Composing Literary Arguments in an 11th Grade International Baccalaureate Classroom: How Classroom Instructional Conversations Shape Modes of Participation

Theoretical Framework
In contrast with the dominant “skills” view, we have adopted an “ideological” view of literacy, in which literacy not only varies with social context and with cultural norms and discourses (regarding, for instance, identity, gender, and belief)—what might be termed a “social” model—but also that its uses and meanings are always embedded in relations of power. It is in this sense, we suggest, that literacy in general and teaching and learning argumentative writing in particular can be seen as ideological: they always involve contests over meanings, definitions, boundaries, and control of the literacy agenda. For these reasons, it becomes harder to justify teaching only one particular form of literacy when the learners already will have been exposed to a variety of everyday literacy practices (Lea and Street).

We also take a situated, emic view of what counts as “good writing,” grounded in theories of writing as social practice within a broader theoretical framework of social constructionism in which languaging and languaging relations are central to how people act and react to each other (cf., Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, and Shuart-Faris; Gergen; Newell, Bloome and Hirvela). In our view, rather than formulas and recipes, what fosters “good writing” in a classroom is interactionally constructed during instructional conversations in which the teacher and students are acting and reacting to each other as well as to the content and form of the written texts. Following the work of David Bloome, Stephanie Power Carter, Beth Morton Christian, Sheila Otto, and Nora Shuart-Faris, Discourse; Roz Ivanič; Paul Prior; and Brian Street, we view writing as languaging knowledge and learning embedded in particular social events with all of the complex social and cultural processes involved in human relationships.

Many of the classrooms we studied using ethnographic methods and perspectives over eight years took up an “argumentation as learning” perspective to the teaching of literature. Argumentation as learning within English language arts asks students to consider complex and multiple definitions of knowledge and ways of knowing and to recognize that insights into an understanding of the human condition and their own lives are continuously evolving (Bloome, Newell, Hirvela, and Lin). This framework is grounded in the idea that knowledge is discursively constructed over time and that discourse processes, social actions, and communicative practices shape what counts as knowing and doing within a particular group (Gergen; Prior).

Accordingly, arguing to learn can be seen as the ability to participate more effectively in written genres of a wider range of communities of practice (Applebee). One way to conceptualize this social action through language is with the term “writerly move,” or action mediated through language (Harris; Bazerman). Grounded in Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s view of learning as participation, Prior has described two modes of participation (in a graduate school context) as “procedural display” and “deep participation.” These modes “involve ascending levels of access to and engagement in disciplinary activity” (Prior 100) such as learning how to make a literary argument in a high-level IB English high school classroom. An important implication for understanding “learning to write” is to avoid relying on single idealized pathways or trajectories of expertise. Instead, we embrace what Prior has pointed out from Lave and Wenger that “forms of participation in communities of practice are diverse, multiple, always peripheral, and that there is no core to such communities” (102). This idea shapes the general argument that we are making about learning to write within a social constructionist framework.

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Methods

Design of the Argumentative Writing Project Study
Teachers were recruited to the study based on recommendations of school district administrators and teachers associated with the local National Writing Project affiliate. Our project was designed as follows: each academic year, seven to thirteen teachers were recruited to participate in the project; the summer before each academic year, the teachers participated in a three-week summer workshop on the teaching of argumentative writing. The content of the summer workshops was based on the concept of argumentative writing as inquiry and learning (cf., Newell, Bloome, and Hirvela). The workshop consisted of discussions of academic articles and sections of George Hillock’s Teaching Argument Writing and the writing of arguments by the teachers in response to essays and exercises (such as the “slip or trip” exercise in which readers must examine a picture for clues as to whether a murder suspect is lying and then write a “report” to the police chief warranting their claims). During the last week of the workshop, teachers individually developed curricular and instructional plans for teaching argumentative writing. Although teachers shared ideas with each other, no attempt was made to standardize their instructional plans or how they conceptualized argumentative writing as inquiry and learning. At the end of the workshop, members of the project met with each teacher to discuss research procedures for the upcoming year.

A member of our project was assigned as the lead researcher for each classroom to conduct an ethnographic and discourse analytic case study of the teaching of argumentative writing across the ensuing year. During the academic year, we observed and video-recorded an average of at least two class sessions per week (depending on what was happening in the classroom, observations and video recordings might be conducted every day for a few weeks, while at other times not for a few weeks). We also conducted teacher and student interviews, collected classroom documents and student work, and debriefed with the teachers frequently. Monthly meetings were held with the teachers for them to share their experiences teaching argumentative writing with each other.

 

Research Site and Participants
The study took place in the 2014-2015 academic year (the data presented later is from the autumn 2014 semester). The site of the research study and the source of our data for this article was an 11th-grade IB English classroom located in an academic magnet school in a major urban school district in the state of Ohio in the US. The school has a reputation for academic excellence and various options for participation in both Advanced Placement (AP) and IB programs across a range of content areas. Please note that the constraints of The Ohio State University Institutional Review Board only allow us to use pseudonyms for all references to the teacher and the students. The teacher, Ms. Hill, self-identified as African American, female, and having twelve years of English language arts teaching experience at the time of the study. She had taught IB English for three years. At the time of the study, Ms. Hill had just begun a master’s degree in English education. At that time, the class was composed of 22 students who self-identified as white (16), African American (2), Somalian American (2), Latina (1), and Asian American (1). The majority of the students also were enrolled in other AP and IB courses. According to school policy, Ms. Hill and her students would work together for two years, 11th grade and 12th grade.

 

Case Study Students
Out of the students who agreed to be regularly interviewed, Ms. Hill chose four focal students whom she believed represented different kinds of experience with and knowledge of writing literary arguments. For purposes of this study, we selected only two students: Gary (white, male), who was one of the stronger readers and writers in the class and was a frequent contributor to whole-class discussions, and Catherine (white, female), who often contributed to class discussions but struggled with reading and writing. She revealed to us that she felt “a bit intimidated” by some of her peers in the IB classroom. However, she said she wanted to use the school year with Ms. Hill to learn how to be a better writer and to get a high-level IB diploma.

Our selection of Gary and Catherine as case studies was purposeful in that we were especially interested in developing “telling cases” of deep participation and procedural display (Lea and Street, Prior, respectively). To be clear, we are not proposing these two modes as a classification of “good” or “poor” writers. Although the two modes—deep participation and procedural display—are a limited heuristic, we think they capture important patterns of school-based disciplinary socialization that Lea and Street treat as necessary but not sufficient. Rather than treating disciplinary practices and genres as relatively stable and as unproblematic for students to reproduce once learned, academic literacies enabled us to understand Gary’s and Catherine’s argumentative writing practices “as more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated, and involving both epistemological issues and social processes including power relations among people and institutions, and social identities” (Lea and Street 228). Specifically, we examined Gary’s and Catherine’s argumentative writing practices by considering when, how and what adaptations they made.

The 11th grade IB English class was embedded in a “humanities” program, an advanced or “high level” IB option students could self-select for the study of literary analysis. The course description on the IB website states:

The course is organized into three areas of exploration and seven central concepts, and focuses on the study of literary works. Together, the three areas of exploration of the course add up to a comprehensive exploration of literature from a variety of cultures, literary forms and periods. Students learn to appreciate the artistry of literature, and develop the ability to reflect critically on their reading, presenting literary analysis powerfully through both oral and written communication. (Retrieved from http://www.ibo.org/)

We include this quote not only to highlight the academic demands of the course, but also to point out that Ms. Hill took the course description seriously, as the criteria implied in the quote above were reinforced by an IB assessment regimen consisting of “two essay papers, one requiring the analysis of a passage of unseen literary text [literary argument], and the other a response to a question based on the works studied” as well as “a written assignment based on the works studied in translation, and [performance] of two oral activities presenting their analysis of works read.” This testing regimen shaped a great deal of Ms. Hill’s instructional conversations with students. However, rather than separating test preparation from her concerns with engaging her students in new argumentative writing practices, before an IB test she took limited time to review and practice the format. She also used the testing regimen to teach students to be reflective about their reading and writing performances (using rubrics across the school year) within the larger institutional context of the IB testing program that included a range of oral (e.g., “formal oral commentary and interview”) and written assessments (e.g., “literary commentary”). As background, it is important to note that two years earlier, the students’ ninth grade English language arts course was their entry into formal, academic writing. Ms. Hill described the writing instruction in the ninth grade as an “introduction to the five-paragraph theme” and “a kind of academic boot camp to tear you down to build you back-up as a student” (interview, 18 Sept. 2014). In other words, Ms. Hill challenged her students’ notions of what counted as good argumentative writing, including practices that had been sanctioned within the school context, and engaged them in discussion of and practice in arguing to learn while also embedding various requirements of the IB assessment within their discussions and writing.

 

Data Collection and Data Analysis
Following Street as well as David Bloome, Judy Klaman, and Matt Seymour, as ethnographic researchers our approach to data collection and analysis is to hover just above classroom events; that is, we observe events in their immediate contexts. It is in the events that teachers and students employ a range of practices that privilege some discourses and as well as some students over others. In this section, we describe our approach to data collection and analysis as a part and parcel of a logic of inquiry guided by these assumptions.

Because class sessions occurred two days (Monday and Thursday) per week each for 80 minutes, we were able to video record almost every class session. The teacher focused her instruction during the autumn semester on writing arguments in response to literary texts: a set of Hemingway short stories and Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. After reviewing the data collected from Ms. Hill’s classroom and in collaboration with her, we identified two key classroom events to analyze. Event 1 occurred an hour into the class session on October 30th, when Ms. Hill distributed what she labeled “Paragraph A” and “Paragraph B,” two essays that students in the class had written in response to Hemingway’s short story, “Up in Michigan.” Event 2 entailed a small group discussion of a thematic analysis that considered connections between “Indian Camp” (Hemingway) and Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. During this event, one of the case study students, Gary, proposed a broader archetypal framework for interpreting literature, a topic he took-up in his literary argument, while Catherine struggled with what she regarded as a “totally new way to write.” With Ms. Hill, we understood these classroom events as key because during these events Ms. Hill and her students engaged in instructional conversations that explicitly explained criteria for “good” argumentative writing (event 1) and for supporting students’ own topic selection for writing a literary argument (event 2).

The corpus of data used in this study consisted of classroom instruction (video recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8 to November 3) that concluded with a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews, and collaborative data analysis (with video clips); student interviews about instruction and their writing; samples of student writing; and related documents. For this article, we also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students—Catherine and Gary—in response to what Ms. Hill described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed, through dialogic interaction with her students, as a literary argument.

In order to respond to our first research question regarding analysis of key events in the instructional unit, the theoretical framework for the procedures used in data collection and data analysis derive from Bloome, Power Carter, Christian, Otto, and Shuart-Faris and are labelled microethnographic discourse analysis. Throughout data collection, researchers, in collaboration with the teacher, asked what are the key events in the classroom that need to be explored in depth in order to better understand the teaching and learning of argumentative writing (Mitchell 238-41). A key event is defined here as a classroom event that is viewed by participants as crucial for students’ acquisition of those social practices that define them as engaging in writing a “literary argument,” that is, a literature-related argument. We need to note that the acquisition of a social practice involves both its situated enactment (the procedures that count as doing that social practice in social situations) and the social and cultural ideologies that provide a social practice with its meaningfulness (cf., Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, and Shuart-Faris). A key event may be recurrent, such as a series of instructional conversations on what counts as “literary argument,” or it may be a single occurrence of an event (as per Mitchell’s telling case).

After identifying key events in the classroom, we analyzed video recordings of those key events using procedures described in Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, and Shuart-Faris. In brief, the event was transcribed and an utterance-by-utterance analysis conducted of how the teacher and students acted and reacted to each other and constructed meaning and conceptions of argumentative writing. In order to capture how a key event was situated within the flow of classroom activity and learning, classroom lessons both before and after a key event were also analyzed. We also looked for analogous classroom events before and after the targeted key event in order to understand how a social practice (such as using argumentative moves to teach literary argument) evolved over time. As part of the analysis of each key event, we interviewed the teacher and students about the event, how it fit into the broader context of classroom activity, and how they interpreted the meaningfulness of what occurred in the key event.

To respond to our second research question regarding students’ modes of participation, case study students’ written products were examined for evidence of the influence of key events through intertextual tracings (Olsen, VanDerHeide, Goff, and Dunn). We also interviewed students about their writing. We asked students to read their writing aloud and then describe how they composed it. Our goals in these interviews were (a) to understand how each student conceived of the writing task; (b) to trace features of previous instructional conversations; and (c) to find connections to their sources (primary and secondary sources).

In order to trace how students’ enacted modes of participation in writing practices and shifting writer identities, we began our analysis with the students’ final essays. We conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered analysis using procedures (based on previous intertextual analysis scholarship and backward mapping processes suggested by Green and Wallat; Prior; Olsen, VanDerHeide, Goff, and Dunn). First, we constructed a data set of transcribed classroom interactions, curricular materials, and writing from within the instructional unit. Second, we analyzed each essay for connections to the texts and talk over time, marking the traced connections. Third, we used “text-based” interviews in which the students described their writing process; we analyzed these interviews for connections to the essays as well as personal background that were not accessible from the essay (the product) itself (Prior). The tracings among the essays and other texts, and modes, illustrate the actions the students took to participate in the writing practices of the classroom community.

Before describing how we interpreted and understood Ms. Hill’s approach to teaching literature-related argumentative writing and how her students responded, it is worth recalling that we are particularly interested in Streets’ academic literacies model and related work (e.g., Bloome, Carter, Christian, Otto, and Shuart-Faris; Lewis, Enciso and Moje) whose learning theories foreground power, identity, and agency in the role of language in learning processes. Specifically, we are concerned with how Ms. Hill re-locates authority in two classroom events. That is, rather than assuming that the authority for what counts as a “good” argument resides in her own pre-set criteria or in the demands of the IB writing assessments, she and her students socially construct what makes sense through and within instructional conversations. Of course, such a shift is not easy or simple, and, as will become obvious, Ms. Hill and her students engage in moments of tension.

 

Instructional Context
Over the course of the semester from August 28 to November 20, Ms. Hill spent some portion of each of 14 sessions teaching her students both the Toulmin model of argumentation and how to write “an essay on some aspect of Hemingway’s short stories, Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid or a comparison of the two” (See Fig. 1 below.) A key feature of this assignment is the absence of a particular topic or question to consider. In an interview, Ms. Hill reported that the reason for this decision was to introduce her students to the nature of the IB’s assessment of literary commentary: “They [the students] have to choose the topic. The teacher is supposed to be pretty hands-off. And that is part of the struggle. And there are [IB] rules where I am able to read it [essay] but not comment on the paper or able to make very specific comments” (interview, 13 Oct. 2014).

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 In this section we respond to our second research questions by describing the process of two case-study students participating in the classroom context described above. Note that before beginning our analyses we acquired the students’ permission to include their writing as well as the content of the interviews we conducted with them. Specifically, we consider the students’ shared experiences as well as writing moments in which we see each of their modes of participation diverge.  For each student, we provide an illustration of how one excerpt from each of their essays traces across events, talk, and interactions, and we provide an extended depiction of each student writer, as made manifest across data: their interviews, written work, verbal participation (or lack thereof) in full class conversations and with their peer writing partner, assignment sheets, and the teacher's interview and informal conversations.

Both Catherine and Gary willingly applied themselves to the challenges of the IB English curriculum but with differing levels of confidence. Gary believed he would do well in IB because he “enjoyed the challenge of new ideas,” while Catherine described herself as “a bit nervous about all of the reading and smart students [in the classroom].” We chose to focus on Gary and Catherine because they approached the writing assignment with very different modes of participation: procedural display and deep participation (Prior). Recall that we are less interested in a single idealized pathway or trajectory of expertise. Rather we include Gary’s and Catherine’s efforts to write a literary argument each as a telling case of participation in communities of practice that are diverse, multiple, always peripheral, and without a single (or simple) core to be reached at the end of an instructional unit, a semester, or a school year (Prior).

 

Catherine: Participation as Procedural Display
After weeks of preparation, part of which we describe above, Ms. Hill gave the students just over a week to write their literary arguments. Catherine explained to us that she “waited till the last minute to get started and then had to work fast.” She had done so because “last [school] year I learned to write a five-paragraph essay and I got good grade [in English language arts] because I knew it. So, I did not take a lot of time. . . . I wait[ed] until the last minute [to write the essay] and then realized how difficult it was [to compare two different stories from differing historical periods and places].” This may explain, in part, why Catherine participated procedurally to display “all the parts of a good essay.” (see Table 1 for an illustration of Catherine’s mode of participation.)

Essay Except  (Initial Draft)	Originating Event/Text	Type of tracing	How tracing used	Affordance of the trace	Mode of Participation
Literature often portrays how a culture deals with certain archetypes. Although “Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Hemingway probably was not based on The Aeneid, they are both written about the same general subjects. The Aeneid was written in 29-19 BCE in Rome, Northern Italy, and possibly Greece. It was based on ancient Roman culture, while Hemingway writes of the same topics from the view of a well-traveled American in the 1930s. The Aeneid and “Snows of Kilimanjaro” both portray the writer’s own cultural belief surrounding death, regret and hell.	Class Session 10 (10/23/14) Small group work: Reference to opening sentence: “Literature often portrays how a culture deal with certain archetypes.” Interview Catherine said: “I was just writing about certain aspects and then comparing the two stories … I was trying to show the similarities in the two stories. They deal with the same thing—dying and whatever comes with it.” T-Chart practice from 6th grade Catherine said, “I made a T-chart with the titles at the top and made a list. This is something I learned to do in 6th grade. Then I thought about three ideas for each story. They (teachers) made us develop three ideas in freshman year—I think Ms. Hill wanted us to do that too.”	Thematic	Repeating	Catherine relied on writing practices she participated in during previous school years that she assumed that Ms. Hill required: (1) form first with five paragraphs and a three-part thesis statement; (2) prioritize performance for a grade: “I’m not sure what [Ms. Hill] wants me to write."	Catherine’s participation during the unit was shaped by her concern with form over content: she reported, “not really knowing what I mean but I know she [teacher] wanted us to make some sort of comparison.” This is procedural display. She also admitted to “waiting until the last minute [to write the essay] and then realizing how difficult it was [to compare two different stories from differing historical periods and places].”

Table 1: Illustration of Catherine’s Mode of Participation

 

One feature of the writing assignment that confused and frustrated Catherine was that Ms. Hill did not offer a specific question or prompt, though Catherine knew what texts she wanted to write about. When we asked how she composed her essay, she traced the practice back to sixth grade: “I made a T-chart with the titles at the top (“Snows of Kilimanjaro” in one column and The Aeneid in the other). This is something I learned to do in sixth grade. Then I thought about three ideas for each story. They (teachers) made us develop three ideas in freshman year (ninth grade) —I think Ms. Hill wanted us to do that too.” Based on her success with writing in ninth and tenth grade, she assumed that Ms. Hill “would want to see three ideas.” When Ms. Hill gave the students time to work in pairs to develop ideas, Catherine wrote the following at the top of her notes: “The Aeneid and The Snows of Kilimanjaro both have themes involving regrets, death and hell.” The list of notes that Catherine sketched suggests that she is listing ideas but not developing an argument.

Catherine’s essay included four paragraphs with a total of 872 words—within the limit of 800-900 words prescribed by the assignment. In general, Catherine’s essay introduces her focus on the two literary narratives and concludes the first paragraph (below) with what she described as a “thesis statement”: “The Aeneid and “Snows of Kilimanjaro” both portray the writer’s own cultural belief surrounding death, regret, and hell.”

Literature often portrays how a culture deals with certain archetypes. Although “Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Hemingway probably was not based on The Aeneid, they are both written about the same general subjects. The Aeneid was written in 29-19 BCE in Rome, Northern Italy, and possibly Greece. It was based on ancient Roman culture, while Hemingway writes of the same topics from the view of a well-traveled American in the 1930s. The Aeneid and “Snows of Kilimanjaro” both portray the writer’s own cultural belief surrounding death, regret and hell.

Catherine’s participation during the unit was shaped by her concern with form over content: she reported, “I know she [teacher] wanted us to make some sort of comparison.” We regard this as an instance of procedural display. We use Prior’s extension of David Bloome, Pamela Puro, and Erine Theordrou’s notion of procedural display from “doing a lesson” to “literacy events” that involve talking and text. Catherine’s interpretation and enactment of the writing assignment was procedural in that she decided to use a format (five-paragraph essay) to present three themes—a practice that she had learned in previous school years that Ms. Hill’s approach was attempting to change. Prior, in reference to Lave and Wegner’s terms, might describe Catherine’s practices as “relatively sequestered from participation” as Ms. Hill defined the goals of IB English.

In addition, rather than an argument or an analysis, Catherine’s essay repeats, in summary fashion, ideas that she accumulated across the instructional unit. During an interview, Catherine stated that she was “frustrated with [Ms. Hill] as I don’t know what I have to do to get a good grade.” Put another way, when we traced Catherine’s sources back to the instructional conversations (See event 1 and event 2 above), it was clear that the moves she made, that is, her participation, made it quite difficult to approximate the kind of literary argument that Ms. Hill had in mind: “When I read [Catherine’s] essay, it was a rather simple five-paragraph theme, and  I did not understand if she was making an argument. She seemed to write an essay like she would’ve in ninth or tenth grade. I want her to get beyond using the same form all of the time” (interview, 6 Dec. 2014).

In summary, although Ms. Hill approached literary argumentation as an exploration of ideas and experiences that emerged out of reading and discussing literary texts, Catherine relied on a pre-set formula that she assumed would lead to a “good” grade. We employ Catherine’s case to stress that students need time to understand and appropriate the complexities of argumentation as a way of writing about and knowing literature. In English language arts classrooms in the US, argumentative writing is often taught in a single instructional unit (Newell, Bloome, et al.); however, Catherine’s case illustrates why argumentative practices (in writing and discussion) are more likely to be appropriated across an entire academic year or longer. We also believe that Ms. Hill’s approach to literary argumentation (as described above) early in the academic year illustrates the value and challenges of pedagogical moves that proffer and support students’ writing practices that push against formulaic and pre-set structures. Of significance (but not presented in this article) was Ms. Hill’s responsivity to students’ evolving argumentative writing practices over the course of the academic year that included one-on-one conferencing with her students to provide individualized feedback as well as challenges to their conception of what counts as good argumentative writing.

 

Gary: Deep Participation
Prior defines “deep participation” as not only “open[ing] paths toward full participation, that is, taking up some mature role in a community of practice, but also increase[ing] opportunities to assume privileged roles in a community. Deep participation may be displayed in the roles a person assumes, in her relations to other participants, and qualitative aspects of her engagement in practices” (103). For instance, Gary chose to write on a topic quite different from his peers, relying not only on content from instructional conversation led by Ms. Hill, but “ideas I got from a class that I took in ninth grade.” He developed his ideas for his essay from “Carl Jung 's theory . . . that all humans share basic ideas of archetypes.” However, we traced his developing ideas from event 2 during the small group discussion of a thematic analysis that considered connections between “Indian Camp” and Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid (See Table 2).
As we discussed above, during a small-group discussion, Gary positioned himself as a kind of expert in archetypal analysis, especially when challenged by Ms. Hill to explain his claim that, “[w]e think that the comparison is there but the authors did not make the connections explicitly. They were inspired by archetypes.” We considered this as an instance of relatively “deep participation” in the IB English classroom community of practice not by assuming that he has a contribution to make the field of literary studies (cf., Hamilton’s examination of Frye’s criticism) but by recognizing how Gary has positioned himself relative to his peers and how he engages in discussion with them and with Ms. Hill.

Essay Excerpt  (First paragraph of Initial Draft)	Originating Event/Text	Type of tracing	How tracing used	Affordance of the trace	Mode of Participation
Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Throughout his work he introduced and developed the ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes. He states that “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes . . . “Carl Jung's theory states that all humans share basic ideas of archetypes. Jungian Archetypes are underlying forms that appear as images and motifs. They include ideas such as the mother, child, and the elder to name a few popular ones. All in all, the theory states simply that all humans share basic ideas and images that connect us.	Class Session 10 (10/23/14) Small group work: Gary: We think that types of literature have similarities but we don’t think he (Hemingway) was inspired by the Aeneid. Ms. Hill: Then give me an example. Gary: So, in Dora constantly has to cross a river…. Interview Gary reported that in 9th grade he learned about Jungian psychology and uses of archetypes across cultures.	Thematic	Responding	For Gary’s first draft, he developed an introduction by relying on his response to Ms. Hill question’s that asked Gary (during small group activity) to explain why he thinks an archetypal analysis is more valid that a comparison of two texts. Gary was not concerned with a certain form for his essay as Ms. Hill has encouraged them to find new forms. Gary also generated many intertextual connections to make his argument by alluding to both other Hemingway short stories that he read outside of class and to narratives and characters from popular cultural such as “Dora, the Explorer.”	With his initial draft, Gary positions himself as something of an expert (relative to his peers) in that he deliberately frames his argument using Jungian notions of archetypes as thematic analysis across two texts. However, in doing so he moves beyond comparison of two text to argue that all literary texts include archetypes.
According to Carl Jung' s theory of the collective unconscious, Ernest Hemingway writes his short stories with such archetypes in mind as to appeal to his readers. This is found to be true when examining writing or screenplay of other time periods and finding the same archetypes in each. These archetypes allow readers and viewers to connect to what they are viewing.	Interview Described how he “framed” his essay about the two stories using Jung’s theory of the unconscious: “Authors use certain images to appeal to all reading unconsciously. And this is how I developed my claim (italicized).”	Thematic	Responding and Extending	Gary and Ms. Hill both pointed to this statement as the essay’s general claim. He continues to write in response to Ms. Hill’s questions about an archetypal analysis. He introduces notion of “screenplay” to extend the archetypal to popular culture.

Gary’s Essay (First paragraph of second draft)	Originating Event/Text	Type of tracing	How tracing used	Affordance of the trace	Mode of Participation
“This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes . . . “Carl Jung's theory states that all humans share basic ideas of archetypes.	Conference with Ms. Hill She expressed concern with length of the essay as well as references to popular culture that extended the essay beyond the 800-word limit	Thematic	Responding	Gary’s introduction removes general references to Carl Jung and begins with a direct quote.	With his second draft, Gary’s participation shifts to procedural display after he realizes he will lose points for going beyond word length, being too general with his evidence, and, including works from popular culture that Ms. Hill does not approve of.

Table 2: Illustration of Gary’s mode of participation.

 

The first paragraph of Gary’s literary argument includes what he described as “a framework for the analysis that I want to do:”

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Throughout his work he introduced and developed the ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes. He states that, “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes . . .” Carl Jung 's theory states that all humans share basic ideas of archetypes. Jungian Archetypes are underlying forms that appear as images and motifs. They include ideas such as the mother, child, and the elder to name a few popular ones. All in all, the theory states simply that all humans share basic ideas and images that connect us.

Rather than considering one or two pieces of literature, as Ms. Hill had recommended when she made the writing assignment, Gary assumed that he would make a much broader claim (italicized) that he states at the end of his introductory paragraph:

According to Carl Jung' s theory of the collective unconscious, Ernest Hemingway writes his short stories with such archetypes in mind as to appeal to his readers. This is found to be true when examining writing or screenplay of other time periods and finding the same archetypes in each. These archetypes allow readers and viewers to connect to what they are viewing.

Using interview data and observational field notes, we traced the content and argumentative moves of Gary’s introduction directly to both event 1 and event 2, which we describe above. During event 1, Gary noticed that, “she [Ms. Hill] gave a choice in how to write our papers . . . I like this so that I can try something new and less boring.” Within event 2, Gary took advantage of his small group discussion as an opportunity to try out his ideas about “Carl Jung' s theory of the collective unconscious” first with his three peers and then with Ms. Hill when she entered the small group to monitor progress.

Despite the fact that we describe Gary’s participation as “deep,” Ms. Hill was not convinced that Gary’s writing was successful, especially his first draft, which not only exceeded the word limit (1064 words) but from her perspective “he included ideas and references to literature (a list of Hemingway short stories and a children’s television program, “Dora, the Explorer”) that seemed irrelevant to me. He also—you can see my written feedback—was way too general and lost focus.” These are the things Ms. Hill said to Gary when they had met for a writing conference after he had composed an initial draft. In a second draft, Gary’s participation shifted more to procedural display after he realized he would lose points for going beyond word length, being too general with his evidence, and including works from popular culture of which Ms. Hill did not approve as appropriate given the demands of IB writing assessment.

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