CTL Fellows Final Report

CTL Fellows Final Report M.L. Wade May 16, 2017

My project was to develop strategies for teaching deep reading skills and for developing resources (writing assignments, in-class activities, handouts, etc.) that promote development of those skills. My plan is to make my First Year Seminar next Fall (Understanding Race Philosophically) the first guinea pigs, so to speak, for my efforts at promoting interrogative reading.

I began the CTL fellowship by referring to the kind of reading that I want to promote in my courses as deep reading (a fairly common term in the relevant literature). This term, of courses, provides a contrast to the kind of shallow reading that too often students actually do with their assigned texts. I then came to prefer the term, ‘aggressive reading’ because it connotes a dynamic and engaged relationship with the text. Finally, I settled on the term ‘interrogative reading.’ The term ‘aggressive reading” seemed, well, too aggressive and ‘interrogative reading’ more clearly conveys the kind of dynamic and engaged relationship that I want with the text.

Students should come to recognize that a text’s meaning or meanings do not always (do not often) lie on the text’s surface, ready simply to be scooped up and readily digested. Understanding a philosophy text to any real degree of adequacy requires interrogating the text and this requires more than seeing and knowing the meanings of all the words in the text. It requires digging beneath the surface of the text. But, it also requires recognizing that authors often provide clues or other textual resources that can enable and enhance one’s efforts to understand. I find that students too often don’t seriously engage a text’s table of contexts or its index or its chapter or other section headings. They don’t take the time to determine why certain words, phrases, passages, etc. are highlighted or in some way set off from the rest of the text. They tend to pass over these textual features with little to no notice.

I distinguish interrogative reading into two levels, reading for information and reading for understanding.

Reading for information Certainly the texts that I assign, and I suspect this to be true of many of the kinds of texts that students encounter in their courses, contain fairly obvious forms of information about their content, forms that students often overlook—tables of contents, prefaces, introductions, indexes, bolded and/or italicized text, the frequency with which certain terms are used, and so on. All of these and more tell the reader something about the content of a text. But, I fear that students don’t actively engage this information. Ideally they should, for instance, recognize that a table of contents is often an outline of the content of a work and not just a convenient way to find one’s way through the text. They should ask why an author has chosen to present the work’s content in this particular order, since as we all 2 know, as writers, that the order is not utterly arbitrary. Ideally they should see that the index provides information about which ideas/topics get the most attention in the text and thereby are likely to be among the ideas/topics that the author regards as most important. Ideally they should try to discern why certain words, phrases, passages are highlighted by being bolded or italicized. I have found that students pass over these features of texts without notice and fail thereby to see that an author is signaling that these words, phrases, and/or passages have special significance to the author’s project. One could go on and on with these sorts of examples of information about a text’s content which are right there on the surface of the text, so to speak, but which students often simply don’t engage. One can, of course, tell students to pay attention and to be interrogative readers for this kind of information. But, this is not likely to be enough.

Attached to this report is an example of one sort of writing assignment that I plan to make in my FYSM that aims to address this level of interrogative reading. I refer to this is as a pre-reading assignment. (See Attachment #1)

In addition, seminar members will be required to keep a reading journal in which they will list and comment on the words, phrases, and passages that the author of a given assigned reading has highlighted in some fashion to indicate that the reader needs to pay special attention. The seminar mentor and I will review these journals on a weekly basis in order to provide seminar members with feedback on how successful they have been at identifying and discussing these sorts of reading clues.

Reading for understanding The literature that I have perused so far on deep reading often analyzes reading for understanding in terms of three dimensions—reading for explication, reading for elucidation, and reading for evaluation.

Reading for explication As the most elementary level of reading for understanding, the focus here is on figuring out what an author is communicating in a text, figuring out what elements of the text are essential and which, however interesting they might be, are relatively tangential, and figuring out how to articulate those essential elements. (A confession: I have increasingly come to view getting students to accomplish these reading tasks as the most I can reasonably expect. That is an unhappy, and perhaps lazy and/or unfair, conclusion.) And, I model explication in my lectures and in the kinds of questions that I pose in class and in my efforts to respond to the questions posed by students. Unfortunately, this clearly is not sufficient for getting students to do the kind of reading necessary for successful explication of a text.

Attached to this report is one example of what I refer to as an interrogative reading exercise that is intended to address this dimension of reading for understanding. (See Attachment #2 and Appendix Reading Philosophy)

Reading for elucidation 3

Reading for explication is, of course, essential but reading becomes philosophically interesting and perhaps even philosophically valuable/enlightening when one’s reading aims at elucidation. Here the term “interrogative reading” becomes especially apt as one’s reading begins to dig beneath and venture beyond the surface of a text. Ideally one wants students to pose and attempt to answer certain kinds of questions as they read. What are the unstated assumptions at work in the text? Some times these assumptions might be deliberately unarticulated, while in other instances they might be assumptions that a writer makes without conscious awareness. Ideally one wants students also to ask what are the implications of the ideas, claims, arguments, and interpretations that an author articulates. What further ideas, claims, arguments, and interpretations follow from these? What illumination, if any, might these further ideas, claims, arguments, and interpretations shed on the content of the text and what significance might they have for the larger field in which the text is situated? For instances, Socrates typically proceeds by asking certain kinds of questions of his interlocutors and by getting them to judge voluntarily that their answers are defective. When reading Socrates for elucidation, one wants students to ask why pose these kinds of questions, to ask what is the significance of his interlocutors voluntarily (albeit often reluctantly) conceding the inadequacies of their answers? And, what might all of this imply for Socrates’ conception of the nature of knowledge, his views about what can or cannot be known, and his ideas about how one acquires knowledge of that which can be known? In other words, what is the theory/conception of knowledge, the epistemology, at work in texts where a reader encounters the so-called Socratic method? (Another confession: I have come to regard this dimension as beyond the reach of many of my students, except for some who are pretty advanced in the major. Here too this might be lazy and/or unfair on my part. Nonetheless, I will attempt to address this dimension as well in my FYSM.)

Frankly, I am not yet sure what kind of assignment would be well suited to this dimension of reading for understanding. Although my thinking might well change as I continue to do my reading about deep/slow/close/interrogative reading over the next few weeks, I am considering attempting to address this aspect of reading for understanding by having students write an imaginary interview with the author of one of the assigned readings on some topic/argument/conclusion. They will need to occupy both the position of the interviewer and the position of the person being interviewed. If I ultimately decide actually to make this sort of assignment, I need to carefully formulate the instructions that students will be given. The motivation for this assignment is to get the students at least to begin to move beyond explication to elucidation.

Reading for evaluation Evaluation, in my view, is intellectually irresponsible without some mastery of explication and elucidation. And, over time, my expectations of students’ ability to read for explication and elucidation, especially elucidation, have gotten rather low. This has led to very, very low expectations for their ability to evaluate. I have found that students are often quite able to tell us what they like or dislike, agree or 4 disagree with, in a given text. But, I have also found that, all too often, they are unable to articulate why they like or dislike whatever they like or dislike, why they agree or disagree, much less to mount a persuasive case for these judgments. The ability to read for evaluation successfully seems to me to be a pretty sophisticated skill, one that requires a high level of intellectual maturity and lots and lots of practice. (Of course, I cannot speak for other disciplines, but philosophy texts, especially if one is using original sources, are often rather obscure and dense.) I do, as with the other two dimensions, attempt to model this dimension of evaluation in what I do in the classroom. When I ask students to explain in their writing assignments why they do or don’t like or agree with something in the assigned readings, I give that portion of their writing rather little attention because my expectations have become so low. Of course, I am always happily surprised when a student can provide this kind of explanation and almost astounded when they can do so with some persuasiveness.

Despite my pessimism, I will address this dimension of reading for understanding by having students write a critical book review of J.P. Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, an important, albeit problematic, text for the philosophical study of race.

This assignment is attached to this report. (See Attachment #3)

I have downloaded materials and a variety of links that I need to explore now that classes are over and grades have been submitted. Of course, that means that my thinking about what to do to promote interrogative reading in my seminar might well change substantially over the summer. I especially aim, in addition to these writing assignments, to develop some in-class exercises and handouts designed to promote interrogative reading.

As I stated in the CTL Fellows panel a few weeks ago, I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from this year of being a CTL Fellow. The discussions were great and I especially enjoyed getting to know the younger Fellows, folks with whom I had no previous acquaintance. Unfortunately, this kind of experience of being a community of teachers is not common. It ought to be, given that teaching is, after all, central to the College’s reason for being. 5