In 2020 I published in the twentieth anniversary issue of Pedagogy “Reader Response Joins the Resistance,” which argued that in that in our political environment we needed a more radical approach to schooling, one that created a democratic community of teachers and learners. I quoted H. G. Wells writing in 1921 that “civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe,” and now on the eve of immanent destruction by the possibility of a second Trump term, of an unleashed Supreme Court and victorious book burners governing states we are even closer to the edge. We don’t need so much a revolution as a restoration of what Allen Ginsberg called the “lost America of Love.”
This sense of urgency led me to look back to what in the past could, in a Janus-faced way, help us look forward to the future, and I found hope in the democratic visions of some reader response critics that looked back themselves to writers and teachers like Louise Rosenblatt, John Dewey, and Walt Whitman. I came to realize that the ways in which we interacted with our students to give them the intellectual courage of their own minds and voices would be more effective than any creeds or ideals we explicitly told them. As we used to say in the 1960s, in teaching the medium is the message. Reader-response seems to most literary critics as an idea whose time has past, but I found some work that was put in the service of opening up the classroom and broadening the minds of students and teachers that we could emulate and be inspired by.
The three articles I tried to rescue from oblivion are to form the introduction to a book I’m writing analyzing transcripts and student writing from a laboratory course for graduate students where we all teach an undergraduate class together and then try to understand what happened, to find what was helpful or not in our teaching, and plan the next class with all this in mind. We also found reading by others that would help our quest. I have already presented these three articles in my previous entries to this Newsletter, but I’d like to present them again to all of you here in the hopes that you’ll find them as exemplary and liberating as we did. They represent a range of materials and student levels in a variety of settings. The reason for cutting the Pedagogy piece up was to some helpful advice I received that readers of a blog are more likely to read shorter entries. But I’m putting the pieces back in juxtaposition along with links to them in this blog and some brief “Contexts” for each.
Robert Crosman, “How Readers Make Meaning”
Context. In the first part of this exploration of theory and practice, I suggested that literary theory can be helpful in our teaching, but only when it creates dialogue and synergy between both. In other words, we should neither try to teach directly and mechanically from a specific theory nor should we let a theory remain unscathed by genuine contact with the realities of students and classrooms. Each can shape and modify the other and both become enlivened. For example, one of the most dreaded aspects of our teaching is the plowing through stacks of student papers, but if we read with the issues of Reader Response in mind, the task of grading and “correcting” becomes an intellectual challenge to observe and conceptualize the similarities and differences behind how students make meanings. A powerful example of this interaction is Robert Crosman’s article, “How Readers Make Meaning,” published in College Literature 9 (1982): 207-15. It is based on a comparison of two readings of William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily.”
https://martybickman.substack.com/p/theory-and-practice-2-how-can-we
Cynthia Lewis, “Give People a Chance”: Acknowledging Social Differences in Reading
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.
https://martybickman.substack.com/p/part-3-theory-and-practice-using
Carol Gilligan, “Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls and Women”
https://martybickman.substack.com/p/part-4-theory-and-practice-carol
Context.This is the third and last example of how Reader-Response can be used in a humane, student-centered, cognitively enriched way, a way sorely needed in our current political and social climate. Including this entry a range of age groups and settings has been represented, from a university classroom to tutoring in an elementary school to the present study of girls from an elite high school, suggesting a wide relevance and applicability of playing as close attention to our students’ responses as to the text itself. Gilligan’s “Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls, and Women” was delivered as the Tanner Lecture at the University of Michigan in 1990, and is a fitting way to end this series, weaving together the personal and the institutional, the individual reader and the community, the present situation and the possible.
In summarizing these articles, I am not simply raising the banner of reader response against other theoretical and pedagogical approaches such as deconstruction and cultural studies. Instead I am advocating a radical change in our entire approach to our work, toward a more engaged, collaborative, and democratic relation among our students and our colleagues, to make all of us theorizers and reflective practitioners at once, each role feeding into the other. We do not need yet another fixed position on interpretation; we need an unsettling scrutiny of everything we do, a willingness to see every instant of our professional
lives as a teachable and learnable moment, especially those small interactions
that have receded into unthinking habit and become business as usual. These three essays suggest ways we can lower the barriers in dichotomies such as text/interpretation, product/process, and individual consciousness/democratic community. They show how, by making our interactions with students more transactional and empathetic, we can also raise the visions of both students and teachers working democratically together.