When I was a child, I loved to read. I remember sitting on the concrete front stoop of my house, head bent over a book, and my rear end getting cold because the sun was setting. I devoured anything—from Beverly Cleary to Nancy Drew to Choose your Own Adventure books. But one day I didn’t love it anymore. I don’t know when exactly this happened. But it had something to do with school. Fast forward to my senior year in high school and AP English Literature. I vowed to myself that I would actually read these novels. And I was reading every word of our first novel, Gulliver’s Travels, that is, until my teacher told me, “Sarah, you’re wrong,” because I disagreed with her interpretation of the Brobdignagians—and I even had evidence from the text to support my interpretation! I stopped reading—it was clear that my ideas on the texts were not welcome in the class. I listened very carefully to my teacher’s interpretations of all of our books and spit those ideas back to her in the essays, and I did okay. I got a B. I did a research paper on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn without reading it either, and I got a B. I wrote on Huck Finn on the free response question on the AP exam, and I got a 5 on the exam.
So I went off to college and signed up for some literature classes. And I still wasn’t reading most of the texts that were on my syllabi. Discussions in class were competitive—I was nearly always silent. I listened very carefully to my professors’ interpretations. I did fine on my papers and exams. I wrote on Huck Finn again (without reading it) and got a note on my paper that it was the “best in the bunch.” So I had figured out how to play the game and be successful, but I wasn’t reading the texts or participating in discussions at all.
The book that brought me back into the world of reading was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I encountered this text during my junior year. By this time I had declared my English major—I’m not sure why I became an English major at that point in my life considering my lackluster experience with literature in my previous years of school. Perhaps it was something like what drew Sumara to it—not so much “a love of studying literature” but rather a realization that he “found the work of literary analysis easy” (2002, p. 147). I too found literary analysis easy. I was good at it. It certainly seemed to fit the way my mind worked better than history or calculus or geology. So when it came time to declare a major, perhaps I followed what I was good at already and became an English major.
But back to Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man, this book absolutely blew my mind. I am not black, nor male, nor did I grow up in the same era as the narrator of that book, but somehow—from the very first line of “I am an invisible man”—this book captured me, captured my imagination. I took on the narrator’s experiences—giving me access to the life and experiences of a far-away other (Nussbaum, 1995). I felt his struggles. I learned about his life and the context in which he lived. I reflected my life off of all of this and it helped me to more deeply contemplate my place in the human situation. This book deeply affected me—it was a true transaction (Rosenblatt, 1978), I was living through this literary text (Rosenblatt, 1938/1995). I brought my life experience to it, and it invited me into the narrator’s world. I lived there from the first page to the last. And even today there are moments from that book that resonate vividly in my memory—the visceral Battle Royal of the first chapter, the image of the narrator sitting surrounded by hundreds of light bulbs as he writes his memoirs, the desperation of the narrator as he tours a wealthy white benefactor of his college around the college’s surrounding community and the situation worsens by the minute to the point where the narrator is certain to be kicked out of school, the symbolism of the pressure valves in the paint factory and how the perfect shade of white paint has just the right number of drops of black, the sambo bank that the narrator can’t get rid of no matter how hard he tries to—I could go on. I still like to pull that book off of my shelf and page through it, seeing in my marginalia on nearly every page how meaningfully I engaged with this great piece of literature.
From Ellison onward in my college literature classes, I read most of the texts on my syllabi, but I still remained mostly silent in discussions. And the silence continued even after I become a teacher myself. One summer, as a part of my master’s degree after I had already been teaching high school English for a few years, I took a literature class at the University of Illinois. It was a course on Toni Morrison’s works. We read all of her novels. Since she is by far my favorite author, I was very excited about this class. And since I had been teaching Beloved in my own classroom, I figured I’d have a lot to say in class discussions. But I, and most of the class, was silenced. The professor did not like the class’s silence, and ultimately she wanted us to participate more, but due to her style of questioning, I was afraid to offer my ideas because I thought they might not be the answers she was looking for. Her questions were very close-ended, suggesting specific text details or ideas as the response. Her questions did not ask about my ideas or about how the text was affecting me or what I thought about it. Her questions did not invite me to read the world with the text as a jumping off point. Her questions sought specific answers—her answers, text-based answers. It was all about her version of meaning making with the text. The kind of response to literature that I describe above that Invisible Man inspired in me was not the sort of response to literature that this classroom seemed to value. My ideas as a result of transaction with the text were not invited to be at the center of the discussion, or even at some place on the edge of it. Discussions were not about taking on the experiences of the far away others on the pages of Toni Morrison’s works and about what we learned from that. Discussions were about the canonical, generally-accepted-in-the-literary-community meanings of the literature—something that the professor seemed to possess and that she worked to bestow upon us by asking us questions until our answers guessed at the right meaning. In short, this class was not oriented toward students’ meaningful engagement with literary texts.
Paolo Friere’s Pedogogy of the Oppressed helps me to conceptualize the experiences I have had as a student in the literature classroom—high school, undergrad, and graduate—and why these experiences have had such a strong effect on me:
The young perceive that their right to say their own word has been stolen from them, and that few things are more important than the struggle to win it back. And they also realize that the educational system today—from kindergarten to university—is their enemy. (Freire, 1970/2003, p. 34)This suggests that students in schools are engaged in a battle to possess their own ideas, to “say their own word.” This was particularly evident for me in the high school and college literature classroom, where traditional notions about what it means to talk about literature and the traditional canon of interpretations of literary texts lead to the loss of students’ ability to develop, possess, and communicate their own ideas about literary texts. These traditional ideas about what it means to talk about literature are what I imagine may have led to my AP English teacher silencing me that day when I disagreed with her Gulliver’s Travels interpretation and my Toni Morrison professor’s questioning strategies that effectively silenced the class.
And what of the legacy of my high school AP English teacher? I can see that my experiences there have driven my teaching career, so the legacy has been great. But her legacy with me was not that she encouraged me to love reading and writing because her class did not achieve that. Her legacy with me is that I have worked for my entire career to build a classroom experience for my students that would encourage them to read and write for reasons that are meaningful and relevant to their lives because that is the experience I hoped to have had in her classroom but I did not. I cannot blame her alone--the experiences I had in AP Literature were pretty much exactly what I experienced in college literature classes as well, where the focus was never on reading and writing because we were human beings, but reading and writing to craft the most elegant argument about a piece of literature. And if my experiences as a student of literature are any indication, it is possible to craft an elegant argument about a work of literature without actually reading it. I want my students to be lifelong readers, to seek out books to help them manage their experiences as human beings.
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And all of this is why I so value Kittle and Gallagher. They confirm what I already believe important about the teaching of reading and writing. They help me to explain what I am trying to achieve in my classroom. They make me feel that I am not alone in what I'm trying to achieve in my classroom. They give me concrete paths to follow to get from what I imagine to what actually happens in my classroom. In short, I consider them two of my most treasured colleagues, and I go back to their texts again and again.
