Volume 35 Nº 3 - November 1999

Rethinking literature circles: reading and rolemaking in a virtual classroom environment

Lyn Hay and Kylie Hanson

Literature circles are literary reading events which have at their centre the making of social meaning. Harvey Daniels in his work Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in the Student Centred Classroom (1994) presents a series of cognitive roles that students can adopt to view the reading and sharing of a text from a variety of perspectives. The process is response-based and interaction with the text and the 'circle' is through the application of the pragmatic context and collective intention of the various roles. This article is based on the experience of a group of academics and teacher-librarians involved in a research project conducted at the School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University. As pedagogues, the application of Daniels' role-making has caused us to consider the process of reading as it relates to the concept of what we prefer to call a 'literary reader', variously referred to in the literature as 'intelligent, independent, good, sensitive, experienced, active or perceptive'...

Lyn Hay is a lecturer in Teacher-Librarianship in the School of Information Studies in the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. Her research and teaching focus on: Information sources and services in schools; Digital reference services; Information policy issues in schools; Information literacy; Professional electronic communities on the Internet Synchronous virtual classroom environments; MOO pedagogy.
lhay@csu.edu.au

Kylie Hanson is a lecturer in Teacher-Librarianship in the School of Information Studies in the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. Her research and teaching focus on: Fiction, literacy and librarianship; Knowledge management; The internet and active learning' Functionality and automation management; and Workplace learning.
khanson@csu.edu.au