Blog Party Inquiry Post

According to the National Endowment for the Arts Reading at Risk report from 2004, the number of American adults reading literature has dropped 14% from 1992 to 2002 (ix). As a lover of and teacher of literature, this decrease saddens me. What saddens me further is that literature instruction cannot seem to halt this decline. Kids seem to be hardwired to rebel against authority as part of their growth into adults, including against reading as a required educational activity.

So, my inquiry question is, how is it possible to teach reading without killing the love of reading? Since we probably need to continue requiring literature, my current conclusion is that instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests and learning styles and to the outside world.

1. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their learning styles. I have known about learning styles for many years, but a turning point for me occurred in 2007 while I was researching student engagement. In a source I can’t find now, I read that 95% of learners prefer styles other than “linguistic intelligence” (PBS) or processing by reading and writing. This shocked me! I prefer reading and writing, but my students probably don’t, and there I was using reading and writing to teach reading and writing to students who don’t prefer reading and writing!! This sounded like a recipe for failure.

Due to this revelation, I’ve begun to build opportunities for students to use different learning styles to understand literature: music, art, comic strips, Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, tableaus, personal experiences, collaboration, and connections to larger life questions through opinionaires, an idea I got from Jeffrey Wilhelm’s 2007 book on inquiry. These strategies use learning styles that may be more accessible for that 95% of students so that they can access literature through them.

2. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests. The use of personal interests and experience in teaching motivates learning. It is even more important in literature because literary interpretation relies on personal experience to make meaning.

As an example of this, I’ll share that I had a very sheltered childhood. My parents and teachers were kind. I always had food, housing, clothing, and money to spend on occasional extras. This background caused me to read Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” as a fun romp in the kitchen. It sounded fun that the father and son were causing “the pans/[to] Slid[e] from the kitchen shelf” in their enthusiasm, and the cute “unfrown” suggested that the mother was just pretending to disapprove. It was not until I read this poem with students who had other life experiences that I realized the poem could also represent abuse. Because our life experiences inspire a wide variety of interpretations, life experience should be central to literature instruction.

3. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to the outside world. All I need is a good book or classroom discussion to make me happy. Unlike me, my students need to know the value of literature in relation to the outside world. I believe that literature study teaches many real-world skills: Through reading, we learn to think outside the confines of our own lived experience, to understand other people and cultures, to make meaning from stories and think critically and artistically, to value individual and ordinary experience, to address future challenges, to long for justice (Pontuso and Thornton 65), and to better understand ourselves (Felski 7). These skills are vitally important to ensuring our culture moves in a constructive direction whether it be in business, politics, health care, or parenting.

To help students see the value of literature, I tried two new strategies this term:

a) Our first week’s readings and our first paper demonstrated that people care and talk about reading outside school and that reading connects to our real-world lives.

b) My on-campus students presented a Town Hall meeting on reading, and my online students will host a Blog Party on reading. In each case, students developed inquiry projects on topics related to reading and/or literature and presented or will present their results in public forums. These efforts represent an attempt to demonstrate to students that discussions of reading are an important part of our culture, not just academic work shut away in classrooms.

Because I am still in the process of this experiment, I don’t know whether these efforts will result in greater learning and engagement among my students. My on-campus students seem to like to come to class and don’t resort too frequently to texting under the desks. My online students seem overwhelmed. I think all the little activities might be easier to keep in perspective if we were working in person, so I’ll need to fine-tune the balance.

To conclude, I would be interested in discussing the following questions: Should we stop teaching literature to encourage reading? If not, how can we change reading education to avoid killing the pleasure of reading?

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle Review 55.7 (19 Dec. 2008): 7.

National Endowment for the Arts. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004. 26 Sept. 2009. < http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf>.

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007. 438-39.

Pontuso, James F. and Saranna R. Thornton. “Is Outcomes Assessment Hurting Higher Education?” Thought & Action (Fall 2008): 61-69.

Public Broadcasting System. “Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory.” Great Performances. 11 Nov. 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. Scholastic, 2007.