"Complex Human Activities Taking Place in Complex Human Relationships"

by David Bloome, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

It is not unusual to hear teachers, administrators, and parents of adolescents make comments such as "So-and-so can't read" or "So-and-so won't read." Sometimes students themselves make such comments. The two pronouncements are, of course, not equivalent. The first refers to a lack of ability, the second to a lack of motivation. Whether a student can't or won't read, we label such students "struggling readers." As a former teacher of a reading program for middle school students and as a former director of a reading clinic, I have also made such comments and used the term struggling readers, especially when frustrated with one or more of my students who would not be reading what I wanted them to read in the way I wanted them to read, when and where I wanted.

Struggling Teacher

I would try everything I had learned from my reading education classes and textbooks. For those students who appeared to lack ability, I would use countless diagnostic tools to try to locate a missing skill or processing deficit and then teach to that skill or process. For those students who had the abilities, skills, and strategies but who would not read, I would seek out texts on topics of interest to them, help them pick out their own books, provide tangible incentives (otherwise known as bribes), and in moments of extreme frustration, threaten them with dire consequences if they refused to become motivated. Occasionally such tactics worked, but for the most part they did not.

Sometimes my struggling readers would begin to make advances or begin reading a "high-interest" text, but the change did not last long. Sometimes they would pretend to be doing the reading I wanted them to do, engaging in what is called "mock participation." At other times, the students and I would engage in "procedural display," concertedly displaying to each other those behaviors that made it look like we were immersed in a successful lesson. I would lead a discussion or organize an activity, working hard at teaching, while they would respond, working hard at being accommodating students―but there was usually little true engagement in the substance of the lesson. We were more like actors putting on a play called "Doing Lesson" without having much understanding of what the script meant.¹ In the end, my frustration with my struggling readers would lead me to characterize too many of them as having "special needs," referring them for special education programs.²

There are problems with the statements "So-and-so can't read" and "So-and-so won't read." They are blinders that prevent us from seeing and understanding our students and the act of reading. When we say "So-and-so can't read" or "So-and-so won't read," we are implicitly defining reading as an autonomous process, a process that stands outside of and is separable from the activity in which it is embedded―as if reading were a thing in and of itself. But it is not. Reading is always about reading something and doing something. Reading is as much about social relationships as it is about getting information from texts, as much about social and cultural identity as it is about communicating with others.³ We make a serious mistake when we treat reading as if it were a set of isolated skills and processes, unknowingly creating the very reading problems that frustrate us as teachers. We need to change how we understand reading, and we need to change how we see our students.⁴ As Robinson points out in the quote that begins this article, reading is a complex human activity taking place in complex human relationships, and when we treat it as otherwise, we distort it, ourselves, and our students.

A Complex Activity

Instead of viewing reading as an autonomous process, we need to view reading as inseparable from the activity in which it is embedded. Consider music, for example. Our students are often deeply involved with music, knowing the lyrics to hundreds if not thousands of songs. Large numbers of young people are engaged with the spoken word, rap, and other "underground" activities. Yet few adults and few students consider such activities "reading." Neither do they think of their religious activities as "reading" even though many of our students regularly attend church, mosque, temple, or synagogue and are very familiar with central religious texts. On a weekly basis they may hear interpretations of such religious texts, and they may engage in such discussions themselves. Similarly, consider activities related to sports, entertainment, friendships, family, and other passions that students may have outside of school. In each of these domains, reading is deeply embedded in the activities, inseparable from them; and if reading were extracted from an activity, it would lose its meaningfulness, and its fundamental character would change.

These are, of course, different ways of reading than we do in school.⁵ The reading that students do in school is a part of an activity we can call "doing school": getting grades, performing lessons, taking tests, competing against other students to be placed in higher tracks and classes, getting certified, making it through the day sitting at a desk, and being defined as a student. The intent here is not to criticize school or schooling but only to point out that reading in school is an inseparable part of doing school; and it is a different kind of activity and a different way of reading from the activities and readings done elsewhere. It may be the case that if we want students to acquire powerful ways of reading, then we will have to engage them in activities in school settings that get beyond doing school.

As well, a second issue needs to be discussed before getting to some practical responses to our students who struggle with school reading: "acting on" versus being "acted upon." For example, consider the reading pedagogy of Paulo Freire,⁶ a Brazilian educator who saw reading as a means to analyze the worlds in which we live. He saw reading as a way to help identify how we act on those worlds to make our lives and our communities better and to take control over our lives. For Freire, reading the word and reading the world always go together; it is a way to act on the world.

Michael: A Case in Point

It can also be the case that reading can be used to oppress, control, and depress people. Consider Michael, an eighth grade student I had in a reading class. He was placed in my reading class because his test scores were low. At the time, the reading program I was using treated reading as an accumulation of isolated, hierarchical skills and tested students on each skill, only allowing them to move forward after they had mastered the target skill. Michael was not making much progress. So I sat down with him and asked him to go over one of his diagnostic tests with me.

The particular test was on "understanding character." He had to read a short passage and then answer three multiple-choice questions about the main character in the passage, a character who was a "cranky" student. Michael got all three questions wrong.

The first question asked what evidence there was in the passage that indicated that the protagonist was "cranky." Michael understood the question, eliminated potential answers as not being consistent with his knowledge of "cranky" students, and selected one consistent with his experience of such students.

The second question asked him to select a word that best described the protagonist. Michael chose "careless" because the other items did not fit based on his knowledge of such students, and he thought that the protagonist could "care less" about school.

The third question asked Michael to predict what the protagonist would do if asked by his father to run an errand. He selected the answer in which the protagonist agreed to do the errand immediately after completing his homework. Michael's reasoning was that while the protagonist had no intention of doing his homework or running the errand, confrontation with one's father was not smart and the protagonist would lie instead. Michael got the answer wrong. In the correct answer the student told his father to ask someone else and to stop picking on him. I had to agree with Michael that the most likely outcome of such a statement to our fathers would have been severe and swift punishment, something that any student would have avoided. Yet that was the correct answer.

None of the correct answers reflected Michael's real-world knowledge. Indeed, by using his knowledge of the world, Michael got all three answers wrong and was directed by the reading program to remediate on that skill. This pattern of failing these skill tests and being directed to remediate played itself out again and again for Michael. No wonder he was frustrated. No wonder he had begun to hate "reading." It had stigmatized him as a low-level (in his terms, "stupid") student. It took him away from his friends. It made him doubt himself and continuously labeled him a failure.

I asked another student, Samantha, who seemed to be making progress, to take the same test. She got all three answers correct. I asked her to explain her answers, and I asked her about Michael's answers and explanations. She told me that although Michael's answers were better than hers, it wasn't what "they" (the test makers) wanted. She could differentiate between what made sense given her world and Michael's world and the world of the test makers. One had to suspend what one knew, and one had to read in the way the test makers wanted.

In Michael's case, a particular way of reading (test reading) functioned as a gatekeeper to higher academic opportunities and caused him to lose confidence as a student and learner. In Samantha's case, it was only because she had analyzed the situation and had strategized about how to act on that situation (the test-taking situation) that she had been able to avoid the same consequences that Michael endured. Not only could Samantha read the test text, but she could read the test makers and the school. Text and context are inseparable. When we teach reading as if it were only about reading the text, we make our students vulnerable to the same kind of consequences Michael suffered―they "can't" read and they "won't" read.

Reading for Understanding: Model Examples

A number of middle school and high school teachers have created models of reading programs that emphasize reading as a way to act on the world and that maintain and exploit the inseparability of reading and the broader activity in which it is embedded. Many of these models of reading education focus on epistemological understanding (what might be called critical literacy) and social action. I briefly mention a few here and provide references for further detail and additional examples.

A good example of reading for epistemological understanding is described by Yeager, Floriani, and Green (1998). In Beth Yeager's middle-level classroom, reading is embedded in "detective-like" activities. Students have to read a text and use evidence from that text to make an argument about what happened (either in history or in the story). They challenge each other by questioning whether the evidence cited can warrant a particular argument or whether that same evidence might warrant alternative arguments. Reading is a form of argumentation, and students learn how to argue (and read) in different ways based on the disciplinary domain of the activity. That is, they learn that arguing and reading in history is different from that in literature, is different from that in science, etc. What they also learn is that "truth" is not received knowledge but rather part of a process of argumentation in which they can be involved and share ownership.

Another example of reading for epistemological understanding comes from an after-school program run by Daneell Edwards (2005). Working with a group of African-American female middle school students, Edwards investigated the cultural politics of hair. How one wears one's hair is not simply a matter of looking good, but reflects histories of racial and cultural politics involving issues of pride, assimilation and cultural distinctiveness, cultural identity and affiliation, and the intense struggle and debate surrounding models of female beauty. The students read about these dynamics as part of doing each other's hair and as part of understanding how they wanted to present themselves. Reading became a tool of cultural and historical analysis directly linked to the students' social, cultural, and gender identities.

The emphasis in Nancy Cheevers's middle school language arts classroom was on the relationship between language and power (Cheevers, 1994). Throughout the year the students examined the different ways that language could be used to constrain people, to privilege some people over others, to create and enact bias and discrimination, and to create solidarity and community building. Whenever they read a novel, a short story, or a Shakespearean play, they examined how the language they were reading created power relations among people (both the characters in the play and the implications for people beyond the text). They used such insights in their own investigations and reports of language use in their own communities. Reading was inseparable from critical analysis of both the worlds represented in their texts and the worlds in which they lived.

An example of reading as social action comes from Ann Egan-Robertson's work with a group of young women who had been struggling with school (see Egan-Robertson, 1998). The young women formed a club during part of their school day and began discussing the problems that they and other teenagers faced in their city. They selected problems and issues to investigate, interviewed community leaders who were involved in addressing such issues, read related books and other texts, wrote about these issues, and published a small book discussing the issues. Reading was not an isolated activity, but part of their efforts both to understand some of the problems teenagers faced and to gain resources that they could make available to other teenagers.

In New York City, Marci Torres engaged her middle school students in ethnographic studies of their own communities (see Mercado, 1998; Torres, 1998). The students investigated a broad range of topics including social service agencies, family life, cultural life, and the people in their communities. The students had to learn how to conduct ethnographic studies; they had to practice note taking, interviewing, and observation techniques; and they had to read methodological texts as well as ethnographic reports. Through their ethnographic reports, they made the cultural life of their communities visible to themselves, to the school, and to the community itself. In many ways, doing so was a radical act. Instead of accepting negative views of themselves and their communities, the students took control over how they, their families, and their communities would be represented. They would not accept invisibility or deficit characterizations. Both in the classroom and at conferences outside the school, they presented their findings.

In Toby Curry's combined social studies and language arts seventh grade classroom, despite her best efforts to have students use their background knowledge to study academic topics, Curry found that the predominant form of reading and reporting was text reproduction. For example, a student from India who had to write a report on India did so by copying a passage from an encyclopedia word for word. To counter text reproduction as a mode of reading and writing, the students were engaged in a series of ethnographic reports on their communities. They read and discussed anthropological texts on cultural relativity, cultural variation, and ethnographic methods. They conducted ethnographic studies of music, food gathering (shopping), community events, community storytelling, and community history and then shared and read each other's reports, creating cross-cultural, comparative reports (Curry & Bloome, 1998). But the pedagogical model did not stop there. Students were then asked to address academic topics, such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, presidential elections, etc., by exploring related topics in their own communities and then integrating the knowledge they acquired from their own communities with the knowledge they obtained by reading academic texts (e.g., their textbooks or books from the library).

It is perhaps ironic that in each of the examples above, the powerful ways of reading were promulgated by not emphasizing reading per se. The students do a great deal of reading but as part of a broader activity, one in which they act on the worlds in which they live. The students may not be aware that they are learning powerful ways of reading and of using reading to act on the world, but the teachers are explicitly aware of this, plan for it, provide resources, support such uses of reading, and monitor its occurrence.

Last Words About New Approaches

To sum up, I've suggested that we need to change our approach to teaching reading as if it were an autonomous activity made up of isolated skills. Instead, we need to teach reading as part of a broad range of activities that are meaningful to students, that position them as people who act upon the worlds in which they live, rather than merely being acted upon by others and by various social institutions. We need to design our instructional programs to eschew mock participation, procedural display, text reproduction, passive stances toward reading, and the isolation of reading from the complex human activities and complex human relationships in which it is inherently embedded. As the classroom models I briefly described here show, there are powerful and exciting ways to approach reading. We need to familiarize ourselves with these models and many others, adapting them to our own classrooms, our students, and their communities.

¹For further discussion of mock participation and procedural display, see Bloome, Puro, and Theodorou (1989) and Unsworth (1988).

²For further discussion of the misdiagnosis of students to special education and the overrepresentation of students of color in such programs, see Artiles, Harry, Reschly, and Chinn (2002).

³For further discussion of reading as a social process, see Barton and Hamilton (1998), Bloome (1985), Green and Weade (1990), and Richardson (2003).

⁴For further reading on models of reading, see Street (1995).

⁵For examples and discussion of different cultural models of reading, see Barton and Hamilton (1998), Boyardin (1992), Heath (1983), Moss (1994), and Street (1993).

⁶For discussions of Freire's pedagogy, see Freire (1970), Freire and Macedo (1987), and Shor (1992).

David Bloome is Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture, School of Teaching and Learning, College of Education and Human Ecology, at The Ohio State University. He is a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English and of the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy. Email:bloome.1@osu.edu.

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References

Artiles, A., Harry, B., Reschly, D. J., & Chinn, P. C. (2002). Over-identification of students of color in special education; A critical overview. Multicultural Perspectives, 4, 3-10.

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies. London: Routledge.

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Boyardin, J. (Ed.). (1992). The ethnography of reading. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cheevers, N. (1994). Toward a more democratic society: Student projects that inquire into language. Unpublished manuscript.

Curry, T., & Bloome, D. (1998). Learning to write by writing ethnography. In A. Egan-Robertson & D. Bloome (Eds.), Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities (pp. 37-58). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Edwards, D. (2005, Spring). "Doing hair" and literacy in an afterschool workshop for African American adolescent girls. Afterschool Matters, 42—50

Egan-Robertson, A. (1998). "We must ask our questions and tell our stories": Writing ethnography and constructing personhood. In A. Egan-Robertson & D. Bloome (Eds.), Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities (pp. 261-284). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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Torres, M. (1998). Celebrations and letters home: Research as an ongoing conversation among students, parents, and teacher. In A. Egan-Robertson & D. Bloome (Eds.), Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities (pp. 59-68). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Unsworth, L. (1988). Whole language or procedural display? The social context of popular whole language activities. Australian Journal of Reading, 11(2), 127-137.

Yeager, B., Floriani, A., & Green, J. (1998). Learning to see learning in the classroom. In A. Egan-Robertson & D. Bloome (Eds.), Students as researchers of culture and language in their own communities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.