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Reading Reminders

I'll Grant You That

I Hear America Reading

English Teacher's Companion

Introduction: Reading the World

This page offers related links to those web sites or resources discussed in the Introduction, and an extended excerpt from the Introduction.

Digital Companion

Excerpt from the Introduction to
Illuminating Texts

The purpose of education in this society is to bring the kids up to be conversant with the most important ideas and the representation systems that are used to express them.
---Alan Kay
Let us draw closer to the fire so we can hear what we are saying.
---Unknown

Reading the World

My elementary school class huddled in the dark, all our heads angled up toward the small square of light that promised a glimpse into the next world: the first walk on the moon. Our silence and obedience signaled our understanding that this was a sacred moment. Mrs. Baldwin, our fifth grade teacher, stood by, equally serious. When finally we saw the images and heard Neal Armstrong's voice, we all experienced the same sense of awe, our open mouths spelling out our wonder. None of us questioned whether what we saw was real, whether it had actually happened: in those days what you saw was real. "I saw it with my own eyes," you heard people say. You also heard people say, when testifying as to another's credibility, "He's a man of his word." Despite such events as the McCarthy hearings and the Cuban Missile Crisis, people had faith in what they read, what they heard, and what they saw.

Television, and before that radio, transformed our expectations and shaped our tastes, but not our assumptions about authority, credibility, or veracity. If Walter Cronkite said it, it was true. If we read it in the Time, it was gospel. And if we saw it "with our own eyes," it happened.

Vietnam changed much of that, as did Watergate, as have computers. Chances are when I left school that day, still talking to friends about the moon walk, we came home to parents who watched the news and its statistics about the war in Vietnam, all of which we now know were false, used to create and maintain a level of support for the war. Speaking years later at an English teachers' convention, novelist Tim O'Brien told a story about Vietnam, drawing us in with his mesmerizing details about his efforts to evade the draft. When he finished, having fully engaged us, the room heavy with silence and respect for the storyteller, he said, "Now that didn't happen. But it's true." (1996). Larry Watson, another novelist, has the protagonist of his novel Montana 1948 say, "So no matter what the historical documents might say, I feel free to augment them with whatever lurid or comical fantasy my imagination concocts. And know that the truth might not be far off…. For my students I keep a straight face and pretend that the text tells the truth, whole and unblemished." (1993)

Tim O'Brien's comment captures the sense of confusion many readers experience and will face with increasing frequency in the coming years. We read of Pulitzer Prize winning reporters who write whole series about "real people" that don't exist, incorporating into the stories sources that are equally false. The reporter might claim the story is nonetheless true; the point is that they offered it as fact. We watch events such as the Gulf War on CNN and are told we are seeing Patriot missiles blowing up Scud missiles, only to learn later that Hussein, too, has CNN and so our military had to pretend we were blowing up Saddam's weapons so he would think he was losing. Several years later so many readers of Time questioned the authenticity---surely it was doctored by Photoshop?---of a cover photograph of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky that Time had to publish a statement in its next issue certifying that the picture was, in fact, real, meaning untouched, meaning authentic. Finally, nearly all major newspapers publish both online and print editions of their paper; the difference is that many include on their digital edition stories they do not want to commit to print yet because they might not be true. The point is no longer to be right but to be first when it comes to covering a story; the point too often seems not to be right but to sell papers, magazines, advertisements.

But it's even more complicated than that: there is never one story, or rather there is one story told by an ever-increasing range of authors, in different media, from different perspectives, with different intents due to the nature of their different audiences. Information, whether it is about a product, an idea, history, or science has become one more product in a market saturated with texts, each one competing with the other for the title of "the truth" or "the best." This era's version of the old caveat emptor (buyer beware) is "reader beware."

The Reader's Tool Belt

It becomes the teacher's role then to arm the student with a tool belt heavy with strategies and the skill to use them appropriately when reading---and making---texts. I wrote this book in two different media---paper and the Web---and used a wide range of text types, including images, web sites, and traditional printed texts. I also designed the book to be used/read in several different ways depending on the reader's needs: as a reference book, a netcourse, a workshop, a course for students (i.e., one I propose should exist and which the book helps design), a textbook for a content area reading course, and, of course, as just a book for people to read and enjoy. Though disorienting at first, the experience---and subsequent research on other projects---revealed a trend I begin to see everywhere: writing (and thus reading) texts for multiple media, but also writing them with the question in mind "Which media is most appropriate for this text?" This notion of a tool belt is consistent with the idea that texts are made; moreover, they are made out of a variety of elements and are designed to serve specific, if multiple, purposes. Effective readers in the future will need to recognize the role of design and the function of different elements when they read.

Increasing attention to design, to format, to structure of a text, whether on the screen or page, will demand they know how to skim, scan, screen---and just plain read, of course. Everything in our accelerated society points toward faster living and greater distraction---and thus the need to read well on the run:

All those clamoring activities line up by rank, in order of the power of their claim on your attention. That book looks appealing, but this magazine pulls harder. Even better is that new jazz recording, but then you prefer the exhilarating rush of an on-line session of the game so fittingly called Total Annihilation. It's as if, corrupted by haute cuisine and soft mattresses, we can't go back to the simple pleasure of bread and butter and sleeping under the stars. (1999)

Add to Gleick's and Stephens' lists emoticons (-: and such Web slang as LOL (laughing out loud) or yr (for your) or ur (for you are), all of which make communication more visual but rapid in the effort to achieve "real time" exchanges online. Click here for an extensive list of emoticons and online acronyms.

Gleick writes, "We have learned a visual language made up of images and movements instead of words and syllables. It has its own grammar, abbreviations, clichés, lines, puns, and famous quotations." In his book the rise of the image the fall of the word, Mitchell Stephens (1998) builds on Gleick's comment, "our eyes are no longer asked to see; they are simply asked to interpret the code," a code which is no longer made up solely of logos (the word) but of logo (icons) which we encounter on the page and screen, the body and clothing of others, the labels of products, and the various advertisements we encounter everywhere in between. Stephens argues that a skilled videographer can accomplish in three minutes of video what many writers would need thirty pages (or three hundred) to achieve. Digital storyteller Dana Atchley, along with a growing number of video artists, takes these different media tools and, combining them with cultural or corporate artifacts, creates compelling interactive, multimedia texts:

The best way to understand digital storytelling is to watch Atchley in action. For the past decade, he's done a one-man show called "Next Exit," which traces his life story. The show is a remarkable blend of performance art, memoir, stand-up comedy, and documentary film. Here's how "Next Exit" works: Atchley strides onstage and sits on a tree stump. Beside him is a monitor surrounded by logs. He blows on the screen and -- poof -- a video campfire begins to crackle. On a wall behind him, tethered to a computer, is a screen of roughly the same size as one that you'd find at a multiplex. Atchley puts on a headset microphone a la Garth Brooks, grabs his wireless mouse, and begins. With the mouse, he opens an on-screen suitcase containing about 70 stories, most of them short digital videos that he has crafted from home movies, still photos, and video tapes. With the audience's help, he selects 12 to 18 stories for the evening. (Pink 1999)

See Dana Atchley's digital story "Shipwrecked" and learn more about this emerging form by going to Dana Atchley's site; Digital Storytelling Festival Website; Center for Digital Storytelling.

When I say we need to be different kinds of readers---and judging from Atchley's work, different kinds of audiences---I do not just mean as consumers of commercial texts or news media; I mean of historical, math, scientific, texts, and literary texts, and all video and online texts regardless of content. As 1999 drew to a close, many textbooks included factual errors---this doesn't even include instances of ideological bias. Moreover, mathematics books used to teach young students included abundant commercial content (e.g., word problems about the number of McDonalds hamburgers, miles traveled to Disney, etc.) Finally, more and more films based on novels and historical events appear every year, tempting many students to mistake fiction for fact, a cinematically inspired emotion for a thought that helps them better understand history. Films about Malcolm X and JFK, the Civil War or the American Revolution just to name two, require sophisticated textual skills that enable students to discern what is "real" versus "true," to return to O'Brien's terms.

Closing Thoughts

Each discipline comes with its own types of texts students must learn to read if they are to be literate in that domain. For so long high school teachers used "reading to learn," assuming (because it's what they were told) that students learned to read in the earlier grades. Of course they did learn how to read, and still do, but they do not come knowing how to identify irony or how to discern the organizational patterns used in a particular essay or speech whose intention is to persuade. The range of texts and their changing nature, not the mention the complexity of some texts, make it necessary for us to also teach students how to read such texts so they can both identify the author's intended meaning and construct their own, more personal meaning.

This book is about teaching students what they need to know about be able to do: read a range of types of texts in various ways for different purposes. In our world of multiple texts, many of which---Web sites, hypertexts, textbooks, and newspapers---incorporate words, images, sounds, "visual explanations" (e.g., graphs and tables), even video clips, our students need to graduate able to read these increasingly complicated texts in different media so they can have the "textual power" needed to be successful in their adult lives.

In England they speak of "reading history," by which they mean they study it. So it should be with all other subject areas: how does it change our role and perceptions of ourselves, if our students speak of "reading Health," or "reading science" in high school. I don't mean just reading words: I mean reading the entire topography of the subject, its glorious mountains of words, its rivers of meaning, the landscape of its history as a subject insofar as that helps them place the current study of math, science, or any other subject in the larger context of its history. Every subject we teach is essential, and by emphasizing the idea of teaching reading at all levels and in all subject areas I am not suggesting in any way that English as a discipline be compromised. In fact it seems liberating to me as an English teacher to get out from under the tyranny of assumptions that English teachers are the ones who should teach reading and writing. By teaching students to read in the ways I outline here, we will help them understand that "reading is not just a matter of standing safely outside texts, where their power cannot reach us. It is a matter of entering, of passing through the looking glass and seeing ourselves on the other side." (Scholes 1989) To just read, moreover, is an incomplete textual encounter: not until we have come out on the other side and created our own text, in whatever form, have we completed the interaction between ourselves and the author, our own assumptions and theirs, their ideas and our own. Thus is reading an active, even interactive experience through which we do not fill ourselves up but create ourselves and thereby our world as we understand it.

In this respect I am arguing that through textual studies students can---should be required to---think and operate as a practitioner of the domain they are studying, learning to read as a biologist, a writer, an historian, or a craftsman. This shift in perspective, one that places the student in a more active role of reading and writing within a discipline, offers the added benefit of developing their imagination by requiring them to occupy the role appropriate to each domain. For too long the imagination and its role in education has been dismissed by the public as irrelevant or even dangerous. But what are we doing as teachers if not helping students to try on a series of possible selves through our disciplines, while helping them develop the necessary abilities in that subject, in the hope they will find the one they wish to become in their adult life? In this respect we might say our students are engaged in a constant reading of the world around them and of themselves as they try to figure out what both mean and where they fit into the text of the world they are busy creating through their own choices.

Further Studies

Myers, Miles. 1996. Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.

Purves, Alan. Scribal Society: an Essay on Literacy and Schooling in the Information Age. Longman. 1990. (Out of Print)

Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998.