1.3 A Rhetorical Approach to Classroom Narrative Study: Interpreting Narration as an Ethical Resource for Teaching in the USA

Abstract

Narrative inquiry approaches have become popular as an interpretive method in curriculum studies and teacher education, but they are not designed to carefully study the intricacies of classroom talk, much less its rhetorical dimensions. This chapter presents a rhetorical approach for interpreting narrative talk-in-interaction in classrooms. Grounded in a sustained example of a unit of Holocaust study in a Midwestern United States middle school literacy classroom, I elaborate a model for interpreting narrative-in-interaction within an over-arching rhetorical approach, entailing multi-functional study of narrative discourse. Calling upon earlier educational narrative scholarship in ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics, I argue that rhetorical interpretation of everyday classroom narratives can reveal not only the aesthetic and poetic shaping of course subject matter and curriculum, but also the profound moral socialization that may occur as teachers tell stories to students. While focusing primarily on teacher storytelling, I also discuss narrative curricular material (e.g., literary texts under study) and stories told by students. This rhetorical interpretive approach illuminates how narratives work as dynamic resources used by teachers to do poetic, performative, and ethical work in their classrooms. A rhetorical epistemology and an accompanying set of methodological assumptions and interpretive practices warrant my argument about narrative practices and texts in classrooms.