English Education - Volume 38, Issue 1, 2005

By examining a class discussion between an eighth grade student and her teacher around the reading of a literary text, my intent in this paper is to further the discussion around one of the central issues in English education today – the inquiry around whether it is more productive to teach literature by first connecting students’ cultural narratives with the text and so provide them with opportunities to resist what teachers and others might see as the “right”; reading or whether to begin with an authorial reading, which requires students to recognize the codes and conventions the author used in creating the text, providing a fuller, more complete engagement with literature.

In this article we report a study of a teacher, Jimmy, making the transition from his university teacher education program to his first job. We explore what we characterize as tensions between traditions in his effort to develop a conception to inform his teaching of high school English.