Carolyn Jones Medine, University of Georgia

Carolyn Jones Medine is an associate professor in the religion department and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Her research concentration is in arts, literature, and religion, particularly Southern and Southern African-American women. She is the coeditor of Teaching African American Religion, and has written numerous articles. Medine’s interests are in literature and theory. She has been a workshop staff member, coordinator and consultant for the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion.

Reading “at the Speed of a Writer’s Pen”: A Strategy for Close Reading

Getting students to become self-conscious readers and writers is a perennial problem and is the key to undergraduate research (UR) in religion, literature, and theory. Most of my students are working in literature and theory for their undergraduate research and they need to master not just close reading, but how to engage the arguments of texts and to compare and contrast those with the arguments of other texts. I address this by first reading to students a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Random House, 1996), in which the patient advises reading at the “speed of a [writer’s] pen” (94). To get the students to do this, I developed a strategy based on one I learned from Todd Penner of Austin College.

Though this strategy is one I employ in the undergraduate classroom, I also use it for helping students to prepare for more independent UR as well. Most students at the University of Georgia who are working on undergraduate research are writing a thesis or working on a paper in an independent study. This strategy helps them to learn to read texts closely but also to engage theoretical and critical work on the subject area that they have chosen. Learning not just to quote outside sources, but also to evaluate them, to compare and contrast them to the arguments of other sources, and to put those arguments in fruitful tension and conversation requires close reading.

While Todd Penner grades the annotations students write in whole books, I ask students, early in the research, to annotate key passages from three to four texts. I give the parameters of the passage (page number and beginning/ending phrases). The instructions are:

• Read the passage carefully. Underline the key words, lines, and phrases.
• Comment in the margins on why these are important words, lines, and phrases.
• Photocopy the page in question to turn in.

On the back of the page, students write a paragraph in response to an interpretative question. They explain the significance of particular wording, themes, characters, or moments in the passage, their relation to the work, and analyze those using theory we have covered.

I first used this technique in a “Religion and Literature” course. For the first exercise, I let the class break into groups and compare their insights and work together to refine the paragraph answer. After the group work concluded, we discussed the first of these exercises and talked about reading strategies that worked for them. The students suggested:

• Underlining and using margins to hold a conversation with the author. Some said that in books that are well spaced on the page, they may also write between the lines of the text.
• Reading aloud, to oneself or to another, to sense the beauty of a passage and to draw oneself, if reluctant, into the text.
• Marking passages with sticky-notes: This can be confusing with too many notes, so one might color-code the passages by theme or character, make key-word notes on the sticky, or mark only powerful passages, forcing one to discern.
• Finding the right atmosphere for reading: being in the same place, in a context that “fit” the work, helped one student to focus.
• Summarizing key points at the bottom of the page or on the blank pages of the book: Use the blank front pages for notes and, after finishing the text, summarize key information on the back blank pages, including page numbers.
• Underlining and illustrating the page, not with words but with drawings to symbolize key points.
• Keeping a reading journal that contains insights on readings for a course or academic year. Copying a passage into a journal word-for-word may help one to enter its rhythm and meaning.

These student-generated strategies expanded upon my original assignment in ways that address a variety of learning styles.

When I begin working with students in undergraduate research (UR), I ask them to keep a reading journal. This tool allows them to focus their insights and observations about the text in ways that facilitate our discussions of the material. In helping them learn how to engage the texts critically, I share these close reading strategies to help them focus their work.

This strategy of focusing on a close reading of the text operates on two levels that I want in all my classes, as well as for those undertaking undergraduate research. First, I can analyze it using the ICE Assessment model. The ICE model was developed by Sue F. Young and Robert Wilson, primarily for the high school classroom. Its goal is to enable teachers to be able to generate rubrics in order to make quantitative assessments of what, to students, often seem to be qualitative judgments. The tool is based on cognitive development theory, like the cognitive dimension of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains, as it builds from Ideas (Information and Items that in Bloom’s taxonomy students come to remember, understand, or order, for example) to Connections (being able to do the tasks of comparison and contrast; also in Bloom’s taxonomy, to describe, combine, and interpret) to Extension (internalizing learning and using it in creative ways; for Bloom, to engage in metacognitive knowledge, like construction). In my “Religion and Literature” class, the students engage the passage in terms of its Ideas: what it says. Then, they look for Connections to the rest of the text: why is this moment important in the text? One might also ask them to connect the passage to a key passage in another text. Finally, they make Extensions, analyzing the content in terms of a theory or theme.

Close reading of texts also operates on a second important level by prompting students to engage in what Peter Elbow calls the “believing game,” which asks them to be welcoming to new ideas. The believing game moves students away from their assumption that critical thinking means being skeptical and adversarial and moves them toward a better understanding of critical/creative thinking as a way to truly engage texts by asking us to find flaws in our own thinking and to choose among competing interpretations (Elbow, 5). The believing game also asks students to read and think as, and with, the “other” — which, for me, is crucial when engaging racial-ethnic texts particularly — before either complaining or moving to decision.

Students doing UR are already involved in the believing game, working on topics that they have generated, usually coming from their experience in my classes. I must admit that I took for granted that such students were already able to read closely, critically, connectively, and complexly. I was sometimes wrong. In undergraduate research with a student, I am working with and towards the student’s own goal, constructing a set of readings that move students towards that research goal, whatever the ultimate outcome — such as producing and presenting a paper. Many of my UR students have had little background in theories of religion, and developing their capacity to engage in close textual reading and to apply theory to what they read is where we are able to develop their analytical skills with regard to particular passages. They want to move quickly to Extension/Metacognition, but they need to learn to “differentiate” to determine the “appropriate use” of theory on content.

As in the “Religion and Literature” class, I ask students engaged in undergraduate research (UR) to concentrate on a particularly important passage and to annotate it. The student brings that annotated passage to our conversation. Whether reading a literary work or a theoretical text, she must be able to put into conversation the arguments of that passage with the text and the significance of that passage for the text compared with another text. For example, this semester I have a student reading the works of Rudolph Otto (The Idea of the Holy), Mircea Eliade (Sacred and Profane and Cosmos and History), and Joseph Campbell (Hero with a Thousand Faces). The reading practice has helped him to focus on key passages in order to connect Otto’s sense of the holy, the numinous, with Eliade’s notions of sacred and profane, and to connect those to Campbell’s monomyth about the role of the hero. But it also helps him to differentiate between these thinkers in a more sophisticated way. He has had a paper accepted for the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion meeting and is working on a second paper to submit to a journal.

In undergraduate research, my overall goal is that students attain a sense of mastery over the idea that interests them. Michael Ondaatje, whose words helped shape the teaching strategy outlined in this article, once talked with Willem Dafoe, the actor, about writing The English Patient. His English patient’s insistence on reading a book at the speed it was written puts the reading in the space of the “other” and opens the compassionate and critical faculties. His thoughts on rereading his own work, on editing, illuminate what this strategy tries to teach. Ondaatje says that writing is framing: “Recognizing a new arc.” He continues: 

I am outside myself. I’m looking at [my work] much more clinically and saying, okay, get out of this scene quicker. There’s that element of technique and dramatics and timing and “lighting” in those last stages.…[Y]ou’re writing at a different level, you’re shaping it, you’re aware of a scene in the context of this big arc. You are not just creating a moment. … Small scenes that build and merge, and then you recognize the larger context. … I love those moments. [A] curtain opens for a second. You get a further glimpse into a truth.

Stephen Brookfield described a critical thinker as someone who is in the habit of attempting to identify and examine the assumptions that underlie his or her habitual ways of thinking about something, and the assumptions underlying habitual ways of acting in situations — identifying and scrutinizing them as to whether or not they are well-grounded in reality. In addition to being able to identify assumptions, the other facet I try to develop in students is someone who is able quite easily to slip into alternative perspectives and inhabit other interpretive frameworks — someone who can see a situation from a number of different angles, put themselves in another person’s head and see through their eyes, and do some role-taking. These two very difficult intellectual, or cognitive, functions are both encouraged and supported by careful attention to helping students develop their close reading skills (Brookfield).