To Read or Not to Read

I think that I found Salvatori to be a little more useful than most, but first I want to comment on something that got me thinking about an "us and them" (false?) dichotomy that began to creep into my head as I read the blog posts this morning. I think maybe there's a psychic disconnect between students who are inclined to go to graduate school--and for English no less (us)--and students who either 1) see their 4 (or 5... or 6) year tour of duty as an undergrad as the means to getting a job somewhere--anywhere--outside of higher learning. We (hopefullly) love to read--they often (usually?) don't, at least not just for the sake of reading, and that's why tying reading assignments to other activities in the class is crucial. I don't think that undergrads feel that "reading is for idiots"--and I don't think that's what's implied or assumed in the readings for today--but that students often don't see what use-value reading has for them. I take this up here because the question reminded me of one of the books that I've been reading--the one Dr. Strickland talked about (and I held up at the time) by the anthropology professor who posed as a freshman for a year to essentially do what amounts to an ethnography of college students (_My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student_ by Rebekah Nathan). One of the main motivations for Nathan is that she was baffled by how seldom her students read what she assigned. I'll just quote from her at length--from pages 137-9:

To Read or Not to Read: What the Cultural Experts Say.

I was particularly fascinated by the question of "reading" for class during my year as a student because of my class experiences as a professor, when I found the number of people who seemed not to complete assigned readings in my classes to be both troubling and astounding. ["]Did they just not read the syllabus["], I had speculated? I tried repeating the assignment verbally in class before it was due: "Remember to read article X because I'd like to talk about it next time." Was it too time-consuming to read at the reserve desk at the library, or to copy the articles to read later? I put all the article readings online as well as [a] hard copy for easy access. Yet, despite these efforts, I didn't perceive an appreciable difference in class preparation. Either most of the class hadn't read all the articles or they hadn't read them in a thorough enough way so that we could have a discussion.

But then, as a student, I encountered the same dearth of class preparation. There was frequent pre-class exchanges among fellow students--"Did you do the reading?" or "What was the reading about?"--particularly as the semester went on. Seeing the same behavior across courses and professors, I began to question other students about the considerations that went into their decision whether to do the reading or not. It is a classic anthropological strategy: go to a cultural expert, a native who is particularly skilled and knowledgeable in a subject area, and attempt to reproduce the rules and the considerations that he or she uses to make decisions.

How does a "cultural expert" decide whether or not to read something for class? What are the tacit rules governing his or her decision? After interviewing juniors and seniors about course preparation, and in seeking their advice, I discovered that cultural experts don't casually or lightly discard assignments; rather, they mentally ask themselves a series of questions:

"Will there be a test or quiz on this material?"
"Is the reading something that I will need in order to be able to do the homework?"
"Will we directly discuss this in class in such a way that I am likely to have to personally and publicly respond or otherwise 'perform' in relation to this reading?"

If the answer to all of these is *no*, then don't do the reading. At least, I found that the probability of not doing the reading is much higher.

As I became acculturated as a student, I became more finely attuned to the conditions under which class preparation did and did not occur. My personal epiphany came one day several weeks into a mildly interesting lecture course as I was taking notes near the end of the class period. It was well after midterms, and there were final projects, papers, and presentations looming in all my courses. The professor mentioned that he had put an extra article on a Web site that would amplify the subject of his next lecture and that he would like us to read it for the next class. As he began reciting the Web address, I found myself chuckling, realizing that I had no intention of doing this reading and would not even copy down the information. It was immediately clear to me why students had not read articles for my class: there was no strong signal from me that I would use the article--in a quiz or an assignment or even a guaranteed discussion--and, apart from the exceptionally interested student, I had given no reason to priortize these readings above obligations for other classes.

The answer to the problem of reading that I now favor is to hone the assignments to those I will actually employ in my classes while at the same time creating new classroom forums for making direct and immediate use of the readings I seriously want my students to prepare. I could see why my former "solutions" had not changed their behavior. Like many of my teaching and administrative colleagues, I often design solutions to student problems that do not address the actual source of the problem. The miscalculations come from faulty assumptions concerning what good students do and how they organize their academic lives.

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Nathan goes on to give "Just a few examples [that] will suffice to show how assumptions that do not reflect the reality of student life can lead to weak analyses, bad policy, or ineffective solutions to problems" (139), including some intriguing observations about library practices and the promise of online library services and the (overestimated) role academics play in students lives versus their peers. One of the things that I've taken away from Nathan is an articulation that she makes toward the end of that passage: "miscalculations come from faulty assumptions concerning what good students do and how they organize their academic lives." It's not about whether English majors value reading more than other students--it's about realizing why students don't (and won't) read what we assign and doing what we can to change that. It seems to me that just as Rogerians put the onus on the speaker in communication, the onus is on us to convery the (use-)value of reading to our students *if* we want them to learn and critically engage the readings we assign. What's productive, for me at least, are the strategies offered in the readings for today for engaging students--through reading, through finding ways to motivate them to want to read and to learn, to take part in the process--I see active reading (Curazn and Damour's term) as another active learning strategy, and I thought the Salvatori article complemented that. It's "vulgar Freire," but the strategies that Bean outlines for facilitating active learning--for avoiding the tendency to "place students in a passive role and imply a transmission theory of knowledge in which students 'receive' the ideas and information 'sent' by the instructor'" (169) reminds me of the banking model of education that Freire rejects, and implicit in that (for me) is coming up with strategies that engage students--to do that, we have to understand what motivates them in the first place.