I owe a great deal to my colleagues in the Department of English at Manchester Community College, especially Donna, Ken, and Patrick, for empowering me to make a reading pedagogy central to the developmental writing courses that I teach. My colleagues, following Bartholomae and Petrosky’s lead in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course, spotlighted the reading and writing connection, and in hallway conversations talked with me about the importance of communicating to our students the vital link between engaged and receptive reading and convincing writing.

Bartholomae and Petrosky are among the first composition theorists to articulate a theory and method for a reading and writing course that seeks to answer the question: why do we read in a composition class? in distinction to the question what do we read in the composition classroom? and to argue that how we answer the first question will inform both instructors’ and students’ choices in response to the latter question. (The question—“why do we read in a composition classroom?”—is the first trigger point for our discussion during this month’s module.) Silence, moreover, is a seminal moment in Bartholomae and Petrosky’s theory, and a teachable moment during which a compositionist resists facilitation, extrapolation, and exposition and asks that as self-directed learners, her students make reading and writing participatory and eventful. Bartholomae and Petrosky’s guiding insight that a “course in reading and writing whose goal is to empower students must begin with silence, a silence that students must fill”(7) challenges us to work against the grain our own acculturation within the academy, particularly to our roles as lecturers and to the notion—articulated or inchoate—that a text—that is, a poem, a journalistic reflection, an essay—is centralized authority in the classroom (as distinct from textual authority). As my faculty mentors, Donna, Patrick, and Ken have worked closely with me to tease out the importance and the implications of self-directed learning in the developmental classroom, and as fellow participants in our College’s Center for Teaching’s semester long dialogue, reflexive practice, and collaboration, Ken and I have observed how silence works in each other’s classroom practices. It is this creative silence that is most often key to the later academic successes of the developmental reader and writer because in silence the awesome responsibility of learning to read with patient attention to the other voice one encounters on the page and to reinscribe that voice in one’s own writing emerges.

Many compositionists, including myself who have had the benefit of faculty mentoring, however, have learned to teach reading through what Norman Stahl, Michele Simpson, and Christopher Hayes have called “the side door”—we developed expertise based on our own experience of reading, conference attendance, and by working closely and reflexively with our students. As compositionists our reading pedagogies developed from our own experiential learning in the classroom—replete with trial and error. In “Ten Recommendations from Research for Teaching High-Risk College Students,” Stahl, Simpson, and Hayes point out that “finding practical ideas about college reading that have been drawn from theory and research is difficult for most veteran instructors, but it is even more difficult for the beginner unaware of professional organizations and journals. This problem of dissemination is exacerbated by the fact there are very few formal university programs that focus on the training of college reading specialists.” Stahl, Simpson, and Hayes conclude that many instructors of developmental writing, reading, and learning “overlook the value of writing to teach reading either as a step in a strategy or by itself.”

My hope for our on line discussion this month is to generate a constellation of ideas that will

• map out our collaborative understanding of the reading and writing connection
• consider the value of writing to teach reading
• map out effective teaching practices for making reading central in a basic writing classroom
• respond in varied and detailed ways to the centerpiece question: why do we read in a BW classroom?

At an OADE conference, Patricia R. Eney and Clayton Samels (The University of Akron) summarized key changes to occur in the research of how students learn to read. Prior to the late 1990s, most reading instruction, as their OADE presentation suggested, situated the student reader-writer as passive and receptive, and the activity of reading as exclusively text based. Classroom activities presented reading skills in isolation and as drills. Reading passages were short and very little critical reading and thinking took place. Moreover, there was very little student-student communication or student-teacher communication—much of classroom time was focused on the summary of a text—a useful and necessary academic skill, to be sure, however, one that must not be learned in isolation from other academic skills such as exposition, interpretation, collaboration. Eney and Samels cite the work of Gourgey as well as Wood as shifting the emphasis from a skill and drills routine to one based on metacognition, which Eney and Samels define as an awareness and control of one’s own learning. Research now supports best classroom practices that involve collaborative reading activities, the integration of reading and writing, critical thinking activities that scaffold meta-cognitive thinking about reading and writing, and a varied group of reading selections.

While Eney and Samels chart the significant changes in the role of student, teacher, and the practice and process of reading in the developmental classroom, David Caverly and Cynthia Peterson, in their article, “Foundations for a Constructivist Approach to College Developmental Reading,” usefully categorize college developmental reading programs as: 1) discovery, 2) skills, or 3) whole language instructional approaches.

Caverly and Peterson write:

Debate among developmental educators looking to revitalize their existing programs often revolves around which approach is best. We propose another way of looking at these instructional approaches. Rather than a collection of pedagogical strategies, these different approaches represent basic philosophical differences that are grounded in Western epistemological philosophy, in psychological interpretations as to how knowledge is acquired, and in educational theory as to how teachers teach and how students learn. Each of these views helps to define the different sets of instructional practices. Because none of the three philosophical views can be considered wrong, none of the three instructional approaches can be wrong. Still, we agree with Perry’s assertion that once all views are understood and accepted (relativism), a commitment must be made by the developmental educator (commitment to relativism) to identify one philosophical approach rather than an eclectic combination of best practices. (Caverly and Peterson’s article was published as a NADE—National Association of Developmental Education—monograph and can be accessed on line at the NADE website.

Caverly and Peterson provide the following table, which outlines the three theoretical perspectives—philosophical, psychological, and educational.

Table 1: Three Theoretical Perspectives

I think that Caverly and Peterson map out the theoretical underpinnings of an integrated approach to reading in the spirit of easing the gap between theory and classroom practice. In addition to the trigger points for discussion that I have listed below, during our discussion, I’d like to foreground specific reading practices that we actively use in collaboration with our students to create interpretation and meaning in writing.

II. Trigger points for on line discussion:

• How do BW instructors delineate the relationship between reading and writing in the developmental classroom?

• In what ways has technology impacted reading in the BW classroom? How have BW instructors used technology in creative and productive ways for the developmental reader?
  
• What kinds of readings are most commonly used in a BW classroom and how are they successful in teaching in a more meaning or text oriented approach (rather than word oriented approach characteristic of many developmental readers)?
  
• In a BW classroom, what kinds of metacognitive information about meaning making and reading comprehension do students provide their instructors with as they read?

• What types of interpretation strategies do readers in a basic writing classroom most commonly use?

• What affective factors play a role in the interpretation strategies that students use?

• Why do we read in a BW classroom?

Teaching Basic Writing