Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

A piece in The New Republic by Jed Perl beautifully describes the complicated relationship between writer and reader.  He is especially concerned with the effect that speedy technology is having on this relationship.  He writes:

…the speed with which words, once written, are now being read—a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround—has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader.

Writers’ Right to Remain Silent

He starts to tease out this idea: writers do themselves a disservice when they write in order to be read by some imagined reader.  (For the record, this is a point that conflicts with my own view on the matter. Or did, at least.)  Perl thinks that the thinking process is an intimate one, a messy one, a drippy one.  Writers make sense of things by writing and sometimes forgetting or rereading.  It’s that

most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.

Writers have a right to be left unread.  To be read is to be drawn into a relationship, a commitment, that etches one’s thoughts into some textual stone.  There is value, Perl argues, in simply writing and in NOT being read:

Nobody understands the extent to which, even for the widely acclaimed author with ready access to publication, the process of writing can sometimes necessitate a rejection or at least an avoidance of one’s own readers.

That avoidance of readers gives writers a sort of right to remain silent.  What’s more,

That silence is a part of writing—that the work of this day or this week or even this year might for good reason be withheld—is becoming harder and harder to comprehend.

Forcing Students to Publish

I agree that recently it has become a new industry to publish one’s ideas quickly and quirkily.  I say this, of course, while doing exactly that. (Have you checked my Twitter feeds or clicked on the suggested links below?!)  Still, there is something to be said here for what we do as educators as well.  Aren’t we in the business of making students publish there ideas, no matter how premature those ideas might be?

The Intimacy of Literacy

I’m thinking about this age of accountability and assessment in education when if it isn’t made public and quantified, it doesn’t count.  And yet, there is much to be gained, Perl says, in exactly that: not counting, not sharing.   What would it mean for us as educators to NOT assess students’ work until they are ready to publish it to us?  Are we, as a profession, guilty of disrespecting the intimacy of literacy?

Teaching What We Don’t Know

I’ve asked a similar question before with regard to students’ reading.  Teachers don’t know–for certain–that students read for class.  They know how well they read quizzes, perhaps, but reading itself is a private act and we only know as much as students wish to share with us.  We fight it, perhaps, or trick ourselves into thinking we “can tell” when a student reads for class.  But we don’t know.  Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn about writing too.  Perhaps writing merits its own distance and silence.  In these days of Tweets and Facebooking and blogging, making one’s ideas public is gaining uncritical acceptance.  For Perl,

But if there are risks involved in resisting the public, there are also dangers involved in running after the public. Nobody talks about those dangers anymore.

Someone should be discussing those dangers with students.  Teachers should.

It is the gift-giving season and I have a treat for you: Paradise Lost in its entirety; right here, right now.  Even if you don’t have the time to read the whole thing, give Book 1 a read.  Happy Holidays! -TLL

This morning I presented on re-reading as a way to engage disengaged readers.  We had a fantastic gathering of ~150 participants.  You can access the site I created for the talk here.  It was especially helpful to me as a professional to be in a room with colleagues and share ideas and experiences.  What’s more, prior to the talk, I tweeted quick pleas for people to come.  I was wonderfully rewarded by several members of the audience tweeting during the session.  See what they said @tomliamlynch.  I’ve signed up for several new blogs and look forward to Day 2.

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

Check out my new article on re-reading books with 10th grade students and the accompanying unit plan at readwritethink.org.