30,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Powerful strategies, tools, and techniques for educators teaching students critical reading skills in the humanities.
Every educator understands the importance of teaching students how to read critically. Even the best teachers, however, find it challenging to translate their own learned critical reading practices into explicit strategies for their students. Critical Reading Across the Curriculum: Humanities, Volume 1 presents exceptional insight into what educators require to facilitate critical and creative thinking skills.
Written by scholar-educators from across the humanities, each of the thirteen essays in this volume describes strategies educators have successfully executed to develop critical reading skills in students studying the humanities. These include ways to help students:
- focus
- actively re-read and reflect, to re-think, and re-consider
- understand the close relationship between reading and writing
- become cognizant of the critical importance of context in critical reading and of making contextual connections
- learn to ask the right questions in critical reading and reasoning
- appreciate reading as dialogue, debate, and engaged conversation
In addition, teachers will find an abundance of innovative exercises and activities encouraging students to practice their critical reading skills. These can easily be adapted for and applied across many disciplines and course curricula in the humanities.
The lifelong benefits of strong critical reading skills are undeniable. Students with properly developed critical reading skills are confident learners with an enriched understanding of the world around them. They advance academically and are prepared for college success. This book arms educators (librarians, high school teachers, university lecturers, and beyond) with the tools to teach a most paramount lesson.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 486
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
Critical Reading Across the Curriculum
Volume 1: Humanities
Edited by Robert DiYanni and Anton Borst
This edition first published 2017
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Robert DiYanni and Anton Borst to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficesJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Editorial Office350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty
While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this book.
ISBN 9781119154860 (hardback)
ISBN 9781119154877 (paperback)
Cover image: dzima1/Gettyimages
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Frameworks and Approaches
1: Reading Responsively, Reading Responsibly: An Approach to Critical Reading
Being Critical
Responsible Reading, Responsive Reading
A Framework for Critical Reading
Demonstration – E. B. White on the Moonwalk
Application – Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Reflective Reading – Reading and Living
References
2: Reciprocal Acts: Reading and Writing
A Story of Necessity
Acts of Conception
Working from Images
Remembering Spontaneity
Getting More Systematic
Merging What and How
Writing as Representation, Writing as Composition
References
3: A Shared Horizon: Critical Reading and Digital Natives
Critically Reading the Digital Native
Responding to the Digital Native
A Shared Horizon
Devices, Screens, and Digital Native Reading Practices
Conclusion
References
Part II: Critical Reading in the Disciplines
4: Critical Reading and Thinking: Rhetoric and Reality
Rhetorical Challenges
Ways of Reading
Logos, Ethos, Pathos
Demonstration: Annotating a Speech
Everything's an Argument: No It's Not! Yes It Is!
A Suite of Exercises
Conclusion
Notes
References
5: The Community of Literature: Teaching Critical Reading and Creative Reflection
Ways of Reading
Textual Conversations – Critical Dialogue
Re-reading and Creative Reflection
Demonstration – Hardy's “In a Museum”
Broadening Context
Application –
Middlemarch
, Chapter XXIX
Contemporary Contexts
Notes
References
6: Approaching Intellectual Emancipation: Critical Reading in Art, Art History, and Wikipedia
Reconsidering Wikipedia
Reading Art: The Visual Analysis
Reading Art History: The Annotated Bibliography
Reading Wikipedia: The Comparative Analysis
Chain Reactions
Notes
References
7: Teaching Critical Reading of Historical Texts
Basic Matters
Challenges for Teachers
Three Kinds of Reading
Selecting Historical Documents for Analysis
Marking and Preparing Historical Documents
Reading Abraham Lincoln's House Resolutions December 22, 1847
Reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Speech Opposing the Vietnam War
Conclusion
Some Useful Sources for Critical Reading in History
References
8: Philosophy and the Practice of Questioning
Questioning Toward Truth
How Do We Come to Know Anything at All?
Toward Practical Wisdom
So What? The Effects of Reading Philosophy Critically
Notes
References
9: Engaging Religious Texts
“Pay Attention!”
Reading as an Embodied and Dialogic Act
Insights from the Religions
The Three Worlds of Religious Texts
Practices for Engaging Religious and Theological Texts
Conclusion
References
10: Gender Studies as a Model for Critical Reading
Gender Studies and Critical Reading
Deconstructing Gender
Documentary Project
Staging the Documentary Project
Aesthetic Distance and Ironic Images of Gender
Melanie Pullen's
High Fashion Crime Scenes
and Cindy Sherman's
Centerfolds, 1981
References
11: Reading and Teaching Films
Personal Response
Analyzing Story
Basic Film Terms
Formal Analysis
Genre Analysis
Cultural Analysis
Historical Analysis
Representation in Film
Film Theory
Exercises
References
12: Thinking Through Drama
Drama and Argument
The Classical Studio
The Structure of Verse
Following the Verse
Exercises
Conclusion
References
13: Approaches to Reading and Teaching Pop Songs
Popular Music and Its Contexts
Reading a Pop Song
Writing about Music
Critical Reading: Theodor Adorno's Criticism of Pop Music
Socially Conscious Music
Additional Writing Assignments
Conclusion
References
Index
EULA
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Table 2.2
Table 2.3
Table 2.4
Chapter 4
Table 4.1
Chapter 11
Table 11.1
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 René Magritte,
The Human Condition
. © 2016 C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Figure 2.2 René Magritte,
Evening Falls
. © 2016 C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Figure 2.3 Visualizing hidden structures: Beginning, Middle, Ending paragraph groupings.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle.
Figure 4.2 Florence Kelly's speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, annotated.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Art + Feminism logo. Copyright © Ilotaha13, 2015.
Figure 6.2 Lawrence Weiner,
Learn to Read Art
, 2012. Limited edition tote bag. © Printed Matter Inc. and Lawrence Weiner. Photo: Author.
Figure 6.3
Professor Hamlin's #shelfie
, 2014. Digital photograph.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Screengrabs from
The Magnificent Seven
,
Seven Samurai
, and
The Way of the Dragon
.
The Magnificent Seven
: dir. John Sturges, prod. Walter Mirisch, Lou Morheim, and John Sturges (released 1960; production by The Mirisch Company, (as The Mirisch Company), Alpha Productions (as A Mirisch-Alpha Production), and Alpha (as A Mirisch-Alpha Production)).
Seven Samurai
(
Shichinin no samurai
): dir. Akira Kurosawa, prod. Sojiro Motoki (1954; released in the USA 1956; production by Toho Company).
The Way of the Dragon
(
Meng long guo jiang
), dir. Bruce Lee, prod. Raymond Chow and Bruce Lee (released in the USA 1972; production by Concord Productions and Golden Harvest Company).
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Pages
ix
x
xi
xiii
xiv
xv
xvii
1
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
36
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
63
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
Notes on Contributors
Adrian Barlow is a senior member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and president of the English Association. Formerly director of public programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, he has taught, lectured, and written widely on teaching literature and the relationship between pedagogy and assessment. He has edited the Cambridge Contexts in Literature series, and his publications include World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context and Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning.
Anton Borst is an instructional consultant at New York University's Center for the Advancement of Teaching. As a specialist in writing across the curriculum and digital pedagogy, he previously worked in faculty development at Hunter College and Macaulay Honors College. He received a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature and writing at Hunter College, Baruch College, and Pace University.
Pamela Burger earned a PhD in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and she received an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She has taught literature and writing at Hunter College, Queens College, and Wesleyan University.
William V. Costanzo is a State University of New York distinguished teaching professor of English and film. He has taught courses in writing, literature, and film studies at Westchester Community College since 1970. Dr. Costanzo is active in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and has published six books on writing and film, including Double Exposure: Composing Through Writing and Film, Great Films and How to Teach Them, and, most recently, World Cinema Through Global Genres (Wiley-Blackwell).
Robert DiYanni is a professor of humanities at New York University and an instructional consultant in the NYU Center for the Advancement of Teaching. He has written extensively on the teaching of literature and writing, interdisciplinary humanities, and critical and creative thinking. Among his books are Connections, Literature, Modern American Poets, Arts and Culture, The Pearson Guide to Critical and Creative Thinking, and, most recently, Critical and Creative Thinking: A Brief Guide for Teachers (Wiley-Blackwell).
Amy K. Hamlin holds a PhD in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. She has presented and published on the art of Paul Cézanne, Max Beckmann, William H. Johnson, Jasper Johns, and Kara Walker. An Associate Professor of Art History at St. Catherine University, she teaches across the art history curriculum and practices experimental pedagogies and socially engaged art history.
Michael Hogan is the author of twenty-two books, including a best-selling history, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico. His essays and articles have appeared in many anthologies and textbooks. For two decades he was head of the Humanities Department at the American School of Guadalajara and Professor of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. A member of the Organization of American Historians, he was awarded the gold medal of the Mexican Geographical Society.
Pat C. Hoy II has taught at the US Military Academy, Harvard, New York University, and Hendrix College. Author of numerous textbooks on composition, his essays and reviews have appeared in a spectrum of prestigious journals. Awards include the 2003 Cecil Woods, Jr. Prize for Nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Spears Prize for best essay in Sewanee Review (2014), and two Golden Dozen Awards for distinguished teaching at NYU.
Thomas M. Kitts, PhD, is professor of English at St. John's University, NY. He is the author of John Fogerty: An American Son, Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, The Theatrical Life of George Henry Baker, and many articles and reviews. With Gary Burns of Northern Illinois University, he edits Popular Music and Society and Rock Music Studies. He is the area chair of music for the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.
Thomas Petriano is professor and chair of religious studies at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue, NY. He received his doctorate in systematic theology from Fordham University in 1997. He teaches courses on belief and unbelief in the modern world, religions of Abraham, world religions, and liberation theology. He also participates in a global service-learning program that involves working with an indigenous community in Nicaragua.
Lawrence Scanlon is co-author of four books on teaching, literature, and rhetoric: Teaching Nonfiction in *AP English, The Language of Composition, Literature and Composition, and Conversations in American Literature. A high school teacher for more than thirty years, he was awarded the Dean's Award for Excellence in Education from the State University of New York. He teaches at Iona College and conducts workshops and institutes for teachers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America.
Louis Scheeder is founder and director of The Classical Studio and associate dean of faculty at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. He has served as producer of the Folger Theatre Group, worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company and was associated with the Manitoba Theatre Centre. Co-author of All The Words on Stage, he has conducted acting workshops worldwide, and is a member of The Factory UK, an experimental theatre company dedicated to exploring spontaneity and argument in their myriad theatrical forms.
Matt Statler is clinical associate professor of management and organizations and director of business ethics and social impact programming at the NYU Stern School of Business. He has published on ethics, leadership, and strategy, and is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Disaster Relief, the Encyclopedia of Crisis Management, and Learning from the Global Financial Crisis. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Heidelberg.
Preface
Critical reading is a term frequently invoked throughout academia; much less often is it explained. What are the steps and procedures that constitute this complex process? How can those steps and procedures be articulated to help teachers in the upper secondary and introductory college classroom explain them to, and practice them with, their students? Critical reading skills are not something we can assume our students – at any level – possess, and however effective we may be as critical readers ourselves, teaching the skills of critical reading is another matter entirely. Veteran teachers may rely on their experience and expertise in showing students how to read critically in their fields, but even the best teachers sometimes face challenges in translating their internalized practices into explicit strategies for their students.
To address this problem, we invited scholar-teachers from across the humanities to describe what they do as critical readers themselves. We asked them to demonstrate and apply the strategies and frameworks they typically use, and to explain what they do to help their students develop critical reading skills. Critical Reading Across the Curriculum is the result of their responses to that invitation.
The book's thirteen essays weave together various thematic threads, perhaps the most important of which is the connection between critical reading and writing. A number of contributors suggest that to teach critical reading effectively students need to write regularly in response to their reading. This writing can take the form of short reflections, annotations and marginalia, and analyses and arguments that range in length from a few sentences to full-term research papers.
In the title of his essay, “Reciprocal Acts: Reading and Writing,” Pat Hoy identifies the close and necessary relationship between reading and writing, deftly mingling them himself while laying out in careful detail how to teach these intertwined processes. Like Pat Hoy, other contributors offer assignments linking reading and writing, such as Thomas Kitts, Anton Borst, and Amy Hamlin, whose essays concern reading pop songs, digital reading practices, and creating and editing art history content on Wikipedia, respectively.
A second common theme is connecting critical reading skills with the world outside the classroom. In his essay on reading religious texts, Thomas Petriano emphasizes the transformative value of critical reading, whatever his students’ status as religious believers. Lawrence Scanlon shows how rhetoric lies at the heart of his students’ everyday interactions in school, at home, and online. And in her essay on using gender studies as a model for critical reading, Pamela Burger challenges students to read gender construction through increasingly complex texts, including the photographs of contemporary feminist artists Melanie Pullen and Cindy Sherman.
A third shared theme among our contributors is the importance of context in critical reading, especially of making contextual connections. Robert DiYanni raises issues of context in his consideration of E. B. White's New Yorker piece about the 1969 moon landing, and additionally in a set of exercises on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In his essay on teaching history, Michael Hogan argues for the centrality of understanding historical documents in terms of the social and political conditions that produced them. Adrian Barlow demonstrates the importance of invoking multiple contexts – literary, historical, social, cultural, and political – for analyzing and interpreting literature. And Anton Borst reflects on how to help students navigate – and critically engage – the digital context through which much of their reading is now mediated.
Pervading the book's essays is an emphasis on strategies for helping students attend and focus, techniques essential for getting students to re-read and reflect, to re-think and re-consider. Focusing their attention in these ways enables students to analyze and interpret texts – it allows them to begin thinking critically about what they read. Our authors explain how to make valid inferences from texts based on careful noticing of words and phrases, of details and images, of claims and supporting evidence. They provide guidance in comparing and contrasting texts in order to produce effective critical analysis.
In attending to each of these aspects of critical reading, contributors consistently emphasize the importance of questions in critical reading and critical reasoning. In his piece on reading film, William Costanzo links analytical questions to various theoretical approaches to film, including formal, cultural, and genre analysis. In his approach to the critical reading of philosophical texts, Matt Statler demonstrates Socratic questioning through a critical reading of Plato's Meno. Adrian Barlow develops a series of increasingly complex interpretive questions based on close reading, contextual reading, and comparative analysis of related texts. And in his essay on digital reading, Anton Borst questions the idea of the digital native in order to critically engage technology's impact on student reading practices.
Reading as dialogue, debate, and engaged conversation permeates the work gathered here. In his essay on theater, Louis Scheeder argues for the importance of argument in drama, highlighting the ways dialogue and debate dramatize a play's conflicts and concepts, and how William Shakespeare's iambic pentameter verse line provides essential keys to understanding the “thinking” of his characters. Adrian Barlow demonstrates how critical conversations between texts can produce effective readings of literature, a method also applied to the reading of images in the essays of Pat Hoy, Amy Hamlin, Pamela Burger, and William Costanzo. Thomas Petriano describes the reading of religious texts as a fundamentally dialogic act. And Robert DiYanni explains how critical reading requires both listening to and talking back to texts, engaging with them through reflection and dialogue.
Related to our contributors’ emphasis on critical reading as conversation with texts and authors is a repeated emphasis on collaboration. Michael Hogan's essay on teaching history and Pat Hoy's on the reciprocity of reading and writing illustrate powerfully the ways students can work together to develop a critical understanding of texts. Other contributors also indicate ways for students to collaborate productively. Lawrence Scanlon's exercises – requiring students to do rhetorical analysis of paired texts of verse, prose, and speech – lend themselves well to collaborative engagement, as do the detailed exercises in William Costanzo's essay on the critical reading of films, Pamela Burger's essay on reading gender, and Amy Hamlin's piece on reading art history.
An overarching concern expressed throughout these essays is with the meaning of the term “critical reading.” Our contributors uncover layers of implication in the term and demonstrate stunning variations in its application. All of them, however, understand the necessity for regular and sustained practice in developing critical reading skills. And so the essays in this book offer an abundance of inventive exercises and imaginative activities through which students may practice the various skills, techniques, and strategies of critical reading. These exercises, moreover, can be adapted and applied to a wide range of disciplines across the curriculum.
Teachers ourselves, our pedagogy has been greatly enriched through exploring the pedagogical perspectives of colleagues in humanities disciplines other than our own. The essays of the dedicated practitioners collected here reveal a careful attention to the craft of teaching critical reading. We hope you too may benefit from their experience, their insights, and their pedagogical expertise.
Robert DiYanniAnton Borst
Acknowledgments
We want to thank our contributors for their willingness to share their experience and passion for teaching, and for all the hard work they devoted to the fine essays collected here. We are grateful to our sponsoring editor Jayne Fargnoli, who gave us generous encouragement and supported the project from the start. We also thank Liz Wingett, who managed the production of the book with grace and professionalism.
Others at Wiley who had a hand in bringing this book to press were Mary Hall, Katie DiFolco, Madeline Koufogazos, Haze Humbert, and Katherine Wong. We would also like to thank the freelancers who contributed their expertise – project manager and copy-editor Janet Moth, and indexer Sue Dugen.
Part IFrameworks and Approaches
1Reading Responsively, Reading ResponsiblyAn Approach to Critical Reading
Robert DiYanni
Critical reading, like critical thinking, is a term much bandied about by educators from elementary education through university study. Like critical thinking, critical reading means different things to different people. What critical reading is and why it matters are genuine educational concerns because reading is a foundational skill for successful learning at every level of schooling; to succeed academically students need to become active, engaged, critical readers. The ability to read critically – to analyze a text, understand its logic, evaluate its evidence, interpret it creatively, and ask searching questions of it – is essential for higher-order thinking. Skill in critical reading builds students’ confidence, enriches their understanding of the world, and enables their successful educational progress. Critical reading informs academic writing, particularly analysis and argument, inquiry and exploration – modes of writing required across academic disciplines.
In this essay I explain what critical reading involves, demonstrate applied critical reading in practice, and provide an approach to teaching students how to become critical readers. Framing this work, contextualizing and amplifying it, are discussions of responsible, responsive, and reflective reading.
We begin, though, by considering what critical reading is and is not, identifying some common student misconceptions.
Being Critical
Students sometimes think their goal in reading is to agree or disagree with a text – to argue and take a stand vis-à-vis its author's idea or claim. Their understanding of “critical” is limited to “critique” and “criticism,” to judging a text, to showing what's wrong with it, identifying its limitations and biases. That more complex work, important as it is, however, comes later, after the initial effort to comprehend what a text says. The first goal of critical reading is to understand. Students achieve understanding through learning to analyze texts carefully and thoroughly. They demonstrate understanding of texts by summarizing and paraphrasing them accurately in writing. These representations of texts need to be done respectfully and responsibly before students engage in any kind of critical challenge to them.
Critical reading focuses not only on what a text says but also on how it says what it does. In teaching our students to read critically, we first teach them to analyze a text's language and selection of detail, its genre, imagery, and form. We teach them to see how sentences and paragraphs are connected grammatically and conceptually, how writers create meaning through their selection of diction and detail, through their choices with respect to organization and development of idea. This fundamental work, however, though necessary, is not sufficient. We must teach our students something more as well.
The larger goals of critical reading include recognizing a writer's purpose, understanding his or her idea, identifying tone, evaluating evidence and reasoning, and recognizing a writer's perspective, position, and bias. Our teaching strategies should focus on helping students see what a writer says through how it is said. And those strategies should also include how well a writer's evidence supports his or her claims. These considerations are fundamental for reading critically in all disciplines.
To do this analytical work well, however, students need to overcome initial resistance to a text, the impulse to contradict, counter, or otherwise challenge it. To develop into effective and productive critical readers, students need at first to remain open to what a text offers. The performance artist/actor Matthew Goulish provides one approach to this kind of textual receptiveness. In his essay “Criticism” from 39 Microlectures (2000), Goulish suggests that when we encounter any work of art, including imaginative works of all kinds (and by extension any verbal text), we should look for “moments of exhilaration.” These special moments of textual encounter may be provoked by something exciting, engaging, or striking in a text, something that stirs our feelings, spurs our thinking, sparks our imagination. Here is how Goulish puts it:
We may then look to each work of art not for its faults and shortcomings, but for its moments of exhilaration, in an effort to bring our own imperfections into sympathetic vibration with these moments, and thus effect a creative change in ourselves. These moments will, of course, be somewhat subjective, so that if we don't find one immediately, we will out of respect look again … In this way we will treat the work of art, in the words of South African composer Kevin Volans, not as an object in this world but as a window into another world. If we can articulate one window's particular exhilaration, we may open a way to inspire a change in ourselves, so that we may value and work from these recognitions. (p. 45)
This way of engaging with a text requires avoiding the tendency to find something wrong with it, something to criticize. Instead, we seek something that's right with the work, something exhilarating, anything at all that might prove useful – a vivid detail we admire, a discernible pattern that aids our understanding, an assertion that provokes our thinking, a question we begin answering for ourselves. Through these “moments of exhilaration” we establish a personal relationship with the text in ways that can lead to “a creative change in ourselves.” The kinds of “recognitions” that arise from openness to a text or work are recognitions as much about ourselves as they are about what we read.
The concept of “moments of exhilaration” can stimulate students’ engagement with a text, animating their thinking about it, opening for them metaphorical “windows into other worlds.” Students’ moments of exhilaration can provide ways into a text for them, a start toward finding something of value in it, something to extend their thinking, deepen their feeling, enrich their experience. By inviting students to identify, explain, and explore their exhilarating moments reading texts, we highlight their responsibility and validate their textual engagements.
We can and should demonstrate for our students the experience Goulish describes by sharing with them our own exhilarating moments of reading. What excites us about a text we have assigned? What have we ourselves found exhilarating about it? Why did we choose to read it in the first place? What possibilities for creative change might it offer our students when they read it in the open and attentive way Goulish suggests?
Responsible Reading, Responsive Reading
Goulish's advocacy of receptiveness to a work's promising possibilities constitutes one aspect of what we might call “responsible reading,” an attitude toward texts and works that goes beyond responding to them subjectively, one that moves, instead, toward being accountable to them, toward a standpoint that Robert Scholes, in Protocols of Reading (1990), describes as “an ethic of reading” (p. 90). Part of this reading ethic involves the responsibility to give a text and its author their due. Our students need to hear out authors and texts, letting them have their say, whether they agree with an author's views or not, whether a text's ideas are accessible or difficult, regardless of who wrote a text, when it was written, or why. We need, in short, to encourage students to respect the integrity of texts, to read them responsibly. Henry David Thoreau, perhaps, has said it best: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (Walden, 1854/1983, p. 403).
This is a foundational principle of critical reading.
In reading responsibly we assume that a text possesses meaning. We give it, from this perspective, the benefit of the doubt. Our goal as ethical readers is to understand what a text means and to accurately represent that meaning in verbal or written form. In reading responsibly we try faithfully to follow an author's line of reasoning and to understand his or her perspective even when – especially when – the author's ideas, concepts, values, and perspectives differ from our own.
Once students have learned to read responsibly by attending carefully to texts, they can begin to assume authority over their reading, exercising power by talking back to the texts they read. They can balance giving texts a fair hearing with offering a judgment and critique earned through thoughtful, reflective analytical reading. In first listening and then responding to texts, students make them their own.
To produce something both respectful of the text and responsive to it that is distinctively the reader's own, George Steiner advocates writing in response to the texts we read. In “The Uncommon Reader” (1996), he suggests that reading responsibly requires that we be “answerable to the text” (p. 6). Our answerability includes both our response to the text and our responsibility for it; it requires an “answerable reciprocity” (p. 6) such that our critical engagement with a text results in a form of commerce with it, a textual dialogue, which can be best established through annotation and marginalia. Steiner suggests that in writing annotations, readers become servants of the text. Through annotation we attempt to elucidate the text for ourselves, to understand it, comprehend it. Marginalia, on the other hand, allow us to talk back to the text, replying to it rather than simply representing it. When readers annotate they are “servants of the text,” and when they write marginalia, they are the text's “rivals” (p. 6).
In writing marginalia, we augment the author's text, perhaps disputing aspects of it, perhaps extending its significance through amplification, relating it to other texts we have read and other experiences we have had, finding new applications of the text as we consider its implications. The process is dynamic, collaborative, re-creative, and results in an inter-textual web of meanings – those provided by the authors we read and those we make ourselves in the process of reading them critically.
In having students write increasingly extensive marginal comments about a text, we can show them how to begin constructing texts of their own that both respect and rival those they read. We can demonstrate how marking texts in these ways can serve as points of departure for their own thinking. Teaching them to annotate effectively and to write thoughtful marginalia aids their development as critical readers and thinkers. These aspects of critical reading prove essential for our students’ learning, whatever subject we teach. Moreover, through producing annotations and marginalia students become acculturated into the community of critical readers, such that reading critically becomes for them purposeful, meaningful, and habitual.
In helping students to become both responsive and responsible readers who balance openness to a text with resistance to it, we prepare them for the rewards of academic study. In getting them to listen to texts carefully before talking back to them, we encourage their development of empathy and discernment. And in having them write annotations and marginalia as preparation for more fully developed academic essays and papers, we allow them to experience for themselves the productive relationships among critical reading, writing, and thinking. These relationships are “critical” in a number of ways. Reading critically, asking questions of texts, stimulates reflection; writing about texts prompts careful attention to reading them; thinking about texts via annotations and marginalia prompts deeper reading, thoughtful reflection, and purposeful writing.
These critical reading practices are foundational for critical thinking.
A Framework for Critical Reading
One way to help students become responsible critical readers is to teach them to apply the following critical reading framework:
Making observations
about a text.
Establishing connections
among observations.
Making inferences
based on observations and connections.
Drawing conclusions
from the inferences.
Considering values
the text embodies and possibly endorses.
Making Observations
All interpretation begins with observation. We can't say about a text more than we can see in it. This is true whether we are observing a poem or a person, a movie or a monument, an artifact or an architectural structure, a laboratory experiment, a mathematical proof, a musical performance, a museum exhibition, a theatrical production, a social or political event, anything at all to which we may devote our attention. We learn to look at, and we learn to look for specific details, aspects, elements – of novels and of buildings, for example, of films and fashion photographs, of advertisements and popular songs, of all manner of “texts.” In observing a painting, for example, we learn to notice how the artist creates line, uses volume, blends and balances color, creates perspective, employs smooth or thick brushstrokes, arranges the overall composition, to cite a few elements. In reading poems, we observe how the poem is structured, what kinds of sound patterns it uses, how sentences spill over or are contained within lines and stanzas, what its various voices convey in terms of tone and mood and implied meaning. Through learning to notice and attend – to look and listen with care – our students develop discernment; they come to understand how texts mean, not just what they mean.
There can be no discussion, no commentary, no productive interpretation of any work of any art without this bedrock noticing. The seeing and saying are reciprocal and mutually reinforcing. Careful, attentive, respectful noticing is fundamental to successful critical reading and writing. Our approach to critical reading is grounded in observation, with the active give and take between noticing and recording what we notice – writing it down. Regardless of the discipline we teach and our students’ level of preparation, giving them repeated practice in making careful observations, both verbally and in writing, is an essential first step to critical understanding. They can't say more than they can see. Seeing more, they have more to think about, and ultimately more to say and write about what they think.
The scientist Samuel Scudder testifies to the power and importance of observation in recounting his study of fossils as a graduate student of Louis Agassiz, the Harvard professor of paleontology. Agassiz required him to look at plant and animal specimens for long periods of time without telling him what to look for. After staring at a single fossil specimen for a few hours, Scudder thought he was finished, only to be told by Professor Agassiz, “You have not looked very carefully … look again, look again!” (1874, pp. 369–370).
Only after spending days and then weeks examining that single specimen was Scudder allowed to compare it with others that Agassiz brought him. Along the way, Scudder learned how to look with scrupulous attention to detail, and how to prepare himself to see things he didn't expect to see. There are lessons here, for sure, not the least of which is that learning to look requires persistence and perseverance. Patient, deliberate noticing gives students a chance to see more, think about what they see, and thus have something more to say about it.
Establishing Connections
Observing textual details and features, whatever the nature of our “text,” however, is not enough. To read critically, students must also make connections among the details they notice. We should encourage them to look for two kinds of connections: (1) connections among textual details; (2) connections between the writer's text and their own lives and world. (And, of course, for non-verbal texts, connections among their basic elements, whether visual or aural, experiential or conceptual.)
For example, in reading the following couplet, which concludes Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, we would invite students to look for connections between and among the details of its two lines:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
And so, they connect the “I” of the second line with the “thy” of the first. They relate the speaker's self to his beloved, whose “sweet love” he remembers. They relate the past tense of “remembered” to the present of “scorn to change.” They contrast the literal wealth of kings with the metaphorical wealth of the speaker's love. From these related details, which also include rhyme and iambic pentameter, students can begin to think about meaning. We might ask them to explain the relationship between the couplet's two lines as a guide to its meaning, and to consider the couplet's meaning in relation to the meaning of the sonnet overall.
The connections we establish among observations move us toward meaning; those connections provide the basis for preliminary thinking about implications – about what those observed details might suggest or signify. Establishing and understanding relationships between and among details, and then between and among parts of a text, is crucial for critical reading. Considering connections between text and world authenticates the work of critical reading, making it personally meaningful and valuable. And so with Shakespeare's couplet, students might think about how their experience of being unhappy or even depressed can change dramatically with the remembrance of someone they love, with the evocation of the beloved's image, such that nothing can compare with the value and power of that love.
Making Inferences
Establishing connections among textual details prepares us to make inferences about texts. One of the most important things we can do for our students is to help them make reliable inferences. We need to encourage them to make the inferential leap from the details they notice and connect. And we need to remind them that their inferences should be grounded in and supported by the details they observe and the connections they establish – textual evidence in short. When they make inferences, students should reasonably conclude that something is the case based on evidence – on what they have observed, and on connections between and among their observations. They need to learn that their inferences, however, may be correct or incorrect, or partly correct, and that inferences are hypotheses that need to be tested.
All disciplinary study requires making sound inferences. Scientists are expert inference makers. The scientific theories they develop out of the laws they devise are based upon their observations, which they test and confirm or disconfirm. They are inference-based extrapolations into the unknown from the observed data. In The Meaning of It All (1998), Richard Feynman calls them good guesses that have held up as true so far. Those good-guess inferences that determine the theory could be proven inadequate; they might be shown later to be slightly or even completely wrong. But they are the best inferences that can be made at the time – and thus they constitute current scientific knowledge. The guessing and estimating, the extrapolations from observation – the inference-making leading to laws and theories – all are essential for doing science.
Historical investigation follows an analogous process, mostly using primary and secondary source documents, rather than experiments, as evidence upon which to develop conclusions through reasoning inductively about particular instances and arriving at general principles. The particular details of history – historical facts, data, and other forms of information – provide the evidence for the development of inferences and theories of historical explanation.
Both scientific experimentation and historical analysis, however, may begin, and often actually do begin, with a theory or an idea – that is, with a generalization the investigator sets out to test by finding evidence that either supports or falsifies it. In this case, the process of thought moves from a general idea or concept to specific supporting evidence. Thus, thinking, including scientific and historical thinking, typically involves interplay between inductive and deductive reasoning, moving back and forth between them repeatedly in a looping, recursive process.
Our students need to understand this reciprocal process of investigative thinking. They need to know that they themselves do this in their everyday lives, and that this thinking process is formalized and deepened through academic study. We might suggest to them, in fact, that gaining confidence and competence in making inferences is essential for critical reading and critical thinking. Inference-making is a turning point in the critical reading/thinking process, one that pivots from the basic skills of observing and connecting to the deeper skills of concluding and evaluating.
Drawing Conclusions and Considering Values
Thinking about the inferences we make in analyzing a text leads us toward developing a conclusion about it, an interpretation. We should help students understand, first, that an interpretation must be grounded in textual evidence – in the observations and connections they make about it and in the inferences they draw from what they have noticed and related. We also need to help them understand that the interpretive conclusions they make are tentative and provisional. Their interpretations can change. Like the theories scientists develop and the theoretical models historians employ, a textual interpretation is subject to revision. It can change based on the re-reading of a piece, on a reader's having thought more about it, on having discussed it with others, on relating it to other texts and life experiences. Textual interpretations are always subject to modification.
So, too, are evaluations of texts. Students are inclined to evaluate. They like to offer opinions, to judge. We can capitalize on those tendencies by helping them understand what evaluation can mean for critical reading.
Evaluation consists of two different kinds of assessment: (1) a judgment about a work's achievement, including the power and persuasiveness of its ideas; (2) a consideration of the values the work reflects and/or embodies. In the first sense of evaluation, in evaluating an idea, for example, we consider its accuracy as a description, its validity as an argument, its persuasiveness and interest as a proposal, its credibility as an imaginative construction. Evaluation depends on interpretation, on understanding. Our understanding of a work's idea influences our evaluative judgment of it. That's why understanding a text is so important and why we need to work our students hard to determine what a text means, signifies, suggests for them.
In another type of “evaluation,” we assess the social, cultural, political, religious, and other values reflected in a work; in the process, we bring our own values into play. Considering those kinds of values in a work brings students to a better understanding of their own. We need to help students understand that their social values reflect their beliefs and customs, that their cultural values are shaped by their racial, ethnic, and family heritage, and that these values are also affected by gender and language. These aspects of evaluation can help students move beyond thinking of evaluation as making a judgment about a text's quality, whether it is “good” or “interesting” – or not – to think more deeply about how texts endorse or reflect a wide range of cultural and other values.
An additional point about values is that as our values change, the ways we evaluate particular texts, objects, processes, artworks, and the like can change as well. We may have found Hawthorne's or Melville's fiction, for example, or the paintings of Picasso, unappealing when we were high school or college students only to discover their allure later in life. The history of taste represents one large-scale example of evaluative shifts. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach was not appreciated nearly as fully in his lifetime as it is today. The work of many women writers, painters, and religious and philosophical thinkers was long neglected. We need to help students understand that evaluation is dynamic rather than static, provisional rather than final.
Demonstration – E. B. White on the Moonwalk
We can demonstrate the process of responsible, reflective critical reading with a close look at E. B. White's paragraph about the first moonwalk, written for The New Yorker in 1969. White read his sixth and final draft over the phone to the magazine's editor. All six drafts can be found in the appendix to a biography of White by Scott Elledge (1986). We will use the critical reading framework to demonstrate how students might engage with a text, and what we could help them notice about White's achievement in his nine-sentence paragraph. The sentences have been numbered for ease of reference.
Notes and Comment
E. B. White
[1]The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. [2] One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. [3] The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. [4] Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. [5] (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) [6] It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. [7] Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. [8] It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. [9] What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
White – Observations
We can begin by asking students what they see on the page: a single paragraph that begins with a brief sentence and ends with a much longer one. We might invite them to notice the length of White's sentences throughout the paragraph. They will find that his sentences vary quite a bit in length, that White intersperses his three very short sentences between longer ones. The varied sentence lengths avoid monotony, while aiding the paragraph's fluency. The longer sentences make room for complexity of thought.
We can ask about the function of White's opening sentences. “What do those initial sentences do?” we should ask them. The first sentence does two things: it makes an assertion; it creates surprise. Who would have thought (the surprise) that the moon (of all places) is “a great place for men”? Reading this sentence attentively, we wonder why White says what he does. We ask ourselves: “How” is the moon great for men? White's second sentence answers that question by positing two explanations: first, it is a place of “triumph”; second, it is a place of “gaiety,” with White describing the two astronauts, Armstrong and Aldrin, as “happy children” doing a “bouncy little dance.”
These first two sentences, our students should notice, are closely linked. The second provides specification for the first; it answers the question raised by the first, and it begins to suggest how, in White's view, the moon is “a great place for men.” We might additionally help students notice that White compares the bouncy way men move on the moon (due to its signifi- cantly lower gravity than earth) to a “dance,” illustrating their “gaiety.”
White's opening differs in emphasis from what most other commentators of the time highlighted, focusing on the astronauts’ walk on the moon as “one small step for [a] man” and “one giant leap for mankind” (Armstrong's own famous formulation). Triumphant it certainly was, though White chooses to emphasize something other than that triumph, and something more than gaiety, something, paradoxically, both humbler and more ambitious, which he develops later as the paragraph progresses.
White – Connections
Toward what connections might we direct our students’ attention in analyzing White's paragraph? One thing we might lead them to see (and hear) is a shift – a change of tone as the paragraph proceeds. In sentences 3, 4, and 5, White shifts from the men's apparently happy movement – their “bouncy little dance” – to the American flag they planted on the moon's surface. The flag's stiffness, White suggests, is an indication of its awkwardness, its being out of place. The moon's atmosphere lacks the breezy force to make the flag wave in celebration of the Americans’ triumphant walk on its surface. The fifth sentence's parenthesis injects a note of humor into its fundamental seriousness. White will develop the “lesson” he alludes to here in successive sentences.
We might direct our students’ attention in these sentences to a shift from the celebratory tone of the paragraph's first two sentences to something graver that follows. We could point them to White's contrast between the active men and the static flag to detect this shift in tone. And we would hope they might take up White's invitation to consider the lesson implied by the paragraph's first five sentences – particularly as it is implied in sentences 3 and 4.
We might invite our students to look through the paragraph, noting words and details that are related and/or repeated. White repeats the word “flag,” for example, in the plural “flags” and echoes it again in the word “banner.” He uses the word “plant” (or a variant) twice – in planting an American flag and in planting a handkerchief on the moon.
Other connections they might notice include the references to nature – to river, sea, and sky, as well as to the moon. Considering the implications of these connections and repetitions leads students to begin thinking about meaning, initially through the inferences they begin making about those repeated terms and the references to the natural world.
But there is yet another element to making connections, one involved with analyzing the component parts of a text. In reading critically, students attempt to understand how a text – whatever its length or its genre – breaks down into parts. Students need to identify the parts. They need to understand what each part contributes to the whole; they need to identify each part's function or purpose. In short, they need to understand relationships – the relationship of part to part and of part to whole. The process of re-reading a text, focusing on its overall structure, solidifies and deepens students’ understanding. Without understanding a text's structure, students can achieve no real understanding of its governing idea. Connecting the parts is essential for this understanding. On the basis of those connections, students can begin to think about implications. They are now ready to make well-grounded inferences.
White – Inferences
How might we help our students make inferences as they analyze White's paragraph? What inferences might be made from their observations and connections? What initial thoughts might they infer from them?
Making inferences leads us back to the text – for yet another look at (and listen to) its language and structure. Making inferences forces readers into scrupulous textual observation; it prompts them to make yet another pass at the text to reconsider it, ideally, perhaps, reading it aloud to hear what it suggests, to ascertain what its rhythms contribute to its meaning.
We might encourage our students to look carefully at (and listen carefully to) White's language as he builds out sentence 6, which is longer and more complex than the five sentences that precede it. We would ask students what work this sentence does, and why White might have made it as long as he did. We would help them see the contrast White develops there between admiration and national pride for the astronauts’ achievement, on one hand, and a more expansive sense of awe for their accomplishment, something beyond patriotic fervor, on the other. We could encourage them to see the moon landing as more than an American triumph. The moon, as White notes, “belongs to all,” while, paradoxically, belonging to no one.
Our critical reading goal is to help students develop the inferential habit, a habit of speculating about implications and possibilities, less to determine fully, finally, and definitively what they think than to provoke their thinking. Making inferences leads them to ideas.
White – Conclusions and Values
What conclusions might our students make about White's paragraph? Foremost, we would want them to understand (from sentence 7) that it's not just the moon that provokes this paradoxical idea, but nature more generally: “every great river and every great sea.” This universalizing concept is further developed and illustrated in sentence 8, which relies on familiar associations of the moon with madness and love, while recognizing as well the moon's physical influence on the watery tides “everywhere.” We should help students see how White brings back the image of the flag in an implied comparison with the sky, the “banner” under which lovers kiss “in every land.” We are given, thus, another kind of banner, a universal banner of blue, to contrast with the national banner of the stars and stripes.
White's final sentence is a tour de force in its range of reference, its re-collection of images and ideas that come before, and in its stunning control of phrase and rhythm. Those images and that rhythm collect and connect earlier descriptive details, enforcing and solidifying White's notion that in emphasizing the moon landing as a human triumph, we miss a chance to see its larger human implications, that it remains an exciting yet imperfect achievement for humankind. In emphasizing its national American accomplishment, we miss an opportunity to see its universal human significance.
White's paragraph about the moon landing acknowledges the amazing accomplishment it was. White sees the moon landing as a tribute to human ingenuity as well as to American triumphalism. And yet for all the feat's triumphant success, White adduces other considerations beyond the values associated with either a national or a broader human achievement. He invites his readers, instead, to consider another way of thinking about the meaning of the moon landing.
He conveys these larger ideas with two related details at the end of his paragraph: his reference to the “familiar Iwo Jima scene” and his suggestion to replace the American flag with a white handkerchief, symbol of “the common cold.” White refers to the iconic picture of American soldiers hoisting the flag after defeating the Japanese in World War II on the strategic Pacific island of Iwo Jima. He connects the moon landing to the important American victory only to suggest that there are other values at stake in the moon landing, and that there are other ways to think about the significance of what was achieved that day in 1969, different symbols by which that achievement might be represented, remembered, and revered.
An additional aspect of critical reading is thinking about the author's idea and evidence – whether or not we accept what is said and why, whether we agree or disagree, and why. In reading a text critically, we consider whether to accept, reject, or qualify what the writer says – and what form that qualification might take. The following exercise invites students to engage in this process of critical evaluation: to consider the extent to which they find White's argument persuasive and the extent to which it stimulates them to think about the larger issues he raises about nationalism and universalism.
Exercise: Further Considerations of White's Moonwalk Paragraph
Consider the historical context of the paragraph, first in relation to White's reference to Iwo Jima, and then in relation to the time in which it was written. How was White's little piece received at the time? How did it compare with the many other pieces written about the moon landing, in newspapers and magazines and books? What larger cultural and political implications does White's moon landing paragraph have for thinking about nationalism and internationalism? How have the issues of nationalism and internationalism played out historically since 1969?
Why do you think White included the sentence in parentheses: “(There must be a lesson here somewhere.)”? How would you characterize the tone of this sentence? How effective is this sentence? What “lesson(s)” do you draw from White's paragraph? To what extent do you agree with the lesson(s) the paragraph presents? Why?
In her book
Leaving Orbit
