Entry 2: Reader Response

Readings: 

Louise Rosenblatt, “The Challenge of Literature”

“The Lens of Reader Response”

Mary Styslinger & Emily Eberlin, “Where We Are: Responsive Reading Using Edmodo”

Bridging English, Chapter 5 Review
Susan Henneberg, "Dimensions of Failure in Reader Response"
Maureen McLaughlin, "Critical Literacy as Comprehension"

Fundamentally, Rosenblatt argues we, as ELA teachers, are teaching the human experience. In this light, the canon still 'matters' because “Works of the past […] engender a major psychological question: What are the basic human traits that persist despite social and cultural changes?” (13). While not a lot of my graduate English studies' subjects are inherently transferable to secondary education, one idea that has come up a few times is that both the reader and text are active in their own ways during the reading process. As Rosenblatt puts it, literature is a “living context” (24). Readers have individual proficiency and experiences that shape the literature they can grow from reading; while the process is on the surface a temporary experience, it is actually quite persistent as what is experienced (ideally) stays with the reader. Essentially, the power of literature only comes in part from the texts themselves; students have the power to grow and we as teachers direct their employment of that power. This, in the context of last week's readings, explains why we can teach lessons on more intuitive texts and still have students learn from them. On that subject, McLaughlin's article details several suggestions on how to have students exploring the texts they currently comprehend critically. I think it is always important to remember we can draw on the resources we currently have; students can critically approach any text, not only the classics.

One thing these readings made me think about was this recent 'cult of relatability' I have noticed as a guy attending graduate studies almost a decade after he should have been. There is this idea that a text being 'relatable' inherently gives it value. At first, this seems to be an idea in line with reader-response theory, and may well have been influenced by reader-response exercises in secondary school, but the danger lies in if ones considers 'relatable texts' in a binary, meaning texts that are not 'relatable' have NO value. Are we overdoing it with RR? Are kids only taking their personal responses into account? "The Lens of Reader Response" shared similar concerns, proposing, “I was guilty of imposing a theoretical framework with no room for deviation” (31). The writer's proposed solution to eliminating the binary is to teach students what they are doing when responding to texts. The meaning of a reading comes from the text meeting the individual in RR theory, but RR is only one critical lens to apply to literature. This is why RR is an excellent springboard that should be used with essentially all literature taught, but we should aim to eventually teach critical synthesis; reading is simply not an entirely egocentric exercise.

With regard to Styslinger's and Eberlin's article, the title immediately made me pay attention, as Edmodo has been used frequently in the classes I have observed and seems like a very important tool for students in the current classroom. Maybe that will not be true forever, but it’s certainly here now. The article gives a lot of food for thought, especially in its last paragraph, asking the big questions facing us right now. Particularly, I find myself wondering about the query, “what does plagiarism mean to a student who has always been able to find the answer to a question on the internet?” (28). This is a problem we cannot solve in the existing model of ELA we teach in our classrooms. It’s only going to change more as products like Google Glass go mainstream and make the internet even more easily accessible. This idea of always being connected changes reader response too; students will be able to know data at any time and potentially understand texts more rapidly, which means we have to focus more than ever on how they make meaning of the things they read so they find purpose in what they are doing in our classes.

One of my peers mentioned on our GroupMe that she noticed CP students need far more RR than she expected before moving on to formal analysis. The 15 minute plans I thought up in 547 may not be valid depending on the students. During my first rotation's teaching week, which is coming up very quickly, I will likely be trying to make the most of time and merge Response with Analysis. This class is behind, especially on their writing levels, so they need more scaffolding than I anticipated during the reading. Henneberg's article provided some insight in to what techniques I might need to employ in response to the failure of one of my lessons. My CT has provided an invaluable resource in an audiobook recording of our novel, which has some amusing direction choices that the students are appreciating so far, and its chapters are also very short and at a low reading level. From this point, using Henneberg's advice, I need to keep an eye on a couple of students who are known troublemakers in case they need to be isolated, but I also need to keep the conversations we have on track from the very beginning in order to maintain classroom management.

The students need engagement with the text before we move on to Formal Analysis, so I will need to focus on making sure those things happen in that order. This is nothing new, but now that I have a better idea of how a classroom flows, the challenge in making it happen is more obvious. At first, I plan to stick very closely to my CT's lesson structures to try and gauge my students better from the front of the room. The review of Bridging English was helpful in this regard, as I was able to list several methods that I might put to use the week after next in order to keep the students engaged in their reading.

This set of questions is an artifact from my third week of Internship A. The questions themselves are practice for the 9th grade EOC exams, in response to the class's Article of the Week on the recent Louisiana floods. At first the inclusion of this artifact may seem off topic, but the important thing is that going over the questions got the students thinking about our recent flood experience here in Columbia. It opened up into a Personal Trigger exercise very naturally, and the class had a very welcome discussion after completing the questions. This is one of those teachable moments my CT was able to anticipate and adapt to very quickly, and an important aspect of reader response. The students were engaged for the remainder of the class period.