Corey Gruber
Blog #7 final draft
Reader/writer transaction and digital literacy
Here is my nightmare: it’s early on a Monday morning when I walk in to class. I’m tired and disheveled because all weekend I have been grading essays, and though I’m not in my underwear, I might as well be. The students I am teaching are bored already and I haven’t said a word. They use their phones to maintain some degree of motion, twittering thumbs and gum-smacking jaw jerks. When I ask them to take out their books and turn to a certain passage, the passage from the reading I thought was the most riveting, the most capable of tuning these device addicts into paperback readers, they look at me with blank stares. And then come the shuffling of backpacks, bodies shifting in their chairs turning to talk to a neighbor, the request to go to the bathroom. I have to stop two students from reading from an actual book because they are reading from chemistry or microbiology. No one has any insight about the passage I have written on the board. It was the most interesting part of the reading when I read the book as a college student. The passage that changed my life, made me want to be a writer, want to teach writing in the first place, and they, as far as I can tell, did not even read it. So I call on Sofia to read it, and she stumbles through it without affect and mispronounces a key word in the middle of the passage. I have to correct her, but by then the author’s impact is lost; the meaning is lost. The message I am trying to make is lost. My lesson plan has been obliterated by complacency, and I am standing, shoulders slanted, in front of an audience of apathy. They are bored and/or do not care about this passage. My class is boring. This is what I am thinking when from the back of the class Omar, a student who has made it clear on several occasions he is only taking this class so he can play football, asks, “did they make a movie out of this book?” And it’s then I wonder, as thirty pairs of eyes blink back at me, if what I am asking them to do—mainly, read my favorite texts—is unnatural. Their world, a world dominated by dazzling visual effects and gimmicky audible accessories, is not so much the text-based world mine was. I live on a digital planet. This fear leads me to question what my role is as a reading/writing instructor, and why reading theory should now be more concerned with digital mediums than it has been in the past. And something about that feels fundamentally wrong to me. Should we allow the disinterest of the students to dictate their education? Probably not. But we have to find ways to take advantage of their interests and skill bases if we are going to be able to educate millennials. There must be a careful balance of finding challenging reading material that also allow for appropriate composition on the students behalf.
Lawrence Musgrave doesn’t think so. In “What Happens When We Read: Picturing a Reader’s Responsibilities” he applies reader response theory to students whose sentiments lie not far from those of the students I began discussing this analysis with. To get there, Musgrave recaps three major players in the development of reader response theory. He carefully diagrams Rosenblatt’s transaction between a reader and a text by articulating the idea of the reader’s engagement as a product of that transaction. He looks at Probst’s ideas of how engagement can be implemented in the classroom in a way that values choice and multiple responses to any piece of reading; and he goes on to examine Booth’s focus on the ethical criticism of fiction and the argument that the reader has a responsibility to a certain limited number of responses any text might logically allow for (59-60). In synthesizing these major players’ ideas in a more detailed diagram, Musgrave concludes that when a student is bored or uninterested by a written text, it is likely because they haven’t been operating responsibly as a reader. As he puts it, “I can tell them that when they claim a text is hard to understand, they are really saying that they don’t have the understanding they need for the text” (62). This argument highlights a central component of reader-response theory, mainly that the reader’s engagement is key to the meaning that is created between reader and the text.
On the one hand I am a strong proponent of the ideas Musgrave has proposed here because they emphasizes the value of work, not just on the part of student, who is encouraged to consider how their own efforts and lack of interest are part of the problem, at least with respect for the question of engagement. Musgrave’s ideas also challenge the instructor instructor, who here might have to diagram and effectively communicate the relationship between reader and text (some thirty plus years of theoretical discussion) in a detailed drawing on the board who knows how many times over the course of the semester, or who needs to find ways to embody that discussion in their pedagogy throughout the course. Most good teachers would probably say they do that some how, and the nightmarish scenario I reference in the opening to this précis was clearly not an example of good teaching. However, I’m not sure illustrating for the students that they need to try harder is enough, a point that needs consideration since that transaction between author, text and reader is one in which meaning is the product but also becomes the basis for new texts (Rosenblatt, 1988). When we ask our students to engage texts, we are doing so with the goal of getting them to produce thoughtful and engaging texts of their own. Most reading and writing teachers, having produced literary and academic work as their own products in becoming teachers, see this as an exercise in producing academic texts and therefore recognize the transitive link between reading and writing.
There are many educators who are questioning the degree to which the “product” of students’ reading and writing through literacy transactions needs to be literary or academic. W. Ian O’Byrne, for example, argues that the important part of the transactional exchange involved with theories of reading (reader-response, schema, etc.) is “moving learners from consumers to producers” (2014). In his article “Empowering Learners in the Reader/Writer Nature of the Digital Information Space” he introduces teachers of reading and writing to ideas that will help them embrace the notion that their students can and should be producing digital content because it is, quite literally, the future and also what our students feel most comfortable engaging right now. O’Byrne uses the experience of one tenth grader who was suspended after he found a way to hack the school’s Facebook page. The effort this student made was not unlike much of the effort required of students engaging in what we might call scholarly work. It required a good deal of critical thought, engagement with research, and a focussed composition. Except, for his efforts, this student was suspended. O’Byrne proposes that educators “need to find ways to make education more meaningful,” and in doing so they can take advantage of the mediums our students will be engaging in developing their own texts. While this idea might make some reading theorists uneasy, it addresses important questions about the attributes of the reader writer transaction. If students will be asked to produce texts in a digital age that differ from those of the past, then asking students to compose texts in a traditional manner and forcing students to engage traditional literature exclusively does something of a disservice to those students needing education in becoming literate in their world. This is not to undermine the value of good literature or to suggest that writing about literature should go away, but rather to emphasize the importance of considering the input feed of the writer/text/reader transaction going forward.
In “What’s Wrong with the Completion Agenda: And What We Can Do About It,” Debra Humphreys challenges the notion that teachers should in anyway play in to the push from corporate players who seem to want the education system to catch up to the skills based, economy driven world these students will be entering. She notes how some Community College English teachers have pushed for ending the requirement of the research paper because it would result in more students passing (2012). But Humphreys makes a great point when she argues that teachers don’t need to abandon traditional writing assignments in order to prepare students for the future. Teachers just need to be more willing to embrace the future in their course creation. Perhaps the biggest problem with this idea is that it asks reading instructors to operate on ground they might not be familiar with. It is precisely this question that Zac Chase and Diana Laufenburg take up in their article “Embracing the Squishiness of Digital Literacy,” in which they argue that digital mediums pose difficult challenges for teachers, but they are worth the trouble. In their article, they breakdown the distinctions between literacy and digital literacy as projects that involve technology to increase the engagement of students in inquiry driven projects. They dive into projects that asks student to explore their curiosity using technology as a faster access point. As they put it, “students deal with multiple authentic texts, navigating them by using numerous tool and code switching to understand the writing of multiple authors on a single subject” (536), which is a way of saying that students have a tremendous amount of agency in the decision over what to read in a digital literacy activity. The problem with this is granting the students ownership over what is consider good reading material. It is difficult for anyone to argue that the students, who have come to the classroom seeking education, would be somehow better equipped to choose reading material than the teacher. On the other hand, granting students the ownership and responsibility behind the task of finding texts that the student relates to personally may just lead to a more active transaction between reader and writer. The distinction between boredom and engagement in either case comes down to a careful interaction on the student’s behalf.
The fear I have expressed to start this analysis, the fear of trying to inspire thirty some-odd disinterested students to read, is merely anecdotal to the more serious question that considers what will the transaction look like going forward. At the same time, there is a real and valid concern among teachers that our students don’t read. Part of the problem is that teachers have needs and goals for their students’ writing abilities that don’t necessarily line up with the interests of the students. Students do need to be challenged, but those challenges need to occur in ways that allows the students to benefit practically from the difficulties that engaging texts create. This combination of challenge and practical application might just be the future of transactional theories of reading going forward.
References
Chase, Zac & Laufenberg, Diana (2011). Digital literacies: Embracing the squishiness of digital literacies. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, (45)7, 535-537.
Humphreys, Diana (2012). What’s wrong with the completion agenda: And what we can do about it. Liberal Education, (98)1, 32-68..
Musgrave, Lawwrence (2006). What happens when we read: Picturing a reader’s responsibility. JAEPL 11, 52-63.
O’Byrne, W. Ian (2014). Empowering learners in the reader/writer nature of the digital information space. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, (58)2, 102-104.
Rosenblatt, Louis (1988). Writing, reading, and the transactional theory. National Center for the Study of Writing (13), 1-24.
Teaching online 