In the Age of Analytic Reading: Understanding Readers’ Engagement with Text by Colleen Pennell

A Close Look at the Philosophy Circle: Discourse, Text, and Experiential Knowledge

In order to understand how students co-constructed meaning through philosophical inquiry, I highlight three salient elements within the intervention that guided their reading development: the dialogic frame of the discourse, the fluidity of the text, and readers’ experiential knowledge. Although my intent is not to oversimplify the process of meaning construction, as additional factors mediated understanding, I do hope to elevate an awareness of these areas in order to demonstrate how they worked in concert to advance growing readers higher order thinking.