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.