Part 3. Theory and Practice. Using Reader Response in Understanding Social Differences

Cynthia Lewis, “ ‘Give People a Chance’ ”: Teacher and Student Read Each Other

Context

When I teach Reader Response in my Graduate Pedagogy Course, I get some pushback from the students that the approach doesn’t take full account of issues of diversity, especially class and gender issues.  This and the next section are two of the exceptions that prove the rule and show that Reader Response can be a powerful instrument in analyzing these differences and altering our teaching in their light.  Cynthia Lewis’s, “ ‘Give People a Chance’: Acknowledging Social Differences in Reading” was first published in 1993 in the journal Language Arts while Cynthia was still a graduate student; it was handed out to the class by an African American student in Education, who felt that our discussions were too abstract, too divorced from the classroom, and I have used it with good effect on dialoguing ever since.  In it, Lewis poignantly shows a teacher caught between some of the practical imperatives of schooling, such as standardized testing and the need to reaffirm a child’s imaginative and empathic personal vision.  Lewis also shows the courage to go back and critically examine her own work as a teacher and underline her mistakes rather than her successes.

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Preview: We must honor Lewis’s honesty and courage in publishing this article.  Most reports from the classroom celebrate our successes—see how well this works!—and urge we do something similar in our classrooms.  What Lewis discovers—partly through the serendipity of having recorded and transcribed the session but mainly through her own integrity in wanting to improve her and our teaching—is that such close examination not only reveals how our students read and think but our own reading and processing.

Like Crosman’s piece, Cynthia Lewis’s article is based on her interaction with a single student, Rick, a fourth grader with whom Lewis worked as a reading specialist three times a week.  She transcribed one session where she and Rick did a “think aloud,” a technique, that can help us see the processes by which students construct meaning but also—somewhat to Lewis’s discovery in this case—can reveal processes and problems in her own reading and teaching strategies: “When I audiotaped Rick’s think-aloud, I had intended to reflect on and analyze his discourse, not mine.  As I later began to analyze the tape, however, I found that I had listened selectively to Rick’s interpretation of the fable as he thought aloud in a way that disregarded his close reading of the text in favor of my own.”  Below is the text (click here to have it read!) they worked with but with an important omission:

The Pelican and the Crane

1.     The crane invited the Pelican to tea. “So nice of you to ask me to come,” said the Pelican to the Crane.  “No one invites me anywhere.”

2.     “Entirely my pleasure,” said the Crane to the Pelican, passing him the sugar bowl. “Do you take sugar in your tea?”

3.      “Yes, thank you,” said the Pelican.  He dumped half the sugar into his cup, while spilling the other half on the floor.

4.      “I seem to have no friends at all,” said the Pelican.

5.     “Do you take milk in your tea?” asked the Crane.

6.     “Yes, thank you,” said the Pelican.  He poured some of the milk into his cup, but most of it made a puddle on the table.

7.     “Will you have a cookie?” asked the Crane.

8.     “Yes, thank you,” said the Pelican.  He took a large pile of cookies and stuffed them into his mouth.  His shirt was covered with crumbs.  “I hope you will invite me again,” said the Pelican.

9.     “Perhaps,” said the Crane, “but I am so very busy these days.”                                    

10.   “Goodbye until the next time,” said the Pelican.  He swallowed many more cookies.  He wiped his mouth with the tablecloth and left.

11.  After the Pelican had gone, the Crane shook his head and sighed.  He called for the maid to clean up the mess.

The omission is what the author, Arnold Lobel, attached as the moral to his fable, “When one is a social failure, the reasons are as clear as day,’’ which Lewis omitted in Rick’s copy so she could “observe him use textual clues as he began to construct a logical moral” and provides a convenient “bottom line” for the story to extract and strip of any complexities in the story itself.   Both the author, and Lewis’s first impression, sides with Crane and against Pelican; Rick, not so much, as seen in this excerpt from the “think aloud”:

T: How do you feel about Pelican?

R: Sorry.

T:  Do you feel sort of sorry for him?  How come?  You describe him as someone who just makes a mess . . . just makes a mess and leaves.  Doesn’t clean up.

R: Maybe (unintelligible) he can’t eat right.

T: Does he seem to understand why he doesn’t have any friends and why people don’t invite him?  How come?

R: No.

T: Is that why you feel sorry for him?

R: Uh-huh (yes).                                                                                             

Lewis as T(eacher) is steering R(ick) to a negative judgement of Pelican instead of Rick’s more empathic response.  As Lewis notices when she mentions his “subtle resistance,” Rick senses he’s not on the right track (a valuable skill for students who are frequently told they are “wrong”) but instead of arguing to make his case, Rick withdraws into clipped monosyllables, trying to opt out of the game as much as he can.  Rick also knows that reticence on his part might allow the instructor fill in the gaps by answering her own questions.

Lewis persists in getting Rick to adopt her and Crane’s point of view and Rick persists in giving short answers.  She asks again how he thought Crane felt about Pelican.

R: I don’t know.

T: Well, look back at the last sentence.

R: It didn’t bother him.

T: It didn’t?  Look again at that last sentence and find some clues that maybe it didn’t bother him.

R: He shook his head (referring to segment 10).

T: O.K.  So how do think Crane feels about the Pelican?

R: Not very good.

T: Because he’s sighing and shaking his head.  Do you think he’ll invite the Pelican back again?

R. No.                                                                                                                  

Rick detects that Lewis’s last question is really rhetorical and gives T what she asks for at the end.  But Rick’s own reading is still actively resistant.  He notes that Crane shaves the truth when he gives busy-ness as the reason for not having Pelican over again; in answer to why Crane won’t re-invite Pelican, Rick says: “Might not be that busy.  Just don’t want him over.”

Rick’s own reading re-emerges particularly when he is asked to give own moral to the story and responds with the phrase that gives the essay its name:

T: What do you think the moral might be?

R. Give people a chance.

T: Who should give who a chance?

R: The Crane should have given the Pelican a chance: then maybe he’ll like him.

T:  O.K. . . .O.K. . . . That could be a possibility.  But. . . the Crane was trying to be nice, wasn’t he?

R: Yeah.

T: Yet the Pelican never realized his problem.  What could be another possible moral?  Maybe a lesson more for Pelican than the Crane?

R: I don’t know

T: What might be a lesson for you if every time you went to your friend’s house, you were really messy and got crumbs over the living room carpet?

R: Just don’t eat? [Spoken softly]                                                                

One smiles at the perhaps unintentional humor here, both of Rick’s ingenious “solution” which he probably knows is “wrong,” phrased as a question and whispered, and Lewis’s subjunctive and conditional “suggestions”—“could be a possibility,” “another possible moral?”  It seems that the more insistently directive she becomes, the more she tries to balance this stance through language that sounds tentative and open.

But while we smile, we must honor Lewis’s honesty and courage in publishing this article.  Most reports from the classroom celebrate our successes—see how well this works!—and urge we do something similar in our classrooms.  What Lewis discovers—partly through the serendipity of having recorded and transcribed the session but mainly through her own integrity in wanting to improve her and our teaching—is that such close examination not only reveals how our students read and think but our own reading and processing.  When I work with beginning teachers I have come to increasingly focus on giving them practice and skills in reading the classroom itself, both in the moment and in their ability to later remember and reflect on it, as Lewis does here:

My own reading was one-dimensional; it acknowledged Crane’s disapproval but viewed that lie as a “white lie,” which in terms of middle-class social codes would be an acceptable way for Crane to extricate himself without unduly hurting Pelican.  Indeed, my selective reading of the fable acknowledged Pelican’s social failings but dismissed Crane’s responsibilities as a social being who ought to be compassionate towards others.  My interpretation was manipulated by the text, which does not develop Crain’s failings, and by the moral which does not comment on Crane’s behavior.  I accepted this exclusion, but Rick resisted it.                                     

As Lewis ruminates further, she notes that problems lay not solely in the differences in the two individual readings of the text but in factors surrounding and beyond her teaching that interfere with it:

Like many teachers, I teach in a district that is informed by whole language philosophy, yet is required to use standardized tests to assess such skills as “determining the author’s purpose.”  As the school’s reading specialist, I felt a responsibility to prepare Rick for such assessment so that he, like others his age, could develop interpretations of texts that conform to the expectations of particular audiences.                                      

Through writing this article, Lewis becomes aware that this imperative of reading for the test had led her to stifle not only Rick’s interpretive processes but her own.  Lewis had earlier told Rick at the beginning of the session “that there were many possible meaning for any one fable,” and that she herself accepted “multiple meanings” (456).  But as she admits, she pushed back at Rick’s interpretation because she wanted to help him figure out the “acceptable” answer and for the time missed some of the insights in Rick’s reading that Crosman came to see in Stacy’s.  Lewis looks back at her own reading as “one-dimensional” and “selective,” and now comes to see the coherence and authenticity of Rick’s reading.

Rick was better able to see Crane’s faults than I was.  He saw through Crane’s “white lie” as most skilled readers, but in keeping with his interpretive frame and the way he had constructed those characters, he thought Crane’s lie was worth mentioning.  This interpretative frame conflicts with my own. I was teaching in a school where “mainstream” meant “middle-class,” but Rick was an academically marginal student whose background experiences and knowledge differed from those of his classmates. 

Lewis is sensitive to the difficulties of her dilemma.  She cites Lisa Delpit who argues that middle-class children absorb from their home environments the “power codes” of society but that marginal students have to be explicitly taught them in school to compete.  Lewis wants to prepare Rick for the high stakes multiple choice testing that may determine his educational and career options.  When I’ve tutored young people for these exams, I find myself saying “Don’t overthink this,” which really means “don’t think too much; don’t do nuance.”  Complex and individual thinking are the casualties of the pervasive simplified and simplifying notion of reading.  Particularly in the case of literary texts, the notion of the convergent and single answer assumptions of such multiple choice tests confines and distorts the very nature of the reading experience.  Louise Rosenblatt has helped us conceptualize the issue through her differentiation of “efferent” and “aesthetic” reading.  The former is her own coinage for reading solely for information; the extreme examples she gives is reading the label for the antidote to a poisonous substance one’s child has just swallowed.  At the “aesthetic” end of the spectrum, there is more emphasis on the experience of reading in itself, of being in and enjoying the moment, both being “lost in a book” but also taking in consciously or unconsciously the felicities and play of language.  To see a literary passage mainly as something from which “facts” are to be extracted is to distort the figurative and hypothetical nature of literary language.  Even though I went through school well before the pervasiveness standardized tests, I remember most of our English grade was based on a series of short answer tests—Q: What is the theme of The Tempest.  A: Freedom consists of obedience to authority.  That could well have been the motto of the high school administration, but it is as dubious as the “moral” of Loebel’s own fable as it is of Shakespeare’s play.

The response to Rick that Lewis formulates in retrospect is similar to Crosman’s—to affirm and validate Rick’s reading but also to make him aware of other possibilities as she became aware of other possibilities as she read the transcript: “Both Rick and I eventually would need to struggle with the tensions created by our socially constituted reading of this fable.  Inexperienced readers tend to hear a single voice in what they read.  Sometimes experienced teacher-readers hear a single voice as well.”  I see as crucial that just as Rick needed to cue in on different social cues, Lewis needed to share some of his resistance to these very social cues: “For it was not just Rick’s voice and my own that filled the room that day, but many others, including the voice of authority, in the form of interpretations sanctioned by middle-class social codes and school culture, as well as the voice of resistance, both mine and Rick’s.”

Lewis does not provide easy answers to the questions and paradoxes her analysis raises, but we come away from the article that more careful and empathetic listening can only help, that to begin with “morals” and expected conventional answers rather than the students’ personal experiencing of the text is to turn the learning process on its head.  Lewis’s piece is an argument and a demonstration that all people, all students should be given a chance.  It is this openness to other voices and other points of view that can counteract the narrow and hateful stances of our current national situation.