Carolyn M. Jones Medine, University of Georgia

Carolyn M. Jones Medine is professor of religion and a professor at the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She co-edited Teaching African American Religions (Oxford University Press, 2005) with Theodore Trost. Her forthcoming book, co-authored with John Randolph LeBlanc, on religion and politics, transitive spaces, and hybrid identities, will come out in Fall 2012 from Palgrave. Jones Medine writes on southern religion and literatures and on religion and theory.

Utilizing Textual Passages in Split-level Courses

Having undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in "mixed" or "split-level" courses (for us, at the University of Georgia, courses numbered 4000–6000) poses particular problems for professors. The undergraduates in such courses are engaged in a two-fold process of general education and specialization in a major. Since many religion programs, ours included, do not have prerequisites for courses, the undergraduate religion majors and graduate students find themselves in courses with students who do not know anything about the study of religion. This is a frustrating situation for those who are ready for exercises in higher-level thought. The graduate school at my institution does not see such courses as providing core requirements for graduate study, though they may be used as electives, and the graduate school demands that the graduate students have additional requirements that set their education apart from that of the undergraduates.

For the professor, this situation offers many challenges, including how, in essence, to teach on three different levels at once: that is, how to scaffold the course in terms of learning goals and assignments so that those with no background are not overwhelmed while the majors and graduate students are still challenged. In addition, the graduate students are involved in a process of specialization and professionalization, and thus the course should address those issues as well. To accomplish these varied objectives, I have come, over my twenty years of teaching, to concentrate on a common issue for all of my students: that of learning how to read complex texts.

This problem, which is one for both graduate and undergraduate students, is caused by an educational deficit. The National Reading Panel Report suggests that there are five critical areas for effective reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In colleges and universities, we have come to expect that our students have high-level cognition functions like fluency, the ability to read a text accurately and to gain meaning from it, and comprehension, the reason for reading in the first place (Pinnell, 2008). Many of our students, however, do not have the basis for these skills. An article in the Washington Post suggests that only 31 percent of undergraduates and only 41 percent of graduate students were "'proficient' in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts" (Romano, 2005). This is one necessary practice, therefore, in which undergraduates and graduates start essentially at the same level of proficiency.

I use many strategies for reading over the course of a semester, including, for example, double-entry journals, which have students copy certain phrases or sentences from a text and then write down their responses to them (see http://www.adlit.org/strategies/22091/). The strategy I will discuss here, however, emerged from the fact that my students were having problems reading assigned texts, as well as from my need to generate a common but high-level discussion in classes that included both graduates and undergraduates.

For key short passages in a text the class is reading (2–4 paragraphs), I photocopy the passage, setting it — isolating it — in the center of a blank page. I ask students to annotate the text, underlining key words and phrases, as well as ask them to make comments in the margins regarding why these things are important. In addition, I add one to two questions at the bottom of the sheet. These questions push the students to comment on the passage in relation to a theme or idea that it carries forward, to its connection to another part of the text, and/or to its connection to a larger theme and concern of the course.

I prepare the students for this kind of reading by practicing with one or two passages in class before they begin to count for a grade. In both the practice and the "for credit" sessions, I have them sit alone to read and annotate, then I break them into groups of two or three to discuss what they have found. I particularly want graduate students to be in groups with the undergraduates, so I often assign groups comprising both. During small group work, I encourage students to write their insights on the board. Whether they do or not, we return to a plenary discussion in which we work through the elements of the passage and the questions together.

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.

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."

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.

This strategy can be used in any class in which one is focused on a particular text. It could also be used with a visual text (by putting an image up on PowerPoint, for example), a musical one (by playing a piece of a larger musical composition), or a material one (by allowing students to handle and think about the use of a religious object that is used in a tradition). The intent of the strategy is to get students to engage in an act of attention, a discipline that they can transfer to their own practices, and to move all the students from a general reading towards what John Guillory calls "professional reading," reading with vigilance, within the boundaries of an academic tradition, and expecting that one’s reading will be opened to a critical audience (Guillory, 2000).

This strategy also shows students that while there is no one "correct" interpretation of a text, there is a range of better and worse interpretations. It allows students to talk through a range of interpretations together before they have to venture one. Since these assignments are "low stakes" ones, they give students practice for writing a longer paper in which they will do this kind of analysis over several passages in one text or across two or more texts.