Inspiring Reading and the New Literacy

There is something very nice about knowing that a whole country has read the same books in school.  It is a conversation I have had with my daughter, currently doing A levels, on several occasions.  As lovely as reading the exactly the same books may seem, it frustrates me enormously that she isn't set any of the amazing literature of the last 20 years, in fact I would be pretty impressed if they set new books of the last 100 years.  Wuthering Heights was written in 1847, Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 1891.  They are of course classics of literature and highly worthy.  My daughter's response is generally a practical one: these books have tons of essays written on them, the critical thought on them is established and hundreds of examiners know them backwards.

I was really inspired to read in a New York Times article over the weekend about a teacher in the US who is not setting a particular book, but is permitting her students to read what they wish to.

"The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.

In New York City many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of reading workshop. Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing.

....fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading."

This approach obviously is a much more personal approach and makes (I believe) quite high demands on teachers.  But how wonderful it sounds to be a student of inspiring Ms McNeill! (She also transformed the classroom layout).

Wired magazine has also published an interesting article on the New Literacy and examines new research results from a huge study conducted by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University.  The study called the Stanford Study of  Writing found some fascinating results:

"The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago."

Links via: Konrad Glogowski [Teachers Without Borders]