Reading in Composition: The Importance of Prior Knowledge

On the recommendation of a member of a listserv I subscribe to, I recently read Ellen C. Carillo’s Securing a Place for Reading in Composition.  Having spent my early teaching career at the high school level, and then taking a twenty-three year hiatus in the private sector, I missed all the development of composition pedagogy she describes, so it was an interesting backgrounder. 

Her descriptions of various kinds of “reading” teachers have their students engage in were interesting, in part confirmation of my own practice of using reading to supply models for student writing.  Her prescription for “mindful” reading was on point, but somewhat vague, much like that term is when used by New Age quasi-Buddhists.  I prefer the more prosaic “attentive,” but I think we refer to the same type of engagement.  

Interesting as all that was, Carillo assumes that all we have to do to meet the challenge of students’ difficulties with reading is to figure out the right process and all will be well.  She quotes Ann Bertoff to the effect that the heart of reading is interpretation.  This is puzzling to me.  Bertoff might have a point if her readers are literate and experienced.  But my students struggle with reading because their “prior knowledge” is not sufficient to help them.  They can’t follow the syntax, don’t know the vocabulary or literary or historical references, concepts from politics or sociology or psychology or physical science.  Hence, they are mystified by similes (“I admire the natural, and I hate the miscalled improvements that spread like impetigo into the hills.” Stegner), the significance of dates (1946, the date of Orwell’s “Some Thoughts on a Common Toad”), and allusions (“But within the company, he and others who felt that way were the Chicken Littles.” McLean & Nocera).

Presumably, we give students names and examples of rhetorical practices (á la Aristotle or Richard Lanham) before we ask them to read “rhetorically,” but if we are asking them to respond to an essay’s arguments without the knowledge the writer expects them to have, students can only fall back on prejudice and vague concepts.

That ESOL students would have problems with these things is not surprising, but the students who grew up here are no better off.  Our pedagogy deplores memorization, but how do we help students make the connections we have already made if they don’t remember the stories and concepts and, yes, names, places, and dates that they encounter in the classroom?  How could they understand movies like Trumbo and The Bridge of Spies, for example, and the lessons we need to learn from them?  We spend a lot of time talking about context in English classes, but our students often do not have sufficient knowledge to supply it themselves.  It is a curious predicament to have put our students in through our emphasis on active learning.

One of our difficulties as composition instructors is that rhetoric, as Aristotle pointed out a long time ago, does not aim at itself, though it certainly has conceptual and factual content.  It is much like mathematics in that it is a tool for doing things, informing and persuading and delighting others, to take Cicero’s formula.  We leave it to other domains to supply the prior knowledge students bring to their rhetorical tasks.

Absent that prior knowledge, we resort to assigning students self-referential personal essays.  The research paper is a way to have students build a knowledge base from which to write, but in a Comp I class that would blur course distinctions for those of us who also teach a research paper focused composition class as well (Comp II), which has unpleasant practical and political consequences.

An approach I have adopted is to have students write a quasi-research paper, for which I assemble readings about selected contemporary topics, from Edward Snowden (soon to be Apple Computer) to racial profiling to drones to community college retention.  It’s a platform for argument analysis and rebuttal, MLA documentation, and critical reading all in one.  Students are still tempted to supply their own ill-informed arguments instead of adapting arguments they encounter in their research.  They have apparently been trained to disdain reliance on “authorities,” with the consequent lack of facts or conceptual coherence.  But it at least gives them an opportunity to develop some expertise on a particular issue and apply that to their analysis and argument.  That, of course, depends on their having the requisite knowledge to understand the readings I assign.

I have alternatively had the class examine a single topic together, typically citizenship.  Westheimer and Kahne have developed a model for describing three approaches to citizenship that we use as a point of departure.  We then read accounts that typify the models.  It’s a fun assignment in an election year, and has wakened some students to greater civic engagement.

The knowledge issue is difficult for any college instructor to crack.  We do what we can.  What we should never do, however, is discount its importance in what we do, whether we are talking of writing or reading.   Students are better readers and writers when they bring greater, not lesser, knowledge to bear on those activities.  Process is not a substitute.

References

Carillo, Ellen C. Securing a Place for Reading in Composition.  Boulder:  Colorado UP, 2015.

Lanham, Richard A.  Analyzing Prose.  2^nd Edition. New York:  Continuum, 2003.

McLean, Bethany, Joe Nocera.  All the Devils are Here:  The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. New York:  Penguin, 2010.

Orwell, George.  “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” The Orwell Prize. http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/. Web.

Stegner, Wallace.  All the Little Live Things.  New York: Viking, 1967.

Westheimer Joel, Joseph Kahne.  “Citizenship:  Three Models.” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer, 2004),  American Educational Research. JSTOR. 24 Feb 2011. Web.