Isolating a Passage from a Reading in “Mixed” or “Split-level” Courses

Isolating a Passage from a Reading in “Mixed” or “Split-level” Courses - Learning to Read Well

Page 2 of 3

The strategy described previously emerged because I found that students often miss key elements in a text, whether that text is theoretical or literary, and that students do not pay attention to authorial voice and intent. This strategy is an attempt to get them to focus their reading. Isolated on a page, without anything else around it, the text becomes a center. Since it is short, the students can read it very carefully. This exercise assumes that they are doing the class reading on their own, but what is important to me is that it makes reading a communal process that involves and discovers agency.

I adopted this strategy after realizing that my students do not "mark up" their books and, thereby, converse with them. At the same time, I was thinking through Patricia O’Connell Killen’s handout from a Wabash Center workshop on reading, one which sets out the multiple processes that reading well demands.

Patricia O’Connell Killen, in her handout "Read Chapter 2 of 'X' and Come to Class Prepared," says that when we are asking student to do this we mean a variety of things, including:

Recognize words and when one does not know a word
Recognize the meaning of the visual layout of a chapter
Attempt to summarize as one reads
Recognize argumentation
Discriminate between what is in the text and what we bring to the text
Construct meaning from the text, consider the kind of text being read, and the implications of that genre for constructing meaning

All these processes are part of "active" reading.

Robert Detweiler’s Breaking the Fall: Religious Reading of Contemporary Fiction (HarperCollins, 1989) and a Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion-sponsored workshop on "Women of Color in the Religious Studies Classroom" also led to this strategy. In that workshop, we discussed reading Phillis Wheatley’s "On Being Brought From Africa to America," a text I often teach and one that students tend to read on its surface, missing its subversive strategy. To remedy that, I turned to Detweiler, who stresses the importance of reading communities, though these communities may be temporarily gathered around a text and then disperse after reading it — a structure that is not unlike a class setting. Reading the Wheatley poem in a community, for example, gathers students around a text and opens their ears to a voice that often seems foreign to them, one that they do not expect to have agency, since Wheatley is a slave. In the reading community, they probe her language together, without fear of being right or wrong and/or alone in facing this "other."

In our forthcoming article, Melanie Harris, Helen Rhee, and I write:

The strategy is to get the students to read this poem "as the other." That is to say, their first response is to read as white Bostonians read, to read the surface meaning: that Wheatley is grateful to be a slave because she became a Christian. The second step is, however, to look at the language of the text, its diction and construction, as well as how it uses cultural references to find and understand Wheatley’s voice. This voice is claiming an equality with her readers that they might find startling. Doing this kind of reading can be difficult for students who have not read African-American literature, particularly of this period.

The strategy works because it brings together students who are reading at a variety of levels, whether they are at a stage at which they can only summarize or at which they read interpretatively, and allows them to contribute their skills. Being in the group means that the group product involves and necessitates all levels of reading; this dissolves the tension between the undergraduates and the graduates, since all contribute to and "own" what the group produces.

Religious Studies News