”Det rister litt i hjernen” : En studie av møtet mellom høytpresterende elever i videregående skole og litteraturfaglig praksis

Abstract

The dissertation "Det rister litt i hjernen". En studie av møtet mellom høytpresterende elever i videregående skole og litteraturfaglig praksis [“My Brain Is Rattling”. A Study of the Dialogue Between High-Ahieving Upper Secondary Students and Literary Practice”] is catalysed by an interest for how participants in a literary practice on different developmental stages carry out and interpret the practice in a disciplinary context. The abovementioned interest in such literary practice springs from a conviction that insight into what a literary practice is and may be prepares the ground for discussions of the purposes, contents and methods connected to formal literary education; discussions that in turn may lead to the in-school development of disciplinary literacies. The dissertation aims at contributing to the field by providing knowledge about the dialogue between student and literary practice in the upper secondary Norwegian L1 classroom through the studying of highachieving students’ talk about and carryingout of the practice. The theoretical framework for the dissertation is a sociocultural one: Vygotsky’s language development theory and Bakhtin’s dialogism together form a theoretical platform, whereas theories about discourse (Gee, 2011), about practice and communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), and about the recontextualisation of practice (Van Leeuwen, 2008) are employed in order to investigate the complexity of the dialogue between student(s) and text. The literary practice is understood as one that primarily is mediated through situated language and it should therefore be studied though the fine details of such language. The approach to the data may be referred to as dialogical discourse analysis (Skaftun, 2009; 2010). The dissertation explores literary practice through a) the close reading of literary group conversations of poems at the onset of upper secondary school (16 years of age), and b) retrospective group interviews of final year students in upper secondary school (19 years of age), probing their interpretation of the literary practice in the L1 classroom. The events that are analysed derive from a larger battery of data from the same upper secondary school; the larger battery of data providing a frame for the interpretation of the conversations and the interviews. The dissertation is article-based and includes three articles; all of which are written in Norwegian. The dissertation draws on data collected in a Norwegian educational context, thus its primary relevance is the Scandinavian context. It is nevertheless assumed that the findings are also relevant in other contexts.