Developing Critical Reading Sherry Lee Linkon One of the core learning goals in nearly all of my courses is helping students develop their abilities as critical readers. The term “reading” may imply the simple task of decoding a text, but I use it in a much broader and more complex sense. Critical reading involves a continuing process of exploring and investigating a text, and it works on multiple levels: the text itself, the reader’s interaction with the text, and the interactions of both the text and the reader with their respective contexts. Thus, a critical reading of a text does not end with the text but is always contextualized, and I approach critical reading with the underlying assumption that the significance and “meaning” of any text is multilayered, shifting, complex, and often contradictory. The study of texts, then, pursues the identification of these multiple layers and meanings. For students, however, this way of thinking about reading can be challenging, in part because it contradicts the assumption they have been taught about texts: that texts have set meanings that are available for identification by the informed reader, and that the purpose of reading a text is to locate and define its meaning. Too often, students’ inquiries are guided by neither their own interests nor any genuine questions. Rather, they read to find “the answer.” More to the point, students have learned that – to exaggerate just slightly here -- “research” means going out to find a couple of quotes to add to their papers to show that they did research. One reason for this is the structure of learning in higher education, that is, the boundaries of the semester and the expectation that students will “complete” a project during the 15 week term. In many cases, students study an individual text or a small set of related texts in just a few weeks, moving from first responses to final papers in a very short period. In some cases, this is because relatively little time is allotted for research or interpretation projects, while often even when a project is assigned early on, students don’t get started until a few weeks, days, or even hours before the project is due. Another reason, equally important, is that students have not had training in or experience with genuine inquiry. For many students, reading has become a task to complete in preparation for class and or the first step in finding an argument for an assigned paper, not a process of exploration, reflection, or contextualization. This project explores another approach, one that builds student inquiry into the course structure, that replaces the usual expectation that students will produce a final coherent argument with the expectation that they will pursue their own questions about a text as far as possible in 15 weeks, and that models and provides support for students as they engage in various critical reading practices. In my upper-division American Literature course, American Genres: The Immigrant Novel, I assigned an “inquiry project” in which each student explored one immigrant novel. The project consisted of a series of about a dozen activities, beginning with a reading journal and culminating in a series of reflective essays that asked students to identify what they had learned so far about the text they were studying. Along the way, they identified tensions in the text, framed questions to guide their inquiry, found secondary sources of various kinds, analyzed their sources and how they shed light on the novel, and considered how their novel connected with other books in the genre. The final product was not a paper but a portfolio, including all of the inquiry project pieces, including any rewrites the student chose to complete, and a final reflection on the process of learning. Nearly all of the students reported that they found the assignment engaging, challenging, and rewarding, but the fact the they liked it doesn’t tell me whether it fully achieved what I intended. Further, given the widely-held expectation that a formal paper is the best, or at least standard measure of students’ learning, this project raises an important research question: how well does a well-structured but ultimately open-ended assignment that does not end with a conclusive product help students develop critical reading skills? Defining critical reading practices Note that “text” refers to all kinds of written, visual, material, and multimedia materials. These ideas should be applicable to reading of literature, photography, visual arts, architecture, music, film, and so on. Self-awareness Good critical reading requires that the reader not only observe the text but also observe him or her self. Readers bring a lifetime of experience, previous reading, culture, attitudes, and knowledge with them to every text, and this “toolkit” shapes how they read. Good readers are aware of how their own biases, assumptions, habits, and knowledge shape their reading, and they recognize that their own perspective will change over time. In these portfolios, self-awareness is demonstrated through comments about the reader’s history with a text or a group of texts, the reader’s responses, the reader’s biases, positions, attitudes, etc. Recursivity Good critical reading requires rereading. It’s impossible to read a text well with just one reading. Rereading allows the reader to see the text again, to focus on specific features and consider how those features fit into the larger content and arrangement of the text. Recursivity may also take the form of returning to a previous question, outside source, or issue, and the same principle applies. Looking again allows one to see with more complexity, depth, and perspective. In these portfolios, recursivity is demonstrated through comments about rereading, seeing again, and thinking again. Inquisitiveness Good critical readers ask questions all the time – about the text, the text’s creator(s), the context, themselves, related texts, ideas, meanings, references, everything related to the text. Ideally, these questions become more focused over time, though they may vary from wide-ranging, almost theoretical questions to very specific questions. But specific “informational” questions get one only so far. Critical questioning means asking why things are the way they are, how readers might respond, how a text does its work, and so on. It also means asking questions about one’s own questions, as in “Am I asking something useful? Is this really what I want to know? Why is it important to know this? In looking for evidence of inquisitiveness, look for places where readers pose questions and places where they comment on their own questions. Look, too, for how questions change over time. Connectivity Good critical reading uses connections and comparisons with other texts as tools to reveal elements of the text being studied. These two paired ways of looking, connection and comparison, allow the reader to see an individual text as part of and/or different from larger patterns, which may be textual (among a group of texts), historical (ideas and issues of a particular moment in time), geographical (among different texts from different places), and so on. The patterns revealed through connectivity in turn provide clues about aspects of a text to examine further. Thus, connectivity may guide recursivity, directing a reader to look again at some aspect of the text, or it may prompt new questions, about why a text differs from others or how it carries out a theme that ties a group of texts together. The easiest way to identify connectivity in these portfolios is to look for references to other novels, to the genre of immigrant literature, and to the history of immigration in the US. Open-ended Synthesis Ultimately, good critical reading should lead the reader to new insights into the text, as well as (perhaps) insights into the text’s context and the reader’s own perspective. Synthesis refers to the way new readings are made possible by the four previous elements of critical reading, or, more specifically, the way that readers pull ideas from multiple resources (their own responses, their questions, multiple rounds of looking at the text, and related texts and materials) and by identifying connections between them, explores possible meanings or conclusions. Yet the nature of the other elements of critical reading should make it impossible for a good critical reader to claim any definitive meaning or conclusion, since there is always the possibility that one’s own perspective blinds one to possible meanings, that another look at the text would reveal new information, that further questioning could uncover new layers or aspects of the text, and that other texts might reveal new possibilities. Thus, while we might look for places where readers offer arguments and analyses in these portfolios, we should also be attentive to hypotheses and even questions that emerge from self-awareness, recursivity, etc. And any arguments and analyses should somehow acknowledge the complexity of texts and their contexts, recognize their own limitations, and at least gesture towards the possibility of error or that further investigation would reveal a different view.