Thank You, Louise

Dear Louise,

I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. This may seem a bit odd, since I haven’t ever met you in person, however, I certainly know of you because your name or at least a reference to reader response theory appears in so many of the books I read these days. So much so, that I decided it was time for me to read exactly what you had to say, as opposed to what others have been saying about your thoughts about reading.

And so now, only a third of the way into the latest reprint of your seminal work, Literature as Exploration, I am compelled to thank you for the inspiration you have offered me in relationship to my role as a middle school English language arts teacher and as graduate student preparing to take qualifying exams for a Ph.D. in language and literacy education.

Several ideas have been ruminating in my head concerning reading and writing instruction and cultural identity. My primary interests in my doctoral work concern new literacies and critical literacy pedagogies, with an emphasis on writing instruction. Although I think that these areas relate very nicely, I think that I’ve been subliminally looking for a thread to hang my thesis and ultimately weave my precepts together. I think I’ve been looking for the balance between the ideology concerning cultural identity among adolescent students and literacy instruction. You see, I believe that when my students are able to discover and embrace their own cultural identities, they will ultimately be better prepared to contribute to a more socially just and equitable world. I believe that when students know themselves well, they are better prepared to know and serve others. Regardless of the kind of work my students will chose in their futures, I believe, that the notion of service to others is central to society in communities across our globe, particularly if we are to survive the eradiation of history and the blurring boundaries facilitated by globalization and digital technologies, as we are experiencing them today.

Well, Louise, I think you have helped me find it. The magic word is humanity. You helped me realize that all of literature is about humanity; it’s about the human condition. In the first chapter of the book I mentioned earlier, you talk about finding a balance in the “many complex elements that make up the literary experience” (p. 23), and you claim that reading is a transaction between the reader and the text that “have social origins and social effects” (p. 27). You said it well when you wrote,

We can communicate because of a common core of experience even though there may be infinite personal variations. Human beings participate in particular social systems and fall into groups by age, sex, occupation, nation. These, too, offer general patterns on which individual variations can be played. The forces of social conditioning are also pervasive in the formation of specific emotional drives and intellectual concepts (p. 28).

You are talking about culture and society, and that the reading experience hinges upon the ability to share common experiences as human beings. You go on to say that,

Just as the personality and concerns of the reader are largely socially patterned, so the literary work, like language itself, is a social product. The genesis of literary techniques occurs in a social matrix. Both the creation and reception of literary works are influenced by literary tradition. Yet ultimately any literary work gains its significance from the way in which the minds and emotions of particular readers respond to the linguistic stimuli offered by the text  (p. 28).

Thus, even literary techniques, the tools that authors use, are uniquely human as well. Therefore, all of reading essentially pivots around the human condition. How silly of me not to realize this before. If people write texts, then of course, such authors are essentially writing about what it means to be human, regardless of the genre.

Now I recognize that when you first wrote this, you were attempting to persuade traditional English teachers to expand their views about teaching literary interpretation, and the importance of understanding literature with a broader scope than isolated critical correctness (p. 29). You beg for a balanced approach to reading, and I’m not talking about balanced literacy in the sense of a balance between phonics and whole language instruction. The balance you refer to lies somewhere in the continuum, as you call it, between an aesthetic and efferent reading experience. As you well know, the standards movement you witnessed in the latter half of your life has nearly sabotaged your work as teachers scramble and succumb to the suffocating test preparations that focus on correct answers and often times diminished reading experiences.

Yet I say, nearly because you have left such an indelible mark on the field of reading that, I believe, the best literacy teachers today scramble less to meet the demands of the test, and more to find inviting ways to engage their students in reading as a pleasurable and educational experience within literature classrooms as well as across the curriculum. Numerous scholars have written volumes (Beach, 1993; Ferrell, 2005; Hancock, 2008; Kern, 2010), for example, about ways that your transactional theory has transformed literacy instruction through reader response practices.  In fact, your influence has been pervasive enough to inspire scholars to invent instructional approaches around your theory without ever calling it reader response. Keen & Zimmermann (1997) in Mosaic of Thought and Beers and Probst (2013), in Notice and Note write about reading comprehension without mentioning the reading response strategies, yet their systems of getting students to look at literature closely for deeper meaning require that readers find themselves somewhere on the continuum of aesthetic and efferent reading experiences. I read and value these authors as much as your work because their ideology aligns so nicely with yours. I just wish they would have at least given you credit in these books in their list of references.

Nevertheless, reading and writing standards and standardized assessment does influence the decisions teachers make about teaching English language arts today. I worry that in our effort to help students find the right answer on the reading test or include particular literary techniques on their essay exams, that we forget to teach the humanity involved in all of literature. Realizing this helped me identify, or maybe label the core of my beliefs about literacy instruction. When I told my students the other day that all of reading and writing is about the human condition, and then after we brainstormed what that means, I believe we made a giant leap toward bridging understanding literary elements and author’s purpose, theme and of course characterization. By the way, by author’s purpose I mean more than simply identifying what students exclaim with rote memory: to entertain, to persuade, or to inform.

And so now that I have my students living in the balance of the aesthetic and efferent continuum, I hope to gain more meaningful reading responses that reflect not only connections to their lives as readers and citizens, but also as writers who strive to find their own voices in the texts they encounter and in the texts they create in the likeness of their own human condition. When they can do that, then I believe they will have discovered their own cultural identity and its place in their lives. Thank you, Louise, for helping me find my way.

References

Beach, R. (1993). A teacher's introduction to reader-response theories. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Beers, K., & Probst, R. (2013). Notice and note: Strategies for close reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Farrell, E. J. (2005). A tribute to Louise. Voices from the Middle, 12(3), 68-69.

Hancock, M. R. (2008). A celebration of literature and response: Children, books, and teachers in K-8 classrooms. Columbus: Merrill Prentice-Hall.

Keene, E. O., & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought. Heinemann Portsmouth, NH.

Kern, D. (2010). Reading and responding in the 21st century. New England Reading Association Journal, 46(1), 96-99.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1995). Literature as Exploration. New York, NY: Modern Language Association.