Reading Circles, Novels and Adult Reading Development

Sam Duncan

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441107589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Adult literacy teachers are constantly searching for effective, engaging and distinctly 'adult' ways to develop adult emergent reading and, for at least the past two hundred years, adults have formed themselves into reading circles to read and discuss novels on a weekly or monthly basis. Why then are reading circles rarely used, or studied, in formal adult literacy provision? This book explores adult reading development, novel reading and reading circles in the context of a wider examination of reading pedagogies and practices in the English-speaking world. It discusses reading as both an individual and a communal act and investigates the relationship between literature and literacy development, practice and pedagogy (including a reassessment of the controversial approaches of reading aloud and phonics for adults). Sam Duncan reviews a case study of an adult reading circle in a large London further education college and identifies the wider implications for the teaching and learning of adult emergent reading, for the use and understanding of reading circles and for how we understand the novel reading experience more broadly.

FIGURE 1 Eye-Balloon by Odilon Redon, 1878

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at City and Islington College and the Institute of Education, as well as everyone at Continuum, for your kind support. Thank you in particular to Irene Schwab, Peggy Aylett, Monica Duncan, Brian Duncan, Alice Kaye, Steven Cowan, Tom Woodin, Sophie Yarde-Buller, Vanessa Tyrell-Kenyon, Yvonne Hillier, Jane Spiro and Ron Barnett for your advice and feedback on aspects of this process, and to Jay Derrick and Amos Paran for your detailed and extra-ordinarily generous help throughout this entire project. I also owe you, Amos, a lifetime of thank-yous for supervising the doctorate work this book is based on.

Thank you to all those I interviewed in my reading and reading circle research, particularly the members of the Passenger reading circle; it was such a pleasure to read with you. A huge thank you also to Billy Cowie, author of Passenger, for coming to talk to our reading circle. Finally, thank you to Marco and Eva for more than I would ever have time to put on paper.

List of Figures

1 Eye-Balloon by Odilon Redon, 1878

2 An image of reading

3 Paula’s mind-map

4 Beverley’s mind-map

5 Aisha’s mind-map

6 Luis’ mind-map

Introduction

We read rotas, train tickets, political manifestos, signs on the doors of public toilets, funeral cards, wedding invitations, biology school textbooks, love letters, shop signs, novels, newspapers, receipts, recipes, prescriptions, notes passed in secret, emails we do and do not want, letters from banks, prayers, food packaging, letters on headed paper from debt-collection agencies and tax offices, posters on walls and windows, calendars, community newsletters, Tube maps, draft notifications, flyers, leases, job-application forms, menus, slogans, fridge warrantees, trial transcripts, telegrams, diary notations written months ago in messy handwriting, websites selling nappies and DVDs, road signs and address labels, books about birds, holy books, repair manuals, poems, cinema listings, court summonses and washing instructions. Some of us, like Truman Capote, read ‘too much’ and ‘anything’(editors of the Paris Review, 1957, p. 26)

We read in the mornings and in the middle of the night, when we are busy, lonely, bored, tired, eating breakfast and on the go. We read at home and in workplaces, in bedrooms, toilets, offices, and on factory floors and balconies. We read on buses, trams, trains and cable cars and occasionally on bicycles, horses and mules. We read in meadows and public squares, in coffee shops and on mountaintops, in prisons and on beaches. We have even read in trenches and on the moon.

This is a book about adult reading practices and pedagogies, about novels, reading circles and adult emergent reading development. It is about using reading circles to develop adult emergent reading. It is written by an adult literacy teacher for other adult literacy teachers. It is also for adult literacy teacher-educators; for those with academic, professional or personal interests in adult literacy or reading development; and for those interested in novel reading processes and practices. Though aspects of this book may (I hope) be of interest to anyone teaching or studying literacy or the novel in any language, its focus is on literacy practices, pedagogies and adult literacy provision in the Anglophone worlds.

As an adult literacy teacher I searched for ways to help adults with their reading, and was struck again and again at how every book, every course, every trainer and every teacher seemed to be working from their own particular definition of reading. But, what about the learners’ definitions? How can we help adults with their reading if we don’t know what they mean by reading? This led to research (Duncan, 2009) posing the question: ‘What are we doing when we read, according to adult literacy learners?’ I gathered adult literacy learners’ ideas of what reading is, what it involves and how best we can develop it. This taught me that researching the conceptualizations of adult literacy learners can yield invaluable insights into the learning and teaching of reading. It also indicated that the relationship between fiction and individual reading development warrants further – and closer – exploration. I decided to research what adult literacy learners can tell us about novel reading and what novel reading can tell us about adult reading development.

However, in searching for literature on the novel and reading development, I found large amounts of data on ‘reading circles’: people getting together to read and discuss novels (or other texts) as a group. Most of this research is either historical/ethnographic research into the circles formed autonomously by groups of adults in the past and present, or educational research on the reading circles formed by teachers within compulsory schooling or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) provision. It was hard to find any research on the use of reading circles within adult literacy provision, despite the fact that the research conducted in the school and EFL contexts has found that the reading, thinking and discussion generated by reading circles can develop reading and discussion skills, independent study skills, confidence as both readers and members of the community, the exploration of personal identity and the development of personal reading practices – all arguably goals of adult literacy education. I became increasingly interested in what reading as a group involves, why it appeals to individual readers, and how it relates to both adult literacy development and novel reading. I therefore decided to set up a reading circle in an existing adult literacy class, give the group control over what they read and how they read it, and use this reading circle as a research case study. Reading Circles, Novels and Adult Reading Development is based on this case study, placing it within a larger investigation of reading circles, adult reading practices, the novel and literacy education.

I aim to make one primary argument: that reading circles should be used in, and as, adult literacy provision. To make this argument, I will place the above-mentioned research case study of a reading circle within formal adult literacy provision alongside secondary research on how reading is conceptualized and researched, on past and present reading practices, on how adults and children have learnt to read, on the place of literature in literacy development, and on reading circles. In doing so, I will also make three secondary arguments: that to know more about reading we need to talk to readers; that adult literacy teachers should learn about the history of literacy practices and pedagogies; and that adult literacy provision should be located within a wider adult education offer based on adults’ needs and goals.

Yet more than to make a linear argument (or arguments), my aim is to follow a train of thought around adult reading development, literature, novels and reading circles. This book is therefore an exploration, speculation or meditation on the issues which crop up along the way, such as how reading is defined and researched, the role of reading in adult life, the relationship between literacy and literature, whether reading is primarily an individual act or a communal act, and, crucially, what is actually going on – for any of us – when we read novels.

Chapter 1 examines how different disciplines claim, define and research reading; Chapter 2 inspects the role of reading in adult life, past and present. In Chapter 3, I have traced how we have learnt to read, from Ancient Greece and Rome to the late twentieth-century Anglophone adult literacy campaigns. Chapter 4 will analyse the relationship between literature and literacy (how and why literature has been used to develop literacy skills), while Chapter 5 investigates the reading circles formed in the past and the present, looking particularly at why people choose to read communally. Chapter 6 looks at how we formed a reading circle within an existing adult literacy class and how I used this as a case study for research. Chapter 7 is an analysis of the findings of this main case study: the assertion that reading is five distinct acts (educational, cognitive, imaginative, affective and communicative); the notion that we each have a ‘reading identity’; observations on the relationship between decoding and vocabulary development; how the ‘story’ of the novel is built up by its readers; thoughts on the relationship between fiction, truth and learning (including ideas on ‘the tenacity of the story’ and corresponding ‘disappearance of the author’); and five benefits of reading as a group.

Chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 examine these findings in light of other literature in order to explore reading as experience, reading circles as ideal pedagogy, reading as an individual act versus reading as a communal one and, finally, the pleasures and politics of novel reading and reading circles. This includes investigations of heightened experience formation; collaborative learning, negotiated syllabi and open-ended pedagogy; how reading aloud can develop phonic decoding skills; the novel as an exploration of individual psychology versus the novel as the product of a mass-taste-led industry; the ethics of fiction; and the vital importance of ‘what could have happened’. The hope is that readers will pick and choose the chapters, or the sections of the chapters, that are of particular interest to them. I have suggested further reading at the end of each.

In 2005 Margaret Atwood published a review of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2004). She writes: ‘There is a book club in Reading Lolita, but it’s more like a life raft than an after-work social gathering’(Atwood, 2005, p. 317). This one sentence contains four important and implicit messages. It indicates that the concept of a ‘book club’ is widely understood: book clubs are a common, accepted, ‘normal’ part of Anglo-North American lives. Second, it implies that book clubs can play dramatically different roles in these lives – from ‘life raft’ to ‘after-work social gathering’. It also conjures the question of how anyone could possibly identify the role that a book club plays in someone else’s life: what may seem like an ‘after-work social gathering’ may in fact be a ‘life raft’. The individual reader’s perspective is usually obscured. Finally, for anyone who has read Reading Lolita, or who goes on to read the rest of Atwood’s review, this sentence raises the issue of the relationship between informal book clubs (or reading circles) and formal educational (and political) policy. These four messages are aspects of my rationale for this book. More than this, they are reasons why I feel that literacy – and literary – teaching and research will always be of critical cultural importance.

Chapter 1

The Charted Waters of Reading: How Reading is Claimed, Researched and Defined by Different Fields

If, as an adult literacy teacher, I want to feel better equipped to help learners develop their reading, what should I do? The answer to this question seems to depend on the answers to so many more. What do I need to know? Who should I turn to? Who are the reading experts? What should I read? What are the ‘key readings’ for adult literacy studies? And what are the ‘key readings’ for reading development?.

The answers to these questions are not straightforward. There are many different traditions of reading research, produced by different groups of reading experts, each working from a different definition or understanding of reading. Very simply, reading is claimed by many different fields. What ‘claimed’ means and what exactly is being claimed needs further explanation. Three images come to mind. The first is James Gillray’s famous caricature of imperialism, ‘The Plum Pudding in Danger’ (1805). Napoleon and William Pitt carve up the territories of the world like two greedy schoolboys carving up a large and tempting plum pudding. Yet this representation of ‘claiming’ suggests that the various parties are in cahoots, like Pitt and Napoleon, aware of each other’s desires and so together dividing the spoils. The various experts busily claiming reading show little awareness of one another’s existence, let alone one another’s work.

Perhaps a more appropriate image would be that of the blind men touching the elephant in the parable. As each man is touching a different part (a leg, the trunk, the tail, etc.), they each describe a different creature and a disagreement ensues. Like the various disciplines claiming reading, their descriptions do not match because they are each describing a different creature, a different ‘elephant’. Yet this still implies that there is a complete, sharply delineated and independent creature called an elephant, waiting to be discovered if only the men could work together and share their perceptions. I do not believe there is one definitive ‘reading’ waiting to be discovered.

The final image is a group of fishing boats heading out into a rough and infinite ocean, each boat charting its own waters, each drawing maps and taking measurements, sometimes shouting over at one another but generally paying little attention to the rival charters. Hundreds or thousands of different maps are produced: at times the maps overlap, at times they agree and at times they contradict, but huge territories remain uncharted and no one really knows where the ocean begins and ends. Perhaps more significantly, their acts of exploration shape the very ocean they are hoping to ‘discover’. This, I feel, is closer to representing the situation with reading and its range of busy expert explorers. There is, overall, little communication between the different fields, with their boats of contrasting colours and distinct measuring equipment (and separate journals and conferences and university departments). What they are charting is so vast, mysterious and ever-changing that though their charts may at times overlap, they will also always miss something. Their job will never be done.

This chapter presents five fields of reading experts: psychology and neuroscience (often called ‘scientific studies of reading’), literary theory, social history, social practice theory and education. I will examine the concerns, research methods and some example findings of each, along with the definitions which both inform their concerns and are produced by their findings. I will then briefly discuss examples of interdisciplinary studies before turning to how adult literacy learners themselves have defined reading.

The Scientific Studies of Reading: Psychology and Neuroscience

Psychologists and neuroscientists are concerned with what have been termed the cognitive, physiological or neurological processes of reading. Al-Haytham was a Basra scholar working in eleventh-century Cairo. He used his physiological expertise to draw and theori...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figure 1
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Charted Waters of Reading: How Reading is Claimed, Researched and Defined by Different Fields
• Chapter 2: Reading and Adult Life
• Chapter 3: How We Learnt to Read
• Chapter 4: Literature and Literacy Development
• Chapter 5: Reading Circles
• Chapter 6: Researching a Reading Circle: What We Did
• Chapter 7: Researching a Reading Circle: What We Found
• Chapter 8: Reading as Experience
• Chapter 9: Reading Circles as ‘Ideal Pedagogy’
• Chapter 10: The Individual and the Communal
• Chapter 11: The Pleasures and Politics of Novels and Reading Circles
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Reference
• Index