Readers in text worlds and lived worlds : a narrative inquiry study of understanding and meaning making with literature in a high school classroom

This study used a narrative inquiry model to examine how students in a senior honors English high school classroom engaged with literature and closely considered their strategies for understanding and meaning making with texts. The study draws upon the narrative voices of the participants from the classroom while they engaged in both class-based reading and personal, out-of-course reading processes. This study takes the perspective that the reading process mirror social interactions and constitutes an exchange of “shared voices.” The study examines how textual engagement may draw upon the reader’s accumulated personal experiences and meanings as well as the collection of dialogic voices that constitute the act of meaning making in a chain of active responses toward the ontologically oriented development of one’s being in the world. Data were collected over the course of an academic semester and included class observations, multiple individual interviews with participants, and artifact collection from class assignments. The findings suggests that one of the primary ways of making meaning with texts is through intersubjective encounters that allows for recognition and recontextualization of the text between the text’s world and the reader’s lived world