I’ve been continuing to develop my dissertation study about teaching English in online environments. I begin the study by telling the story of Boss Tweed and how he had certain textbooks tossed out of NYC schools in 1871. The textbooks were all published by Harper’s Brothers, whose popular Harper’s Weekly featured the political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Nast had some nasty things to say about Tweed and Tweed sought his revenge through Harper’s.
At the time, Harper’s published a textbook on English composition, from which I’ve lifted the excerpt below. To see more of the original publication, click here. Otherwise, here’s how composition was taught in NYC back in the day:
Online learning needs to go social. So says the founder of Einztein.com, a free course search engine, which is well worth a visit and a browse. In his piece on Mashable! recently, Marco Masoni writes:
What’s required are innovative approaches to course design that set aside old models of instruction where theory often trumps actuality. Online course providers must embrace the web’s potential to match students with the kinds of timely knowledge and skills that address current issues head-on, and enable them to thrive in the global marketplace.
Yes, the web’s potential to make learning experiences dynamic and real-time is seemingly limitless. And exciting. Still, when I search through what’s out there using Einztein’s site, I’m disappointed. Like iTunes U, Einztein allows users to connect with myriad courses and online instructional videos. I did a search for Milton, for instance, and it linked me to Yale’s Open Course on the poet. That’s not what disappoints me. In fact, it’s incredible that these kinds of courses are available for free to anyone with internet access. What does disappoint me is that for Masoni (and Apple, for that matter) learning still resembles one-way communication from an expert to unknowing students. Students are empty vessels whose minds are to be filled with factoids and figures. He skips scrutinizing this point and jumps eagerly to the use of “real-time” lessons:
It’s not enough for a course to be accessible online, it must also be designed in a way that keys into the digital pulse of current events, trending topics and insider knowledge endemic to the web.
No. It’s not enough for a course to be accessible online if it used as a way to perpetuate the kinds of monolithic teaching that are iconic of traditional means of instruction. I think the merits of real-time learning are not talked about enough. Still, it is what students do with the information they learn that matters. If all a student does is watch a professor lecture on Milton for nine hours and take an exam (which I myself might enjoy immensely) have we really innovated teaching and learning? The medium is not enough, not without equal attention paid to pedagogy.
For anyone who has ever thought Charles Dickens was lurking inside his or her prose, a new website claims it can find your inner author.
The recently launched I Write Like has one simple gimmick: You paste a few paragraphs that exemplify your writing, then click “analyze” and – poof! – you get a badge telling you that you write like Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk.
The site’s traffic has soared in recent days and its arrival has lit up the blogosphere. Gawker tried a transcript from one of the leaked Mel Gibson phone calls. The suggested author: Margaret Atwood.
The New Yorker found that an invitation to a birthday party was James Joycean. Many others were aghast to discover they wrote similarly to “The Da Vinci Code” scribe Dan Brown.
The New York Times tried putting in actual novels, such as “Moby-Dick.” Herman Melville, it turns out, writes less like himself than King, according to I Write Like.
Atwood, herself, tried the site only to discover she also apparently writes like King. “Who knew?” she tweeted.
There is a novelty to it for sure. There is also a history to this approach to teaching writing. Education scholar Robert Scholes writes about the birth of English from classical studies. When studying Greek and Latin texts, 19th century students studied the author’s writing so they could emulate them. You read Cicero in order to write like him. When English was struggling to be respected as a discipline in the early 20th century, it fell under the spell of critical essays. To this day, exams tend to ask students to play the role of mediocre literary critic, because it somehow strikes us as more rigorous and scholarly.
My hope is that sites like IWL will rekindle our interest in what Scholes calls “writing literarily”, that is, in reading literature in order to write with literary style. Imagine, rather than simple asking student to write a thematic essay on a short story by Hemingway, we asked students to also write like the author. Students would have to have a sophisticated literary sensibility to do so and would develop a much richer understanding of how writers write in order to influence readers. It has been over a century now and the time has come to mend the split between literary and composition studies. Three little words can help us get there: I Write Like…
Google posted today about a series of grants they’ve provided to professorial teams committed to digitizing literary scholarship–with an emphasis, it seems, on the classics. The post begins:
It can’t have been very long after people started writing that they started to organize and comment on what was written. Look at the 10th century Venetus A manuscript, which contains scholia written fifteen centuries earlier about texts written five centuries before that. Almost since computers were invented, people have envisioned using them to expose the interconnections of the world’s knowledge. That vision is finally becoming real with the flowering of the web, but in a notably limited way: very little of the world’s culture predating the web is accessible online. Much of that information is available only in printed books.
David Brooks wrote a piece called “The Medium is the Medium” in the NY Times recently about a study that shows giving “disadvantaged students” books to take home to read improves test scores. Brooks is quick to point out that other studies suggest that Internet-reading and activity is linked to slumps in test scores. A dichotomy, Mr. Brooks? Really? The Big Bad Computer against the Tried and True Book?
Three Cheerleaders in the Tomes vs. Technology Battle
Brooks then uses these two studies to set up Nicholas Carr’s new book about the dangerous effects the Internet is having on our brains. Brooks writes:
These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation. Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
Carr and Brooks might have in mind here the work of scholars like James Paul Gee, whose writings on the positive effects of video games on literacy have been widely cited. So to review up to this point: Brooks is cheering for the victory of books, Carr is warning of the dangers of digital literacy, and Gee et al. are championing video games and online media as the new literacy that seems to transcend traditional approaches to reading and writing.
Teach the Battle, the Argument
Dichotomies are of little use if they aren’t used to dig into the nuances of issues. This is no different. While I respect the work of Brooks, Carr, and Gee, I can’t understand why such smart people get so comfortable in their either/or positions. Wouldn’t we all benefit from a discussion about when we read digitally and when we read on paper? Wouldn’t our students benefit from the conversation concerning how they read for different purposes at different times rather than the pontification that “Books are better for you!” or “The Internet is rotting your mind!” or “Video games are inherently educational”? The only reason I can think of that such thoughtful men would become so comfortable slinging their ideas to one side of a dichotomy is this: it sells and the media eats it up.
The Validity of Heaviness
A few years ago I had a student who was clearly not reading for class. I asked to speak with her after class. When I posed the question to her–”It seems like you haven’t been reading the assignments. Is that true?”–she didn’t hesitate to say that she hadn’t read a page. “Why haven’t you read?” I asked. She looked down at the floor where her book bag was resting. She pulled out the book. “I can’t carry this home with me,” she added, “it’s too heavy.” It’s easy to say that she was making up silly excuses for not wanting to read and that I should have told her exactly that right there and then. I did. And she apologized, promised to read, and left. She didn’t read the next assignment. Or the one after that. What did I gain by ignoring her complaint–that the physicality, the texture, and the weight of a book was too much for her to manage? I wished I had engaged her further–do you read online? do you find other books more readable? do you need glasses? I didn’t ask these questions, though. I found a comfortable corner in a two-sided room and I ensconced myself there. Quite happily.
Get Beyond the Dichotomy
Surely there is more to be learned by probing into initial dichotomies than by stubbornly claiming a side of one. For instance, what would the above authors think about the fact that I read their texts online? Or, to phrase it as one of my favorite question types, What was lost and what was gained when I read their pieces online rather than on paper? Think about that. By asking that question–a question that uses a dichotomy and pushes through it–I’m left asking about my own relationship to reading and encouraged to question, not to make staunch and flashy claims. It’s worth noting a small and significant moment in David Brooks’ opening. He writes:
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Notice the parentheses. Perhaps there is significance in students’ choosing. Perhaps we, as adults in their lives, should guide them in better understanding their choices–to read or not to read, to read online or to read on paper, to read a serious text or to read a humorous one. (Perhaps the medium is not the medium. Perhaps the reader is.)
A product development group’s study recently found that readers read more quickly on paper than on e-readers, the iPad in particular. Ian Paul, of PC World, writes
So it appears technology hasn’t quite figured out yet how to replicate the experience of the printed page. That said this study leaves a lot to be desired owing to its small test group size, but it would be interesting to see a similar study on a much larger scale. I’d be curious to find out, for example, if there’s any big difference in reading speeds based on age groups.
Paul is right to point out that the test group leaves much to be desired (only 24 people who already read with frequency) and I agree that a larger study would be intriguing. Do reluctant readers, for instance, find the device on which they read to make a difference in a text’s readability? Or, are some works better read on some devices (this study uses Hemingway’s short stories). There are other considerations raised by this study, too.
Reading Faster is Better
Or so one would think based on this study. Why is reading speed so important? Speed is important, perhaps, if one’s job requires them to sift through piles of information in search of only useful data. Sure, then speed matters. But, does speed help or hinder one’s experience of reading for pleasure? Is speed pleasurable? Or, what if you are reading to think more deeply about yourself as a person (a kind of reading we could all do more of… our young adult students are no exception)? Is rapid reading a positive attribute in that case? The emphasis on quick reading suggests to me that the study does privilege a certain kind of reading: reading for specific uses. This kind of reading runs the risk of ignoring other reasons for reading… readings that aren’t easily aligned with the work-place or with data-gathering.
There Must Be a BEST Way to Read
This study makes you think there is a best way to read out there. One would think reading more quickly or with clearest comprehension is necessarily a good thing. And yet, reading slowly in order to enjoy a story or reading a story that defies comprehension can be convincingly argued to have a place and value (consider the kind of confusion, for instance, Italo Calvino masters or that Milton creates through his convoluted Latinate style). And why choose one over the other? I would argue that it is much more valuable to teach students to ask themselves what kind of reading experiences they wish or want to have with a particular text. A student who chooses to read an article on an iPad or a novel on paper (or vice versa) is making a choice that can rightly be ascribed to a maturing reader. And likely a lifelong one, too.
Who Reads, Not What is Read (or What it’s Read On)
Our attention is misguided if we find so interesting the reading pace of a small study group on iPads while neglecting the more important question: why do these readers read at all. And equally, why don’t some readers read at all? The real subject of study is NOT the text that is read or the machine that presents it. The real subject is the reader. It is the reader who reads and without whom there is not text or text-presenter. And all readers CHOOSE to read; they cannot be forced to. Why readers do and don’t read is–in my mind–a central question in this age of new literacies and technologies. How they read is also essential. But, on what they read? That is only of interest if it helps answer the former questions. We must always come back to who reads and why. Without that, studies like this one are of only fleeting interest at best and will be quick to go the way of yesterday’s iPad.
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.
I came across this piece recently about the rise of digital textbooks. In it, two experts on the topic take questions in a chat setting. For instance:
Moderator: Katie Ash: Brian – do you want to go into a bit more detail about what exactly is going on in California, and what the different phases are? Brian Bridges: @Katie. digital textbooks can be as simple as an electronic version of a print book, which is exactly what we’re reviewing right now. College professors and CK-12 have created a number of excellent books which can be printed out or can be read on devices. Digital books can also be web sites or interactive. Neeru Khosla: @Caryn. Digital Textbooks is not just text, but it is next generation textbooks leveraging technology to make content available in various formats Brian Bridges: Phase One of the Free Digital Textbook Initiative focused on downloadable PDF textbooks in math and science. Neeru Khosla: including print on paper, as well as on web and mobile devices
Granted, this is “phase one” of the digitization of textbooks. Still, I’m left asking myself: why are the adults still the ones writing textbooks here? It’s a fair inference from the whole transcript that adults remain in the role of expert. But, why? Wouldn’t students learn mountains of knowledge and skills if their only task for the year was to write a textbook for other students on, say, an introduction to chemistry or English literature? They could then share it with other students and schools and update it collaboratively. For free. The role of the teacher, then, is that of editor: verify accuracy, project manage, and stay out of the way when needed to.
I am re-reading a book by education professorSheridan Blau about teaching literature. He describes a profound realization he had four decades ago: the work he did assembling content to teach his students was precisely the work the students themselves needed to be doing. And, they couldn’t ever do that work because Professor Blau would walk in to his classes prepared to teach what he had learned. The paradox is this: so long as adults prepare the content for students, students can’t prepare it for themselves. It is the preparation of content–or, the curation, perhaps–that effects learning.
I do indeed think that the textbook industry is undergoing a major transformation. Between online textbooks, the influx of devices like the iPad, and the surge in Apps for sale, there is little direction for this to go but up. But, transformations in technology do not mean transformations in pedagogy. A transformation in pedagogy would have students writing the textbooks for other students, sharing those online, and even voting on which ones were most effective. That would be transformative. Downloading PDFs of adults’ own learning of the content? Hardly.
It was a quiet match, literature fans, but it happened again: Shakespeare pounced Milton in a curricular smackdown. When the Common Core Standards were unveiled recently, they came with a series of recommended texts for study in multiple disciplines, including English. Sam Dillon of the Times writes:
…the English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks.” One play cited as appropriate for high school students is “Oedipus Rex,” by Sophocles.
Battling over Books
The debate about which books to read when has been ongoing for decades. Even going back to the 19th and 20th centuries, colleges put out reading lists of the literary works they expected students to have read. These reading lists determined which books were taught in high schools. So what? Each college had its own list! Secondary schools were caught in a corner: either prepare students for a specific school’s entrance exam or give them a rounder exposure to texts, but leave them unprepared for college admissions. As for the Common Core, there are five works that are deemed required:
High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who was lead writer on the English standards, “Students have to read one Shakespeare play — that’s a requirement.”
One Shakespeare a year? I respect the fact that Shakespeare is so lauded in our schools–and has been for generations. Still, why not add others to the list of required reading, or, don’t require any single particular author.
Consider Milton Over Shakespeare
A few years ago, I refused to teach a Shakespearean work to my 10th grade students. My rationale: Milton was more interesting, more rewarding, and had a certain novelty with students because he wasn’t Shakespeare. We didn’t read all of Paradise Lost, but we studied three books closely. When I shared with colleagues my Miltonian mission, they replied that Milton was far too difficult for high school students.
Difficult? Milton? Well, yes, of course he’s difficult. And so is Shakespeare. The difference is that teachers have myriad resources to teach Shakespeare well–movies, Folger’s Library, just to name two main ones. Milton’s got nothing. But Milton could have whole communities of educators whose mission it is to teach him. They could create social networks and resource sharing points and thereby make Milton as accessible as Shakespeare.
But, there’s less hope of that happening now. Thanks, Common Core. Thanks for ensuring this particular literary treasure–or paradise–remains lost to pedagogues.
Ancient Greek Scholar Simon Goldhill breaks down for us the eternally useful lesson of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. (I also highly recommend Goldhill’s book Love, Sex, Tragedy…). Oedipus thought he was in control of his destiny. Well, Goldhill says, “When you thought you were in control…”:
I love that Google’s book-scanning endeavors have made it so digitally simple to find really old books that would otherwise be sitting unseen in some university basement. Here’s a fantastic artifact from a 19th century education journal that comments on both the literature textbooks being produced and the importance of studying literature in the first place:
Lectures get a bad rap. Sure, learning should be constructed and not delivered; students should create understanding and not absorb the understandings of another. Still, nothing beats a good lecture. A good lecture puts the intellectual onus on the listener. A good lecturer creates a performance environment where those present are not only entertained or engaged, but they are are challenged to imagine the ideas of the lecturer as their own.
The New York Times discusses how universities are currently using cyberspace to transmit great courses and lecturers to the world, often for free. Interestingly, what seems to be all the latest rage is in many ways a throw-back to an earlier day. Since this ideas is the focus of my newest study, let me elaborate.
In the teaching of literature, this is nothing new. As literature was gaining traction as a serious academic discipline, it was this kind of super-lecturing–part intelligentsia, part rock concert–that pervaded the countries major universities. One really well known figure was Billy Phelps. Education professors Robert Scholes and Gerald Graff discuss at length in their respective histories of teaching literature that Phelps brought the fervor of the preacher to the earliest literature classrooms in the US. Students packed into lecture halls to hear Phelps interpret great literary works. What was it that drew them then as students today are drawn to the courses of the professors in the Times piece?
Sometimes, I think, there is something more intimate, more sincere, about one person performing his or her passion for a subject than group work and what-do-you-think pedagogies can offer. I might even go so far as to say that a well-crafted and -performed lecture on a timely topic is precisely what many students want. And if a particular lecturer isn’t hacking it, well, they need go no further than their computers and phones to catch a glimpse of others who are.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be beginning to put a hypothesis to the test. We often hear that our current schools are stuck using 19th century models of teaching and learning, that the 21st century student must be prepared for a new globalized economy. I myself have nodded my head to these claims. I might even have made them. And I might make them again. Before I do, however, I’d like to put them to a test.
What if I closely read and analyzed 19th century textbooks for teaching literature? Then, what if I conducted a similarly rigorous content analysis of popular online content companies who provide English literature content to schools? What would be new–or innovative, rigorous, 21st century–and what not?
My suspicion is that the 19th century textbooks and the 21st century online courses will prove to be remarkably similar. I’m open, though, to the contrary.
Are there other questions I’m missing? What might you yourself expect to see in such a comparison?
Just moments ago, I submitted my second certification exam. It’s a fifty-page review of studies related to my own present and future work. In it, I ask a series of questions to guide the review:
- Why don’t policymakers read educational research? - Why don’t researchers write for policymakers? - What gaps exist because policymakers and researchers don’t read and write for each other? - What assumptions about reading and writing underlie this gapbetween research and policy?
I’m becoming particularly interested in learning more about policymakers and implementers as readers, non-readers, and re-readers. Many thanks to Jon Becker who replied to my last post and gave me invaluable direction.
The next steps include meeting with my adviser for breakfast Friday, discussing the kinds of studies this lit review lends itself to, and beginning preparations on a dissertation proposal for a hearing in the May. If you have any ideas, leads, or links, please send them along!
** On another note, I’m also beginning now to prepare for a reading of Paradise Lost to my son, Declan. These tender, but literary, posts will pepper the blog in the months to come. **
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
There is a need for other voices in this discussion because the loudest ones–those who write popular books and get spots in international newspapers–are themselves only serving to pry apart the possibility of the coexistence of literature and new literacies.
A case in point: Macintyre concludes his piece thus:
Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.
That “great narrative” wasn’t written as a tweet… it wasn’t likely that it was written at all initially. Ancient and biblical scholars like Havelock and McDonald have pointed out that the the Bible–the New Testament in particular–was likely composed by many people over time, and constructed orally. McDonald goes as far as to say that Acts of the Apostles follows the story-telling framework of Homer’s Iliad and that biblical stories that we like to think were written by one divinely inspired writer are group compositions that follow a commonly shared scaffold. Tweeting might be much closer to early composition processes than we think. It’s a commonly shared scaffolding form, takes pieces from disparate voices, and blends them together over time.
Storytelling isn’t dying, it’s developing. And while I do agree that the teaching of literature is in trouble in schools, it’s not because the information age is trumping it. It’s because the voices carrying on the discussion are boiling the issue down to Us vs. Them, Literati vs. Technorati, Twitters vs. Readers. It doesn’t help. Not one tweet.
This fantastic NYTimes piece gives voice to several sides of the debate around reading and the influences of e-books. For instance, Alan Liu of UC, Santa Barbara, writes:
Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.
Dr. Liu’s is a rich reading for those of us interested in both literature and literacy, and the other perspectives only round out his own. What I’d love to see is an article like this opinion piece used as the foundation of a e-Books curriculum in schools.
As lawyers and authors argue over the legality of an unsanctioned spin-off of Catcher in the Rye, questions are raised about who makes a work of literature "literary". If the author is dead, as Barthes said, and if it is the reader who creates the text, as Rosenblatt discusses, it seems like it’s the readers who should decide. Why not take the sequel–in which Holden is aged and Phoebe is down-and-out–and have the readers vote? Perhaps writers have to loosen their hold(en) on their works after all.
NPR has a project called Place+Memory in which people can recreate places they recall from the past–places that had a great effect on them–and both record a story about it for radio as well as plot it on a map. I have to imagine that this might be adapted for our pasts as readers. What if students recreated the settings of memorable childhood readings? And plotted them on a map? I’m thinking of weaving it into my own re-reading project that I’ve done with 10th grade students. It might be a rich example of how new literacy technology can help with rough old practices like reading off of paper.
There is quite a bit of excitement and pedagogical anticipation surrounding eBooks nowadays, especially for English teachers. Wesley Fryer, for instance, writes with glee:
How amazing it was and is to:
Think of a book I’d like to obtain for my son to read.
Perform a quick search in the Project Gutenberg database via the Internet for the book.
Click a small, simple button: DOWNLOAD– And in seconds, the book is available for us to read and enjoy. For FREE!
This is AMAZING! This is incredible. I know eBooks have been around for awhile, but I’m still amazed to personally experience the ease with which public domain texts like this can be legally downloaded and obtained, and how affordable commercially sold books can be purchased and downloaded as well.
The low cost of eBooks and the quickness with which users might acquire them is indeed exciting. As someone who spends his days looking for new tools online and trying to marry technology and education in new ways, I share Fryer’s awe. To a point. I also worry about the way these new technologies might well only perpetuate a bad habit of English departments, which I call Rented Readings.
Rented Readings–in its pre-digital, analogue form–refers to those specially bound books that we English teachers give students and in which they cannot read. Rather, they stick post-it notes in them all of which must be thoroughly removed before being returned to the book room. We rent readings. We teach students that a book is to be looked at but not scrawled on. Meanwhile, writing in books is something many English teachers themselves have found useful.
I recall being in an undergraduate philosophy course and watching a colleague mark up his pages as we talked. There were two immediate reasons I myself did not do that: 1. I was taught the exact opposite in school–writing in books was one way to pay a fine before collecting my report card; and 2. If I wanted drinking money for end-of-semester revelries, I needed to keep my books in tip-top shape so as to command the most Buy-Back-Buck I could from the college bookstore. (In fact, some friends and I would toast the author of the book whose refunds had bought us rounds… “And here’s to St. Thomas Aquinas for his application of Aristotelian logic to Christian doctrine and for these twenty ounces of fine brew!”)
It seems to me that when we rent books to students we teach them to be renters of reading. As if to say, Don’t get too comfortable here because the relationship you form with this book is only temporary. I am not saying that students’ reading experiences can’t stay with them. Rather, I’m saying that the books should stay with them too, that students should amass their own physical libraries in which they could trace in the marginalia the twists and straightening of their handwriting or the recurring questions that reveal themselves as significant across time and text.
I have in mind Kelly Gallagher’s term “readicide”, which he defines as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools”, when I suggest that one readicidal practice is the renting of books to students and the correlative result: rented readership. Over time, students who don’t pay their rent–by completing assignments and arriving to class with ideas, notes, and enthusiasm–get evicted. I purpose letting students scar up pages of book, deface the text, impale the book with their ideas and daydreams like you’d drive in screws to a wall to support bookshelves. While on the one hand the new digital form of rented readings–eBooks–allow us to transport literature anywhere we like, it also, in someways, might make us lifelong renters who never get a chance to stroll around a home built in and of books.
Last week, newly released test scores in middle school English went up on average in New York City. While skeptics suggest it could just mean the tests are getting easier, both Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein were publicly pleased. On the very day the scores came out, they were both in Washington chatting school reform with the president.
I have seen the middle school English Language Arts test. It is comparable to what high school students take on their ELA Regents exam. It worries me. So much emphasis is put on test results and too little is said (or perhaps heard) about what is lost in such exams–especially when it comes to English and literature.
As quoted in the NYTimes,
“This is confirmatory of the fact that results continue to grow and increase,” Mr. Klein said in a telephone interview while he was on his way back from Washington. “I think we have multiple data points now that show that we are making that progress.”
When it comes to English, what constitutes progress? Test scores? My concern is that the reading of literature is experiential, aesthetic, and private. You can’t test it authentically. In a strange twist, to the credit of the State, they don’t even really try to test literature. Most of what is tested is reading comprehension and argumentative essay writing. When students do encounter literature, it isn’t in any literary sort of way: At a desk, in a stuffy room, clock ticking, questions awaiting response might spawn the writing of literature–some sharp societal satire–but not the reading of it.
As school reform becomes synonymous with test scores and achievement, literature will continue to become less and less literary in schools. And as more emphasis is put on teaching into new literacies, literature awaits the settling of falling dust as it fades into its bookshelves.
Presidents have preferred quoting Shakespeare, though Mr. Obama has yet to do so in public. Lincoln was enchanted by Macbeth; Jefferson and Adams ventured to Stratford-upon-Avon together. Though he hasn’t quoted the Bard in public, Barry Edelstein’s recent NYTimes article points out
His closest brush was in his Inaugural Address, where his evocative phrase “this winter of our hardship” glanced at Shakespeare’s “winter of our discontent” from “Richard III.”
The step from literary allusion to direct quotation is small, however, especially since there is no shortage of Shakespeare with which Mr. Obama might address the country’s challenges. For example:
On the trouble in the Gulf of Aden, he could say this from “Antony and Cleopatra”: “I must / Rid all the sea of pirates.” He could quote from “Henry IV, Part I” on limiting Wall Street bonuses: “A little / More than a little is by much too much.” When he cashiers the next Fortune 500 C.E.O., some “Pericles” might come in handy: “We would purge the land of these drones, that rob the bee of her honey.”
What Mr. Obama needs is not winters and bees. He needs Milton. Milton gives both poetry and prose, and it is the directness of his politics in prose that might make him most fitting today.
Obama’s insistence to be reasonable, speak clearly, and remain overtly calm speaks to the power of the mind. Milton describes “One who brings”
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (Paradise Lost, 1.252-257)
Of course, it’s Satan speaking above, which might be one reason presidents avoid Milton: He makes the devil so alluring.
The President’s own style of leadership, which he says rests on transparency and communication between individuals and institutions, might well benefit from this excerpt from Areopagitica:
For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truth guiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our own weak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught and irreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as good as theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from house to house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore that which is now thought cannot be sound?
The quiet backdoor dealings (“privily from house to house”) that became iconic of the previous administration seem for the moment to have given way to “openly…writing…to the world”. In these first 100 days of office, we have heard more than ever before of the importance of communicating with the public the workings of offices that they themselves fund.
But still, Milton might be uneasy with my praising loudly the new president. He might direct me to a passage on the fallibility of man, which, considering the fate of our last popular democratic president, we all might be wise to keep in mind. Milton’s God describes in Book 3 of his great epic, how Satan, Adam & Eve fall from Grace:
I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all th’ Ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood & them who faild;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. (98-102)
Mind your freeness to fall, Mr. President. And for the most compelling literary advice on how to keep on your feet, read Milton. Not Shakespeare.
The Kindle is poised to change the way we read, not to mention the ways in which authors write and publishers produce books. In his insightful article, Steven Johnson lays out several realistic possibilities for the future of reading in an age of the Kindle. He speaks of a world in which Google can search individual pages of books (the technology is essentially there already), chapters will be bought like iTunes songs (recall the death of the album…no reason to buy eleven humdrum songs when you only want the one with bounce), and even an influx in reading of books as they can be bought on whim (under two minutes from impulse to opening line). Exciting and frightening. The former because never before has this kind of reading been possible; the latter because there is a physicality that is fading. But, what does it mean for teaching literature?
I’ve blogged before about the Kindle and reading, suggesting that it might well entice reluctant readers to get into it precisely because it isn’t a weighty book with many many many pages. It’s just a sleek light device. Johnson predicts one of my great concerns for the future of reading literature when he writes about what will happen with the Kindle inevitably goes the path of the iPhone and offers more than just reading books and newspapers:
As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
What will happen to literary imagination when it competes with emails and phone calls?
In his book Private Readings in Public, Denis Sumara talks about the immensely private nature of reading literature. Wired reading endangers this kind of privacy, which, you could argue, is necessary for the kind of imaginative immersion Johnson mentions. And what of the labor of turning pages? Or, the feeling of a pen etching into the fiberous surface of the page?
I am certain the reading literature will not be the same from this point forward. My greater concern, however, is that those of us in English education will just stuff our ears, claim the topic too beneath us to take seriously, and miss shaping the direction of these new literatures.
In the recent issue of English Journal, Viv Ellis writes about why teaching toward understanding sexual identity is important in English education. He tells a powerful story of a student of his who was cruelly beaten to death, having been labeled gay. Ellis pinpoints his student’s death as a turning point in his teaching English and sexual identity. It’s a brief piece with a readable balance of the scholarly, the personal, and the pedagogical.
Especially compelling for me was not only Ellis’ astuteness and candor, but also the way he justifies teaching literature at all. He writes, “Personal growth–in terms of conceptual development, criticality, imagination, socialibility, empathy, morality, and ethics–may be presently an unfashionable phrase but it presists as an ideal for the institution of schooling, and English has an important role to play in the pursuit of this goal.”
In a time when the humanities are losing funding and support, and some teachers are being paid more because of the subject they teach (math and science teachers in Georgia are slated to start out at 5th year teaching pay), I find Ellis’ matter-of-fact defense for teaching literature a breath of fresh air that is currently all too rare.
Literature’s power rests on imagination. With all the new technological advances, literary writers have to step it up a notch. Bemoaning the iPhone is hardly effective:
Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the “no Sirens” route.)
Socrates bemoaned a technological advancement (which we now call writing…His student Plato thought writing quite brilliant, which is a good thing considering we wouldn’t know who either Socrates or Plato was if they weren’t written about). The Church was certain the printing press would be the ruin of biblical interpretation. We know what critics have said about TV.
Technology is part of humanity. What’s more, little techy devices are the products of imagination. And it is imagination that is at the root of the quote above. Authors need their readers to be imaginative. And they are right to expect imagination of their readers. But, though technology is the product of imagination and authors need it, I fear imagination is what is most likely to be lost in our technological times.
I’ve just finished reading Grown Up Digital. In it, the author glosses over the loss of literature and imagination. He focuses on tangible and pragmatic ends to justify the value of Internet culture and social action: students who sift through information and organize protests against corporations. OK. But, let’s not abandon a thoughtful discussion of imagination.
My concern, as I have voiced elsewhere, is that imagination will be devalued to make room for rampant pragmatism. I believe deeply that there should be meaningful ends to things–I’ve also decried the abstract ridiculousness of academic writing, for example–but imagination still merits cultivation and exploration. A world without literature–can you imagine?
There are said to be two literary allusions on a cup of Starbucks coffee.
The first is in the name, Starbuck being Ahab’s first mate in Moby Dick. The second is the image, which is said to depict a Siren from Homer’s Odyssey. It’s the lattet that draws my attention.
When my wife and were at the original Starbucks in Seattle this past summer, I noticed a very different Siren. She was pulling her aquatic ankles up to her ears. (It made her look nearer Calypso than a mermaid.). And yet, as I drink my morning coffee below, I see the difference: Starbucks cleaned up the logo–cropped the earlier salacious version for this new homely model.
To what extent do literature teachers do this with literature? Should I have resisted assigning students to look up unfamiliar Chaucerian words? It included Zenith, as well as “quim” (a medieval word for vagina).
I wonder if schools, as they have become more aware of public perception, have cleaned up their literary acts. I sure hope not. Otherwise, we might lose the bawdy richness of lit: Shakespeare’s puns, Melville’s homoerotcism, and every other sentence of Joyce.
Teaching literature might need to downsize. While reading an article recently about nanotechnology curriculum, I wondered what nanoliterary criticism would look like.
What if students are asked to respond to some traditional literary prompt–How does Clarissa Dalloway’s language betray her feelings for Septimus?–and add this twist to it: Please respond to the prompt with your cell phones using 140 characters or less. Why ask students to spend 5 – 10 pages answering a question when in one thoughtfully composed paragraph will give a teacher enough to work with. Not to mention it could be assessed more quickly.
If paper-based culture values breadth, this digital age values terseness. Imagine working for a week crafting a single SMS response. It might well be nothing less than poetic.
I went to a dinner last night with colleagues from graduate school. One friend was excited to tell us what she just bought. “A Kindle!” she exclaimed. “It’s in the mail as we speak.” A table of English Educators has much to say about the Amazon’s Kindle. The second model especially. From its marriage of tech and literature to its new ability to read aloud to the user. We mused about what technological devices like the Kindle do to the reading experience.
(The Kindle’s name, of course, is witty: while it itself is paperless it borrows its name from fuel for fire, something paper does quite well.)
As is want to happen in engaging conversations, I heard myself suggest something, that I hadn’t ever considered before: What if the sheer physiciality of reading literature factors into why some students resist reading? The very things we at the table were holding up as the greatness of reading literature–the weight of the book, its thickness, the smells, the turning of the page, the writing of notes, the placing of finished and unfinished books on the bookshelf–might be precisely what prevents some students from reading literature.
We English teachers come from a very specific perspective. We think reading is good, vital, and pleasurable. We have come to enjoy the physiciality of reading; we love reading books. Students often don’t.
Reading literature doesn’t have to be for our students what it was for us. (In fact, all accounts it isn’t already and surely won’t be in the future!) Imagine a classroom in which every student had a Kindle and could download any book they wanted in seconds. Imagine English departments that didn’t spend thousands of dollars on books, but invested in a limitless subscription to Kindle so that students could download newspapers as well as literature. What would students say are the differences between reading on a Kindle versus books?
I would love nothing more than to study this question. (Amazon, if you are reading, I have emailed your PR department with a proposal!) I imagine it would offer at least new insights into our students’ relationship with literature, and might even change the way we ourselves teach literature in our own classrooms.
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).
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.
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.
The end of English teachers is near, I’m afraid. While it has been a couple centuries, the time has come to acknowledge the need to move on. English teachers haven’t been defeated, perse . They have been subsumed by media well beyond the purview of the English language, literature, reading, and writing. Our task now is to transition out of teaching English as traditionally understood and begin to think and teach in terms of these new media. The transition comes with challenges.
Traditional teaching of English is inextricably linked to devilish content certainty. Just consider this exchange from a highly regarded (and used) 19th century textbook, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres:
Q. On what is Metaphor founded?
A. On the resemblance which one object bears to another. It is a comparison in an abridged form. “A Minister upholds the state, like a pillar;” is a comparison. “A Minister is the Pillar of the state;” is a metaphor.
Q. Does this figure come near to Painting?
A. Yes. Its peculiar effects is to make intellectual ideas visible to the eye, by giving them colour, substance, and sensible qualities.
Q. What is the first rule to be observed in the conduct of Metaphors?
A. They should be suited to the nature of the subject of which we treat; neither too many, nor too gay, nor too elevated for it. *
The Reverend John Marsh, who adapted the book in 1822 from a longer edition, has several other similar rules for how one should use metaphor. He notes in a footnote, quite seriously it seems, that this first rule, “*… should be particularly attended to by young writers, who are apt to be carried away by an admiration of what is showy and florid, whether in its place or not. A great secret in composition is to know when to be simple.” O, how we long for the days of such content clarity and unabashed authoritative teaching!
Those days are long, long gone. The days ahead are much closer to what Marsh’s contemporary Herman Melville tried to accomplish in Moby Dick: a genre-bending tale with irresponsible and spotty narration that seeks to flip tradition on its ear. In these new times, content is both everything and nothing; the notion of disciplines in academia crumbles as governments build emergency scaffolding around it in the form of quantitative tests. Disciplines–and, for our purposes, English–would be best to follow the path of the Pequod: after some lofty meandering, have the decency to sink.
There is no more content, not as we have known it. Whereas in the past, Rev. Marsh might have rattled off the content of English with certainty, I imagine our current experiences with online literacies, video/audio production, remixes, emails, and other digital tools would have left him wordless. Here’s the twist: English has always been a technology and media studies course; only, it focused on one medium–the written word.
Above, I said that English is subsumed by tech and media studies, but in actuality, it always has been just a single specialized branch of such studies. It was the technological innovation of the stylus, according to Walter Ong, that changed the way peoples communicated. For Ong, writing is a technology. The next major innovation might be the printing press, which standardized printed word and enabled individuals to mass produce it quickly. These two technological tools privileged written media. Of course media studies was synonymous with English class. Literature and other written and performed derivations were all we had. However, in the 20th century, as film, television, and the internet began challenging and co-opting written media, English teachers began to splinter. Today, it is still writing and reading the dominates our work.
Let’s let English go. Let’s let other media have their time as well. We must share curricula between literature, film, music, and online texts. Perhaps, in later studies, curricula can make room for specialized courses like 19th Century American Literature, or Youtube Film Studies. Let’s be suspicious of other disciplines that seem steady and stately. Let’s re-read our own narrative with Ishmael, rather than Starbuck, in mind.
My sister-in-law went to an info session at her son’s school recently to learn about online safety. By the end of the session, she was ready to destroy the home computer to save her two adolescents from the many dangers of cyberspace. The school should know better than to rattle off a litany of Things-To-Be-Afraid-Of. Let’s consider an analogy.
Imagine that a school calls an emergency meeting to warn parents of a new worry. Apparently, students are being exposed to media that models brutal attacks on others, comical raping of women, and adolescent suicide. As parents and teachers rally to expel such material from school, they are informed by a sheepish English teacher that the media in question are the Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, and Romeo & Juliet. In this imagined school, the school raises honest concerns and truthful points, but it does so with neglect of its role as a place of learning. A school must respond to the darkness of literature with pedagogy. A school must be expose, interpret, and critique phenomena. It must do the same for the new literacies students engage with online. To raise awareness without a curricular plan is negligent, or at least rash and alarmist.
Why are schools running away from these new literacies? To be fair, we have always run from them. Recall the disdain with which Socrates speaks of writing in the Republic. Writing– the newest technology at time–rang for him the death of the mind. Fortunately for western history, his student Plato didn’t share his technophobia. But, there are still others–not just Socrates and schools–who fear the power of technology. Consider Cairo.
Recently, the Egyptian government found itself in an unimaginable situation. In response to the government’s efforts to stunt public protests, an underground group of thousands of technophilic young people orchestrated a series of dissident activities. When the ringleader was caught and interrogated–or tortured, by some accounts–his interrogators demanded, of all things, his Facebook password.
The political resistance was created, discussed, planned, and fueled by a Facebook group. This raises important questions about the role of schools here. Do schools–and perhaps English teachers most of all–have a responsibility to teach into responsible and critical use of new literacies? Is the paranoia of some adults merited? Especially when we see how new literacies like Facebook can lead to subversive political action? Whether you agree or not with the policies of the Egyptian government, at the end of the day Facebook helped a group of users break the law.
Somewhere between paranoia and protest are answers to these questions. Democratic candidate Barack Obama might be on to something. His campaign has walked the line by providing open source wiki-like capabilities for his supporters and still maintaining a top-down strategic structure. All with programs that our students would be very comfortable on: social-networking, blogs, micro-blogs, and the list goes on. Schools must teach in to these new literacies because, as I’ve written before, school is not about school. It’s about non-school, that is, what happens when students are out there in the world. It’s not just about the worries of paranoid adults or the harnessed verve of youthful protesters. It’s about pedagogy.
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.
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.
Google posted today about a series of grants they’ve provided to professorial teams committed to digitizing literary scholarship–with an emphasis, it seems, on the classics. The post begins:
A piece in The New Republic by Jed Perl
Teaching literature might need to downsize. While reading 
I went to a dinner last night with colleagues from graduate school. One friend was excited to tell us what she just bought. “A Kindle!” she exclaimed. “It’s in the mail as we speak.” A table of English Educators has much to say about the
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.
