Take it out of class: Exploring virtual literature circles

Bowers-Campbell, Joy. (2011). Take it out of class: Exploring virtual literature circles. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(8), 557-567.

Here, we see how literature circles were converted to an online format, using threaded discussions. The context was a four-week teacher education course designed to model the process of conducting literature circles so that these future or early-career teachers might implement them with their own students. The author, too, was a student, but a student in a doctoral program, and served as an apprentice to the course’s professor of record. The course was newly launched online, and had a hybrid format, with one week of face to face meetings, two weeks of reading and online threaded discussions done by three small groups of students (groups chose 2-3 books to read and discuss during this time), and then one final week of face to face meetings. The author had access to all of the online archives, but was not involved in grading or assessing. We are not specifically told whether the author actually interacted with the students, either online or face to face, though we do know she attended the face to face meetings. I’d suspect she did not participate in the online discussions, though we are not told that definitely. It seems, though, that she was simply a “lurker”, though probably the students knew she was monitoring the discussion threads and analyzing those data (they’d need to formally consent to being a part of the study for ethical reasons, and informed consent would require knowing what was going on).

Knowing this much about the context of the study up-front is necessary because these findings, though interesting, have to be interpreted with caution. What seems to work fairly well in a teacher education course (and the online literature circles DID seem to work fairly well with the three groups) may not work well with middle school and high school students. They may not have the same motivation to engage with the experience, nor may they have the same access to or expertise with the hardware and software needed to do online literature circles. I’m trying to imagine how exactly online literature circles would look as part of a busy school day in a middle school or high school in my own urban area. I’d really rather see an article about online literature circles in that sort of context than in the context presented here. I wonder if any of the participants in this study wondered the same thing? It seems like a very good thing to model exemplary instruction in teacher education courses; I try to do that myself as a teacher educator. We do have to be careful, though, not to present things in ways that might not actually work in classrooms with younger children. I wonder if there was any discussion evaluating the method and asking important questions about how it would be adapted to work with, say, middle school students? I hope that occurred, but with such a short course term, and so little time available in the face to face portion of the course, I’m not sure such discussions could occur with any level of depth.

To sum all this up, the context always has to be kept in mind when interpreting the findings. About all we can say here with any degree of certainty is that literature circles probably can be implemented online with a reasonable number of benefits, though probably there also are a reasonable number of challenges involved, and those will probably be more perplexing when trying to do the same thing with a younger group of students. More research on this is definitely needed.