Reading as Identity Construction. : Practices and processes of building a sense of community in literature discussions among male Vehicle Engineering students.

In this dissertation literature discussions which include students of Vehicle Engineering at a Swedish upper secondary school will be discussed. The students are all boys. The study is focused on these boys’ small-group literature discussions, and the aim of the study is to describe what happens when they discuss four of the novels that form an integral part in the context of their Swedish studies. Principal fields of interest are the readings and the reception that the boys give utterance to in the literature discussions, as well as the identity-constructing processes which set in when they interact in the light of what they have read. The empirical material consists of eleven video recorded small-group discussions, and a conversational analytic perspective is combined with a reception theory perspective in the dissertation. The study shows that a sense of community is vital to the core of the boys’ literature discussions, and this has an influence on the reception and the readings that come up in the discussions. The boys are anxious to come to an agreement and voices which threaten to shatter the sense of community that has been constructed in the discussions are opposed in different ways. The literature discussions are not only arenas where the boys construct themselves as readers but are also considered as a forum where various identity-constructing practices take place. As readers these boys are bound to what can be read, and what cannot be read, in literary texts, but it is possible to see a certain development in their readings towards a more complex attitude, such as they find expression in the discussions. The boys also carry out the literature discussions, and the constructed sense of community is based on the reading of the novel to be discussed in a small-group discussion. Thus the boys take on the responsibility for their own learning as well. Many of the processes in which the boys are involved during the literature discussions could be described as processes of social reproduction, but various dividing lines which could be identified in the study also show that there are openings for other directions of the discussions.