“It’s important to explicitly acknowledge the downsides of any technological transformation – to “think of the underside first,” in a precautionary way.”
-Bruce Sterling, in Shaping Things
Bruce Shauble’s post, A Book in the Hand, raises an interesting question about reading. Bruce is wondering whether kids are missing the chance to read deeply because so much of their reading and entertainment is electronically mediated.
…they’re essentially non-readers. Or, more accurately, they’re merely functional readers. They may be, and and in most cases probably are, technologically adept. They’re good at text messaging and instant messaging and Googling and playing video games. They know how to access information. They graze, grab what they need to get an assignment done, and then move on. But their mental lives, as far as I can see, are about a mile wide and about an inch deep.
I’m grateful for Bruce’s post, because it prompted me to look at this issue for myself. Like Bruce, I believe that my reading habits have changed in the last few years, and that my purposes for reading seem to have become more centered on my interest in blogging. I don’t know if this means anything – good or bad – in the grand scale of things. I’m reading a novel now, and though I don’t make as much headway with it as I would have pre-internet, I still read a variety of books.
The influence that computers have had on reading is an important question for teachers to think about. Are people reading more superficially? I don’t know. But the temptation to condemn technology should be resisted. The web is a great resource, and it needn’t be viewed in a deterministic way.
Differentiating between literary and informational reading was a subject that Louise Rosenblatt addressed with her theory of transactional reading. Rather than seeing texts as being either informational or literary expressions, she developed a model of reading that constructs reader stance as a variable that exists on a continuum between what she called efferent and aesthetic reading. In an interview that nicely summarizes her thinking, she had some advice for teachers that is worth passing along:
…the same text can be read either way. I can read Shakespeare efferently, I can tell you how many images of pain there are in King Lear or something like that. But if I really want to experience King Lear as a tragedy, I have to be reading it very differently. Not categorizing or labeling. It’s often very valuable to know afterwards, to do it afterwards, after you’ve had the experience. So I would say about teaching: whenever you are having students read something, have them be clear about their purpose.
I believe that superficiality is a danger of information overload, but with technologically mediated texts, we should remember that we can exercise choice in what we read, and how we read. It’s a question of stance, not substance, and we can learn to deliberately read from a variety of them.
7 Comments
I think you make a good point, Doug. I don’t mean to suggest that reading via technology—onscreen, online, via listening to an iPod, whatever— is bad, or worse in any absolute sense than reading in a book. There are different reading modalities with different purposes and different levels of attentiveness and engagement, and I agree with Rosenblatt that our job as teachers is to encourage students to learn how to read in a multitude of ways, for a variety of purposes, and—this is key—to be aware of which kind of reading they are doing in a given situation, and why.
My concern is (what I perceive to be) the growing number of students who now, given a menu of choices, opt out entirely from what for lack of a better term I’m going to call traditional reading. A teacher at the junior school on our campus who retired last year told me with a combination of bewilderment and amazement during her last year of teaching that for the first time she had students arriving in her seventh grade class and basically telling her, when she handed out the books, that “I’m not a reader.”
I know that you can’t always take that kind of declaration seriously, and I know that if a kid were to say that to me—and so far none has, directly—that would be the start of a pretty interesting long-term set of interactions between the two of us.
But still, that the student would say it, and feel that that position, that condition, of, well, nonreaderism, was a legitimate stand to take as a student: all of that is pretty mind-boggling to me. If intellectual humility is a virtue, then dismissing reading, dismissing books, seems to be just as much a failure of humility in a thirteen-year-old as dismissing the internet or the wikipedia or blogs as so much technological frippery would be in a fifty-year-old. And yes, we have a bunch of those around too.
I believe, as you do, that the principled position is to value and to aspire to proficiency in ALL kinds of reading. I use every power of persuasion that I possess to get that message across to my students, and with a lot of them I succeed, not so much because I’m a great rhetorician as because the argument is makes pretty good sense all on its own, if you have ears to listen. But it seems like it’s a harder sell than it used to be.
I’ve always had students who don’t like to read, and who aren’t ashamed to say so. When they say this, it always strikes me much like the things I hear about math from many parents – people who believe that math is hard and only useful for people who are going to college. Most of the time I can get kids to enjoy reading if I give them time to read books that they choose. We teach about “author’s purpose” as a way to help students make inferences about meaning. I’m thinking that explicit teaching about “reader’s purpose” – and presenting that in terms of a range of choices – would also be good. The trouble in school, though, is that the student’s usual purpose for reading is to complete an assignment. More autonomy, and a range of purposes for school reading might help.
Around the table with some education graduate students today, we were discussing this very issue. The need to cultivate a ‘reading identity’ and becoming a part of a ‘literate culture’. It seems to me that cultivating a reading identity in students, which acknowledges that they are ‘readers’ already and then works towards the development of a variety of stances which we can take when reading, will help us in engaging these students in deep readings.
It is the same for me, as I take on the identity of a person who blogs, a blogging identity. I meet teachers who say, ‘I’m not Cool enough to blog’,which in fact was the title of a post in my graduate studies class. We are talking about identity.
Many forms of literacy, many kind of reading, many new identities to explore.
Thanks for the interesting conversation.
The fact that students are not reading much beyond what is required for their classes saddens me greatly. As a child who was not only read to from a very early age, but was also taken to the library at age six for my first library card, and is a certified bookstore junkie, not reading in all of its modes – I can hardly imagine life without it. Not to mention that I am
As a teacher of Spanish to speakers of English, I see the direct impact of the lack of deep reading on the part of my students. Their background knowledge re: the world is not as rich and as textured. Moreover, their writing lacks depth and complexity of thought in their development of ideas, not to mention sound grammar and mechanics. Although I teach beginning and low-intermediate-level students, their ability to imagine, and to create from nothing, is so dramatically limited even when compared to students I taught five years ago, and I attribute this to being a population of non-readers.
A final example: I oversee the after-school study hall for middle schoolers at my school. The expectation is: When there is no homework to do for a class, have a book in your backpack. Hardly any of the students comply with this; they’d rather play an “educational” game on the computer, or read email. I suppose that I should be somewhat grateful that they do pull a magazine off the rack from time to time, but, this is hardly the deep reading to which you are referring.
My capacity to create with the language as a writer is so greatly enhanced by my wide range of reading interests.
More on this topic on my blog today. Feel free to drop by.
I’ve been trying to put links in but I’m not having much success. Here’s yet another try.
Franki is starting a list of books about books and reading on our blog. We work with elementary school kids who are just beginning to develop a sense of self as a reader — an important conversation to start early and revisit often if we are going to raise more than non-readers or funcitonal readers.
Any short texts/picture books/excerpts you use to talk to your students about becoming a reader and the importance of reading?
It’s a good question. Off the top of my head, I know that Lemony Snickett’s books do this. I also remember that in Esperanza Rising, Experanza’s experience as a student in Mexico when she was a rich girl set her apart from the field workers she had to live with in California, where she was an “illegal.” In Breaking Through, by Francisco Jimenez, he tells about his experience having to study and work his way through high school.
I’ll think on it a bit more. Maybe other readers have some ideas.
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] After reading this post by Doug at Borderland I began to reflect on my reading habits since the creation of my bloglines account. He says, [...]
Post a Comment