#4 - Comprehension, Retention, and Literacy (Oh My!)

Chapter 2 of Doug Beuhl's Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines addresses some of the expectations of middle school and high school students regarding their reading comprehension. As students read, they should be generating questions, recalling prior knowledge, visualizing and creating mental images, making inferences and drawing conclusions about presented information, determining importance of various pieces of information, synthesizing and organizing that information, and applying reading strategies to adapt for different kinds of reading material.

Doesn't that sound exhausting to you? It sounds exhausting to me, yet that is exactly what we find ourselves doing when presented with extensive and detailed information that we are genuinely interested in reading. We do it automatically! The human mind is amazing. However, Beuhl calls attention to students's seeming inability to do something that we hope might be automatic by the time they are entering high school, at the very latest.

My theory? We need to pay more attention to our third, fourth, and fifth graders. Middle school teachers should be teaching students advanced reading methods for dealing with more complex texts, not teaching (and re-teaching!) basic skills. Literacy needs to be a focus of educators in every discipline at every level, not just when we start to realize our teenagers are having problems.

But hey, that's easy for me to say, right? I don't want to be a teacher, I'm an oddball here. That's all right, sometimes it's nice to be an outsider, you get a fresh perspective, a different angle. As a librarian, I feel like I have the chance to have a wider perspective on literacy in students of all ages, even if I don't have the deeper influence that teachers and parents get. Still, libraries are part of the communities that surround them, and I look forward to finding new ways of encouraging young students to not only read, but to explore the world around them.

#3 - Human Profiles: Our Identities as Readers

In Chapter 1 of Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines, Doug Beuhl focuses on our identities as individual people and the influences these identities have on us as readers. He focuses on 4 subcategories of human identity: 

Individual human nature- aspects of our life that are not under our control 

(I, for example, am a white female in my early twenties who is an older sister and who looks far more like her mother than she would care to admit)

Positions- attained and confirmed by groups/institutions

(I am a college student and a Michigan citizen.)

Personal traits- that others recognize in us and that characterise us as individuals

(I like mac&cheese, bright green, snow, and playing softball, but dislike mud, protein shakes, and litterbugs.)

Associations- that we have with particular people or groups

(I am a Detroit Tigers fan and a member of Sigma Tau Delta, an international English Honors society.)

Beuhl goes on to define being a reader not as someone who can simply read the words (ability), but as an individual with preferences of what, why, how, and even when and where they read. Humans are incredibly multifaceted, with hundreds of opportunities to develop as completely unique individuals. I wonder how many of the various elements that make up my self contribute to my preferences and capabilities as a reader. Probably all of them, though in varying degrees.

Classroom Applications:

Students read a lot of obligatory texts throughout their school years, and I believe students should have the opportunity for choosing their reading material in literature classes, at least to some degree. Not only does each student bring their own identity into a classroom, but that identity is constantly growing, evolving, and adapting, even more so than my own as an adult. Giving students a choice in what they read allows them to play a part in directing their own development as readers and as people. It also  motivates their interactions with what they read, and the more practice they have with different texts, particularly different styles and genres, then the better they will become at adapting their abilities to new texts in various disciplines.

#1 - All for One and One for All?

Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice.

Chapter 1: “The Measure of Our Success” by Kylene Beers

I come from a small, poor farm school in Southwest Michigan. Schools like mine were, and still are, a dime a dozen. We averaged 45 students per class and held sixth through twelfth grades all in one building. Including faculty and staff, there were about 180 people in the entire building on a daily basis.

One of the most important lessons I had to learn throughout high school was that my classmates—my friends—and I were just as capable of achieving success as students at bigger, richer schools. I had to work my tail off at times to do it, but I showed my parents, teachers, coaches, friends, and—possibly most importantly – myself that a lack of resources did not equate a lack of ability. 

In Ch. 1 of Adolescent Literacy, Beers explores the measuring sticks of American educational systems: the tests whose scores are used as leashes on teachers. He points out—with incredible accuracy—the urgency with which principals and teachers are forced to meet pre-set, universal standards which are designed to be applied to all students.

It would be so incredibly easy for me to be infuriated, to exclaim that the necessity should not be for regurgitation of analytical information, but for the synthesis of new ideas. Students should be allowed to construct new ideas based on what they have been given rather than build based on someone else’s instructions. Indeed, this is what I wrote in the first draft of this post. While I do not entirely disagree with those words—I did write them, after all—I also do concede that structure is needed in schools. I also agree with Beers when he points out that the No Child Left Behind campaign “accomplished something that for too long had been left unaccomplished and, at times, even unconsidered…that all children be taught to the same rigorous standards and explains that gaps in academic achievement between and among groups of students…are not acceptable” (5).

The trick, however, does lie in the fact that modern school systems do not always allow for the expression of individuality through opportunities of praising students for their progress and accomplishments. Rather, they system forces them all to conform to the same standards. The journey will begin when we can all understand what kind of literacy our students need to be taught so as to be capable of adapting and expanding their knowledge.

NOTES FROM THE CHAPTER:                                            

Different kinds of literacy—more than reading the words

Signature	Recitation	Analytical	Conceptual
basic reading/writing abilities	pure memorization of information	regurgitation of outside ideas	creation of opinions and synthesis of ideas
Colonial	Pre-WWI	WWI -1990s	Now

Styles of Informational Learning

Consuming Information                  vs.                  Producing Information

Regurgitation                                    vs.                                           Creation

Gathering Information                     vs.                          Learning a Lesson

Yes, students need to be able to retain information; memory is very important. However, they also need to be able to analyze the information in a way that allows them to synthesize their own ideas and opinions.

Reading and Life: Individual Results May Vary

It's no secret that no two people are exactly alike. What works for one person might not work as well for someone else, what one person loves another might hate, and so on. We've all heard it before. I love hot-air-balloons and mac&cheese. You might be afraid of heights and lactose intolerant. When I study, I like to have classical or instrumental music playing. You might like heavy metal music or even absolute silence. This is the beauty of humanity: the one thing we all have in common is that no one is like anyone else on this earth.

Unfortunately, these vast differences can cause....challenges, particularly for educators and other people who would help us learn. I am not a future teacher, but I still think these differences are important to note no matter what field you work in. In Reading in Content Areas, we will focus largely on the differences in individuals in the way they read and how to encourage people not only to read, but to read better, to find a way that lets them learn all they can from the words in front of their face. Like in any university course, and like anything else life, my and my classmate's individual results may vary, because we are all a little different. But hey, that's what makes the adventure so much fun.

You have been warned.