Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer

Composition

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition

The Importance of Teaching for Transfer

Ellen C. Carillo

Utah State University Press

Logan

© 2015 by the University Press of Colorado

Published by Utah State University Press

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The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

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ISBN: 978-0-87421-959-3 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-87421-960-9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carillo, Ellen C.

Securing a place for reading in composition : the importance of teaching for transfer / Ellen C. Carillo.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87421-959-3 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-87421-960-9 (ebook)

1. Composition (Language arts). 2. Reading. 3. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. I. Title.

LB1575.8.C37 2014

372.47—dc23

2014017560

Cover illustration © Artex67/Shutterstock

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 Reading in Contemporary First-Year Composition Classes: A National Survey

3 Historical Contexts

4 Reading in Composition Research and Teaching, 1980–1993

5 Transfer of Learning Scholarship and Reading Instruction in First-Year Composition

6 Teaching Mindful Reading To Promote the Transfer of Reading Knowledge

7 Epilogue: A Changing Landscape

Appendix A: Annotated Bibliography

Appendix B: Handouts from Professional Development Workshops on Integrating Attention to Reading into Courses across the Curriculum

Appendix C: Supporting Materials from National Survey of First-Year Composition Instructors and Their Students

References

About the Author

Index

Acknowledgments

I must begin by extending my deepest gratitude to my editor at Utah State University Press, Michael Spooner, for believing in this project from the start. I appreciate his patience and encouragement through the long review and revision process and the risk he took accepting a manuscript on a topic that was not on the field’s radar when I proposed it several years ago.

For their pointed and detailed feedback on my work, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Utah State University Press and appreciate how carefully Laura Furney, Beth Anderson, Kelly Lenkevich, Karli Fish, and Daniel Pratt prepared this manuscript. Thank you to my colleagues at UConn, including Tom Deans, Lynn Bloom, and Tom Recchio who offered insightful comments and suggestions at various stages of this project. This book is significantly better for all of this feedback.

Many others have helped me complete this manuscript through collaborations on conference panels, conversations about reading and writing, and simply through their friendship and unwavering encouragement: Kirstin Collins Hanley, Michael Bunn, Mariolina Salvatori, Patricia Donahue, the members of The Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group, as well as my fellow Writing Coordinators at UConn and my colleagues in English and Freshman English at UConn, Waterbury.

I would also like to thank those who participated in the study detailed in this book. I appreciate the time these instructors and students spent with me discussing how they experience the relationship between reading and writing in their classes. I was struck by their willingness to offer me the little free time they had—and sometimes free time they had to make—in order to participate. For some this meant answering my questions while simultaneously placating rambunctious toddlers or crying babies in the background or speaking with me in the car while driving from one teaching job to another. For others it meant taking time away from the Conference on College Composition and Communication convention in St. Louis for the interviews I conducted at a nearby coffee shop. I must also thank the Conference on College Composition and Communication for supporting this study with a Research Initiative Grant, as well as the University of Connecticut’s Research Fund for their material support that helped make this book possible.

With this book’s emphasis on teaching, I would be remiss not to thank the fine teachers I was fortunate to encounter over the years, including those at Muhlenberg College and the University of Pittsburgh. The former saw promise in my work and encouraged me to continue onto graduate school and the latter helped me to see the importance of teaching reading alongside writing. I was thoroughly shocked when I left Pitt and realized this practice is not a given within the field. Perhaps one day it will be.

Thank you to my parents, Beverly and Joseph Gerber, and my sister Betsy for their ongoing support even though the path I chose was so unfamiliar to our family. And finally, thank you to my husband Dave, without whom I could not have finished this book. He often played both mom and dad to our boys especially during the summer so that I could focus exclusively on writing. My work is considerably better for his consistent guidance and thoughtful feedback. And a special thanks to my two boys, Avi and Harris, both born during the course of writing this manuscript, for being great nappers, and thus affording me the time I needed to complete this project.

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition

1

Introduction

In the final months of 2009, the WPA listserv (WPA-L) saw an onslaught of detailed responses to an initial post with the deceptively simple subject line: How well do your students read . . . ? The complete question, posted in the body of the email, sent to the listerv on October 27 by Bob Schwegler (2009) from the University of Rhode Island read: How well do your students read complex texts—other than literary texts? With more than fifty responses in just a few days, it became clear that this was an issue that interested a range of subscribers, many of whom responded to the question by drawing on their classroom teaching practices. Some listed useful assignments and methods (e.g., rhetorical analyses, annotation) while others wrote about textbooks that encourage the teaching of reading in composition such as Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading and Rosenwasser and Stephen’s Writing Analytically.

The majority of the respondents, however, went outside of composition to think about reading. Some encouraged those in composition to turn to the Education Departments at their schools. Others such as Jennifer Wells (2009) shared websites for high school English teachers and names of speakers and other scholars (e.g., Frank Smith) working within K–12 whose work might be adapted for use by post-secondary instructors. Arguing, on the other hand, that literature instructors are especially well-equipped to teach reading, Ryan Skinnell (2009) looked to the New Critics as exemplars of literature instructors committed to the teaching of reading, which he defines as comprehension, close reading, critical assessment. I will not, can not, shall not claim that literature specialists are the best reading teachers in the world, writes Skinnell, But I will, can, and shall claim that they are expert readers with the potential for teaching reading as a valuable function of what English departments claim to do. Overall, the posts are best characterized by Patricia Donahue’s (2009) post wherein she writes: It is curious to me that when the subject of reading comes up those of us in rhetoric/composition veer in one of two directions: towards literature, saying that’s what those people teach; or towards developmental reading specialists, trained in more qualitative methods. But we don’t refer to the substantial body of work done on reading in our own field (especially in the late eighties to early nineties)—particularly on the interrelationship of reading and writing. Why not? Interestingly, although subscribers continued to respond to this thread for days after Donahue posted her provocative question, no one addressed or answered it except Bill Thelin (2009b) who suggested an online study/reading group to discuss the research Patricia talks about in order to help us implement it and perhaps contribute to the body of knowledge by creating new applications.

WPA-L subscribers are not the only ones in the field for whom the 1980s and 1990s is not a reference point for scholarship on reading. Histories of the field such as Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition do not include a discussion of those scholars within composition for whom reading pedagogy was as important as writing pedagogy. More recently, Susan Miller’s 1,760-page The Norton Book of Composition Studies and Villanueva and Arola’s (2011) 899-page Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, two anthologies that are often used in graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, neglect to include essays on reading despite the overwhelming presence of these in the field during the 1980s and 1990s. This moment wherein attention to reading flourished within composition is simply not a part of standard accounts of composition’s history. Neither is it represented in texts used to educate scholars new to the field. Why didn’t the subject of reading become integral to how composition defined itself as a field since compositionists were studying reading and developing reading pedagogies at this disciplinary-defining moment? Over the years, hypotheses have been offered as to why reading did not establish itself as one of the field’s primary subjects. The first holds the great divorce (also called the great divide) responsible, noting that as composition worked hard to define itself against literary studies in the 1980s it held especially tight to writing instruction since that was the one element that separated these fields from each other. Related to this first hypothesis is the theory that a struggle over disciplinary identity may have been the cause, a struggle that was marked by composition’s investment in separating itself not only from literary theory, but also from reading instruction as it was defined by education (particularly K–12). Another hypothesis is that reading as a subject of inquiry has not disappeared, but that the term reading has been subsumed by the broader term literacy in much the same way Paul Butler found that attention to style never disappeared from composition, but simply migrated to other areas within composition, including genre studies among others. A final hypothesis has to do with the social turn, wherein the field’s attention turned toward writing’s social dimensions and situated the writer as a social being affected by cultural, political, and social forces. While these are viable hypotheses, I am not convinced that they tell the entire story.

Each of these hypotheses looks outside of what I will call the reading movement¹ in order to account for reading’s inability to take hold in the field. And, while Chapter 4 details the aspects of the discussions from the 1980s and early 1990s that are worth recovering, this book also contends that one contributing factor may actually lie within the scholarship from that movement. This project recovers that scholarship to explore precisely how scholars articulated their theories of reading and how the conflation of the terms reading and literature, as well as differing goals of the scholars, were obstacles that prevented reading from securing its place as a primary focus of the field. These dissonances reigned, and as Kathleen McCormick (1994, 5) points out, in the absence of such dialogue, work in reading remains fragmented and its transformative capacities limited.

Looking closely at the proliferation of scholarship on reading from the 1980s and 1990s both to imagine what went wrong, as well as to describe what seems recoverable and useful from that moment, this book considers what might be involved in reanimating discussions about reading within composition. Studying this moment provides access to how it was that these scholars managed to redefine reading instruction as something other than remedial and expand the intellectual and pedagogical sphere of rhetoric and composition—even for just a short period—to include theories and pedagogies of reading.

As I make the final edits on this introductory chapter, initially drafted a few years ago, I am excited to point out that we may again be entering a period like the 1980s and 1990s wherein compositionists are starting to (re)turn to questions surrounding the teaching of reading in composition. As Salvatori and Donahue (2012) note in their most recent College English piece, Stories about Reading: Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing, and Revival, there seems to be a revival of interest in reading in the field of composition. I imagine this book contributing to this revival by offering an account of reading’s demise, some historical antecedents that may help explain it, as well as some recommendations for reintroducing discussions of reading. Taking into consideration how and why, historically, reading has been neglected by composition and pairing that history with a current, qualitative study of the place of reading in contemporary first-year composition classrooms (Chapter 2) allows me to make recommendations for effectively reanimating discussions of reading in composition and productively integrating attention to reading into first-year composition classrooms.

Reading and Writing: Counterparts in the Construction of Meaning

The term reading throughout this book is not simply referring to the scanning of words on a page. Although the term composition has, for years, been used synonymously with the term writing in curricula and scholarship, this study—like the scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s—is founded on the idea that both practices of reading and writing involve the construction—or composition—of meaning. In defining reading as an active enterprise, this study follows the lead of Ann E. Berthoff, David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, Alice Horning, Mariolina Salvatori, Patricia Donahue, Donna Qualley, Linda Flower, and James R. Squire, among others, whose scholarship and teaching locate reading and writing as forms of inquiry and ways of making meaning. Berthoff (1982) has argued that at the heart of both reading and writing is interpretation, which is a matter of seeing what goes with what, how this goes with that. Interpretation, she writes, has survival value. We and all of our fellow creatures must interpret in order to stay alive. The difference between them and us is language: It is language that enables us to go beyond interpreting to interpret our interpretations. This spiraling circularity empowers all the activities of mind involved in meaning making (85). Squire (1983, 581) sees reading and writing as two operations that actively engag[e] the learner in constructing meaning, in developing ideas, in relating ideas, in expressing ideas. Bartholomae and Petrosky (1986, 14) locate reading as an activity that centers itself on a general inquiry into the possible relations between a reader and a text, something that can be represented by studying the specific written responses of specific readers. In From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing, Petrosky (1982, 20) describes reading in terms of understanding: Reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interactions with each other run the serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding. Qualley’s (1997) essayistic reading also assumes that reading is a form of inquiry that is transactional in nature, but she argues that her approach has a wider application in that it may be used by students and teachers alike and offers a both/and stance that she believes is lacking in Bartholomae and Petrosky’s method. A form of hermeneutic inquiry into texts, Qualley’s approach is not a way of reading (or writing) that many students have experienced. . . . In essayistic reading and writing, readers and writers put themselves at risk by opening themselves to multiple and contrasting perspectives of others. At the same time, however, they reflexively monitor their own beliefs and reactions to the process, since readers need to be both the subject and object of their reading (they read themselves as they read the text). This ensures that their encounter with ideas will be dialogic and bidirectional rather than unidirectional (62).

None of these scholars defines reading and writing as mechanical or instrumental processes. Instead, they highlight the hermeneutical nature of reading and writing (some, drawing directly from Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Georg Gadamer) and how these practices can be used to foster understanding and self-reflexivity. Adopting this formulation, this study also posits that reading is a deliberate intellectual practice that helps us make sense of—interpret—that which surrounds us. And, that which surrounds us includes so much more than published texts. We also read our own writing, our own and others’ belief systems, as well as everything from ideological and social structures to political and advertising campaigns to each other’s expressions and our personal interactions. The range of activities that falls under what might be called reading demands a more complex practice than a one-size-fits-all mechanical process of decoding. The emphasis that the scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s place on self-reflexivity and (meta)cognition acknowledges the complexity of reading and its many manifestations, and, thus, becomes crucial to my recommendations for renewing discussions about reading in composition.

Reading in Composition: The Last Two Decades

Prior to a 2012 change in the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) call for proposals, it had been almost two decades since composition’s professional organization encouraged panels and presentations on reading. Salvatori and Donahue (2012, 210) found that although in the 1980s several subject clusters on the CCCC’s call for proposals invited panels and presentations about reading or reading-writing connections, more recently and for roughly seventeen years the word ‘reading’ was completely invisible. Others have conducted similar studies: David Jolliffe (2003, 128) notes that the word reading only appeared in the titles of two sessions at the 2003 CCCC’s meeting where there were 574 concurrent sessions, special interest groups, and workshops. Moreover, Debrah Huffman (2007, 5) found that combined, the number of sessions and individual presentations devoted to either reading or analytical reading comprises scarcely one percent of the total presentations in any given year.

Certainly, tracing the presence of the word reading in the CCCC’s call for proposals does not outright prove anything. But, these studies suggest, along with the range of other evidence I offer in this introductory chapter and beyond, that reading has seemingly disappeared from composition’s disciplinary landscape. It is worth noting that Salvatori and Donahue (2012) offer an alternate hypothesis—namely that reading is omnipresent in composition, suffusing all that we do in the discipline, and is thus taken for granted and unexplored. Despite our differing perspectives, though, our conclusions remain the same: To neglect reading altogether (my position) or reduce reading to a kind of pervasive background influence and to push it to the borderlines (211) is problematic because composition loses the opportunity to increase its knowledge about writing’s counterpart in the construction of meaning and to imagine the implications of this knowledge for the teaching of writing.

For the most part, discussions of reading as it relates to composition focus on which texts one should teach in the composition classroom (if any at all) rather than the practice of reading itself. In other words, composition scholars spend time focusing on reading(s) as a noun—rather than on reading as a verb, as a practice or process. For example, in what has come to be called the Lindemann-Tate debate, compositionists Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate discussed the role of literature in first-year composition courses. In the pages of College English, Lindemann (1993) details her position that literature should not be taught in first-year composition because literary texts don’t adequately represent the type of writing students will be expected to complete in the academy. Still, she notes that the course should pay attention to reading. In fact, she insists that paying attention to reading is an integral part of first-year composition, noting that we need to join students in exploring these sites of composing (316). Tate and others who entered the discussion, however, conflated the teaching of reading with the teaching of literature without recognizing the distinction upon which Lindemann’s argument depends. Tate (1993), for example, focuses exclusively on text selection noting that we should not deny our students the pleasure and profit of reading literature (319) since this excellent writing helps students improve as writers, a point he does not develop except to say that his vision excludes no texts (321) in the composition classroom.

More recently, in Profession 2009, which focuses on The Way We Teach Now, many scholars address the status of reading within English studies. While David Steiner’s (2009) Reading and Mark Edmundson’s (2009) Against Readings take the usual approach to discussing reading as a noun rather than a verb, Gerald Graff (2009) approaches the issue differently, contending that it