Dr.

Jennifer VanDerHeide
Tuesday, November 11th
11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Erickson Room: 133F

How High School Students Learn to Write Literary
Arguments Through Social Interaction: An Apprenticeship
Although reading and responding to literature comprises a large portion of the English Language Arts
curriculum, and argumentative writing is growing in focus in secondary schools, what literary argument is and
how to teach it is not well addressed in the scholarly literature or practitioner materials. This study explores
what literary argument is in a particular classroom, how the teacher teaches students to write literary arguments,
and how three focal students learn to write literary arguments over time. I frame this teaching and learning of
literary argument as an apprenticeship, drawing on Rogoffs (1995) theory that learning is changing
participation in the activities of a sociocultural community. Through methods of case study and interactional
ethnography, I analyzed students participation in literary argument at Rogoffs three analytic planes: the
context and nature of the apprenticeship in literary argument, the interactional processes that guide students
participation, and individual students appropriation of the interpretive, analytic, and argumentative moves that
constitute literary argument in this learning community. The findings of this study make evident the
interactional processes that support students learning of argumentative moves but also the various learning
trajectories of individual students as they appropriate argumentative moves in speaking and in writing.

Jennifer VanDerHeide is a fixed-term assistant professor of English Education. As a
former high school English teacher and literacy coach, her scholarship focuses on teacher
learning of writing instruction, student writing development over time, and connections between
classroom interaction and learning to write, specifically within the context of the teaching and
learning of argumentative writing. She is interested in the contextualized nature of writing and
learning to write and the tensions that arise between what counts as learning to write within a
particular context and high-stakes, decontextualized measures of writing achievement. As a
doctoral student at The Ohio State University, Jennifer was a researcher on the Argumentative
Writing Project, a 3-year grant funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, studying the
teaching and learning of argumentative writing in high school ELA classrooms. As part of this
work, Jennifer was awarded Written Communications Best New Scholar Award for 2013.

2014-2015 Literacy Colloquy Presentation