Engagement

Today I read about reading and learned about Jeffrey Wilhelm and his efforts to document how "highly engaged adolescent readers produce meaning" and "what can be done in the classroom to help reluctant readers reconceive of reading as a creative and personally meaningful pursuit" (11).  Is it ironic that as I was trying to engage myself in reading this book about how to engage readers, I fell asleep in the process?  Lights on, books and notebooks strewn, mechanical pencils in the covers.  I disengaged.  I'm rusty in my own reading efforts I guess.  At least I wasn’t in the library. So maybe it was the text or perhaps my prior knowledge of reading texts on this topic or the textual meaning I’d gained that triggered my snooze.  Perhaps, I was just overwhelmed in efferent reading, my stance solely focused on what information I need to take away (27) through my note taking.  Clearly, I need to focus on my aesthetic stance and becoming an expert reader.  Who knows.  Maybe I’m just tired in life. 

At any rate, more from my notes on Chapters 1-3 and more blogging tomorrow. 

Day 2: I'm back and blogging. 

Wilhelm's You Gotta Be the Book is Wilhelm's account of his researcher-teacher investigations into "Why do some kids love reading?  Why do other kids hate reading?" (8)  He encourages us to look at what's working for some students and use this to find ways to motivate less engaged readers (109).  He starts by describing student responses to attitude inventories in which half of his students reported that they didn't read on their own" (10).  He then takes on his path in which he set out to investigate: "what can we discover about how highly engaged adolescent readers produce meaning?" and what "can be done in the classroom to help reluctant readers reconceive of reading as a creative and personally meaningful pursuit?" (11).  He talks about the human factor to teaching: how teachers's relating to students in a meaningful way is key (13), and the cultural factor: how teachers need to teach in an environment that encourages risk-taking and innovation and experimentation (16-17).  He instructs on how to "move toward a reader-centered classroom" (18) and walks us through the most common of current practices, i.e. bottom-up approach to reading instruction, teaching students by: "moving from small units such as letters to bigger units such as words phrases, and sentences" (20) and then use of these skills in decoding... the "page is greater than the reader" (20).  He describes his views on New Criticism approach / whole language approach to reading which pays so much attention to literary form and literary conventions (irony, symbols, metaphors, etc.) and the "whole text" (21).  It effectively dismisses history and the reader's response as important elements to the meaning of the text.  Wilhem espouses an alternative approach, a compromise in which reading is top-down and bottom-up and "readers search for global meaning" and "use decoding skills on a local level" (25).  He describes Rosenblatt's criticism of literary instruction today that focuses on students getting "correct answers" about reading (27).  She draws a distinction between "efferent" and "aesthetic" reading; efferent when readers "are concerned with what information they can take away from the reading" (27) versus the "aesthetic" stance in which readers live through "an experience that is enjoyed while reading" (27).  And so Wilhelm takes on his role as reader-researcher in an effort to find out what strategies can be employed to change readers into aesthetic readers.  Unlike Rosenblatt who doesn't specifically identify strategies teachers can leverage to encourage this change in student reading, Wilhelm sets out to study his students to, as he notes Margaret Meek and colleagues remind us, to "make public 'those secret things' that expert readers know and do" (31).

Chapters 2 describes Wilhelm's study of the three highly engaged readers in his study.  Wilhelm employs various strategies to understand these three students and what makes reading more meaningful for them.  As he does this, he firms up his beliefs and expands upon his educational philosophy to us.  He takes more of a transactional view of how children construct meaning from books by relating to their own background knowledge and experiences.  It is through this that the students build an intensity of engagement.  Does it mean students can veer from the the text and/or from the "canon"?  Yes.  But it also means the students engage, often suspend, and pursue more meaning in their reading.  I like Wilhelm's point that readers "need to have books that understand them as they are and help them to consider and perhaps outgrow their current points of view.  Then they will have the desire to deepen and expand their experience" (49).  Initial experiences of reading should be "meaningful, safe, and engaging" (49).  Students should read from traditional literary mainstreams and outside of these mainstreams.  Exposure to multicultural literature is key as a way for students to broaden their perspectives and extend from their locale (49). 

I found Chapter 3 to be the most useful Chapter for me as I prepare to become a teacher.  I agree with much of Wilhelm's philosophy but I often get frustrated in my teacher prep because I read about what's right and wrong "in theory" but I don't get enough information on what works in practice.  In Chapter 3 Wilhelm gives more detail as to teaching strategies he used to engage students in their reading.  In my studies of Special Education, we learn how to modify lesson plans to create a breadth of access points to learning.  We learn to create differentiated instruction to appeal to student strengths and create multiple avenues to acquiring learning and content.  For example, we learn the importance of creating lessons which can be accessed via student strengths whether in auditory, visual, tactile channels to accessing learning.  What interested me most about Wilhelm's writing was the ideas he presented for methods to employ to engage students.  I particularly liked his use of symbolic story representation where students create cutouts of objects to embody what they read and/or how they are reading (64).  He gives other very useful ideas: use of interviews, literary letters, pairing students as they read for discussion, artistic aids, drawings, collages, flipping through a magazine to choose images of characters.  I really enjoyed reading Wilhelm's epilogue to this chapter.  He reiterates the importance of the following:

• studying how students read,
• reflecting as a teacher - journaling is his key medium,
• providing varied activities to evoke and appeal to what he terms as the ten different dimensions of response that his students used as they "created, experienced, and responded to literary worlds" (67),
• encouraging readers to learn from each other,
• creating an open environment so students can learn from each other,
• developing activities that promote visual connection to text,
• being student centered: listening more and telling less,
• and studying educational theory to inform teaching.

Again, it's all about engaging the student and being the best you can be as a teacher.  I'm daunted by Wilhelm's experience and creativity.  It's also disturbs me that he apparently left teaching because of some criticism?  Overall, I enjoyed reading this book (once I got some rest!!) and have taken away some great ideas.  I hope I can flex my approach as Wilhelm did and not fall into the trap of the veteran teacher Wilhelm mentioned in his commentary on Chapter 1... the veteran teacher who didn't teach thirty years but taught one year thirty times.  

My Literacy Journey and My Current State of Pause...

Here’s the unfortunate thing.  As I grew older and moved away from my life in academia, I dawdled in my pursuit to open my eyes through books.  My reading in my corporate life became manuals, quick reference guides, help sections, email alerts, tickers and market data.  My writing became phrases, bolded words, simple sentences; emails, guides, 1-pagers, and notices.   I think I actually dreamed in bullet points: short vignettes and snippets rather than novels and dramas.  In my personal life, I was busy stabilizing and then acquiring...  always rushing to the next thing in my career, in my travels, in my purchase of “stuff.”  Technology’s fast pace, my job working in “the market,” titles, and the acquisition of things became the focus of my life and my husband’s life.  Life was on the fast track, and I had little time for sitting without sleeping and admittedly forgot about the enlightenment I progressed towards through reading.  These fourteen years in technology and business after a two-year stint in academia changed the landscape of what I really saw when I opened these aging eyes.  But, I’m in Round 2 of my career and personal life now, and I’m once again looking to literature and education for some direction and peace.

In my youth I was an avid, motivated, inspired reader.  If a book engaged me, I would read it almost in a hunger, staying up to early morning hours.  As a child, I can remember tearing through book after book and spending hours in the Bosler Library in Carlisle just reading for pleasure (with a break for Space Invaders and pizza at Backdoor Pizza occasionally).  Today my adolescence seems a very long way away so my memory of my curriculum in school is blurry.  I do remember reading Tom Sawyer, Heidi, Huck Finn, Anne of Green Gables, the Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, the Judy Blume series (what young girl born in the early 70s didn’t read these).   I did my undergraduate degree in English with a minor in Black Studies at Boston College and again tore through book after book.  I remember almost living the books.  When we studied Dionysius, my friends and I would hold Dionysian fests with cheap wine and ludicrous behavior.  I surrounded myself with my English major friends and made sarcastic  jabs to my Econ/Finance friends about how they weren’t really able to live a fully realized life through number crunching.  I remember being swept away when my Romantics professor, John Mahoney, bellowed out Tintern Abbey… I swore I could hear and see the “sounding cataract,”   I could almost feel the words.  I sometimes attempted to sit and look at nature to find that something, that depth to living found in the beauty of nature. I wrote a paper on the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Freshman year about daring and peaches?  and related it to my internal daring yet my freeze in living.   I would secretly “email,” if you can call it that: using the new PINE internal email system (Outlook didn't exist), to my workstudy friends across campus in Accounts and sass up my emails with Ignatius Reillyisms, his A Confederacy of Dunces perversions and discussions about making cheese dip.   After graduation, I decided to attend the Southern Studies Master’s program at University of Missisippi.   My roommates and I had a Halloween party, and my friends and I dressed up as Addie’s buzzards in As I Lay Dying.  After a student in one of my classes did a project on dirt eating and brought in baked dirt for us to eat, I decided the program wasn’t for me.  I then moved to Hong Kong and taught Chinese students grammar and literature for a year and a half.  I was absolutely blown away when my literature students reenacted a scene from Romeo and Juliet and memorized every single word for their flawless performance.  Did I seem on a good path towards literacy and doing good in and through education?   Perhaps Addie’s buzzards were a harsh symbol, an early prophesy of my next steps in my path in literacy…

It was at this point that I left this world to work in technology, business… and the pursuit of money.  For some reason in my head right now, I hear Mr. Potatohead in Toy Story 3 saying “Money, money, money.”   I worked in London for four years in technology and then took a job in New York City on a trading floor and then a research department at a major investment bank in New York City.  My reading became focused on quick reference guides, technology memos, trash mags, travel mags, the signs on the subway…  I read few to no novels.  For a little while I joined a book club, read the Reader and other short novels.  I became a bullet point freak.  Every single one of my technology guides and presentations was cut down.  Less is more.  I used words/phrases like “uptick,” “IPO,” “ping,” “bandwidth,” “iterative,” “gui,” “dist it,” “ETA,” “headcount,” “key takeaway,” “converge,” “diverge,” “disintermediation,” “deliverable,” “QA,” “RDP,” “synergetic,” “defcon,” “mandate,” “wordsmith,” “crumb trail,” “stickiness,” “benchmark,” “low-hanging fruit,” “UI,” “caveat,” “leverage,” “win-win,” “gauge,” “wonderbar,” “verbage,” “metacontextual,” “fungible,” GIGO” (garbage in garbage out),” “LIFO” (last in last out), “FIFO” (first in first out).  My “literary pursuits” were  broker exams, and, as such, took a hiatus from the books I loved so much to focus on my career.  For years my reading was replaced by technology manuals, study for MCSE tests, Series 7 exams, and reading about new technology.  I’d arrive at home late at night with only enough energy to flip the channels.  In the meantime, my husband became obsessed, and I mean truly obsessed with the Internet and social networking and had a tunnel-vision focus on making a lot of money.   As a tech guru, he focused on all things technology and lost himself in social networking.  He launched a social networking company and saw his success gauge in life as whether or not he could make a million.  Sometimes I would get IM’ed from him when he was in his office in the next room.  We had two kids and managing their drop-offs became a battle.  Our conversations started to center around all things social networking, and as all this happened, I retreated.  I retreated into my children.  I retreated away from the fast pace of Manhattan.  I wanted something different.  And I moved back to my hometown of Carlisle.

So there’s more but this is supposed to be a blog which means I can stop when I want to.  The miraculous thing is through leaving my job, separating from my husband, losing A LOT of money, and focusing on my children more, I am slowly but painfully regaining my sense of self, the self that was stronger in some ways in my early days.   Books are again becoming a focal point in my life.  I took a two-year relative hiatus from technology to take care of my two young children, to prepare for a new career, to study, to pause, to renew. 

So what do I hope to impart on my future students? I've learned a lot through all of my crazy experiences and I've tried to go with the flow.  I hope to keep students motivated on stepping forward through experience, whether life allows a baby step, a giant leap, a step back followed by two forward, or just sitting for a time.  I want to encourage reading as a way to inform, to settle restless souls, and to keep dreams alive.  These days life is so immediate: texting, email, Skyping, IMing, googling.  Responses are expected to be quick, abbreviated, timely.  The focus is on ETA, turnaround time, and wireless access.  But connection sometimes is not connecting.  You can be wired but not seeing, observing, thinking.  Books trigger reflection.  Books take time.  Literature teaches lessons.  Life will give lessons whether you want them or not.  But the answers to challenges don’t always come as fast as google search results.  The application of what you learn is not as lightning fast as texts.  The “pause” is real important in reading and writing and in life.  And so I pause...