Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

In the Winter issue of Harvard Educational Review, researchers explore what genuine inquiry looks like in classrooms. In particular, they study a school in Canada in which both teachers and students are involved in less scripted curricula where the students own interests and questions propel their studies. Of the school, the article says, “One of the powerful consequences of their determination to understand and to develop vigorous practices in inquiry is a consistent commitment not only to providing inquiry-based classrooms for children but also to developing a scholarship of teaching…that demands an inquiry stance…in their own work” (676). Inquiry comes in many shapes and sizes. It’s a word, much like “rigor” and “data” are used in NYC public schools nowadays, that can mean nearly anything the speaker’s heart (or agenda) desires. Despite my initial hesitations, this article makes a sound and fresh case for its own brand of inquiry.

Inquiry-based classrooms, for these researchers, is about the students developing their own questions. It puts the weight of question-asking on students, not teachers. Teachers are there to suggest approaches or to help students deepen their own inquiry. There is no telling exactly where an inquiry will go, which perhaps frightens some teachers something horrible. The authors seem to say that, in general, teachers want answers. Right or wrong ones, preferably. Education honors, they say, “the assumption that you can only tell what someone knows if she can show it to you by herself, and unassisted” (680). Despite the fact that this article is written about a science class, the authors seem to be talking to us when they write, “For decades, countless grade 11 students have turned in essays on the imagery of blood in Macbeth–and now they are downloading them for free” (680). By this they mean that teaching with predetermined answers at the heart of your curriculum and method will only produce prescribed answer. Learning, they claim, isn’t about prescribed answers given on private exams. Rather, “Genuine inquiries demand that understanding develops in a public space in which each person’s abilities, interests, perspectives, and talents help move everyone else’s thinking forward” (680). It is communal by nature.

The article anticipates concerns from educators, like the question of academic rigor. One might say that rigor is determined by the difficulty of the task the teacher gives students. (On an aside, I’m always troubled about “rigor” being “justified” simply because one reads a specific author, or because the teacher assigns a lot of reading or homework. Busyness is not rigor.) Rigor, for the authors, however, is not about the teacher posing traditionally hard content questions; it’s about posing more philosophical and methodological questions. For instance, “Inquiry demands an orientation to what matters: What, as far as we can tell, is crucial? What’s just noise? How can we tell the difference?” (683). It is the students who grapple with these questions in the context of genuine interest in a self-chosen topic. A far cry from typical educational methods.

But, what does this mean for English teachers? Can we, too, teach in this type of inquiry-based model? Do English teachers really have the curricular time to do this sort of thing when there are literary devices to learn, books to read, and writing skills to practice? I suggest yes. In two distinct instances, I think I approached such inquiry with my own students in 9th and 10th grade English. In the one case, we inquired into whether or not Chaucerian poetry was comparable to today’s rap music: consider end rhyme, concern for social issues, the role of vernacular English, even occasional bawdiness, not to mention popularity. The inquiry resulted in students recording a literary critique in the form of a rap album. Granted, I raised the initial question and relied on students as co-researchers, but, still, perhaps a step in the direction described above. In another case, my students confessed that they didn’t read when I (or other teachers, for that matter) assigned readings. Instead, they had several methods of faking reading, if they bothered to read at all. The result was an abandonment of planned curriculum and an inquiry into the question, “What happens to the joy of reading?” In the end, students re-read books from their pasts that they remember enjoying and wrote essays about what happens to reading in school. Are either of these what inquiry might look like in the English classroom? What are others doing? What other possibilities are still unexplored?

For the full article, see:
“Testing the Waters: Three Elements of Classroom Inquiry” by Pat Clifford and Susan J. Marinucci. Harvard Educational Review, 78.4. (The Winter 2008 issue).

For more about my work, go to:
www.tomliamlynch.org

We might consider four distinct reasons some students continue to struggle with basic reading skills.  According to findings in Research in the Teaching of English this month, some students’ difficulty with reading—even when teachers have instructed and students “know” certain reading strategies—because we as teachers often expect the teaching of strategies to be enough.  It’s not.

In a year-long study, Leigh A. Hall discuses not only strategy approaches, but also issues of identity.  She writes: [The student’s] opportunities to grow and develop as a reader were marginalized in [the teacher’s] classroom both by her teacher and herself.”  First, the emphasis on “cognitive, print-centric view of reading” held by students and teachers.  Second, the identification of the student as a struggling reader by the teacher, that is, the naming of the student as such and engaging with her from that perspective.  Thirdly, the student sought to prevent her classmates from not finding out how bad she was as a reader; so, she didn’t ask for help or take risks in class that might help her grow. Finally, the student and teacher had different goals in mind—academic and social—and the competition between the two only hindered progress.

In our own classrooms, we might consider finding ways to discuss with individual students not only how they struggle with reading skills, but with the way their peers view them, as individuals and as readers.  Other conversations to have, perhaps—with individuals or with classes—might include asking how students’ experiences reading online compare to their offline reading, or, how they have grown and changed as readers throughout their experiences in school.  It seems that one lesson to take from Hall’s study is for teachers of English and literacy to step back from common professional assumptions and open a dialogue with struggling readers about struggling and reading.

Still, my constant concern in the emphasis on literacy skills and reading strategies, over the last several years especially, is that it overshadows other aspects of English education.  For example, what of the possibility for aesthetic experiences with literature?  What of pleasure in reading?  A recent English Companion discussion thread got at just this issue.  One thing it reveals is that “good literature” and “books we like to read” are not at all the same, necessarily.  The discussion–a really rich one at that–might take on even more interesting light if we take it into our classrooms and pose it to our students themselves.

For the full study, see:
Hall, L. A. (2008). Struggling reader, struggling teacher. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(3), 286-309.

For related reading, check out:
Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice by Beers, Probst, & Rief

Secondary School Literacy: What Research Reveals for Classroom Practice by Rush, Eakle, and Berger

Literature is losing the fight.  By “the fight” I mean two bookish scuffles: one against literature’s digital counterparts described in Click and Jane, an article in the Times Magazine a couple weeks ago; and the other being a century-old battle in which literature has tried to maintain some place of legitimacy in American education.

As the author (and mother) of Click and Jane notes, her three-year-old son doesn’t mistake her Blackberry for a book.  For him, “the only time he describes what he and I do together as ‘reading’ is when we’re sitting with a clutch of pages bound between covers, open in front of us like a hymnal.”  He enjoys playing on book-like web sites for kids, but he doesn’t dare call it reading.  Importantly, the place of reading literature in schools is becoming increasingly complex as students and researchers spend more time engaged with various new/online literacies.  Things are not looking good for literature.  It’s track record, after all, looks fairly feeble.

Literature in schools hasn’t ever been able to defend itself the way other subjects of study have. Other subjects–physics, Spanish, history, for instance–have specific content and methods that, if push comes to shove, have some practical value. (A student can say, “I can send a man to the moon” or “I can communicate with others” or “I can better partake in the political system”). Utility drives education more often than many educators like to admit.  Students know this, of course.  Their frustrated cries of “Why do we have to do this?” are cries of pragmatists. Education loves pragmatists, so long as they do their work.

Literature isn’t practical. In fact, for much of its teaching in America, teaching literature has been justified under the canopy of Developing Character and Culture.  A weak defense. There is no value in teaching literature. There is worth, perhaps, but not value.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines value as “That amount of some commodity, medium of exchange, etc., which is considered to be an equivalent for something else; a fair or adequate equivalent or return.”  The literary experience is not a commodity.  In fact, attempts to demonstrate the practical or quantifiable value of teaching literature have resulted in its being defined in terms of reading skills or as a necessary companion to writing.  (Incidentally, writing has seldom had so difficult a time finding approval in academia. Programs and departments might argue over whose responsibility it is to teach writing, but none would question the importance of it.)  To this day, the New York State Regents exam as well as the AP Exam in Literature value literature in a particular way.  It is something to be parsed, like a dead frog in biology class.  Poke it. Prod it. Cut it up and discard it.

Worth is different. In addition to definitions of economy and markets, worth also conveys something more: “The character or standing of a person in respect of moral and intellectual qualities; high personal merit or attainments.”  With this definition, we start to approach the unspeakable nature of literary experience.  Words like “moral” and “intellectual” float in the ether.  A teacher would be hard pressed to score morality (though, unfortunately, they might do a more confident job with intellect!).

There is no reason whatsoever to argue for the value of literature.  Nevertheless, schools do indeed have a responsibility to ensure certain practical communication skills are taught.  Why not, then, give literature its own course of study?  Let there be a course on Efferent Reading or Communicative Arts, which focuses on the practical and necessary skills of information gathering, critiquing, and presenting.  Then, separately, study literature with an eye toward the intangible, immeasurable aesthetic effects it can create with imaginative readers.  What would be lost in such a curricular approach?

What’s more, the recent trend of using literature to teach reading skills–or, I would argue, even to emulate authors in students’ own writing–is distinctly non-literary.  It prevents any hope of aesthetic experience or, as Applebee writes in his Tradition and Reform, it privileges students’ experiences with literature instead of their experiences through literature.  Teaching literature resists evaluation, so do the students’ literary experiences through literature.  We read literature, to put it simply, because it’s worth it.