands in whatever artistic product
they have created

5. Group Facilitator/personal response
As the Facilitator for the discussion, you will NOT write a one-page paper
ahead of time. Instead, on the day of the discussion you will:

I prepare a list of questions or prompts to guide your group around
important issues of the book

I begin the discussion and keep it moving throughout the group
meeting. You do not need to do all the discussing; merely make
sure the discussion begins and continues in a strong and relevant
way

I bring personal response into the conversation, making relevant
connections to prior experience (i.e. life) and articulating relevant
emotional reactions to text (and their basis)

I monitor whether everyone gets a chance to talk, whether all voices
in the group are heard and keep track of the time to make certain
that all the responses get covered in the allotted time period

I takes notes during the discussion

After the discussion, you will:

I collect the other papers in the group on the day the discussion
groups meet (there should be four papers: textual, critical,
intertextual, and artistic)

I read the 1-page papers from the other group members

228

complete a 2-page write-up summarizing what was discussed (and
whether there were significant differences between the group
members writing and the discussion), as well as what went well
and what might have gone better in the group, noting the
individual members participation. Include your list of questions
and discussion prompts, explaining why you felt they were
relevant to the conversation

hands in to the instructor as a packet the following: the four response
papers from the discussion meeting, the summary of the group’s
conversation, and the discussion questions or prompts

This summary is usually due the week following the conversation
and is worth 10 points.

229

APPENDIX C

PowerPoint Slides Introducing Response

 

 

TE 348: Reading and Responding to
Children’s Literature

Session 2:
oResponsive Readers
Reader Response Roles

 

 

 

Life Doesn’t Frighten Me

- Poem b Maya Angelou; paintings by Jean-
Michel asquiat

. As you listen to. look at, and think about this
book. write:
- This book is about...
- This book makes me feel.....
- The most important word or phrase in this book
was...
- This book reminds me of....

 

230

 

 

 

 

Developing Responsive Readers

Teachers must know children and books
Who you are determines how you read
Reading is a transaction among reader, text.
and context

3 essentials for response-based curriculum:
- Time and choice

- Reading aloud
- Activities to support children's developing
understanding of literature

 

 

 

Literary Responses

Address the text
Response centers on the text itself
Address the text as valuable in itself

Response continually uses the text as the
primary reference point

Address the text as a literary creation

 

231

 

 

 

 

Non-Literary Responses

See the text as a tool to accomplish other purposes

Use the content of the text as a source of information or
instruction (Skills development, academic instruction,
moral development)

Do not address the text itself as a primary focus

Primary focus IS on what the text can do to help further
non- literary goals not what it i_s

Ignore or background the literary qualities of the text

Foreground the immediate practical or functional value of
the text

 

 

 

Modes of Response

Personal
Textual
Critical
Intertextual
Artistic

 

232

 

 

 

 

Personal Response

Readers make connections between texts and
their own lived experiences (Rosenblatt)
Personal connections between reader, text, and
reader’s life

How does the book make me feel? What does it
remind me of?

Taps into reader‘s life experiences, memories,
hopes, dreams, fears

Tends to be spontaneous and strongly affective

 

 

 

Textual Response

Readers closely examine literary elements of texts (i.e.,
setting, character, plot, theme, style)

Deliberate connection between reader, text, and
author/illustrator

How does the book M? What did the author,
illustrator do to make it work this way?

Taps into reader’s knowledge and experience with other
texts

May be analytical, evaluative, comparative

Tends to be cognitive, but may include affective

 

233

 

 

 

 

Critical Response

Readerssee texts and responses as historically, socially
and polItIcally SItuated

Analytical connection between reader, text, sub-text, and
somal context

What is the book really saying? Do I want to accept this
view of the world?

Taps into reader's awareness. of issues of race, class,
gender, power and somal justice

Surfacing and interrogating the assumptions of texts and
readers are key aspects 0 critical response

Tends to be cognitive, may also be affective

 

 

 

Intertextual

Literature is the context in which the text is explored and
our understanding of literature depends on knowledge of
Its conventlons
Readers study the work by comparin and contrasting it
to other texts (or other media forms 0 the text. includIng
movies, CDs, etc.)
What other books (or media forms of text) does this book
remind me of?

- In terms of genre characteristics

- In terms of literary elements

- In terms of artistIc elements

— In terms of response evoked

 

234

 

 

 

 

Artistic Response

- Readers react to material read with an
artistic creation

. The response must deepen or in some
way connect to readers’ comprehension of
the literature itself

. Avenues for expression may include
artwork in any medium (music, poetry,
collage, etc.)

 

235

 

 

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