Applications
If my goal was to shift my teaching stance and my students’ reading stance closer to the aesthetic end of the spectrum, I needed to adjust both my objectives and my methods for reaching them. Given the context of student teaching and the need to adhere to my classroom mentor’s objectives, my freedom to shift paradigms was not unlimited. Nonetheless, I was given some flexibility in terms of my methods. Reading response journals seemed to be a good place to start, as studies have shown them to have many benefits in terms of getting students to: engage with the text; reflect on their emotions, ideas, and understandings; take ownership of their reading by making personal connections between the text and their world; accept the possibility of multiple interpretations and develop a deeper appreciation for literature; and foster self-expression (Pantaleo, 1995). Putting this idea into action, I had my seniors keep a reading response journal (Artifact 4) throughout the duration of our unit on dystopian fiction, during which students were divided into literature circles and read The Handmaid’s Tale, Kindred, or 1984. Reading the journal entries, I noticed that they served various purposes depending on both the student and the book he/she was reading. For students like Leona who connected with their texts, the journal provided a space in which to contemplate the aesthetic experiences they were having. For other students, like Georgie, who struggled with their texts, the journal was an outlet for their frustrations. In either case, the journal itself did not seem to help or hinder the student’s ability to take an aesthetic stance toward the text.
I continued to seek strategies to promote an aesthetic stance toward reading fiction. Mitchell (1993) offers the following prompts as ways of applying transactional theory to elicit meaningful student responses to reading:
I continued to seek strategies to promote an aesthetic stance toward reading fiction. Mitchell (1993) offers the following prompts as ways of applying transactional theory to elicit meaningful student responses to reading:
- What struck you about the story/poem?
- What kinds of things did you notice?
- What would you like to talk about after reading this?
- What issues did it raise for you?
- Were there parts that confused you?
- What questions would you like to ask?
- Did anything upset you or make you angry?
- Is there anything you want to ask any of the characters?
- How did you feel after you read the poem/story?
- What made you feel this way? (p. 44)
Instead of asking students to complete observational tasks, such as describing the evolution of a character throughout the course of the novel, these prompts serve the purpose of guiding students’ attention to experiential elements. With my sophomores, I applied this strategy in the form of a reflective silent conversation exercise (Artifact 5) after they had finished reading Lord of the Flies. As a Do Now assignment, I asked students to write about “something in particular that interested you, annoyed you, confused you, frightened you, seemed familiar, or seemed weird.” Like the senior reading response journals, this focused students' attention on their personal experiences of reading the book. Several of the silent conversations - even among students who claimed to dislike the book - showed that they felt personally involved in what they were reading. More so than with the journals, the silent conversations showed potential to prompt students to take an aesthetic stance, especially if implemented throughout the reading, rather than after it. This may have something to do with the collaborative aspect of the silent conversations.
Vijayarajoo & Samuel (2013) cite research revealing that “in peer-led discussions of narrative texts, [students] explored interpretive problems and learned reflective reading processes to a greater degree than those in teacher-led discussions” (p. 176). Both the dystopian literature circles and the silent conversations provided opportunities for such student-centered learning, and in the silent conversations, student comments built off each other to work through confusion and construct meaning. With the dystopian literature circles, on the other hand, I discovered that conversations sometimes shut down in my absence. This was particularly true in Georgie’s group. While the general consensus among the students reading Kindred seemed to be that it was an exciting and accessible book, the students reading The Handmaid’s Tale quickly decided as a group that they “didn’t get it” and, instead of collaborating to understand the book, collectively gave up. If similarly collaborative in nature, why were the silent conversations more successful than the literature circles at fostering an aesthetic reading stance? In the case of the dystopian literature circles, the book itself seemed to be more important in determining the stance the students took toward it than did the structure of the conversations around it. Indeed, since an aesthetic reading event is a private experience, matching readers with the “right” books for them is an important factor, and in a survey administered at the end of my student teaching, numerous students expressed a desire to be able to choose their own books (Artifact 6).
Still, I wondered if there might be a way to “force” students to take an aesthetic stance toward a text in which they were not naturally invested. Comparing Leona’s and Georgie’s reading response journals, I noticed that Leona’s ability to picture the story in her head while she read seemed to contribute to her strong personal connection to the text. Based on this observation, I decided to experiment with explicitly asking students to create visual representations of what they were reading. In the senior class, at the beginning of our unit on Antigone, I had students create drawings depicting the stanzas of a choral ode (Artifact 7), and I had my sophomores create portraits of the characters in Lord of the Flies (Artifact 8). In both instances, I found that the drawing seemed to do little to get students to connect to texts with which they were not already engaged. Reflecting on this, my main mistake seems to be in having the students illustrate what they read, rather than having them take inspiration from the text to draw whatever it called to mind for them personally. Illustration is the visual version of the written summary and requires efferent skills, while the latter would have been more consistent with an aesthetic stance.
Accordingly, giving students more freedom of expression was one of the intentions behind incorporating drama in the units on Antigone (Artifact 9) and Lord of the Flies (Video Analysis). Playing off of parallels we drew as a class between Greek tragedy and soap operas and using the soap opera Revenge as a model, my seniors were tasked with modernizing Greek tragedy. They could do this in one of two ways: either by “updating” the story of Antigone using contemporary language, or by coming up with their own story that incorporated elements shared by soap operas and Greek tragedy. Throughout the process of creating, practicing, and performing their skits, students demonstrated a level of engagement with Antigone I would not have thought possible based on their previous negative reactions to it. Likewise, my sophomores responded positively to a lesson in which they created tableaux depicting important scenes from Lord of the Flies.
Vijayarajoo & Samuel (2013) cite research revealing that “in peer-led discussions of narrative texts, [students] explored interpretive problems and learned reflective reading processes to a greater degree than those in teacher-led discussions” (p. 176). Both the dystopian literature circles and the silent conversations provided opportunities for such student-centered learning, and in the silent conversations, student comments built off each other to work through confusion and construct meaning. With the dystopian literature circles, on the other hand, I discovered that conversations sometimes shut down in my absence. This was particularly true in Georgie’s group. While the general consensus among the students reading Kindred seemed to be that it was an exciting and accessible book, the students reading The Handmaid’s Tale quickly decided as a group that they “didn’t get it” and, instead of collaborating to understand the book, collectively gave up. If similarly collaborative in nature, why were the silent conversations more successful than the literature circles at fostering an aesthetic reading stance? In the case of the dystopian literature circles, the book itself seemed to be more important in determining the stance the students took toward it than did the structure of the conversations around it. Indeed, since an aesthetic reading event is a private experience, matching readers with the “right” books for them is an important factor, and in a survey administered at the end of my student teaching, numerous students expressed a desire to be able to choose their own books (Artifact 6).
Still, I wondered if there might be a way to “force” students to take an aesthetic stance toward a text in which they were not naturally invested. Comparing Leona’s and Georgie’s reading response journals, I noticed that Leona’s ability to picture the story in her head while she read seemed to contribute to her strong personal connection to the text. Based on this observation, I decided to experiment with explicitly asking students to create visual representations of what they were reading. In the senior class, at the beginning of our unit on Antigone, I had students create drawings depicting the stanzas of a choral ode (Artifact 7), and I had my sophomores create portraits of the characters in Lord of the Flies (Artifact 8). In both instances, I found that the drawing seemed to do little to get students to connect to texts with which they were not already engaged. Reflecting on this, my main mistake seems to be in having the students illustrate what they read, rather than having them take inspiration from the text to draw whatever it called to mind for them personally. Illustration is the visual version of the written summary and requires efferent skills, while the latter would have been more consistent with an aesthetic stance.
Accordingly, giving students more freedom of expression was one of the intentions behind incorporating drama in the units on Antigone (Artifact 9) and Lord of the Flies (Video Analysis). Playing off of parallels we drew as a class between Greek tragedy and soap operas and using the soap opera Revenge as a model, my seniors were tasked with modernizing Greek tragedy. They could do this in one of two ways: either by “updating” the story of Antigone using contemporary language, or by coming up with their own story that incorporated elements shared by soap operas and Greek tragedy. Throughout the process of creating, practicing, and performing their skits, students demonstrated a level of engagement with Antigone I would not have thought possible based on their previous negative reactions to it. Likewise, my sophomores responded positively to a lesson in which they created tableaux depicting important scenes from Lord of the Flies.