Temporality and Textual Engagement in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Using Gadamer's concept of tarrying, this paper explores the impact of classroom temporality on students' engagement with text in an 8th grade English Language Arts classroom. Through an analysis of interactional data collected during two years of an ethnographic study of classroom activities, I show how reading strategies helped constitute and were constituted by a linear, dimensional temporality, within which text and reader were individuated and textual meaning objectified, characterized by an “ontology of static substance” (Ross 2006). In such cases, the act of reading was defined as a processual movement through or consumption of text, which could break down requiring strategies to restore the smooth flow. At other moments, however, interaction around text took on a tarrying temporality. These less frequent moments resonate with Gadamer's claims for the state of understanding associated with the experience of art, a “being moved” (2001:76), an “uninterrupted pure gazing” (2006:72) associated with the “absolute presentness” of art (2006:60). In classroom moments I call tarrying, students were more often engaged in an open‐ended, exploratory co‐construction of meaning with other participants, rather than producing items at someone else's request. Text was not possessed but, on the contrary, became something that took hold of participants and was jointly occupied or shared. Within such moments, reading strategies, usually decontextualized tools to be applied by an individual subject to a text, receded instead into the tarrying or “playing”—a “movement backwards and forwards” (Gadamer 1975:93)—of the immediate interactional context.