English Education - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2000

Explores three questions concerning the effect of a language arts graduate course on 11 inservice teachers: (1) how teaching practices changed as a result of the course; (2) how teachers’ ideas of teaching changed; and (3) what factors facilitated professional growth.

Finds the metaphor of reading the classroom as “text” is (1) easy in that all it takes is an orientation that asks what the classroom has to teach; and (2) difficult in that what it has to teach is complex, multi-layered, and often conflictive. Provides a heuristic to guide teachers in viewing and understanding the classroom as text.

Uses data from case studies of literature classrooms to suggest that contemporary literary theories can enrich literature instruction in both high school and college classrooms. Claims that theories of interpretation offer not only ways of reading texts, but also ways of seeing and interpreting beyond the world of the classroom.