Meeting #3 12/13/21

11:30 am

Reading: Bob Fecho – Literacy Practice and the Dialogical Self: Isaac Making Meaning

At our third and final meeting of the fall semester, we read Bob Fecho’s piece on the relationship between reading, the dialogical self, and acts of making meaning. The beginning of our discussion circled back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, addressing how meaning making relates to Bakhtin’s idea of “ideological becoming” as well as the ongoing and unending process of development and evolution that we all live within as students, teachers, and people (all of which serve as avowed and ascribed identity positions – a topic we discussed in meeting #2).

We read Fecho’s methodology closely, considering how his study reflected findings based off of his participant, “Isaac’s” experiences with literacy practices. Here, we entered a discussion about “wrestling” with reading and concluded that one can easily fake enthusiasm about a piece; it is much more difficult, however, to feign confusion. Confusion, we agreed, often requires assessing a text from a range of perspectives, effectively “trying on” a variety of identity positions to attempt to find meaning, purpose, and value in a text.

We ended our discussion by considering a variety of texts for spring 22.

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