Adaptive Expertise in the Teaching and Learning of Literary Argumentation in High School English Language Arts Classrooms 1

Abstract

Across four decades of Arthur Noble Applebee's scholarship in English language arts (ELA), he was concerned with how teachers' curricular and instructional decisions mediate how students learn what counts as interesting and appropriate, what can be said and how to say it. This chapter explores how an ELA teacher supported her students' learning of what is interesting and appropriate about literature through argumentation. It considers how an ELA teacher adapted her developing understanding of argumentation across a school year to teach literary analysis as part of an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. In the context of the Argumentative Writing Project (AWP) study, the chapter considers adaptive expertise for the teaching of argumentation and argumentative writing in a high school ELA classroom. Macroadaptation refers to educational programs planned for a particular group of students such as programs in gifted education or those in consideration of sociocultural background, as in programs designed as culturally responsive teaching.