Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, Volume 1

Humanities

Robert DiYanni, Anton Borst

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119154891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Compétences de rédaction et de présentation

Powerful strategies, tools, and techniques for educators teaching students critical reading skills in the humanities.

Every educator understands the importance of teaching students how to read critically. Even the best teachers, however, find it challenging to translate their own learned critical reading practices into explicit strategies for their students. Critical Reading Across the Curriculum: Humanities, Volume 1 presents exceptional insight into what educators require to facilitate critical and creative thinking skills.

Written by scholar-educators from across the humanities, each of the thirteen essays in this volume describes strategies educators have successfully executed to develop critical reading skills in students studying the humanities. These include ways to help students:

• focus
• actively re-read and reflect, to re-think, and re-consider
• understand the close relationship between reading and writing
• become cognizant of the critical importance of context in critical reading and of making contextual connections
• learn to ask the right questions in critical reading and reasoning
• appreciate reading as dialogue, debate, and engaged conversation

In addition, teachers will find an abundance of innovative exercises and activities encouraging students to practice their critical reading skills. These can easily be adapted for and applied across many disciplines and course curricula in the humanities.

The lifelong benefits of strong critical reading skills are undeniable. Students with properly developed critical reading skills are confident learners with an enriched understanding of the world around them. They advance academically and are prepared for college success. This book arms educators (librarians, high school teachers, university lecturers, and beyond) with the tools to teach a most paramount lesson.

Part I
Frameworks and Approaches

1
Reading Responsively, Reading Responsibly
An Approach to Critical Reading

Robert DiYanni

Critical reading, like critical thinking, is a term much bandied about by educators from elementary education through university study. Like critical thinking, critical reading means different things to different people. What critical reading is and why it matters are genuine educational concerns because reading is a foundational skill for successful learning at every level of schooling; to succeed academically students need to become active, engaged, critical readers. The ability to read critically – to analyze a text, understand its logic, evaluate its evidence, interpret it creatively, and ask searching questions of it – is essential for higher-order thinking. Skill in critical reading builds students’ confidence, enriches their understanding of the world, and enables their successful educational progress. Critical reading informs academic writing, particularly analysis and argument, inquiry and exploration – modes of writing required across academic disciplines.

In this essay I explain what critical reading involves, demonstrate applied critical reading in practice, and provide an approach to teaching students how to become critical readers. Framing this work, contextualizing and amplifying it, are discussions of responsible, responsive, and reflective reading.

We begin, though, by considering what critical reading is and is not, identifying some common student misconceptions.

Being Critical

Students sometimes think their goal in reading is to agree or disagree with a text – to argue and take a stand vis-à-vis its author's idea or claim. Their understanding of “critical” is limited to “critique” and “criticism,” to judging a text, to showing what's wrong with it, identifying its limitations and biases. That more complex work, important as it is, however, comes later, after the initial effort to comprehend what a text says. The first goal of critical reading is to understand. Students achieve understanding through learning to analyze texts carefully and thoroughly. They demonstrate understanding of texts by summarizing and paraphrasing them accurately in writing. These representations of texts need to be done respectfully and responsibly before students engage in any kind of critical challenge to them.

Critical reading focuses not only on what a text says but also on how it says what it does. In teaching our students to read critically, we first teach them to analyze a text's language and selection of detail, its genre, imagery, and form. We teach them to see how sentences and paragraphs are connected grammatically and conceptually, how writers create meaning through their selection of diction and detail, through their choices with respect to organization and development of idea. This fundamental work, however, though necessary, is not sufficient. We must teach our students something more as well.

The larger goals of critical reading include recognizing a writer's purpose, understanding his or her idea, identifying tone, evaluating evidence and reasoning, and recognizing a writer's perspective, position, and bias. Our teaching strategies should focus on helping students see what a writer says through how it is said. And those strategies should also include how well a writer's evidence supports his or her claims. These considerations are fundamental for reading critically in all disciplines.

To do this analytical work well, however, students need to overcome initial resistance to a text, the impulse to contradict, counter, or otherwise challenge it. To develop into effective and productive critical readers, students need at first to remain open to what a text offers. The performance artist/actor Matthew Goulish provides one approach to this kind of textual receptiveness. In his essay “Criticism” from 39 Microlectures (2000), Goulish suggests that when we encounter any work of art, including imaginative works of all kinds (and by extension any verbal text), we should look for “moments of exhilaration.” These special moments of textual encounter may be provoked by something exciting, engaging, or striking in a text, something that stirs our feelings, spurs our thinking, sparks our imagination. Here is how Goulish puts it:

We may then look to each work of art not for its faults and shortcomings, but for its moments of exhilaration, in an effort to bring our own imperfections into sympathetic vibration with these moments, and thus effect a creative change in ourselves. These moments will, of course, be somewhat subjective, so that if we don't find one immediately, we will out of respect look again … In this way we will treat the work of art, in the words of South African composer Kevin Volans, not as an object in this world but as a window into another world. If we can articulate one window's particular exhilaration, we may open a way to inspire a change in ourselves, so that we may value and work from these recognitions. (p. 45)

This way of engaging with a text requires avoiding the tendency to find something wrong with it, something to criticize. Instead, we seek something that's right with the work, something exhilarating, anything at all that might prove useful – a vivid detail we admire, a discernible pattern that aids our understanding, an assertion that provokes our thinking, a question we begin answering for ourselves. Through these “moments of exhilaration” we establish a personal relationship with the text in ways that can lead to “a creative change in ourselves.” The kinds of “recognitions” that arise from openness to a text or work are recognitions as much about ourselves as they are about what we read.

The concept of “moments of exhilaration” can stimulate students’ engagement with a text, animating their thinking about it, opening for them metaphorical “windows into other worlds.” Students’ moments of exhilaration can provide ways into a text for them, a start toward finding something of value in it, something to extend their thinking, deepen their feeling, enrich their experience. By inviting students to identify, explain, and explore their exhilarating moments reading texts, we highlight their responsibility and validate their textual engagements.

We can and should demonstrate for our students the experience Goulish describes by sharing with them our own exhilarating moments of reading. What excites us about a text we have assigned? What have we ourselves found exhilarating about it? Why did we choose to read it in the first place? What possibilities for creative change might it offer our students when they read it in the open and attentive way Goulish suggests?

Responsible Reading, Responsive Reading

Goulish's advocacy of receptiveness to a work's promising possibilities constitutes one aspect of what we might call “responsible reading,” an attitude toward texts and works that goes beyond responding to them subjectively, one that moves, instead, toward being accountable to them, toward a standpoint that Robert Scholes, in Protocols of Reading (1990), describes as “an ethic of reading” (p. 90). Part of this reading ethic involves the responsibility to give a text and its author their due. Our students need to hear out authors and texts, letting them have their say, whether they agree with an author's views or not, whether a text's ideas are accessible or difficult, regardless of who wrote a text, when it was written, or why. We need, in short, to encourage students to respect the integrity of texts, to read them responsibly. Henry David Thoreau, perhaps, has said it best: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (Walden, 1854/1983, p. 403).

This is a foundational principle of critical reading.

In reading responsibly we assume that a text possesses meaning. We give it, from this perspective, the benefit of the doubt. Our goal as ethical readers is to understand what a text means and to accurately represent that meaning in verbal or written form. In reading responsibly we try faithfully to follow an author's line of reasoning and to understand his or her perspective even when – especially when – the author's ideas, concepts, values, and perspectives differ from our own.

Once students have learned to read responsibly by attending carefully to texts, they can begin to assume authority over their reading, exercising power by talking back to the texts they read. They can balance giving texts a fair hearing with offering a judgment and critique earned through thoughtful, reflective analytical reading. In first listening and then responding to texts, students make them their own.

To produce something both respectful of the text and responsive to it that is distinctively the reader's own, George Steiner advocates writing in response to the texts we read. In “The Uncommon Reader” (1996), he suggests that reading responsibly requires that we be “answerable to the text” (p. 6). Our answerability includes both our response to the text and our responsibility for it; it requires an “answerable reciprocity” (p. 6) such that our critical engagement with a text results in a form of commerce with it, a textual dialogue, whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Frameworks and Approaches
• Part II: Critical Reading in the Disciplines
• Index
• EULA