What rhetoric can contribute to an ethnopoetics of narrative performance in teaching: The significance of parallelism in one teacher's narrative

Abstract

This article employs rhetoric to examine the poetic dimensions of one performed narrative in teaching. The analysis stems from a larger study of oral narratives in classroom talk during a Holocaust unit in a middle school language arts classroom. A corpus of seventy-five teacher and student narratives was transcribed and analyzed for the broader study. Focusing on the poetic dimensions of one narrative performance from that study, this analysis illustrates what rhetoric can contribute to the study of oral narrative in teaching. This rhetorical analysis is situated within an ethnopoetic approach to narrative study, attending to parallelism of sound, word, syntax, stanza, and theme in the teacher's narrative performance. Analysis of this multi-layered parallelism reveals this teacher's construal – through narrative – of a tightly coherent poetic text which may cue processes of identification during a lesson about Kristallnacht. The discussion elaborates some pedagogical implications of analytic attention to the textual coherence and structure of oral narrative in teaching—especially to “poetic” performance keys. Treating teaching as a rhetorical practice, the discussion further illuminates new questions about the pedagogical and moral significance of narrative performances in classrooms.