Religious Studies News

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.