You Gotta Be the Book - Introduction and Chapter 1

"You Gotta Be the Book": Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents
Jeffrey Wilhelm

Intro and Chapter 1

Many (most? all?) English teachers entered the field partly because of a love of literature. Our love of literature can translate into a contagious attitude that will transfer to our students. Unfortunately, that same love of literature can make our lives as teachers difficult because of the disconnect that occurs when our students don't share our love. This can seem bewildering to us. We need to seek the source of this indifference or even hatred for reading. What experiences do readers and non-readers have that result in vast difference in attitude?

If we look to children who are read to, we can begin to see the roots of these differences. For children, reading time is a joyous time. More importantly, it is interactive. Children do not sit quietly and submit to the story being read to them; they take part in the story, add to it, memorize it. By learning these skills at an early age, they are better prepared for high school studies than their classmates who are not read to.

However, this is not the complete answer. There are also students who love to read on their own, but hate to read in school. We can only blame some failure in their education for this problem. What are we doing wrong as teachers if an independent book lover shuts down while at school? If students see reading as something done to them – simply memorizing information for questions on a test – then we need to change how we teach literature.

Much of the blame can be placed on the use of New Criticism in the classroom. When literature can only be read one way correctly – when the teacher is the final arbiter of the truth – then the fun of reading is eliminated. Wilhelm comments that he didn't even know that New Criticism was a theory (14) . This is true of many teachers who actually use this theory as their default pedagogy.

The following three tenets of teaching literature can help extract us from the New Criticism mire.

1. Reading should not seem like something that is forced upon students or seem like a job.
2. Reading should be more than decoding words.
3. Reading should be seen as an active (interactive) task.
   

Wilhelm relies heavily on Louise Rosenblatt and her foundations of reader response theory. Reading is a transaction between the text and the reader; it is not a one-way transmission (19). I am intrigued by the notion that it is a reader's stance towards the text that determines what is taken away from the text – not the text itself. Efferent reading is done for the express purpose of taken away content from the text; aesthetic reading is done so the reader can live through the text (20). It should be noted that it is not necessarily a bad thing to partake in efferent reading. For example, I am using this stance while reading this particular task.
Rosenblatt tells us that it is the reader's responsibility to interact with the text – to take an active role in reading. Wilhelm is interested in how we can teach students to do this. He will begin his research by showing how successful readers read. This is a similar method that has been used to study writing skills.