Use of didactic learning materials during whole-class literary conversations

In this article we examine teachers’ use of publisher-produced didactic learning materials in a multiple case study in Danish lower secondary schools. We characterize the teachers’ use of analytical and interpretive activities from publisher-produced learning materials in three 8th-grade classrooms during whole-class literary conversations in mother tongue teaching. The project is motivated by research showing that learning materials from publishing houses are widely used in primary and lower secondary schools. Yet we know very little about the influence of learning materials on literature teaching. Video observations of whole-class literary conversations were examined through a framework grounded in three theoretical foundations: 1) a usage analysis (of learning materials) (Gissel et al., 2021), 2) a content analysis (Norup, 2024), and 3) a structure analysis (Roberts & Langer, 1991). We show that declarative and procedural knowledge about the world and basic understanding of the literature and other aesthetic texts dominated whole-class conversations in the three classrooms, even though analytical and interpretational activities were available in the publisher-produced learning material. We also show that the teachers primarily talked about activities they had designed themselves, even though they used a publisher-produced learning material as the frame for their teaching.