An internal struggle over discursive reading in class

There's a discussion that's been ongoing in my Lit for Older Children class which is unresolved. As any educator who's been through school themselves in the last 30 years knows, teaching is now focused on student centered approaches. While I'm amazed that this approach is still talked about as if it were novel, it isn't new. Student centered approaches to teaching began gaining ground in the 70s and 80s as constructivist theories of learning percolated from the university teacher training systems into the schools. Given the long serving terms of classroom teachers and the lack of pressure to change or update their strategies (which is totally debatable but I'll tow that line here for the sake of argument), I can see how it may take time for large scale changes in pedagogy to take place.

Since I'm learning about literacy and the teaching of literacy, the focus of discussions in my classes almost always relates to reading and what came up Tuesday was the idea that a teacher should stand out of the way as much as possible. Let the kids discuss and carry on about their reading. Let uncomfortable silences last until one of them breaks it. Let the students be wrong about a text if only so they might reflect on that wrongness and learn from it. There is, to my delight, profound disagreement about this approach and how far to take it. Strangely, I find myself on the more student-centered side of the argument. It's not somewhere I expected to be.

The overall philosophy of a student centered approach is a constructivist one. The teacher is not the primary source of knowledge in the classroom and instead fits a role more like a curator. I should create a learning environment and instructional events which provide the students with a chance to figure it out themselves. Please know that I'm actually highly critical of constructivism but mostly because it's been dumbed down into a kind of "exposure" teaching which leads to all kinds of abuses.

Anyway, I'm on the side that you can and should let the kids have free ranging discussions about the books you read in class. I think these discussions can accomplish a number of curriculum goals without you having to sit down and make the kids identify specific things for your lesson. Through tutoring and from recalling my own experiences, I see a lot of teachers following a path where they lay out something for a student to find in a text e.g., theme, mood, tone, metaphor, allusion. This results in a lesson where the kids are doing a search and retrieve for specific tidbits which the teacher has identified as important. In my idealized classroom (I admit I'm a few years removed and lack experience) kids would still end up talking about theme and mood and tone and all the rest but it would occur as a product of a good conversation about the readings. If you ask them to pick out some controversial issues in a book (race, class, gender, etc) they'll end up talking about themes. If you let the students discuss what did and didn't seem authentic to them they'll discuss issues of tone, characterization, and setting. By letting them get around to discussing a text organically, you then open up chances to teach about the things your curriculum should include. It's not a panacea and I'm the first one to acknowledge there aren't any silver bullets in education but a discursive class has much more engagement and much more variety.

But what if they're wrong? That's a question that pops up from the majority in my class who are skeptical of this approach. Now, they're teaching students who are much younger than I ever taught. That could be a big part of it. A younger kid my take leaps of logic that aren't really coherent with anything going on in a text. One of my classmates keeps talking about how her students lie about making personal connections to a text. She talks about this a lot, come to think of it. Maybe she's a bad example. The pushback comes from the need to not waste time and that's something which I think I have forgotten about teaching. The clock is always ticking on your class and the calendar is alway flipping toward testing season. This puts a lot of pressure on teachers to make every class productive and to make every class count for something. If the kids spend 20 minutes of a 45 minute class in a discussion unrelated to the text, shouldn't the teacher step in? I think that's reasonable. I'm not dogmatic about literature discussions.

The objections do not end there, however. Teachers complain that they can't run a reading circle for two dozen students at once and they can't monitor every reading circle if they break into small groups. Without a producible output, like a sheet reporting the themes and allusions and such, it's difficult for the teacher to know if the group made any real breakthroughs or had any substantive discussion. Again, I don't have a great response to this. In my mind, this kind of classroom has to be continually modeled and practiced throughout the school year (another time sensitive problem). It relies on classroom norms which might be impossible in certain situations. I don't think this approach would have worked effectively in my small-group special education classroom without significant modification.

Somehow, I'm still in favor of open ended, student centered discussions. I'd like for students to have the opportunity to be more of themselves in class. I want them to feel responsible to each other for their learning instead of to me or their parents. I'd like them to have debates and disagreements over issues raised in a text. While that may not be necessary to help them check off required standards, I think it is necessary for them to be educated.

I'll close out with a link to a new book challenging common notions surrounding the concept of reason. Typically (and classically) reason is put on a pedestal as the best humans can do for noodling through complex problems. Reason is decidedly a solo task in which a person considers her or her own actions, choices, etc. Work on cognitive biases and behavioral studies are beginning to chip away at that pedestal pointing out that human reason is deeply flawed and subject to all kinds of environmental influences. In The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding, Mercier and Sperber propose that reason is not a superior means for an individual to think through problems. It is, instead, a system meant to be used in interactions with others. They argue reason is used to justify our thoughts and actions towards others and to convince others to think and act as we do. We use reasons other people produce to to justify their actions to convince ourselves of things. If I can borrow from Rosenblatt for a moment, reason is transactional. Classrooms ought to reflect that.