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Adapting Literature Circles: A Study of "Reason"
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by Sylvia Sarrett
Hillsborough High School
Tampa, Florida
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| | The Concept of Literature Circles
"Reason" is a raison d'être of AP English Language and Composition, right? What is reason? How does it work? How do the professionals use it? How do we respond to it and use it ourselves? How do we follow its course in fiction and nonfiction texts?
The route actually begins with Harvey Daniels's theory of literature circles as a way of making book clubs work in all kinds and levels of classrooms. In 1993 he, with a group of 20 teachers, originated this wonderful concept (not an isolated activity), and I highly recommend that you read about it firsthand, in depth, in his book Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups (2nd ed., Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers, 2001). The use of role sheets and how sensible they were first attracted me to the literature circle concept. As soon as I began to read Daniels's book, however, I saw how roles are secondary to student choices. In fact, the section "Eleven Key Ingredients" (p. 18) elaborates on these choices -- everything from temporary group arrangements, topics, and the direction of conversation itself to the selection of books to read. In my classes, we follow Daniels's suggestion: we start with the roles but stay there only long enough to find our way into the issues. I no longer originate the subject to be discussed. It is of primary importance that students themselves find, explore, and support those issues.
Daniels sets up four basic roles: connector, questioner, literary luminary/passage master, and illustrator. Each group member is responsible for one role. The connector links the reading (or argument) to life, feelings, other works, or ideas. The questioner "is always wondering and analyzing." The literary luminary looks for very cool passages, that is, "important sections of the text" to "savor, reread, analyze, or share them aloud" (p. 103). The illustrator makes things visual -- charts, graphic organizers, stick figures, maps, and sometimes wonderful drawings from emerging artists. (I still have a pointillist drawing of "the creature" from Charles Johnson's Middle Passage that not only captures Johnson's idea of the shape-shifting of that character but also continues to open the passage to other students.)
A Vertical Team Approach to Concepts
At Hillsborough High, we teach AP English Language and Composition in the junior year. After looking at the goals of the AP course, we decided which concepts we needed to introduce and practice in earlier years. We adjusted our reading lists for each grade level to include nonfiction works, either as part of a study in fiction or in and of itself. For example, in the sophomore year we talk more now about audience, purpose, and topic than we ever have, and we have subconsciously moved from "theme" to "argument and issues." The AP Vertical Team has certainly been a viable practice for our English department as these adjustments have improved the study of both fiction and nonfiction.
Literature circles play a significant role in our study. Last year, my sophomore, honors English class used literature circles throughout the first semester and, as part of our Vertical Team connection with the junior AP English Language and Culture course, were thick in the study of "reason."
While the sophomores do not choose their core reading materials, they do select the ways of focusing on them and the kinds of presentations that demonstrate their knowledge and emerging understanding. Our study of reason began with the book of Job from the Holy Bible because it presents seminal ideas about reason, faith, loyalty, and friendship as well as important images of God, Satan, a good man, friends, and a wife. The book of Job is a staple not only in studies of poetry and drama but also in discourse about life's purpose. It raises foundational questions and so grounds the topics (or so I originally planned, and certainly the students conceded that you couldn't have Archibald MacLeish's play J. B. if you hadn't first had Job). Robert Frost's short play, A Masque of Reason, offers other perspectives on both the ideas and images raised in Job, and the play J. B. certainly extends the ideas and images. Two articles topped off our study: MacLeish's own analysis, "About a Trespass on a Monument," and a 1959 Life magazine article, "Three Opinions on 'J. B.'" Small-group discussion, whole-class discussion, lists, questions, and essays showed what students knew and wanted to know.
Two basic roles always work well for us in trying to understand "reason": connector and questioner. We began with a whole-class discussion of the first kinds of questions: What is the book of Job? How does it work? What is it about: suffering? The students quickly asserted that Job accepts the physical dimension of his suffering but keeps asking for the reason why it is happening, so we developed our first definition for reason as "cause." We all got a bit frustrated that the three friends, Elihu, and Job himself could not find the answer, while the reader knows from Job 1:12 and 2:6 that God has allowed Satan to render Job alone, homeless, and in pain. We understood that Job curses the day of his birth, but he never curses God. "That isn't reasonable," the students moaned, and so we developed our second definition for reason as "logical." Neither the evidence nor the inferences made sense. The students then wondered whether the topic might be "faith" or "loyalty" rather than "suffering," so we added those two to our list and set Job aside to see what Frost had to say about the matter. Talk about controversy!
Other questions arose: Why does Frost take such a satiric stand on the topics, changing the characters and adding humor? We made more lists of possibilities and set those aside to see what spin MacLeish might bring. Is his play just a modern version of the book of Job? What reason would he have to do that? We now had three professionals -- the biblical author, Frost, and MacLeish -- exploring reason and offering not only different views of it conceptually but also different discussions of it substantively. MacLeish's play, in fact, had been so controversial that Life had published its article with three analytical perspectives from leading theologians, and MacLeish himself wrote his essay with its personal, seductive defense.
We needed more analytical methods to improve our discussion. Enter Harvey Daniels's encouragement to feel free to invent new roles, even offering such varying examples created by other teachers as cartographer, historian, biosystem leader. I did it. That is, my students and I did it. We modified Daniels's literature circle ideas, including roles, to fit our study of nonfiction prose. The move was lively, productive, and easy.
Role-Playing That Worked
The students decided to use the roles but not be bound by them. They had long since internalized the basic roles of connector, questioner, illustrator, and literary luminary, accepting them as fundamental ways to understand literature. The students decided we needed two of the optional roles, summarizer and researcher, and together we created three new roles of issues seeker, pro thinker, and con thinker. Discussion clarified that the pro/con thinkers were both summarizers and creators of arguments. They could see what the articles were proposing, and they could come up with their own positions on the articles. The only problem was that we now had nine roles for groups of four. "It's okay," they assured me, "We'll just each take two or three." And that is how those roles have worked for us. Once internalized, some are so natural that we do them automatically. The directions are simple: read the articles through the roles, take some notes, and come prepared to talk about it all. I deliberately do not define "it."
Our 90-minute class periods were indeed exciting demonstrations of understanding three works, two articles, and one's own ideas. I moved around the room, stopping and taking notes, sometimes chatting with groups. Every group was actively engaged, talking with depth and evidence, using reason itself to get at "reason."
I designed the discussion so that the first 10 to 15 minutes would be a "finding our way" time in which the students determined central points for discussion. Some of the groups wanted a prompt. I shook my head, no, and reiterated that the cool thing was finding the prompt. As I circulated, I saw the summarizer role kick in with, "Well, this article was about . . . ." The researcher quickly helped by bringing forth pictures and notes. For example, in Jesse's group, Neel began, "I researched Hiroshima because I didn't get it in class," and that group was off to see what Hiroshima had to do with things, especially since they now knew that MacLeish's brother was killed in World War I. Author, purpose, topic, and audience came together in significant ways. "It has to be more than a modern ash heap," Jesse insisted. Then the issues seeker took over most groups, with the pro thinker and the con thinker beginning to argue noisily about their personal positions. Interestingly, in some groups the summarizer actually missed ideas and topics that the issues seeker and pro/con thinkers picked up. I thought I would see overlapping, but I didn't. When the students chose their roles, they chose the way they naturally saw things, and that pattern meant different foci and details.
We stopped to "debrief," and to make sure that every group had found a way into the topics. It was a quick stop because they were ready to continue the discussions.
One group focused on "just" as the center of all the works, moving from suffering to justice and justification. Another group, caught up in the circus/actor metaphor, downloaded a copy of MacLeish's poem, "The End of the World," because one article had suggested how much that poem affected the play. I had that poem in my folder and was glad that I had not introduced it but had given them time to find it on their own, to follow a thread of research and set up their own analysis and connections. The illustrator and researcher in that group brought in pictures of different play productions, online discussions about the circus, and masks. The students went beyond the assigned reading and chose their additional sources. The use of literature circles encouraged these extensions.
Examples: Two Groups Find Their Way by Different Routes
Two groups in particular represented very different ways of discussing similar issues. The first pair, Jon and James, was theoretical and philosophical from the beginning, and the second, a group of four steered by Crimson, stayed closer to the sources. Both discussions considered the idea of "interpretation" and how it belongs to the author and the reader.
Jon and James independently moved through four issues: acceptance, interpretation, questioning, and love. Even the brief segment of their dialogue below shows their extended and interactive search. In addition to the Book of Job and the play J. B., they referred to an article by Reinhold Niebuhr called "Modern Answers to an Enigma."
Jon: "MacLeish went right at the idea: accept whatever we have. I saw that's a flaw in Job."
James: "But that was basically MacLeish's interpretation of J. B. This guy [in the article by Niebuhr really supports it."
James then synthesized Job, J. B., and Niebuhr's "Modern Answers to an Enigma," and connected them to the reader, any reader.
Jon: "But what's your interpretation of it?" The group moves into the issue of questioning.
James insisted that "God can't make mistakes" and asked, "Can we rationalize anything about God?"
Jon: "Should Job have tried to look for a reason in the first place?"
James took the discussion up a notch in his conclusion that Job "asks questions [to] learn about himself." There was some laughter and confusion, and Jon refocused on Job per se. James stayed with his theory that the reader himself is important and that when you read you "take the same journey within yourself." He addressed that huge issue of "Why read literature?" and asserted that it is the function of literature to "cause you to question."
Jon then shifted the topic to the role of "love" in J. B., a point that MacLeish emphasized in his own article, and concluded that "Love and reason [equal] nothing. . . . Love doesn't do anything for you to understand the play." Jon began with a quote from MacLeish and moved to his own understanding that "it's about dealing with what you have. We should value love."
James returned to his understanding of the levels involved in interpreting these ideas, cautioning: "We're talking about the opinions about J. B., not J. B. itself."
The second group represented an emerging ability to work independently. They began by waiting for me to come to their group and get them started. Since I did not want to give them a topic per se, I suggested that "titles are always interesting," and the conversation began. The group discussed J. B., the Frost play, the Niebuhr article, and an article called "Arid Repudiation of Religion" by Thurston N. Davis.
Keyana pointed to the Davis article and summarized: "So he's saying that J. B. is lacking religion."
Crimson reexamined the basic question: "MacLeish himself explained his play thoroughly. Finkelstein is the only person who can reach anywhere near MacLeish in the idea of people asking, 'Why? Why me?'" Then there was silence, so I nudged again toward the huge idea embedded in the title word, "enigma" [from Niebuhr, "Modern Answers to an Enigma"].
Vicki: "Niebuhr's article says the modern answers are in J. B."
Crimson: "Yes, and you never figure it [enigma] out unless you analyze everything deeply."
Vicki: "So 'enigma' doesn't have any answers either?"
Crimson considered the question and moved to the Frost play: "That's the idea that we question. When you look at Robert Frost's work . . . ."
Appreciation for a "Professional Approach"
These two groups represent quite different approaches to the task, each of them successful in varying ways. Their understanding of the materials allowed them to question huge ideas on several levels. That synthesis probably would not have happened without the reading skills developed through Daniels's literature circle roles; the power of making choices about issues, interpretations, and extensions; and the freedom of exploration. These discussions brought the study of reason to a culminating point. The students saw how all professional writers are thoughtful and implicit in their consideration of major issues. The students also realized -- perhaps more importantly -- how they could use a professional approach to understanding both fiction and nonfiction. What more could a teacher ask?
Materials Used
The book of Job. Holy Bible (Old Testament).
Daniels, Harvey. Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups. 2nd ed. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers, 2001.
Frost, Robert. A Masque of Reason. In Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995.
Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Scribner, 1998.
MacLeish, Archibald. "About a Trespass on a Monument." In Biblical Images in Literature, edited by Roland Bartel, James S. Ackerman, and Thayer S. Warshaw. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1975. Originally published in the New York Times, December 7, 1958, section 2, pp. 5, 7.
MacLeish, Archibald. J. B. Boston: Mariner Books, 1989.
"Three Opinions on J. B." Life, May 18, 1959, comprised of "Arid Repudiation of Religion" by Thurston N. Davis, "Insight Into Our Deep Need" by Louis Finkelstein, and "Modern Answers to an Enigma" by Reinhold Niebuhr.
Sylvia Sarrett is a Table Leader for the AP English Language and Composition Examination, the immediate past chair of the English Academic Advisory Committee to the College Board, and a College Board English consultant.
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