Theory becomes practice : combining reader-response theory and the new rhetoric in describing the meaning-making processes of college freshmen as they respond to poetry

For my study, I investigated the meaning-making processes of college freshmen as they interpreted and discussed poetry. Operating from a theory base involving Reader-Response Theory and the New Rhetoric, I studied the students' individual construction of meaning and their social construction and negotiation of meaning, respectively, as they interpreted poems. I used the methods of qualitative researchers in gathering the data: participant observation; a collection of artifacts that included student compositions, written notes, and audiotaped discussions from small-group work; purposive sampling of these artifacts; questionnaires; and field notes. I placed myself as a full participant observer, since I served as both professor and researcher in my own classroom. For each theory, I identified and described categories of the meaning-making processes derived from the artifacts, and I used the constant comparative method for refining them. For the purposive sampling procedure, I used maximum variation sampling of the student compositions and the audiotaped discussions in selecting salient examples to demonstrate these meaning-making processes for both theories.