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Collaborative Practices
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Valuing Confusion and Difficulty
By: Leah Straschewski
The research that we have gathered demonstrates that students benefit from reading instruction in the writing classroom and makes it clear that reading instruction should be a part of the composition course, with a focus here on the basic writing course. What then does this integration of reading into the writing classroom “look” like? Many teachers want to know what types of texts basic writers should read. In “Reconciling Readers and Texts” Elizabeth Flynn argues that instead of offering students a mixture of “easy” and “hard” texts, we should be offering them a mixture of “transactional” and “expressive” texts. She writes, “Textbooks, journal articles, case studies, collections of documents, biographies, and autobiographies are written…to inform, or to advise, persuade, or instruct. Where possible, students should also be provided with reading materials written in the ‘expressive’ mode-language used for the purposes of exploration and discovery” (143). She notes that journals, diaries, and personal letters reveal the “private dimension of productive activity,” and “serve to demystify knowledge” (143). Transactional writing tends to be very polished and to have a finality to it that students may find intimidating. Flynn argues that “If they [students] are introduced to the writing of professionals which is unfinished and meandering, they will be better able to accept their own imprecision and uncertainty” (143). However, our purpose here is not to specify certain texts or even certain types of text. Rather, our purpose is to think about texts in the basic writing course as texts that challenge a student’s thinking, whether transactional, expressive, or any other type. In every course, including the basic writing course, students should be reading texts that they do not necessarily “get” the first reading through. Still, not all composition instructors agree that their students should spend time reading and working through difficult texts. In “Reading Matters for Writing,” Mariolina Salvatori writes that “one of the most frequently invoked arguments against the inclusion of readings in writing instruction (particularly the inclusion of difficult texts), was that many students read little and/or poorly; therefore, having students respond to difficult texts was unfair to them and to their teachers who had to invest most of their time explaining to them the assigned readings… (198). In general, our society views difficulty as being something negative and, in Salvatori’s words, “not profitable or economically viable” (199). The above argument, identifies, though not explicitly, difficulties as complications that require the explanation of the teacher in order to be resolved. While difficulty is often regarded as a lack of understanding, there is value to be found in confusion. In The Literature Workshop, Sheridan Blau argues that “confusion often represents an advanced state of understanding” (21). The student who comes to class disliking the poem because he doesn’t “get it,” understands enough to know that there must be something to “get” and recognizes that he has a problem. Reading, like writing, should require practice, as well as active participation on the part of the student. As Sheridan Blau notes, our students are inclined to “behave like consumers of literary interpretations rather than producers of them” (20). More often than not, students come to class prepared to take notes on what the reading “really means,” and expect the dominant interpretation to be handed down from their teacher. Blau argues that “whenever we [teachers] cooperate in this well-established system, we may be encouraging many students not to read the text at all” (20). The responsibility of making meaning from a text should be placed on the student, and the student should not rely on the teacher’s explanation. It is then not the teacher’s responsibility to solve the problem or difficulty that the student is having with the text, however, it is the teacher’s responsibility to give the student strategies and tools to work through the text on his own, in order to arrive at his own understanding. When the teacher no longer has the final say, but works instead as a guide and urges the student along, the student is forced to examine the source of his reading difficulty and to become a more reflective reader. The classroom practices offered by the following links are not, by any means, all inclusive. These are merely starting places for helping students work through readings in the composition classroom.
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