This is the book to blame for all my current hoarding issues. I began reading Nancy Drew mysteries when I was seven, and I wanted all of the series. All fifty bajillion ghost-written Carolyn Keene books. However, my family lacked the resources to pay for those yellow-spined jewels, so I had to settle for the local library. My family also refused to buy me books when I was younger because they complained that I read them too quickly, many times before getting out of the car when we got home. As an adult, I've done a bit of over-compensating for my neglected childhood desires, buying so many novels that I'm currently keeping some of them at a friend's house. But this book-broken road has been legitimized by Bomer; he tells me that I need a well-equipped classroom library, so BOOM. I'm so excited.
I really enjoyed that he spent an entire chapter on environments for supporting reading, since I think that it's important for encouraging a reading life that continues to occur outside of the classroom. If a classroom's library is only comprised of class sets of books, it makes reading seem like something you can only do at school, under close supervision. Don't get me wrong: lending out my own books makes me a little nervous (yes, I am a book hog, I know), but it encourages independent reading as well as a sense of trust.
So, on the subject of independent reading, I liked the presentation of tiered levels of classroom reading. These three levels include independent reading, small group reading, and whole class reading. Bomer mentions accomplishing whole-class reading by having the teacher read the text aloud or recording it (which seems like that could get pretty time consuming), and I actually like the idea of reading the text aloud to the class. I don't remember having teachers read anything aloud after I got out of middle school. Still, I think it's an interesting way for students to interact with a text. It's also comforting in a way, because it could call to mind being read to as a child. And I don't think it would be too childish, either, because you're calling on the students to practice a different kind of listening, which could also help them with interpreting the text (which I'll get to in just a bit).
Moving on to the next couple of chapters, in which Bomer discusses the practices involved in inhabiting and interpreting the text, there are some interesting teaching strategies to consider. The chapter on inhabiting the text is pretty straightforward, and it covers the some of the basic strategies involved in active reading (picturing the text, listening to the text's voices, creating relationships with characters, and so on). The most helpful chapter to me talks about how to teach interpretive reading. What strikes me is how he emphasizes that when we're teaching reading, we're not necessarily teaching content. Instead, we're teaching how to recognize your own reading practices and how to question the text.
The notion of teaching how to question really resonates with all that I've been learning about critical pedagogy in my Multicultural Curriculum class, in that in order to provide students with critical thinking skills, we must focus on the how and why instead of the what. And that's what Bomer is getting at as well with his steps of interpretive reading--all of the steps culminate in critiquing the text, looking at the groups within a text, who does and does not have power in the text, and looking at issues of injustice. From there, the text does not remain merely something to be read inside a classroom; it permeates students' perceptions of the world, allowing them to think about their lives and their communities in a different way. I think this is why these chapters seem like a very helpful bridge to me--they link the theory with the practice in a useful way.
Well, I had even more to write about, but this post is getting pretty overwhelming. I'll leave you with this: have you ever checked out the Best American Nonrequired Reading series? A group of high school students are selected each year to be on the committee to pick out short works from that year's publications (from magazines and journals, generally). These can include short stories, essays, graphic fiction, and even silly lists. I always buy the book when it comes out because it introduces me to new authors and essayists. It also picks up on some interesting political themes and social issues from the year. I think that it'd be worth it to check out the series, since one of the short stories or essays from one of the books could possibly be used as a whole-class text that Bomer mentioned. Also, they're all picked by high school students! Yay, classroom library time!!
I wrote a long comment and it was deleted when I clicked on the link to the Best American Nonrequired Reading Series - which I love and am excited to look at and oh my goodness, I didn't know that this was a thing.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to reconstruct my thoughts in my grief over the lost comment though.
The importance of independent reading has become more and more clear as we continue to talk about it in all of our classes, but I love how pointedly Bomer talks about it. This insistence upon a diverse classroom library is great, and I am so stoked that we're all excited about building our own! Nancy Drew for the win.
One thing you talked about that I forgot to touch on in my own writing is the inhabiting and interpreting of writing. This notion of teaching students different methods of reading rather than teaching them what they are reading (they should know already - they're reading it, right?) is really cool. I like this teaching students HOW to read, something I don't feel like I really grasped even as a concept different from basic understanding of content until college, is such a wonderful undertaking. My thoughts are getting jumbled.
My last thought was your connection to Multicultural Curriculum and notions of power apparent within various classroom texts. Something Bomer said that really resonated for me, and something I think I'd like to talk more about in class, is his assertion that until "the straight, white males are reading about people different from themselves as often as the black lesbians are" we cannot really have an honest and productive conversation about students learning from writers with voices different from their own. This idea of giving minorities a voice in the classroom to teach students in the majority seems different than what we've been talking about previously, not minority reading to reflect minority students experiences and reach out to them, rather minority reading for everyone as a tool for a greater understanding.