ABSTRACT

The text analysis we presented in chapter 4 sheds some light on how our students might enact rival hypothesis thinking in their writing. Using the lens of textual analysis allowed us to see presences and absences in students texts, moves that they were likely to make and moves that they did not make. But textual analysis, like any research method, is simply one among many rival ways of naming and interpreting data; its coding schemes enable certain insights, while at the same time blinding us to other alternative perspectives (see Greene & Higgins, 1994). We realized that although we understood more about what our students were doing in their writing, we would have to shift our vantage point or adopt a new set of lenses to learn more about why

they might have produced the texts they did. To develop a fuller picture of rival hypothesis in action, we realized that we must, as we argued earlier, examine the rival hypothesis stance not simply as a set of text moves but as a range of connected practices, including the very thinking and decision making writers struggle with as they leap into inquiry. Collaborative planning became for us another lens, a close-up look at students’ reasoning processes-the way they sized up this writing situation and the provocative voices that called out to them as students, writers, and individuals with a history of experiences and feelings about racism and educational progress. This new lens would itself offer a rival perspective on what students actually were learning, what they wanted and felt they could pursue in their chase after meaning.