Content-Area Conversations

by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Carol Rothenberg

Table of Contents

Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath

Virginia Woolf's 1938 book of essays, Three Guineas, opens with a letter to a barrister who has asked the question, "How are we to prevent war?" The question leads Woolf to weave throughout her answer a theme that must have seemed odd, if not irrelevant, to readers of the time: the work of language in the academy. In writing to the barrister, Woolf speaks for and through the voices of women, the poor, and other groups excluded from the academy while also holding out the ideal purpose of advanced learning—to address eternally vexing questions.

Woolf despairs that the academy will never be inclusive or take up society's hardest questions. She points out that while the academy remains inert, society and the needs of all its citizens continue to change. How must universities tackle the real, practical need to teach students to earn their living while also presenting them with the wisdom of the masters? If trained to teach, can instructors use their influence to address questions such as how to prevent war? Or must the educated, in the end, merely maintain the status quo? Must the university rely so heavily on lectures and examinations and undertake only research that promises to yield monetary rewards? Woolf calls on "the face on the other side of the page" to recognize that the educated often come to focus their energies on acquiring possessions and gaining power; various forms of force become their accepted means of moving forward. In the end, Woolf argues, the university must be "rebuilt" and education must be altered (1938, p. 35).

Woolf's letter contains within it an imagined response to itself, invoking the dialogic and deliberative nature of what has come to be called "academic language." Those from the academy always assume a knowing, conversing audience; indeed, the academic essay traces its roots to conversation. English essayists such as Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, and Virginia Woolf made dialogue and a give-and-take of ideas the essence of their essays on social values, habits, and arts (Heath, 1993, 1997). Woolf's letter to the barrister continues this dialogue through artful persuasion as well as strong argumentation with claims, warrants, and evidence. In demonstrating these fundamentals of academic language, Woolf gives her readers a look at the give-and-take of substantive conversation among the "informed."

The book you hold in your hands echoes Woolf's affirmation of talk as fundamental to learning. Good conversation among individuals who care and are informed about a topic provides the groundwork for reading and writing as well as listening intently and carefully to deliberation. Though this volume focuses on the importance of talk in classrooms, I extend the claims made for this situation to other settings—intimate get-togethers with family or friends, for example, or casual conversations with new acquaintances in informal public settings. The more frequently we engage in deliberation, the greater the ease with which we raise a narrative as point of evidence within an argument. (Consider, for example, the importance of narrative in legal testimony and argumentation.) The more extended the opportunities for talk, the more fluid the speaker's flow of evidence and reference points.

The reality is that the practice time available in classrooms is not sufficient to build fluency in students who have few other occasions for extended conversation on weighty topics. The harsh truth is that listening and multiparty talk occur too rarely in classrooms. The authors of this book have good reason to question higher education's need to continue its dependence on lecture and examinations.

Content-Area Conversations helps learners to understand some fundamentals of rhetoric, such as deliberative discourse (one of Aristotle's three types of rhetoric, along with forensic and epideictic). Repeatedly addressed since the 1990s by political scientists and philosophers, such discourse is often referred to in the context of "deliberative democracy" and generally refers to deliberation that centers on political considerations (Mutz, 2006). Distinct from debate in that two oppositional positions are not assumed, deliberative discourse gives voice to multiple positions and views, centers on the common good or democratic values, and brings new information and perspectives into the open in a collaborative spirit. Critical to deliberative discourse is the fact that the process takes precedence over the status of participants; a central authority does not power over conclusions or pronouncements regarding consensus. Such discourse is therefore often paired with the descriptor participatory.

This volume also presents core ideas from linguistics, such as register, that call attention to roles and what lies behind these roles in terms of representation. Learners only begin to make connections among experiences when they feel that what is to be learned has value and meaning—a notion reinforced in the section on different conversational norms of English language learners and the importance of strategies of inclusion. Throughout the book, we learn ways to help learners gain a curiosity and fascination with language and grasp the meaning of "metalanguage."

Chapter 6 addresses a central irony of the contemporary climate of assessment. Though educators frequently use terms such as accountability, evaluation, and standards, rarely do they consider the best ways to assess the most frequent means of communication among the young: oral language, visual media, and performance. This volume shows how teachers can use multiple means of assessment and establish opportunities to model language and offer meaningful situations of oral language exchange. The teachers whose words, ways, and wisdom are discussed in this book represent exceptional caring, connecting, and communicating. Their patterns of listening, talking, researching, and inquiring are not routine classroom practices; rather, they represent the deep principles that shape roles and relationships.

"Academic language" consists not of lectures, examinations, force, or avoidance of questions that cry out for deliberation. Quite the opposite: true academic language lies in the details of vocabulary, syntax, and genres that characterize deliberative, democratic participation across roles and responsibilities. If we were to analyze the linguistic structures most frequently illustrated in this volume, we would find numerous "rare words" with clear definitions and examples worked into conversations by the teachers. We would also find open-ended questions, hypotheticals, "if–then" propositions, narratives of argumentation, and mental-state verbs that ask students to imagine, plan, think about, wonder, and speculate. These linguistic structures are the nuts and bolts within deliberative discourse that set learners on their way to taking in information as well as determining the bases, merits, and possibilities of that information.

Of course, learning about language goes well beyond the classroom. If classrooms become havens of extensive deliberative talk, we can depend on the joy and exhilaration of such participation to spill into other participatory occasions. We need to ensure that our learning is lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep (Banks et al., 2007).

Lifelong learning depends on our acquiring attitudes, fundamental behaviors, and real-world information that enable us to keep on learning. Thus, we fare best in life if we have opportunities very early to hear and use language that will shape our pursuit of curiosity ("But what happens when that's not there?"), enable us to challenge and test ideas ("Does that mean there's only one way to get that answer?"), and persist in collaborative ventures ("We're trying to work it out, but we've got to help each other with this vocabulary"). Through using such language, we develop the mental habit of self-assessment as well as the capacity to observe and listen to what is happening with others around us. We learn to ask hard questions of ourselves and others. Such habits of language—if started early—stay long with us.

The width of our lives is determined by the range of experiences we have and the extent of empathic reasoning we master. Life-wide learning comes through experience managing our learning with and from others across time, space, and unexpected turns of events. We have to figure out how to adapt, transport knowledge and skills from one situation to another, and transform direct experience into tactics and strategies for the future. To gain life-wide learning, we need opportunities to play an array of roles and take up multiple responsibilities with the help of caring scaffolding and strong modeling. Early experiences in life-wide learning ensure that we learn to see others' points of view, sense the experience of how others live, and know why is it important to think anew about questions such as how to prevent war and how to remake education.

Life-deep learning is the hardest to develop. Before writing Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, had visited Italy and experienced fascism up close. Throughout the late 1930s, news of Germany and its impending invasion of Great Britain was constant in their lives. The fate of Jews, the indifference of nations, and the persistence of war were at once intensely private (Leonard was Jewish) and public for them. Their writings and activities tell of their sense of the pain of others and their attempts to speak for the silenced and expose the torturing effects of oppression. Virginia, in particular, pled that education be available and accessible without regard for gender, class, or birthright. Life-deep learning encompasses our commitment to religious, moral, spiritual, and ethical values in relation to our behavior and social relationships. We create this deep learning as we develop and examine our beliefs, ideologies, and orientations to facing life with integrity and respect for self and others.

In the end, academic language is not just academic. It is life giving when it extends through the length, width, and depth of all that we can learn. Such language allows us to question, deliberate, negotiate, ponder, and imagine. Fluency and ease in this kind of talk help us to find our way in the world and humanity to make the world a better place.

Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. All rights reserved. No part of this publication—including the drawings, graphs, illustrations, or chapters, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles—may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from ASCD.