The Myth of Readership

Graduate students and I recently began a course together called Critical Approaches to Literature.  It’s one of simplest pleasures I know of: sitting around a table in good, smart company and making sense of something.  We first had to make sense of the course title. “Critical Approaches to Literature” seems to float in the ether as intangible as imagination.  Made up of just four words, there are two words suspiciously missing. Teaching and reading.  How can there be a critical approach to literature without the critical approach-er and the reader of literature?  

As we began our coursework, we read chapters from Literature as Exploration by Louise Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt wrote this work in the late 1930s when the dominant methods for teaching literature consisted of using books and poems as historical, biographical, or cultural artifacts.  You’d read Hamlet, for example, and psychoanalyze his character, or you’d investigate the politics of Shakespeare’s turbulent England. Less than half a century prior, the teaching of literature wasn’t even done very often in English.  Those who could afford school read Greek and Latin works mostly—with an emphasis on translation and rhetoric.  While some progress had been made, Rosenblatt saw the need for more.  For Rosenblatt, teachers of literature needed to pay more attention to the experiences of the actual students who were reading.  It was by guiding students from their own life experiences into the text that teachers could help students relate to the works, all in the name of personal and cultural growth. 

I asked my own students to pen responses to Rosenblatt’s writings. I read their papers in various places over the past few days: in cafes, on trains, and libraries.  There is something about slowly spreading out such reading over time.  It almost seems that, somehow, as time and places pass by, what might at first seem daunting (the reading and responding to student work) transmutes into delight. Several students raised one idea in particular that I’d like to focus on here: Rosenblatt’s “reader”. Rosenblatt, like many other education scholars, makes an assumption about students and reading that might well have a devastating effect on teaching: they assume that students and readers are the same thing.  My own experiences as both a student and teacher suggest this isn’t necessarily true.  For a teacher to affirm this relationship between a student and a reader, he must account for the student’s engagements in the act of reading: all the historical experiences reading, the memories of reading, the spaces of reading.

Readers read; students read sometimes.

Rosenblatt misses this point often in her book.  Take, for instance, her chapter entitled "What the Student Brings to Literature," in which Rosenblatt unpacks all the experiences that a student draws on or can draw on when interacting with a text.  Throughout the chapter, Rosenblatt strays from her focus on the student (named in the chapter title) and discusses the reader: "It is easy to detect the influence of the reader's preoccupations and past experiences when, as in the preceding instances, they lead to an interpretation unsupported by the text" (81).  No distinction is made between students and readers, which suggests that for Rosenblatt the two are one.  The seemingly innocuous nature of my point is anything but innocent, however.  The assumption that students are readers--whatever an individual teacher decides "reading" means--leads to choices in pedagogy that then run the risk of creating a classroom, not of readers, but of illusive readers who personate precisely what they know the teacher wants: "readers".  Teachers, too, have their own side in this story.  After all, it is they who lead students in critically approaching literature.

In The Literature Workshop (2003), Sheridan Blau describes the "anxiety of the right reading" experienced by teachers of literature.  Blau asserts that English teachers are caught between the desire to encourage students to interpret literature for themselves, in the spirit of Rosenblatt's "admonition that taking somebody else's interpretation as your own" only yields an empty reading (187), and the reality that teachers teach particular books because they themselves have already determined them to be worth teaching--that is, they have already interpreted the work.  It is this latter point that brings the anxiety of the right reading to the surface: Teachers of literature believe deeply that there is in fact a right and a wrong way to read a text insofar as they deem it worthy of teaching in the first place.  For English teachers, while "right ways" of interpreting are myriad, they are not limitless, which makes the anxiety all the more felt. It's for this reason that Blau sets out to show how "some readings can be wrong and many may be inadequate" (190), not due to the reader's foolishness or stupidity, but "ignorance, inattention, lack of experience, or in some cases the vagaries of a momentarily mistaken perspective" (190).   I agree that the reading skills of students are often in need of guidance from a more experienced teacher.  I also think that to only focus on reading strategies and skills overshoots where students are and assumes a certain degree of readership.  Sure, an instructor might work on particular skills of approaching a poem in class--and these skills might be effective for an in-class activity--but when an instructor treats a student like a reader, he might well assume that such skill- or strategy-based instruction is sufficient.  It is not.  If a soccer coach teaches a young person a series of discrete moves to use when attacking goal, and the young person doesn't ever play soccer as part of his life, what good would such instruction do?  Even if this young person goes to weekly or daily practices, if he doesn't play of his own volition, it doesn't matter.  It might, in fact, spark interest in some; but it would be foolish to assume such a spark in all or even many.  We as English teachers must approach our students as students, not as readers.

Reading is something internal.  While we have devised myriad tests, methods, and assessments to have students externalize their reading, what students produce is not itself reading.  Consider whether or not a reading quiz proves conclusively that a student did or did not complete a reading assignment.  Or, that the student who performs poorly on a reading quiz did just that: he performed poorly on a quiz.  It says little about his reading of literature; it speaks only to his reading of a quiz.  So long as teachers avoid engaging their students about their reading practices and histories authentically, the myth of readership will go on.  But another myth also goes on: a myth of teaching. 

Pedagogy + Politics

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors.  The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth.  Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological.  Teaching, however, has never been apolitical.  Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young.  Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times.  The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.  

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy.  That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas.   Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room.  In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter.  To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it.  But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion?  Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”?  Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading? 

Hardly.  As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective.  My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions.  In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric.  If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation. 

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active.  Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.”  Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions.  Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end.  How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”?  Is there room for disagreement here?  And if there is, how is a student going to know that? 

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.”  For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves.  In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making.  Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument.  This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish.  Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms.  Graff would hardly take issue with that.  Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge.  I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise.  A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely. 

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new.  A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’”  It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data.  I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity.  As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it.  And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research.  If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument.   I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged.  This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work.  Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue.  The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.

 

The Divorce of Reading and Writing

I’ve become hypersensitive to a term recently that gets floated in education discussions. It seems used with lightness and universal comprehension. The word is literacy. In a recent meeting, someone asked a roomful of educators and doctoral students what literacy actually meant. No one knew. On a basic level, we agreed that it had something to do with reading and writing. This troubled me greatly. Has the term literacy come to mean so little that the relationship between reading and writing is going unscrutinized? What, after all, is the relationship between the two. Reading and writing are used in unison frequently. It seems that at the center of the current conflation of reading and writing is an age-old reductionism: that reading and writing go hand in hand—that there is a seeming causal relationship between the two. Perhaps by allowing these two separate words to be subsumed by literacy, we in education have allowed our own language to become cloudy. Let’s look at a musical example to prove a point.

As a singer, I can read music. Given a few minutes, I can scan through the musical notation after identifying the key signature and hum the song. Being able to read music, however, does not mean that I can compose music. To assume that one ability necessitates the other would be to overestimate my own skill-level and to underestimate the complexity of reading and writing music respectively. Does singing a song mean one can write a song? Hardly. Now, my analogy has its flaws and could be critiqued fairly. But at the heart of it is a simple point that is not easily ignored: reading and writing are two distinct acts and it behooves educators and researchers and theorists to pry the two of them apart.

"Of course reading and writing should be considered together," one might argue, "because in order to write one must know how to read."

True, but in order to read one does not need to know how to write. The two are not necessarily related. Consider these essential differences between writing and reading: students produce writing; they cannot produce reading. The prior is epistemological in nature, whereas the latter is ontological; the prior is a matter of production, whereas the latter is social/spatial; the prior is external, quantifiable, categorizeble; the latter is internal, qualitative, and ephemeral.
Historically, writing seems to have become primary, especially in the latter part of the 19th century when the values of industrialization placed value on product development. Reading began to be seen as a tool for the production of writing, rather than an end for its own sake. Here, we see a teleological treatment of reading—it is a means to a written end. But is that to say reading is purposeless unless the reader writes about the reading? This is troubling. What the reader writes about is likely not to be what was read at all. Rather, it might well be some second-rate version of the reading the student thinks the teacher wants him to have done. The clearest example of this can be seen on a state exam.

One question on a recent New York State Regents exam presented two passages. The student is asked to read an excerpt from a memoir and a poem in order to write a “unified essay about parenting as revealed in the passages.” While there is more to the prompt, including specific instructions as to how to read the texts—including showing evidence and identifying literary elements—I’m struck by the kind of reading the student is told to do here. Is this reading? My instinct is to say, No it isn’t. But perhaps that would be rash. It is a type of reading: teleological reading, perhaps. Using the modifier before the word reading could make a significant difference not only in the way educators or researchers or theorists talk about the act of reading, but it could make be revolutionary for students. I imagine other modified terms for types of reading: aesthetic reading--students reading for emotional impact or pleasure; social reading—students read for the purpose of discussing in a social-academic setting; analytical reading—students read for the purpose of unpacking the structural makeup of a text; laissez faire reading—where students are left alone to read whatever they like, however they like. In any case, students must be brought into the conversation about how they are asked to read texts in school. To neglect the conversation is to encourage dishonest readership where teacher and students go about their roles inauthentically.

It is the invisible ephemerality of the act of reading that we educators have ignored or dismissed. The result has been classroom pedagogy, methods books, and literacy research that have objectified the individual identity of student-readers in the name of knowledge production. Movements to restore the student-reader’s identity (most notably Reader Response and transaction theory) have failed precisely because they have ignored the subjective nature of readership, and the limits of pedagogy: teachers teach students, they cannot force students to be readers. Granted, they can impart and practice certain reading skills, but there comes a point where the student chooses to read or not to read: And the teacher can never know for certain. Only the student himself can choose read.

The divorce of reading and writing must be a group effort. It is a relationship so firmly established at the core of western culture, not to mention educational thought, that to pull them apart will require the ideas, musings, and practices of all involved: educators, researchers, theorists, and especially students. The reward could be great—a new epoch of learning, one of transparency and authenticity, of pleasure in schooling, of deep literary experiences that are as of yet unimaginable.

Public-Private Partnerships, Sans Poets

General Electric just gave the New York City public school system $17.9 million. It’s the largest single grant given to the city schools and will be distributed over a five-year period. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, had this to say: “Public-private partnerships like this one with the GE Foundation have been essential to our success in turning around a failing public school system. This generous grant will help to prepare our students to be the leaders of the 21st century economy which will be built on science, math and technology” (http://www.thecro.com/node/725). While it’s not clear how exactly the money will be used to help schools (something about funding a “pilot program” in ten city schools), I’m intrigued about the mayor’s, GE’s, and other politicians’ emphasis on science, math, and technology. As an English teacher, I’m trying to avoid the pitfall of discipline jealousy: a sort of Marsha-Marsha-Marsha response to watching the above three content-areas be given so much attention and money as funding for the arts dwindles. And we see the effects of this in the research being produced, for example.

Literary studies have played Jan to other disciplines’ Marsha for at least a century. The famous scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams graphs poetry based on the instructions from a popular textbook is an example:

In the early 20^th century, lacking scholarly respect and funding, literary scholars developed a method of critiquing literature that sought to be as objective about poems as the scientific method was about data. It was no longer about the art of poetry; it was about the poem as an object for quantifiable study. The idea was that literature and poetry were too open to rampant interpretation—the reader could read a work however he wished—and some other academically rigorous method was needed if the study of literature was to be taken seriously. We see the results of this movement, referred to as New Criticism or Formalism, even on the New York State Regents exam today:

The notion of showing how an author used certain literary devices evidences the type of attempt at objective literary analysis that developed in the wake of the reverence and funding for the sciences that was alive and well a century ago. Take, as another case in point, the work of researchers in what’s being called content-area literacy. Rather than just focusing their studies on what it means to read and write, some researchers are aiming their work at what it means to read and write in a specific discipline, like science. I don’t wish to discount or discredit this type of research. I only wish to point out that a professor researching how students process information in science class might well be more likely to get funding than a professor doing a similar study in English class, and certainly music class. It’s not, however, that the tide has suddenly shifted towards funding the sciences or technology.

For example, the mayor’s use of the word “technology”carries with it an interesting story. Often nowadays we are likely to hear science, math, and technology all lumped together. Not to mention “21^st Century” education. What pols mean by “technology” isn’t what scholars mean by it, though. One scholar, Walter Ong, posited the notion that the act of writing is in fact a technology insofar as it uses a tool (a pen, pencil, stylus) to aid humans to do something they can already do: communicate. But writing is not what GE or the mayor have in mind when they bestow millions on the City school system. I wonder what they imagine technology to look like: do they think of computers (hardware, networking, repair), the internet (web site design, research), or maybe even blogging? Would the overseers of this grant consider students who blogged about their learning to have been worth GE’s investment?

Doubtful.

Words like “science”, “math”, and “technology” have little meaning to the dolers of monies. And without clearer meaning, the grant is as likely to trickle into sub-contracted organizations that can justify the measurement of their success any way they like, using words like “achievement” and “succeed” and “growth” or phrases like “move students” and “the data suggests”. Whereas the value of literature will always be inexplicable, much to the frustration of the teachers and scholars in its field, the real value of GE’s grant is likely to be as inexplicable--only its results are likely to come with the graphs and charts and data that have always appeased businessmen and mollified scientists. The Dead Poets might say these same graphs and charts and data frighten the art out of poetry.

Small Schools Speak

In yesterday's paper, the New York Times heralded the Department of Education's efforts to break up the large public high schools into smaller learning communities.  Speaking of one particular high school in Brooklyn, the Times wrote: "Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made new small high schools like Law and Justice a centerpiece of his effort to overhaul the system, saying students who get more personal attention will have more success in the classroom."  Yes, students who have more personal attention from adults seem more likely to achieve their goals.  I get that.  But what interests me more is how this notion became newsworthy; how we got to this point in education.  

I'm hesitant to write too sweepingly about education in general.  But I can offer some ideas regarding the history of English class in terms of reading and writing.  

Some scholars have argued, in fact, that it is precisely reading and writing that has led to the current asocial, impersonal, and classroom-packed situation we find ourselves in.  Let me explain: when someone reads or writes, they isolate themselves from live, active, social engagement with others.  That is to say, when one writes one sits in silence and composes soundless symbols on a page.  When one reads, more often than not (and certainly in schools) one reads in one's own head.  The effect of literacy, you could argue, has been only the slow march to schools of de-socialization.  Imagine what these look like: massive buildings with thousands and thousands of students, classrooms jammed with forty students whose identities have already been distorted by the massiveness of the physical space, activities in those rooms that seek to silence students (by reading and writing, for example), and, finally, by requiring assessments that value asocial silence rather than social dialogue.  

This is precisely what the Chancellor is being lauded for--the re-socialization of schools.  

There was some point in the past--scholars say around the late 19th century, early 20th century especially--where the industrial trend of the country said that bigger was better.  The idea of packing a building with as many students as possible who were assigned to study specific disciplines at specific times seemed like a good idea.  Whether or not it ever worked is for someone else to decide.  Few would argue that it does work today.  The Chancellor's plan seems to suggest that it did not in fact work.  I imagine the students at Law and Justice would agree.  

I'm left wondering whether or not we in education are doing a disservice by emphasizing literacy when orality is something many students already show fluency in.  Orality, by which I mean spoken language, seems to me to mean more in many ways than written language.  Spoken words are intimately connected to the speaker.  They convey presence in a way that writing cannot: a writer of a text could well be dead for centuries; a speaker, by the nature of the word, must be present. 

Are we trying to teach students to be present or absent in this world? 

My hope is that we learn from the way these small schools speak.  They speak of the import of presence: presence of teachers, presence of administration, presence of words.  If what we want for our students is their genuine presence, then we  must begin with our own.  And nothing conveys one's presence as the timbre of the spoken word addressed to a single person.  Perhaps if we closed the books, just for a moment, and spoke to each other like learners we'd hear the sounds of learning.