JOURNAL
OF APPLIED
DEVELOPMENTAL
All rights of reproduction
PSYCHOLOGY,
18,37-l
in any form reserved.
Artistic
05 (1997)
0 1997
Composing
Representational
ISSN
Ablex Publishing
0193-3973
Corporation
as
Process
PETER~MAGORINSKY
University
of Oklahoma
Sigel’s distancing
theory and notion of representational
competence provides the
framework
for examining students’ interpretations
of literature through artistic depictions. Through their productions the students represented not only the relationships
they
saw in the literature but also their own experiences as reflected in the action in the story.
Their texts then served as representations
that enabled them to reflect on their own
experiences. The research procedure, which required students to respond to a videotape
of their composing process, further prompted them to develop the material text they
had created into a mental representation
of their vision of themselves as instantiated in
the characters of the story. The students engaged in three processes during their
productions:
generating
representational
images by empathizing
with the literary
characters; using spatial relationships
and material objects to represent their construction of meaning in response to the signs of the literary text; and using their composing
process both to represent their understanding
of the story and to develop that understanding. The article supports Sigel’s distancing theory by postulating that representation
is a reciprocal, dynamic process in which experiences are both represented
and are
developed through the process of representation.
. . . [I]t is the creation of distance between the person and the object psychologically or
physically that requires the individual to represent an experience, and in that process
distances self from the here and now. The experience is transformebit
becomes a
representation. Open-ended questions exemplify the process. For example, they “demand” a response and the answer is not embedded in the question. It has to be constructed
by the responder. It is in the head of the responder. The open-ended question forces the
individual to engage in an active search for a response. This process of construction is
done through re-presentation of previous experience or anticipation of intentions. Such
experiences lead to the development of representational competence.
-Sigel,
1990, p. 98.
Peter Smagorinsky is an Associate Professor of English Education in the College of Education at the University of
Oklahoma. His research interests include defining and assessing classroom literacy, and studying the transition of
preservice
English teachers to the work force which he is currently doing through a grant from OERI.
Direct
correspondence
all
Van Vleet Oval, Norman,
to: Peter Smagorinsky,
OK 73019-0260
University
of Oklahoma,
[email protected].
College of Education,
820
88
SMAGORINSKY
Sigel’s distancing theory, developed over 25 years ago, synthesized a research program that
investigated the types ofhome experiences that enabled young children to engage, anticipate,
reconstruct, and transcend their immediate experiences and impressions into signs and
symbols of representation, and thus participate more fruitfully in the types of formal
reasoning tasks expected of them in school. To Sigel, parent-child interactions that enabled
children to engage in the process of representation through sign creation-that allowed them
to step back from their immediate experiences and create a physical or mental object that
they could ponder-romoted
the capacities of reflectivity and abstraction necessary for
success in school. In its original formulation, “Distancing is a way to characterize differentiation of the subjective from the objective, the self from others, ideas from actions.
Representational competence is hypothesized as the resultant of experiences creating such
distance” (Sigel, 1970, p. 113).
Sigel’s research program has focused on the extent to which parent-child interactions
foster representational competence. Yet the theory has applications to learners at all levels;
Sigel(l990) told, for instance, of how his own personal experience oftaking off in an airplane
as an adult provided the original lucid representation of his distancing theory. In this article
I use his distancing theory as a framework to examine the experiences of a set of students in
their efforts to make sense of a short story they read, using art as the medium of rendering
their conceptions of the relationships among the story’s central characters. The artistic
renderings that this article focuses on-a dance, a drawing, and a play-were not simply
representations of the literary characters in the story they were assigned, however; they were
depictions of the students’ own experiences as realized in the relationships of the characters
in the story. By creating artistic images of themselves as revealed through their ascription
of meaning to the literary figures, the students demonstrated the same sort of representational
competence that Sigel argues is central to achieving distance. Furthermore, the process of
engaging in representation and distance itselfwas a transforming experience for the students,
enabling them to reflect on the objectification of their own experiences and consequently
better understand them.
Representing meaning across sign systems-what Sigel referred to as representational
competence-has also been termed trunsmediution by Suhor (1984). Suhor adopted a
semiotic framework for discussing school curricula, arguing that Peircean semiotics did not
discriminate among sign systems but instead provided the grounds for recognizing the
situational value of whatever sign system was appropriate for communication (cf. Smagorinsky, 1995a, 1995b; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994,1995a, 1995b; Wertsch, 1991; Witte,
1992). Sigel’s notion of representational competence, although not framed in terms of
semiotics, appears compatible with the view that representing understanding and constructing meaning across sign systems does not privilege any sign system over others (such as the
way in which language and mathematics are valued in schools, Gardner, 1983), but sees the
value of any representational system as being situationally appropriate.
This recognition of a variety of sign systems-what Wertsch (199 1) called a tool kit of
mediational means-is central to the points developed in this article. The students were in
a school in which they were given choices about how to represent and mediate their
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
89
understanding of themselves, their worlds, and their academic material. Having access to a
varied tool kit of representational means, I would argue, provided them with opportunities
for distancing experiences that are not typically available to students in conventional schools.
The next section describes the research site and its unusual focus and structure.
CONTEXT OF THE INVESTIGATION
The Facility
The research took place in a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility that provided
both therapy for recovery and public school educational classes. The students had committed
themselves (sometimes reluctantly) to therapeutic, community-based treatment for six to
eighteen months. Because of federal and state laws related to confidentiality, no information
that links data, location, and specific identities of individuals may be described or suggested.
The names of the students focused on in this report are pseudonyms, and confidentiality
agreements prevent us from reporting their specific academic records prior to enrolling in
the facility.’
A general description of the facility is possible, however. The setting for the research was
an important factor in the students’ recognition of artistic texts as legitimate means of
representation. The students lived at the facility, which was located in an isolated, rural
community. Although the students could not leave the grounds without supervision, inside
the facility they were entrusted with many responsibilities. Students were accountable for
all aspects of daily maintenance and therefore cooked for each other and cleaned up after
one another. As part of their recovery from their addiction they were engaged in daily formal
therapy that extended to their social transactions. To aid recovery, students needed to have
a great deal of trust in one another and to support each other emotionally. Students could
only be accepted into the program by a vote of the other residents following a trial period.
Instructional Background
The facility employed two teachers for the student body of 30 to 35 students, an enrollment
that fluctuated as students entered, completed, or dropped out of the treatment program. The
focal teacher for this research came from an artistic family that included a choreographer
and pianist, and he himself was a published poet who owned a keyboard instrument store
that had brought him into contact with many musicians over the years. The teacher’s graduate
education had acquainted him with Gardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences and
theories of semiotics, thus helping to ground his own respect for the arts in formal theory.
During the year of the data collection, the students under the teacher’s instruction had
been encouraged to engage in literary interpretations through artistic media. The prevailing
culture of rock and roll music that permeated the values and interests of the students had
encouraged them to use music as a means of representation and exploration in their efforts
to interpret academic subject matter. At the point of data collection, therefore, students in
the facility had grown comfortable with the idea of using artistic representation in their
schoolwork and recognized it as a legitimate form of academic expression.
90
SMAGORINSKY
METHODOLOGY
The research employed stimulated recall, a methodology originally developed by Bloom
(1954; Rose, 1984; DiPardo, 1994) in which a research participant is videotaped or audiotaped during an activity and then participates in a tape-based interview in an effort to report
processes engaged in during the activity. The interview does not simply reconstruct the prior
processes, but mediates the participant’s recall into a new understanding of those processes
(Smagorinsky, 1995b; Smagorinsky & Coppock, 1994, 1995a, 1995b; Swanson-Owens &
Newell, 1994).
In this research the students were videotaped as they read a short story and developed
representations of it, and then the videotape was played back to four sets of students for a
stimulated recall interview.2 Students were given individual photocopies of a short story,
William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force.” The story concerns a doctor who narrates an
account of a house call he makes during a diphtheria epidemic. The doctor must extract a
throat culture from a young girl who has displayed symptoms of the illness. The girl battles
him savagely and hysterically to prevent him from examining her throat, and her parents try
to help the doctor by holding her down and shaming her into complying. During the course
of the struggle the doctor develops contempt for the parents and passion toward the girl.
Against his rational judgment, the doctor becomes lost in “a blind fury” to attack and subdue
the girl. In “a final unreasoning assault” he overpowers her and discovers her “secret” of
“tonsils covered with membrane.” The story ends with a final act of fury in which the girl
attacks the doctor “while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.”
The room had been stocked with a variety of media through which the students could
express themselves: conventional paper and pens for writing, Tinker Toys, paints and other
art supplies, a versatile keyboard synthesizer, a simpler keyboard instrument, and a computer
with a graphics program. In addition, some students went to their rooms and got guitars,
cassette music tapes, masks, and other resources to supplement what had been provided for
them. Students had one hour in which to read the story, make a decision about whether to
work alone or with others, select the form of their representation, and produce their
interpretation. During this time, their teacher circulated about the room and served as a
resource for students as they worked.
The research project was explained to the students prior to the data collection. Each
student who participated in the stimulated recall interviews signed an informed consent
document that had been approved by the university’s human subjects committee, indicating
that they understood the purpose of the research and the goal of publishing results with
students’ confidentiality protected. Of the 34 students present on the day of the data
collection, 10 participated in stimulated recall interviews. Greene and Higgins (1994)
recommended that retrospective accounts of learning processes be collected within 24 hours
of the process itself. The length of the interviews (averaging about 90 minutes) and the
scheduling of students’ time at the facility allowed for a total of four interviews over the
two-day span that included the data collection itself. The groups of students agreeing to
interviews were selected according to the variety of the size of the groups (groups of one,
two, three, and four students), their representativeness of the alternative’s student body in
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
91
terms of gender (three girls and seven boys) and race (the study included two of the facility’s
three minority students), and the variety of interpretive modes (drawing, dance, music,
drama) they employed. Of the four groups interviewed, three are discussed in this article.
The fourth group-a group of three boys who used a keyboard synthesizer to create a
soundtrack for the story--were not musically trained and spent the majority of their time
arguing about how to operate the instrument, and therefore did not yield a useful interview
for this analysis.
RESULTS
This section examines some of the ways in which students in the class practiced “representational competence, that is, the ability to understand that events can be transformed from
one symbolic system to another and be represented by signs or symbols” (Sigel, 1990, p.
87). The task presented to the students in this class was open-ended, requiring them to create
some product that represented their understanding of “The Use of Force.” The students used
one set of signs-the linguistic signs of the literary text-s
a blueprint from which to
construct a personal text based on the associations they made with the literary figures
(Rosenblatt, 1984). Although students in the class were given the option of using the medium
of writing to produce their interpretations, only one student in the class produced a written
response, that being a poem. The personal texts produced by the other 33 students were
rendered through some form of artistic depiction, often produced in collaboration with one
or more other students and mediated by speech (and its attendant tone and other features),
gesture, and other semiotic tools during the process of production. The representation thus
came about through a polysymbolic process of transmediation, with the representation of
their understanding embodied in the artistic product and subsequently developed into a new
mental representation through the mediation of the stimulated recall interview.
The artistic products created by the students represented their view of the literary
characters as instances of events from their own experiences. As a result their creations
served as representations enabling them to gain distance from their immediate sense of selves
and provide a configuration of signs that allowed them to reflect on their own development.
The literary figures were stable in one sense, that being that the words of the story were fixed
and invariant for all readers. In Sigel’s (1990) terms, the words of the story retained their
object constancy across readers; from the standpoint of Peircean semiotics, the signs of the
text were immutable.
Yet the meaning ascribed to those signs varied greatly from reader to reader, and the
multiple attributions of meaning led to different artistic representations of the story and
different experiences in response to it. Those experiences came about as the artistic texts
provided objectified versions of the students’ life histories for contemplation and, through
the research process, development into new understandings. The students were thus able to
achieve distance by creating material objects for consideration and then mental representations of those material objects.
92
SMAGORINSKY
The following sections describe how students achieved distance through three processes:
the manner in which they generated representational images by empathizing with the literary
characters; the manner in which they used spatial relationships and material objects to
represent their construction of meaning in response to the signs of the literary text; and the
manner in which their composing process both represented their understanding of the story
and served to develop that understanding.
Generating Representations through Empathy with Characters
The students revealed that their initial attribution of meaning to the story came through their
empathic responses to the characters, primarily the girl in relation to the doctor. Martha, one
of the dancers, said that she identified strongly with the experience of the girl in the story
because she shared the character’s reluctance to open up to other people. Like the girl in the
story, she felt “scared”: “I felt like the little girl because we live in two different worlds. . . . I
felt like the little girl because she was always trying to hide from the doctor and I was like
hiding myself from the doctor [in the dance].” Martha’s feeling that she needed to hide from
the doctor during her performance was a consequence of personal experiences parallel to
those of the girl in the story. At one point during the stimulated recall interview she was
asked, “When you dance a role, do you, is there any real part of you that gets played out in
the dancer?” Martha replied,
Martha:
Q:
Martha:
It’s tough for me. When I was hiding from [Jane in the dance] she was the doctor
and I was the daughter, the little girl, and it was just like me. I hate people trying
to find out who I am so I was basically hiding the way I always hide but I was
hiding to be somebody else. I felt like I was hiding in the little girl, but it was
me that was hiding, because I do that all the time. I hide from everybody.
Did you feel for the character then?
Oh yeah, I felt for the character. When I was dancing I was thinking about what
I would do. I hated what the doctor did to her. I wanted to kill him.
Later in the interview Martha returned to her feelings about her character:
Martha:
Q:
My feelings for the kid started when I was reading the story because there have
been many times when I have had some problems. I’m like I’m okay, get away.
In a way I kind of knew how this girl was feeling whenever the doctor was trying
to get into her mouth. I am like that with dentists. I hate dentists. I won’t let them
get into my mouth. I’m afraid they’re going to pull out my teeth. It scares me. I
try to keep my mouth shut too. I put myself in her position through the whole
story knowing she was scared and very insecure because she knows she is going
to die. She knows through the whole story she’s going to die. She doesn’t want
her parents to know about it.
Is it just dentists? Earlier you were talking about how you don’t like people in
general getting inside you. So was it just a dentist or was it-
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
Martha:
93
Well, for people to know me, I don’t like for anyone to know me, it is really
scary for people to know me. Who I am or anything like doctors, and stuff like
that. I don’t like them to look inside my mouth. With her I feel like she doesn’t
want the doctor to know she is dying because I am pretty sure because she could
feel her tonsils. She knows she is dying. She knew it, she knew it was there and
she knew she was going to die and she didn’t want her mom to know. She didn’t
want her parents to know.
Martha reveals here how the collaborative production of her choreographed text enabled
her to get distance from her immediate behavior and reflect on the object of her representation
of her experiences. Her portrayal of the girl-heavily infused with meaning from her own
history-became an object for her to reflect upon. Although ephemeral in that it left no
corporeal artifact, the dance existed to her as a temporary vestige of her conception of the
girl’s relationship with authority figures, one that she could play through repeatedly in both
mental and physical representations in an effort to come to terms with her experience.
Dexter, another student from the class who drew a picture depicting the relationship
between the girl and the doctor (see Figure l), also read the story from the girl’s perspective,
yet for different reasons. Dexter often used art for communicative purposes due, according
to family members, to a childhood hearing problem that delayed his development of speech
and required him to develop other sign systems for communication.
Dexter’s empathy with the girl in the story appears to have been a starting point for his
interpretation. When he started reading the story he struggled to understand it on a literal
level. Then he began paying attention to “something difficult. That’s how I got involved in
the story.” He said, “When the mother was shaming the daughter, that part. I gave a lot of
attention to it. . . . It’s wrong, and, but I can relate something in my life to the story and
[inaudible] draw.” Dexter related a childhood experience that had influenced his depiction
of the relationship between the girl and the doctor:
Well, when I’m sad, I alwayswhen,
when I’m a kid and I’m laying down, and, I was
like seven or eight, six or seven, I was laying in my bed and I was afraid of the dark, and
I was afraid of snakes, and so I brought in my cover-up and I’d be afraid something would
come under. It was going to [inaudible], bad was going to harm, and when I put that
blanket over me, I felt secure. And so when [the girl in the story] got up against the wall,
it would be protective from what is behind her, but, um, but, but she still felt insecure,
and so that is why that shadow is like, you know, that shadow, I claim, is being her shame.
Dexter’s sense of shame caused him to reverse the viewpoint so that, instead of the doctor’s
narrative perspective provided by the story itself, his drawing depicted the relationship from
the girl’s point of view. He created an image of a “hysterical” doctor, yet he said, “I read the
doctor as being kind but, urn, but I did see that the girl had her way she’s, urn, receiving him
and thinks he might be, and that’s the way she’s receiving him.” The reason Dexter switched
perspectives for his text is “Because she was the one with the disease, the diphtheria, and,
uh, also because, uh, because I can relate to her attitude when I was that age too.”
_._‘I
94
SMAGORINSKY
P
FIG. 1. Dexter’s drawing
Like Martha, Dexter initiated his response to the story by recognizing his own experiences’ in the girl’s conflict with the doctor. The picture he drew enabled him to reconstruct
those experience through the structure of the story, with original story elements (e.g., the
narrative perspective, the physical features of the characters, and setting) reconceived to
provide him a personal representation of the relationships involved.
The group that dramatized the action of the story also drew on prior personal knowledge
to inform their interpretation of the story. In selecting the roles they would play, they tried
to determine the best match between student and character:
Donnie:
Q:
Donnie:
Q:
Bart:
Q:
Bart:
We were also discussing who was going to be who. We figured her would be
good for the girl, Wes for the doctor because he has got glasses to fly off his
head, and me and Bart were just sort of deciding, it was actually between me
and Bart to be his mother and dad.
What did you decide?
For me to be the dad, and you to be the mother.
Why did you decide that?
Well, because, personal issues that go along with that.
Uh-huh. Things you don’t want to talk about?
Yeah.
The group members’ decisions for choosing their roles were complex, often appearing to
involve far more than the group members’ accounts for their choices. Bar-t’s reasons for
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
95
playing the mother, which were too confidential to share, came from his recognition of
similarities between his situation and hers. Although the group explained Wes’ decision to
play the doctor according to their superficial similarities, other indications from the transcripts suggest that Wes might have gravitated to the role of the doctor because of his
commanding personality. Suzie felt a personal connection to the character of the girl beyond
Donnie’s account of her taking the role simply because she shared the character’s gender.
One point of contention in the group’s discussion of how to interpret the story concerned
the age of the girl. Different students had pictured her differently, based on their understanding of how children of different ages behave:
Donnie:
How old do you all picture? I picture about 8 years old.
Wes:
I picture about like 11 or 12.
Bart:
I didn’t really think about the age.
Q:
Suzie:
Q:
Suzie:
Donnie:
How about you, Suzie?
I pictured her my age.
How old are you?
15.
So I didn’t think a 15-year old would be sitting on her daddy’s lap.
Bart:
Yeah, she was sitting on his lap.
Wes:
That’s why I’m thinking of an 8 year old.
Bat-t:
Now I didn’t think a girl that old would be so defiant.
Wes:
Yeah.
Suzie:
Q:
Suzie:
I was that resistant.
You were resistant when?
When I went out to the dentist yesterday.
Suzie’s reference to her defiance at the dentist’s offtce suggests that her recent experience
of having resisted a doctor’s attempt to look into her mouth might have affected her decision
to choose the role of the girl, and appears to have influenced the way in which she interpreted
and portrayed the character. Like Martha, she found the doctor’s forceful examination of the
girl’s throat similar to the intrusion of a dentist into her own mouth. And like Martha, she
and the other group members used their affinity with particular characters to provide an
object to reflect on in order to gain distance on the immediacy of her perceptions.
Forms of Representation
The different choices of the groups for their medium of representation provided them with
different problems in terms of depiction and communication. Yet in each case the medium
involved some choice of how the product would represent the relationships they perceived
in the story based on their infusion of the characters with meaning.
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SMAGORINSKY
Jane and Martha reported that they represented their interpretation of the relationship
between the characters through positioning, movement, and expression as they choreographed and performed their dance. Both Jane and Martha created mental images to help
interpret and project their characters. Martha had difficulty performing some of the leaps
required in the production and Jane told her to “picture a pond that you’re trying to jump
over and she did.” Jane further reported that she typically conjured up a mental image of an
animal to help her interpret characters in dance:
Jane:
In dance you talk with your body, not your mouth. You don’t have to be anybody.
It is kind of like a swan, you just aren’t even anybody.
Q:
Well, what did you feel like when you were doing this dance? Did you feel like
the character or did you feel like a swan?
Jane:
Q:
Jane:
Like a swan.
Is that the animal that you always think about when you dance?
Ballet. When it is modern jazz, I feel like a cheetah.
Jane returned to the image of the swan on several occasions during the interview. She
appeared to rely on the image both to help herself perform and to strengthen her self-esteem:
“I did feel like a swan because I could do those leaps and stuff and that makes you feel real
graceful and the swans are real graceful. It made me feel pretty when I dance, so I still felt
like a swan, but I felt the [doctor’s] emotions too.” Jane and Martha’s ability to visualize
images was critical to their ability to envision the form their dance would take, and it
enhanced their ability to perform it. These images also served as auxiliary representations
to inform the composition of their choreographed text.
Jane and Martha needed to depict the relationship between the characters spatially.
According to Jane:
You have to, it is like you are saying you have to put yourself in their position. When
you read the story it tells, it is like in between the lines, it tells how the doctor feels about
the girl, and it tells how the little girl feels. At the first of the dance we dragged, moved
out, and we dragged out. It was like she was still closed out from the doctor, it was like
he was feeling kind of depressed because he couldn’t get into her and he knew she was
dying. He had this idea in his head and he didn’t want to believe it until he could prove
it and he didn’t want her to die because this would be the third kid that had died.
As the story progressed and the girl began to resist, Jane and Martha changed the spatial
relations from the “dragged” choreography to oppositional movement: “When the doctor is
trying to get her around to his way of thinking, we figuratively did it by going around in
circles opposite each other,” recounted Jane. The idea ofplacing the characters in diametrical
opposition and circling one another represented both the doctor’s attempt to persuade and
the girl’s effort to evade, a relationship that embodied Martha’s own experiences with people
trying to look inside her.
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
97
Later in the dance the roles were reversed. Martha described their choreography as
follows: “The way that we set the dance up, we were kind of going in circles and she was
chasing me or I was chasing her, but the way we set it up she was chasing me. I was getting
real scared, kind of had up my own little wall.” Martha reveals here her own real emotions
surfacing during her portrayal of her character.
Toward the end of the dance, Jane and Martha were faced with a different sort of spatial
problem. According to Jane:
We did another dance at the very end and we were practicing on it and like she’s sheltered
like the little girl is hidden. She won’t let anybody fmd out what her secret is and that’s
what she is doing. She is hiding and the doctor is trying to follow in her footsteps to try
to figure out what is going on. And at the very end when it says that she did have
[diphtheria], in the dance we made her die. She just fell and the doctor picked her up and
carried her. Because like we were going to have the doctor die with her because it was
like the third patient he had died and he was dying inside, but [our teacher] didn’t really
like that. And after we started thinking you know how he gets underneath the skin real
hard, it is like we started thinking about it too and he doesn’t really die. He tries to help
her and stuff. We went further than the story went.
Their reconsideration
of their representation following
sulted in a final effort to choreograph the story’s climax:
their teacher’s intervention
re-
That is when they finally figured it out. It is like at the very end they walked together.
It’s like they walk two steps and when you do a little pause, the doctor shelters her and
just looks at her because he’s died with her. His whole life has just gone down the drain
because it’s another kid, he feels it’s all his fault this time. And that is how I really felt
when I was doing the dance.
This representation of the story’s ending departs radically from the literal action of the
story, where the girl attacks the doctor in a rage. Their decision to represent the feelings of
the doctor in their dance, however, focused their interpretation on his sense of loss. The
representation they developed, then, became less a depiction of the story line and more of
an interpretive text embodying their personal reading of the relationship in the story.
Dexter, working alone, also needed to configure space in order to formulate his representation of the relationship between the girl and the doctor, yet did so graphically rather
than through the combination of music and moving images. The doctor, in his narration,
does not describe himself in the story as terrifying, but Dexter took the girl’s perspective and
drew him that way. Dexter first drew the doctor’s hand because it “would be pointing and
everything is going to be all rotten.” The fist was exaggerated and was directed toward the
corner where Dexter would later draw the threatened girl. The doctor’s hair, he said,
represented his “bizarreness.” When asked why the doctor is shown stepping toward the girl,
Dexter replied:
Dexter:
To show control.
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SMAGORINSKY
Q:
Dexter:
Q:
Dexter:
Q:
Dexter:
How is he doing that?
Well, he is controlling her, because he is controlling her emotions like-the way
I think of it- before I was thinking, well, this is all these people’s attitudes, the
parents and the doctors, the doctor, and uh, the reason I was thinking the parents
were wrong was because that’s from she was programmed to honor her program
the way her life’s been before she learned to be, uh, to run from shame or feel
ashamed a lot, and that attitude was put into the doctor too, because of the way
she sees the doctor, and power comes from him making her get pushed back into
the corner. He is afraid too to open her mouth to see whether or not she has
diphtheria.
So he is walking toward her? Is that why that last leg is up like that?
Yeah.
And that’s the power?
Yeah. Well, it’s the power scaring her. It’s supposed to be scary.
Q:
Uh-huh. Earlier you said you thought the doctor was a kind man. Is that what
you said?
Dexter:
Yeah. I said in the story he was considered kind to my idea, but I went from the
place of the girl and the way she was acting in the story to see how she, to see
how the doctor was.
Dexter’s drawing thus served as a way for him to depict his own feelings of shame based
on childhood experiences. His representation of those feelings came through his configuration of space on the page, and provided him an object through which to distance himself
from his feelings and consider them in depth.
The students who dramatized the story relied on various props to symbolize aspects of
the characters. At times the symbols were fairly straightforward, such as their decision to
use ketchup to represent the blood from the girl’s mouth. Others, such as a mask that the
group wanted Suzie to wear to symbolize her anger, were more central to their depiction of
the characters’ relationships. Their plan called for Suzie to appear at the beginning of the
play without the mask. When the doctor started to fight her she would slip it on to represent
her change in demeanor. The mask, the group members felt, would enable them to depict an
emotion that Suzie had difficulty portraying dramatically:
Wes:
Q:
We have this mask that we were going to put on Suzie. Because she is the girl.
She was the girl?
Burt:
Yeah. When she gets mad, just put it on there without really noticing. Like when
they are fighting.
Wes:
[On the videotape] I am telling how good it would be, you know, like at first I
am going to be yanking and trying to get her to take it. She is going to be normal
first, and then she pushes me back. After that she is going to have the mask on.
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
Q:
Burt:
Donnie:
Q:
99
Uh-huh. Why didn’t the rest of you like the mask?
I thought it was cruel.
Because it is a real evil like Halloween mask, and we are doing a play about this
evil girl. We thought she had the evil look already. I mean, aaaah, you know.
Just like act it out instead of the mask?
Donnie:
Yeah. But you know, they do plays where those guys run around in tights and
stuff. They will come out with masks to express their feelings.
Wes:
I know another reason why. She said she wasn’t going to scream or act. I said,
that is why I said, when we get the mask, that will do something for her.
Suzie’s reticence in emoting during the production caused the group to suggest other ways
of representing her feelings. Their decision to depict her emotions through a symbolic mask
suggests that they were aware of the emotional aspects of the story and of ways to depict
emotions in the absence of physical and emotional expression in acting.
As in the other cases, their production provided them with a representational text to
consider. The mask and other props they used provided them with emotional images that
they could not otherwise have produced. Once conceived, these images provided for them
a representation that they could use as a medium to reflect on their own experiences.
Mediating
Role of Representation
Sigel’s (1990) distancing theory accounts for the ways in which a representation allows
an individual to step back and reflect on experience. The case studies I am reporting here
suggest that the process of representation involves an important developmental change
not described by Sigel. In Sigel’s conception the value of distancing occurs after the
creation of a representation and during the process of reflection. The case studies
reported here suggest that theprocess of representation itself involves important developmental changes due to the mediation of thinking and action provided by the individual’s use of tools and signs.
In the case studies reported here, the texts produced by the students were shaped by the
students’ thinking about the story, as reported thus far. Yet the interview transcripts also
reveal that their thinking was shaped by the process of composing their artistic texts. As
related in the previous section, Jane and Martha tried several different endings to their
interpretive dance. Through the teacher’s intervention, they rejected one as insufficient in
accounting for the characters’ state of mind; through the process of reconsidering how to
choreograph the final scene, they came to a more fully developed interpretation of the
characters and their relationship. Their understanding of the story thus changed through their
process of choreographing the dance.
Jane reported that she also experienced a change in her understanding of the doctor’s
perspective through her portrayal of him. When asked if she had learned anything new in
the process of creating the dance, Jane replied:
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SMAGORINSKY
Jane:
Q:
Jane:
I finally figured out what it is like to be in that position of the doctor. That is
why I didn’t hate the doctor so much because I knew how he felt and I also knew
how the little kid felt and I felt sorry for the kid.
Are those things you learned while doing the dance?
How the doctor felt. I knew his feelings, but knowing it and feeling it is totally
different things.
As revealed through these transcripts, the process of representation was reciprocal; that is,
it served to represent the thinking of the students, and also served to mediate their thinking
into a new understanding.
Dexter also revealed the transformative effect of his process of composing. Rather than
having a fully formed picture of the characters in his head prior to drawing, Dexter said that
“at the end, I understood what I was doing more than I did when I began the drawing. . . . I
got more involved in the picture as I did it.” As reported previously, in his initial reading
Dexter simply tried to follow the action, and then eventually began “thinking about
something during the story. . . . something difftcult” that helped get him involved in his
reading. He began making personal connections with the characters, yet when he began
drawing he was uncertain about how he would depict them, knowing only that the relationship between the girl and doctor would involve shame and control.
Dexter related that the meaning of the drawing changed as the picture developed. For
instance, when he started his drawing Dexter had not been certain what the threatening figure
would represent:
Dexter:
Q:
Dexter:
I wasn’t really sure if it was him going to be the doctor or not until the end of
the story, I mean, until the end of the drawing, because I was thinking, well, it
could be this person that she, that she has imaged in her mind and uh-or this
could be an analogy of diphtheria, but then I said it doesn’t matter. It’s just a
doctor. It was going through her mind, [inaudible] but I liked to read. The first
time I’d read the doctor; the second, the analogy. It’s just through that one story.
So you mean, even after you drew the face and everything, it wasn’t the doctor
yet?
Uh-huh. I mean it could have been a lot of things. It depends on your view point
of the picture, but what I was thinking is-it was the doctor and then it was an
analogy of the whole attitude of the story, and then it was the, her parents’
attitude, or the parents, especially her parents.
For Dexter the story took on meaning as he developed his representation. The process of
composing and deliberate effort to depict the relationships and feelings of the characters
mediated his thinking of the story into a new understanding of how he saw his own
experiences reflected in their interaction.
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
101
The dramatic production by the group of four also involved processes that developed their
thoughts about the story. When discussing the dress Suzie would wear, the students
considered how it fit in with the way in which they viewed the tone of the production:
Bart:
I don’t know. That dress it would make it look like she was a little . . . it just
wouldn’t look right just to fit the whole atmosphere of the play.
Wes:
I didn’t think it would either, because she said it was real pretty, and I didn’t
think that would get-
Donnie:
See, the reason we thought about this is because in the story it says a little folly
dressed girl.
Suzie:
Not if you see the dress, then you would understand. It is like, it is real baggy,
and it has flowers on it and stuff.
Wes:
I thought it would have one of them like penitentiary or work dresses or like a
sweater or cardigan.
Q:
Wes:
You would think that would be a good dress to wear?
That is what I pictured in my mind, something drab, not something fancy.
Their discussion about how to represent the relationships in the story helped them think
clearly about the characters. Similarly, as they discussed how the film The Exorcist might
influence their depiction of the girl’s transformation from withdrawn to enraged, Wes
realized that he viewed the girl as “‘possessed,” which enabled him to envision her in a
particular way and interpret the story appropriately.
Bart, too, developed his thinking about the story by situating it in prior classroom
activities. He said that during the production of the play:
I was thinking about the extended definition of what abuse is, because they were talking
about if you are a child abuser.Is it really abuse if someonecuts their hand and you give
them a shot? That is hurting them, but it is to help them out later. I was thinking about
that. How ambiguousabuse can be. What abuse means.
Through his participation in the play, Bat-t continued his prior deliberation on the definition
of abuse. His efforts to represent the doctor’s treatment of the girl forced him to reconsider
other academic material from the curriculum and integrate it into his view of the story and
his beliefs about abuse, a prominent topic among students in this substance abuse treatment
center.
For students in all case studies, there was a second type of mediation that provided them
with a vehicle through which to create a representation: the stimulated recall interview itself.
The interview prompted the students to reconsider and recreate their texts once again as
mental representations. For instance, during Dexter’s production of his drawing, when the
teacher intervened and asked him if the figure represented the doctor, Dexter affirmed the
teacher’s interpretation without including other possible referents. During the interview,
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SMAGORINSKY
however, Dexter gave multiple referents for the Qure, including the mother, the doctor, and
diphtheria. A possible way to account for his less literal, more symbolic explanation of the
figure in the interview is that questions helped Dexter perceive and articulate the multiple
referents he had generated for the picture either at the time he had composed it or during the
period since. Just as Dexter’s perception of the teacher’s question as an association between
the doctor in the story and the figure in the drawing suggested a particular meaning to him,
the probes of the interview could have either allowed Dexter to articulate his prior multiple
referents for the figure or generate them as he participated in the interview. The representation he developed during the stimulated recall interview was therefore not necessarily-or even likelyprecise rendering of the text he had created earlier in the day but a
development of the text mediated by the dialogue with the interviewer.
DISCUSSION
The forms and processes of representation described in these case studies illustrates Sigel’s
(1970,199O) distancing theory in a different setting and with different age learners than those
studied by Sigel. Because the research took place in a residential and classroom setting, the
research provided a different view of the idea of representational competence than is
available through more conventional laboratory research.
In the classroom the students put familiar tools to new uses. Not only did they transform
the tools, they transformed themselves and their classroom through their activity. Prior to
this assignment, the case study students had not consistently used artistic media for formal
representation of core subject knowledge, either in the alternative school or (according to
self-reports) in their mainstream public schooling prior to committing themselves to the
treatment facility. Drawing, dancing, and drama thus took on new roles as legitimate
academic forms of representation aside from the linguistic symbols that had provided the
basis for their language arts representation in the past.
As noted, their process of representing the experiences of literary characters provided
them with a reference point for reflection that enabled them to think about their own
experiences as instantiations of those of the girl and doctor in the story. Their production
promoted changes in thinking about the story and about their own connection to the
characters they interpreted.
Finally, their representations changed their classroom environment. Prior to the data
collection the students had a series of experiences that prepared them for the one studied
during the stimulated recall interviews. In each case they had been asked to create a product
of their choice to represent their understanding of or response to a given text. The students
responded to two stories prior to the data collection, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and
“The Guest” by Albert Camus. The teacher did not give explicit instruction in artistic
response. Rather, he allowed students choice in the textual medium they would use. In
response to the first story, most students had produced a written response. Some students,
however, had produced songs in response to the story and were allowed to perform them
before the class accompanied by “air guitars.” According to the teacher, the students’
ARTISTIC COMPOSING AS REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESS
103
enthusiastic response to the air guitar performance encouraged more students to produce
nonwritten texts following their reading of the second story. These representations included
a Tinker Toy model of the scales ofjustice depicting the mind of the protagonist, drawings,
and other artistic texts.
Between the reading of the stories the class had analyzed a slide projection of two
paintings, one being Vermeer’s “Lady Reading a Letter” and the other being Yves Klein’s
“IKB 74,” a modem painting consisting entirely of a single shade of blue. Following the
discussions of the paintings, the students had been given the option of composing an essay,
writing a poem, drawing a response, or otherwise representing their understanding of the
painting under study. The interpretation of “The Use of Force” followed this assignment,
and was the first time that the majority of students (all but one) chose an artistic medium for
interpretation. The students, through the encouragement oftheir teacher, thus helped to shape
the values and practices of their classroom through their choices of both media and subjects
for their representations.
In addition to the influence of the classroom on the students’ representational choices,
the research procedure itself contributed to their distancing strategies. Conventionally,
psychologists have regarded interactions between researchers and participants as potential
“contaminants” to presumably pristine data. Yet from a different perspective, a researcher’s
role in the data collection is instructive and constructive rather than intrusive (Smagorinsky,
1995b). The stimulated recall interview can thus be viewed as a distancing dialogue that
assisted the students in their ability to create representational artifacts. Sigel (1990), in his
research on children’s representational competence, concluded that “one source ofthe child’s
difficulty emanated from the limited home experiences involving engagement, anticipation,
reconstruction, and transcendence of the immediate into signs and symbols” (p. 93). The
development of representational competence is thus social in origin, relying on the assistance
of home experiences and, I would argue, school experiences for the development of
appropriate strategies. The sequence of instruction provided by the teacher reinforced the
value of alternative means of representation, and his interventions during the students’
interpretation of “The Use of Force” provided them with a distancing dialogue. The inquiry
of the stimulated recall interview, which requested clarification of students’ accounts of their
representational process, further enabled them to step back from their representational
artifact and account for its meaning. The research procedure itself, then, while eliciting data,
also served to model distancing strategies.
The case study students reveal that the medium of representation can be a key factor in
students’ performance in school. If representational competence is achieved through the
capacity to establish distance, then the process of creating distance, rather than facility with
a specific representational medium (e.g., writing), should be the primary concern of educators. These students suggest that unconventional media not only have the potential to
promote psychological growth, but in some cases are uniquely suited to mediate the
development of particular individuals as a result of their personal experiences in social
practices. Taken in the context of other studies that attend to students’ multimedia composing
(Gallas, 1994; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984; Whitin, 1996), this research suggests that
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SMAGORINSKY
broadening the means through which students represent their understanding symbolically
can lead to greater competence in understanding academic material, albeit through untraditional academic ways.
Aclgowledgment:
This research was supported by a Junior Faculty Summer Research
Fellowship from the University of Oklahoma. Thanks to Irv Sigel for encouraging me to
rethink my research in terms of the distancing model and for his suggestions, along with
those of JADP’s external reviewers, during the development of this manuscript.
NOTES
1. All participants in this research signed an informed consent form that was initially approved
by the University of Oklahoma’s board of human subjects. Through their signing of this document
they agreed to participate willingly in the research with the understanding that they could withdraw at
any time. The students were also informed that the research was conducted with publication as a goal,
and so shared their thoughts and feelings with the knowledge that they would be made public.
2. Each interview took over one hour. The interviews needed to be conducted within the
constraints of the students’ heavily scheduled days. It was therefore possible to conduct only a total
of four interviews in the day-and-a-half of time available following the reading and interpretation of
the story. This article reports on three of those four interviews; the other, which featured a group of
four boys experimenting with a keyboard synthesizer, revealed more about their conflicts with one
another than about their process of representation.
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