Cool kids' carnival: Double-voiced discourse in student conversations about literature

Abstract

In this article we will explore group conversations at lower-secondary school about literary texts perceived as subject specific problems. We will focus on cases interpreted as borderline cases concerning student engagement, i.e., conversations where it is not unambiguously clear whether the students are on-task or off-task. These cases represent pedagogical, interpretative and methodological challenges in that it is not obvious (to either teachers or researchers) how to judge what is going on in the conversations. We will give short descriptive analyses of four conversations before more closely analysing the one that we find the most challenging. Alongside laughter, a prominent feature of all four conversations is a register of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “double-voiced discourse”. Our research question is, “How can we grasp and understand nuances of a double-voiced discourse in student conversations about literature?” Our main framework will be Bakhtin’s approach to literary discourse (Bakhtin, 1981; 1984a; 1986), conceived of as dialogic discourse analysis (cf. Skaftun, 2019). We suggest that this approach can make both teachers and educational researchers more sensitive to productive aspects of playfulness in the classroom.