Situated Expertise in Literary Interpretation: An Expert-Expert Study of High School and PhD Students Reading Canonical Hip-Hop and Poetry

Abstract This study brings into conversation two bodies of research that operate from different assumptions and make divergent conclusions about high school students’ capacity to read and respond to literary texts. On one hand, cognitively-oriented expert-novice research comparing experienced literary readers to high school students indicates that students tend not to engage in expert-like interpretive sense-making when they read literature. On the other hand, socioculturally-oriented studies of students’ “funds of knowledge” and socially situated “interpretive communities” indicate that students do engage in expert-like interpretation. One likely reason for these divergent findings is that by default, expert-novice studies often define interpretive expertise by drawing on Western, White discourses and epistemologies. This study experiments with a situated expert-expert methodology that considers the influence of culture, race, and the practices of different interpretive communities on participants’ literary reading and response. First, it offers an expanded definition of interpretive expertise by looking outside conventional academic interpretive communities. Then, the study ascribes interpretive expertise to two groups: Black, Latinx, and Asian-American high school students who self-identified as experts in hip-hop; and mostly White doctoral students who self-identified as experts in poetry. Both groups read lyrics to a highly regarded hip-hop song and a highly regarded poem. Analyses showed that each group was more likely to engage in expert-like practices, such as building symbolic interpretation and appreciating realness, within the genre belonging to their interpretive community. These findings offer empirical support for the power of interpretive communities and the value of funds of knowledge frameworks. The findings strengthen the call for the still predominantly White, Western academy to honor other interpretive communities and recognize the limits of their own.