Travis_Dalsis_Response to Mind, Bodies, and Readers

Stock's “Mind, Bodies, and Readers”

An interesting notion that Stock relates in this article is the presuppositions that people possess related to a field. In his work relating to medicine with regard to the mind and the body, Stock relates how dualistic Western society has become. He argues that we've been viewing medical science as dealing with the body, while religion and philosophy relates to the mind. It was not so in ancient civilizations. I enjoyed this piece because it challenged me to view reading differently as well. Do we as a society view reading with lenses that limit our capacity to engage fully? Stock would argue that we do. Our limitations are on the presuppositions we possess. If we embrace a holistic sense of readership—community within ourselves and without—we will experience a transcendental existence!

Taking the Fluff-Talk Out of "Inquiry-Based Learning" and Really Doing It!

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

ENGL 585

Dr. Baker and Dr. Daumer

16 January 2012

A Response to: “Whose Inquiry Is It Anyway?  Using Students’ Questions in the Teaching of Literature”

            Meyers presents a systematic array of strategies to engage readers of literature to take ownership over their processes of reading.  I found three aspects of this piece to be particularly engaging and though-provoking: 1) As teachers we often assume that we have the best questions. 2) Questioning has layers and levels. 3) Critical thinking about literary texts is a development and questioning in various forms allows teachers and students to synergistically learn and employ critical inquiry.

            As teachers we often assume that we have the best questions: Meyers makes a claim at the onset of his work that inquiry-based learning, where the students ask the questions and construct meaning from their experiences, has been highly-valued in education but under-employed.  He argues that teachers can easily fall into the “I am smarter than you so I know the really important questions to ask, so just answer the questions I create.”  I am reminded of Dr. Baker’s comments about how teachers will continue to teach how they were taught.  I believe Meyers is making visible the reality that even when teachers say they are being inquiry-based, they are either consciously, out of uneasiness, or subconsciously, out of a schematic framework hardwired into their brains still doing what was done to them.  Meyers challenges teachers to pay attention to their practices of questioning and realize that if we are going to be inquiry-driven, we have to trust our students to ask questions that are substantial.  How do we do that?  Well, he doesn’t just say—“Tell them to create questions!”  He provides a framework of understanding.

Questioning has Layers and Levels and Critical Thinking Develops

            To create great questioners, Meyers does imply that teachers must be readily available to guide students as they read literary works.  With that mandate, Meyers empowers teachers to empower their students with ten levels of questioning.  In reading this text, I interpreted Meyers’ induction of each strategy to build on a previous strategy.  The irony here is that the levels of questioning seems to increase linearly in demand for higher critical thinking, but it is stated that questioning itself is circular!  Overall, Meyers points out that great questioning does involves a starting point and a guide (the teacher), but students must be given the chance to create questions that may not be THE BEST.  We must eschew our immediate notion to correct and give students a chance to test their questions in real, authentic discussions with peers.   

            Overall, I think the most helpful part of this article is the methodical breakdown of the types of student-lead discussions that can be generated.  Often times I just tell my students—create five questions: (who, what, where, when, and why).  This framework encourages students to expand and allows my job as teacher of literature to be at an equal level with my students.  They are the facilitators in the classroom through their own questioning.

Dalsis_About Slowness

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Douglas Baker

5 January 2012

A Response to “About Slowness”

Whenever I bring home leftovers from a restaurant and I don’t feel like eating them the next day, I given the meal to my three dogs.  They gulp the food down in an instant.  They don’t stop to taste the sweetness of the pasta sauce, apply the meaty texture of the ravioli to the palate of their mouth, or feel the satisfaction of a crisp buttered bread roll crunch under their teeth.  They swallow it all whole—most of the time.  Newkirk’s introduction to his text, “About Slowness,” reveals a cognitive pattern akin to the fine-dining experience.  In the opening section, I immediately felt that much of my reading was somewhat in between a fine dining experience and a dog swallowing leftovers whole.  It challenged me to consider what Newkirk calls auditorizing a text.  In a disconnected, individualistic culture we often forget that an authorship and readership consists of an invisible, intangible relationship.  The author prepares a bountiful meal and invites the reader to partake.  The role of the author is to engage the reader in a mental dining experience that resonates deep in the heart of an individual much like people who experience the warm-fuzzy moments when they sit down at their favorite restaurant booth and enjoy a meal together.

What does it mean to read slowly?  Newkirk debunks preconceived notions immediately when he states that it’s not about speed.  It’s not about “word-to-word struggle” (2) either.  Slowness in reading consists of processing the information—“follow a train of thought, mentally construct characters, follow the unfolding of an idea, hear a text, attend to language, question, visualize scenes” (2).  In essence, Newkirk defines slow reading as paying attention to the decisions an author makes in a literary work; reading and rereading a text with a new engagement each time; it is also likened to the ebb and flow of a tide where there is moments of fast-paced reading and slow, deep reflecting moments, as well as moments where a reader completely pauses to savor the text (thoughts and emotions evoked during the reading).

“Reading taught me to be attentive” (5).  Paying attention to minute details of a text, constructing meaning through reading and rereading, and excavating the ideas the author lays before a reader is what Newkirk values as a slow reader.  He sends the message to his audience that one can brush pass a text quickly and miss the savory details that makes reading rich.  Newkirk’s thesis claims that paying attention is a difficult practice to undertake, but there is relevance to paying attention to texts.   

1.                      Slow down and pay attention to words.  The author uses words intentionally and if we callously graze over them without savoring their intentionality, we’ll miss meaning.

Overall, Newkirk provides interested metaphors for reading that helps teachers understand the complexity that students are working through when they are reading a text for the first, second, or even third time.  Disciplining oneself to read slowly and pay attention is a skill that all need work to increase.  U.S. culture is inundated with information from many mediums and it’s difficult to stop and carefully read/process all that is presented.  Newkirk makes this implicit reality explicit in his work and thus challenges readers to slow down.

Dalsis_A Feeling for Books

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Douglas Baker

5 January 2012

A Response to “A Feeling for Books”

Radway offers a delicious understanding of her ambivalent experience as a “middle-brow” reader and an intellectual.  Her work examines the feelings she experienced from early childhood and the struggle to transform herself and become a member of a different social climate—and the discomfort and confusion that she experienced when trying to hold on to a past pleasure of reading books.  Radway shows the layers of complexity that surfaces when one discusses what reading literature is and the socio-cultural assumptions attached to literature when it’s branded.

            A common theme in Radway’s work is the underlying motivation and her feelings about what she read.  Her doctoral studies also examined the popularity of romance novels.  She interviewed individuals and discussed the books selected by Book-of-the-Month club to examine the literary body being called “middle brow” literature.  In her research she uncovered the complexities and enthusiasm within the texts read and sold.  Overall, her article challenges the notion that certain readership is serious while others are not.  Claims about literature are not necessarily true—Radway uncovered this truth.  Feeling while reading is a powerful relationship and there is something to be said about it.  When we feel a certain way about what we read, there’s a reason.  Sorting out the whys and so whats is worthy of our time.

            One goal of mine is to examine about how I feel when reading certain pieces of literature.  I can remember from taking a Young Adult Literature class reading twelve novels.  One novel in particular, Where the Red Fern Grows, evoked much emotion.  Laying on the couch of the coffee house while sipping a mug of coffee and reading this text, I remember crying my eyes out.  Why?  The parts that I was reading were sad.  What was it that created such emotional reactions in the texts?  All I can remember was the when the main character decided he wanted two coon hounds (beagles).  He worked so hard to earn the money to get them and he walked through the country to the nearest store to pick them up.  I’ve lost the immediate details of the text, but I still feel the twinge in my heart when recalling this scene.  Perhaps because, as Radway explains there is a human condition in my own life that connects deeply with the text.  Radway challenges us to explore those feelings and the hidden mysteries behind them.     

Dalsis_Disliking Books at an Early Age

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Douglas Baker

5 January 2012

A Response to “Disliking Books at an Early Age”

            Assumptions about reading—what reading is, what type of person reads, and how reading is executed—are entrenched in our culture.  Graff opens his work on “Disliking Books at an Early Age,” with an examination of the cultural landscape of middle-class children living in Chicago during the 50’s.  He reflects upon the cultural forces that work against the reading of literary texts and intellectualizing of them by claiming certain gender role expectations among males and social class observations among females.  In essence, what Graff starts out discussing is the idea of community.  He dictates his own experiences of alienation to a literary community early in his academic studies as a prelude to the discussion of how we as a society read texts and are expected to teach them in classrooms.

            A thread of discussion that Graff props up is a response to the debate over relevance of literary criticism and its role in establishing readers’ interests and confidence in studying canonical and classic literary texts.  Graff describes the argument that anti-literary theory groups make which is that secondary texts involving literary analysis of a primary text convolute and contaminate the purity that the reader is supposed to experience the text with.  The notion that one would consult a theoretical framework to engage in close reading of a text is a violation of the idealized consumption of texts.  Graff argues against this position through evoking personal testimony to the futility of the practice.

            A major point that Graff employs is the idea that literary criticisms can empower readers by giving them a reference point of understanding.  If a student is reading Jane Eyre with a Freudian literary lens, they are empowered to close read for certain objects, words, colors, and characterizations.  Without this literary lens, Graff, like many students, feel alienated from discussion because they have no lexicon to confer with colleagues.  I agree with Graff’s position that helping students find a position to think about texts is vital.  Graff claims that this strategy is useful for students to engage them in reading difficult texts because reading is a communal experience in the classroom.  If students are alienated from a text because of the language, allusions, or other elements, then literary critiques of that text are a road map to help them move closer and they provide an inroad to a more engaged experience.

            Overall, what I enjoyed most about this article was the fact that Graff made explicit the implicit work he engaged in to become active and interested in reading.  Educators cannot always pull back the curtain of his/her students to see the arduous work that they engage in as they struggle with texts.  His ideas help bring an awareness of the illusion that giving a text to a student and allowing its brilliance to vibrate outward is automatic.  He helps ground idealists in the reality that teachers impart theoretical lenses when teaching (if they are doing their job) and that introducing critical theory in the classrooms alongside texts is a powerful opportunity for debate and discussion that will result in critical literacy.