Even if I grant you everything here, Tim (and I’m not sure I do), there is still a missing heart of reading you aren’t directly addressing: The pleasure of walking into an unfamiliar—or even a very familiar—world through the portal of a text and one’s own imagination. Of course you can do that with art and media that aren’t text-based (although there’s the problem of the hidden text of scripts and stories in those). But, still, there’s an intimacy in reading—between the reader, the author, and their separate but linked imaginations—that can’t be accessed without, well, reading. What to do with students and ourselves when we think we no longer need to do that act of reading and imagining (and analyzing)? What are we supposed to teach, and how are we supposed to teach it?
This sentiment came up at the workshop, and I feel it strongly myself, but here's my contrarian afterthought. The first is that intimacy in reading is itself a historically specific way of reading that has passed through several stages--early humanism (there's a good new history of Renaissance humanistic reading focused on exactly this), the evolution of silent and individual reading, and then our ideas about modern interiority. Meaning what we take to be a natural and inevitable dimension of reading is perhaps more contingent and particular to us than we might otherwise assume. But secondly, this idea of intimacy between reader, author and their twinned imaginations has its double or opposite in reading, which is that texts stand apart from readers and authors, they intervene in a relationship, they invite people to imagine intimacy and proximity that arguably doesn't actually exist (for example, they allow us to imagine that we are the same as people who may in fact have been quite different in their time and place). Texts are also artifice, they are craft, they are made things (and reading is a technical skill that not everyone has) and in some sense, texts are as known for lying about their authors (or letting readers imagine what is not true)--about promising intimacy with someone who never existed (in the way they pretend to be through their writing).
I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding this post as it was intended to be understood, Tim, but feel free to present it as an interpretive dance. I'm all for reaching students where they are, but where my students were was at Georgia Southern, and I felt very keenly their loss of a good K12 education as they struggled with the written word. That's why I persisted. It was the conversation and progress that mattered to me.
Yeah, I'm being overly contrarian here in the sense that I do think that there were concrete changes to K-12 education in both the 1990s and 2000s that affected mastery of the basic skill of reading and familiarity with the process of reading long texts, as much of the NCLB pedagogy chunked down texts into very small excerpts and then discouraged interpretation in the more open-ended sense. That all matters. And plainly digitization of text matters, and digital culture matters. Even if we entertain my contrarian thoughts, we do not start the investigation of reading completely tabula rasa. There's a lot we do know about what's happened to reading, and we're not entirely imagining that students now are less familiar with and less inclined to read longer texts.
Even if I grant you everything here, Tim (and I’m not sure I do), there is still a missing heart of reading you aren’t directly addressing: The pleasure of walking into an unfamiliar—or even a very familiar—world through the portal of a text and one’s own imagination. Of course you can do that with art and media that aren’t text-based (although there’s the problem of the hidden text of scripts and stories in those). But, still, there’s an intimacy in reading—between the reader, the author, and their separate but linked imaginations—that can’t be accessed without, well, reading. What to do with students and ourselves when we think we no longer need to do that act of reading and imagining (and analyzing)? What are we supposed to teach, and how are we supposed to teach it?
This sentiment came up at the workshop, and I feel it strongly myself, but here's my contrarian afterthought. The first is that intimacy in reading is itself a historically specific way of reading that has passed through several stages--early humanism (there's a good new history of Renaissance humanistic reading focused on exactly this), the evolution of silent and individual reading, and then our ideas about modern interiority. Meaning what we take to be a natural and inevitable dimension of reading is perhaps more contingent and particular to us than we might otherwise assume. But secondly, this idea of intimacy between reader, author and their twinned imaginations has its double or opposite in reading, which is that texts stand apart from readers and authors, they intervene in a relationship, they invite people to imagine intimacy and proximity that arguably doesn't actually exist (for example, they allow us to imagine that we are the same as people who may in fact have been quite different in their time and place). Texts are also artifice, they are craft, they are made things (and reading is a technical skill that not everyone has) and in some sense, texts are as known for lying about their authors (or letting readers imagine what is not true)--about promising intimacy with someone who never existed (in the way they pretend to be through their writing).
I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding this post as it was intended to be understood, Tim, but feel free to present it as an interpretive dance. I'm all for reaching students where they are, but where my students were was at Georgia Southern, and I felt very keenly their loss of a good K12 education as they struggled with the written word. That's why I persisted. It was the conversation and progress that mattered to me.
Yeah, I'm being overly contrarian here in the sense that I do think that there were concrete changes to K-12 education in both the 1990s and 2000s that affected mastery of the basic skill of reading and familiarity with the process of reading long texts, as much of the NCLB pedagogy chunked down texts into very small excerpts and then discouraged interpretation in the more open-ended sense. That all matters. And plainly digitization of text matters, and digital culture matters. Even if we entertain my contrarian thoughts, we do not start the investigation of reading completely tabula rasa. There's a lot we do know about what's happened to reading, and we're not entirely imagining that students now are less familiar with and less inclined to read longer texts.
Oh, fear not! You got me thinking! Thanks!