The Classroom Lawrence Mr Sipe Analysis

Children’s love for stories comes from the idea of how they perceive them. As a child, one would immerse oneself in a story and let it completely take over one’s life. This passion starts from home and makes its way into the classroom as children learn to read. Implementing an environment accepting of participation in stories creates a space for children to further explore their minds and imagination. Lawrence R. Sipe attempts to communicate the importance of creating such a space in a classroom by providing detailed descriptions and explanations of the types of engagement students express. While he joins examples and experiments together to support this, he lacks solid evidence that it even makes a difference, making it seem pointless as the
Sipe’s introduction plainly states the contents of the rest of the articles: “I will describe this set of responses and do some theoretical speculation about how we might understand them. I’ll also describe how knowledge of the various types of these responses could be put to practical use in classrooms,” setting up and summarizing the body paragraphs (476). Similarly, he states, “In this section, I present a typology of those responses in order to flesh out the idea of the category and to extend and refine our theory of young children’s literary understanding” (477). Instead of just stating the claims, he prepares the reader with this type of introduction, then reiterates them once again later on. Within the body section, Sipe works through his ideas in a listicle approach, lacking variety in sentence structure and word choices. Throughout the article, Sipe fails to state any importance of his claim and evidence until the very end as his conclusion, “There are several reasons why encouraging and valuing children’s talking back and taking over responses are important in classrooms” (482). Furthermore, he merely states reasons as to why literacy knowledge should be more implemented, neglecting to relate the responses to the significance of why they should be encouraged. In the midst of the unsupported claims and incomplete thoughts,
He uses Glaser & Strauss’s constant comparative method (477), Gates’s term signifying (480), and Bishop’s term catalyst (482) to filling in some of the gaps in his thinking, but other sources unintentionally conflict. In the ‘understanding expressive engagement’ section, Sipe states contrasting views on the way children perceive stories. First, he says, “they are deeply pleasurable for children,” but then cites Barthes’ types of literary enjoyment as bliss and pleasure: “Pleasure comes from familiarity; the text reflects a world we expect. Bliss comes from delight in the new—new vistas of experience take us out of ourselves” (479). Sipe continues with, “I believe that the five types of child response highlighted in this article can be seen as expressions of bliss,” thus contradicting himself (479). He claims the responses triggered by the children are coming from experiencing something new, but their reactions come from prior knowledge. Sipe gives an example of “when the text described an encounter between the hero and a bully. The children responded to the text with ‘Ohhh!’ and ‘Oh, no,’” confirming the fact that the children already know what’s about to happen (481). They predict that the hero will encounter trouble with the bully due to their existing familiarity with such subjects. Again, Sipe adopts another one of Barthes’ ideas: infolding and unfolding, “reduc[ing]