|
ENGL567A: Short Paper #3: Active Readers, Active Writers
by Edmond Chang
Written for |
Susan Miller in “Technologies of Self?-Formation” posits a binary between passive, reflecting, aware readers and active, acting, and making writers. She says, “By teaching texts rather than their making, by teaching awareness rather than rhetoric, and by teaching the power of meanings rather the making of statements, we inadvertently reproduce a politics that is aware but passive” (499). That was of course eight years ago. Forgiving (if we can) Miller’s rhetorical, oppositional strategy and heavy-handedness, the concern that university students lack the skill, experience, and literacy for both active and productive reading and writing is still on the table. How much has reading and writing changed since the time and place of Miller’s argument? And is English 131’s goal of “reading for the sake of writing” an adequate response and useful tactic to avoid what she deems “political stasis?” A gut response, initial and raw, says that times have changed, students are more culturally savvy (though not necessarily in a critical way), and composition classrooms have come a long way. English 131 here at UW and my English 101 program at the University of Maryland are both argument-based, rhetoric-based. Reading becomes a pry bar, a lens, a scaffold for students to identify, organize, and analyze rhetorical strategies, style, and language in order to enact such things in their own writing and production of knowledge. It is this transformation, this transference that is central to what Gail Stygall in Reading Contexts calls “active reading” or what Kathleen McCormick in “Closer Than Close Reading” calls “symptomatic reading,” which in part is to “read texts not only for what they are literally saying, but for symptoms of larger cultural tensions; to read the text for ‘what it does not say’ and ‘what it does not want to say’” (41). Active reading begets active writing; both activities are reciprocal, though at times contentious, and mutually constitutive. In order to teach “active reading,” my instance of 131 marks out and models what David Bartholomae envisions as “making connections” and adopting “different points of view, including those of scholars” (17), in a sequence of ascending, focusing activities. Students are assigned a reading, which many (both students and composition theorists) would consider a challenging literacy task; in this case, it is Lister & Wells’s “Seeing Beyond Belief,” a cultural and visual studies primer. The assignment asks nothing more specific than for students to read, and by assumption, they should attempt to “learn” something from the text. Then the students come to class, essay read, and the session is devoted to identifying key terms definitions, sharing their reactions, responses, and parsing out claims and arguments. The session is also devoted to what rhetorical reading is, how to actively read, and how to mark up a text as you read. Next, the students are asked to re-visit the text and a formal “close reading” short paper is assigned (see artifact 1). The short paper offers a comprehensive rubric for close reading and asks the students to distill three main arguments from the reading and to support these arguments with a selected quote. The short paper frames their close reading with the idea that they, as readers, are making a claim, now as writers, about what are the most important key arguments they encountered and understood. The following class, when the assignment is due, gives students an opportunity to share their findings. A further follow-up to the short paper comes in the form of a “blogging point” where students can post their ideas and questions via the class website and message board. Finally, my assignment sequence attempts to transform close reading even further by inviting students to close read a video text (see artifact 2). The claims that Lister & Wells make about photographic images are translated to video images. The “Claim for Video” assignment pushes their reading and analytical skills even higher by asking students to take a meta-analytical stance and claim whether Lister & Wells’s methodology is useful for critiquing video texts. The pedagogical move is consistently from general to specific, from awareness to analysis, from reading to writing. However, students find the move difficult, alien(ating), even threatening. Most of my students have only been taught how to observe, to summarize, to notice, and to express how they feel about their reading. They expect that when they read they must achieve some sort of holistic comprehension; after all, that is what tests like the SAT teaches. However, to insist that reading need only be in the service of writing, to be a means to support rhetorical claims seems counterintuitive (and perhaps even a little disingenuous to the scholarly spirit or mystique). Eventually, my students understand that active reading is suasive, but the leap from active reading to active writing is outside their zone of proximal development. They stall. They revert to old, summarizing habits. Or worse, they give up. Composition theory, from Lee Ann Carroll to Sommers and Saltz to Frank Smith, talk about writing and reading in terms of a continuum of novice to expert, of struggling to competent. Accepting this progression, my reading exercises recognize the need to step through skills. However, I recognize now that the first sequence of assignments is nearly done and my student are still wrestling with their (in)abilities that I need to begin with a more explicit way to illuminate a text. For all of the theorists, reading and writing are ultimately based on letters-as-words-as-sentences-as-text. However, reading and writing need not be limited to one set of signifiers, one set of codes. Students should not only be given the opportunity to make arguments but to make in all senses of the word, be it acting out a theory, drawing their paper idea, or creating a website or publication. Specifically, for the teaching of reading in the service of writing, I hope to first introduce students to the claims and maneuvers of a text in a non-traditional, non-pen-and-paper way. Then, assign a more traditional close reading exercise that allows them to make connections to what they already know and what they have already done. Every section I teach, I always tell my students that reading and writing are inextricably linked. I say to them that they must find pleasure in whatever they are reading and writing, which echoes Smith and Bartholomae. But they must also find meaning, stake, and exigence in what they are reading and writing. “There are few guarantees in life,” I tell them in class, “but I will guarantee you that if you are a good reader then you’ll be a better writer, if you are a good writer then you’ll be a better reader.” Of course, the goal is to extrapolate and explore “good” and “better.” But the sentiment and the philosophy is sound for me. Frank Smith says, “Reading is thinking.” I agree. But reading and writing and thinking are not as discrete, as quantifiable, as prescriptive as many of the compositionists want to make it out to be. In a deep way, I suppose, the end goal is to articulate and agitate students to understand that reading and thinking and writing are not sedentary activities (even though their bodies may be still), but in fact they are doing, making, pushing, pulling, attacking, resisting, changing, and imagining. It is quite the opposite of stasis.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Introduction." In Ways of Reading, 5th Edition. Eds.
David Bartholomae and Andrew Petrosky. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
1-14.
Carroll, Lee Ann. "A Preview of Writing Development." Rehearsing New Roles: How
College Students Develop as Writers. Carbondale: SIU Press, 2002. 1-28.
Miller, Susan. "Technologies of Self-Formation." Journal of Advanced Composition
17.3 (1997): 497-500.
Smith, Frank. "Reading, Writing, and Thinking." In Understanding Reading, 5th Edition.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994. 167-182.
Sommers, Nancy and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year."
College Composition and Communication 56.1 (September 2004): 124-149.
Stygall, Gail. Reading Contexts. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.
© 2005 EYC.
|