Notes after meeting with Judith

Pictures of Changes in a Fluid World
Demands on readers to interpret and respond to texts have changed and instructional approaches need to change in order to prepare students to interact with texts. As a person who returned to school after teaching high school for eleven years, I discovered that I had to learn new ways of reading to understand and contribute to communities I entered. In short, I had to learn to become a reader again. And quickly, I learned that what constitutes a text is changing—in fact, has changed!

Now, as I observe the actions of students—and my daughters, I see computerized technologies surpassing television in interest to young people. Social networking, their preferred method of communication (email is for older people, my daughter said), provides a glimpse into the complexities of their lives, and it demonstrates multimodal literacies that are becoming common. There is not only individual participation but individuals within communities. The huge interest in reality television during the opening years of this millennium also shifted how people viewed television: people wanted to participate more; to see the process of trying out and being selected. So what? How do these shifts inform how we approach reading, interpreting and responding to texts? And what do the answers imply for instruction in classrooms—and beyond classrooms?

Providing students with strategies that presumably will transfer is not enough. Disciplines are being created; knowledge bases are being born and expanding, and the pace appears to be accelerating. And traditional ways of thinking are proving inadequate, e.g., the American approach to making cars and providing credit and educating students through skill-based instruction.

Historical Perspective and 21st Century Demands
In his book Jonathan Boyarin describes how what counted as reading as changed. During xxxx the king was read to; that constituted “reading.” Eventually, people took up reading individually for a variety of purposes. Reading for entertainment is a more recent phenomenon. In another book that recounts the development of literacy, Miles Myers shows that what counts as being literate changed. At one time, signing your name was enough. In schools, we say we want kids to comprehend. The standards suggest that …

Yet, employing practices of reading might be similar to the Periodic Table, where each element represents a strategy or skill. [Think more about how to use this as a metaphor.]

Reading is not just reading, i.e., reading in English is not only moving eyes left to right, top to bottom, comprehending, analyzing, connecting texts, etc. Reading is a verb; therefore, it has an object, e.g., “I am reading a novel.” And these objects imply particular ways of reading within particular communities. Minimally, reading printed text has expanded to include visual and aural texts and combinations of all three (see Golden’s discussion on semiotics and reading). Reading is situated within particular contexts and communities with expectations of practices that

The old patterns do not hold.

So what for instruction? Does the excitement of Facebook, reality television, etc. mean that teachers need to alter their instruction to include Facebook in the classroom or create skits that resemble reality television? No, not any more than we responded in the 80s to Max Headroom by say-say-saying what we meant-meant in his language to excite students with that allusion. But we need to examine the possibilities and implications.

What I am Suggesting
Students need access to information, and part of the information is how to read, interpret and respond to texts within the communities they are participating and contributing to. However, access is not enough; showing them how to engage with texts is not enough either, particularly since new literacies continue to emerge and expand.

Example of how wishes have been exceeded. Growing up my friends and I thought a Dick Tracy watch would provide opportunities, but it was a fanciful wish, similar to swooshing around town in a flying saucer.

Anecdotes
Shakespeare class: Old practices are not enough. Sitting in Zumwalt’s class hoping he doesn’t call on me, I listened studiously to his questions, yet did not understand them. "Doug, Shakespeare is working on three levels here. Can you explain what they are?” No. What did he mean “levels”? I read the text, although I leaned on the footnotes to make any sense of it. My practices as a reader at that time consisted of reading and rereading the text and try to figure out what was happening. Then come to class and take notes and here what was really happening, what we should have inferred. The practices I entered with the class with were insufficient to function as a knowledgeable member of the class. So I sat quietly, staring at graffiti on the table, or at the lines of the texts, scribbling notes.

I learned that I needed to understand the literal storyline, the names of the characters and their relationships, and how to infer the tone and actions from typed text on bible-thin pages of a huge “collected works of Shakespeare.”

Strategies: Not enough. As a high school teacher in the late 80s and 90s, I read texts on teaching reading. Strategies were key. What strategies did students need in order to read the texts effectively or successfully. It was unclear what would count as either, but I showed them how to predict, summarize, etc. and other strategies that would provide them with ways of making sense of texts and participating in class discussions. I would take a short story and show them how to use the opening lines as evidence for claims about what might happen, that experienced readers are always anticipating what might happen. Periodically, we would summarize what has happened and predict more. Some students complained, “Can’t we just read the story?” The idea was that if students learned how to employ these strategies they would become more conscious readers; however, this line of reasoning presumes that strategies are transferable to new situations and texts. Yet, we implicitly challenge this notion when we shift from reading texts of choice, e.g., poems in a particular journal, to academic essays in a research journal. Reading in these two contexts, including purpose, genre and intended audience, demands ways of reading and interpreting texts that at least in some respects differ from each event, depending on the community expectations and norms and objectives for each reading.

Reading a graphic novel. Old practices as reader are not enough. Recently, I was preparing to discuss a graphic novel with students in an adolescent literature class. As I read, it became apparent to me that I was ignoring the visual texts, other than a glimpse at them; however, I recognized that the verbal and visual texts together construct with readers a story that is different than either one individually. The traditional reading practices were not enough.

Wikipedia. Many complain that Wikipedia provides inaccurate information. However, the value to Wikipedia, others counter, is that it provides quick, free (as long as a person can access the Internet) information. Further, it presents hyperlinks to related information and it is dynamic, i.e., entries change as new or additional information is added (cite Wikipedia). But most valuable is that designers of Wikipedia describe processes it uses to construct and validate or assess information compiled. In fact, inaccuracies have been uncovered (e.g., citation). But the key the process of learning more about how information is constructed, by whom, for whom, under what conditions, etc. is invaluable.

Learning to Read, Interpret and Respond to Research. Judith Green and Audra Sku describe how they read an article and then researched the citiatons… They found that their understanding of data were different than the writer’s (Slavin). How can students learn to read a site and learn how it was constructed, by whom, for whom, for what purposes, under what conditions, etc.?

Filling in Gaps
Comprehension is not enough. Readers do not simply read and say back what they read as evidence for comprehending a text. Rather, they fill in gaps based on the reader’s experiences, understanding, knowledge about the texts and the components of it, etc. (Mellor et al.). The offered interpretations represent perspectives also. For example, one of my students stated that Holden Caulfied is a whining, sniveling brat. His rationale was that Holden complained about events in his world, yet he has money, family, choice, etc. In Holden has the opportunity to indulge in his emotions and behaviors. This perspective is based on the interpreter’s background experiences in conditions much different than Holden.

Dilemmas for English Teachers
How do we prepare students for these challenges? How can teachers prepare students to read, interpret and respond to texts in communities that do not exist yet, or for disciplines that are in their forming stages?

What are strategies and skills? How do we prepare students with strategies, principles that can be employed across disciplines and texts? In English courses students learn to interpret texts and professors claim that these learned skills have value and help students interpret other texts. What are those strategies and skills?

Teachers and Students as Ethnographers of Texts
How can teachers and students learn to view texts as cultural artifacts, ones that were constructed by individuals or groups—supported by others even, for particular purposes, under particular conditions, and for particular outcomes? How can students demystify texts? (see Jamie Myers, RRQ, 1990s).