Reader response/literary critical theories. PTs should be familiar with different reader response theories and literary critical perspectives associated with ways of fostering responses to texts (Appleman, 2000; Beach, Appleman, Hynds, & Wilhelm, 2006; Carey-Webb, 2001; Eckert, 2006; Probst, 1004; Schweickart & Flynn, 2004).  This requires PTs to translate their knowledge of these theoretical or critical perspectives into activities that reflect certain ways of constructing meaning.  For example, in adopting a feminist perspective, they are focusing on how students’ gender perspectives shaped their construction of gendered practices in texts.   In constructing these response activities, PTs could reflect on their assumptions about the kinds of responses or critical stances they are inviting students to adopt as consistent with certain response theories and literary critical perspectives. 

 

Transactional literary response theory and practice.  In methods courses, PTs can share their aesthetic, “living-through” experiences with texts related to their experiences of sympathy, happiness, relief, apprehension, joy, anger, anxiety, etc.   as “ways of seeing” or “acts of perceptions” (Vetlessen, 1994, p. 168). 

    They can also draw comparisons between entering into and constructing text worlds involves entering into a “landscape of action” and participating in a “landscape of consciousness” in which they vicariously imagine characters’ feelings, thoughts, and beliefs about participating in a text world (Bruner, 1986).  And, they can identify the different phases of what Langer (1995) describes as “envisionments”:

- “being out and stepping into an envisionment” in which readers “make initial contacts with the genre, content, structure, and language of the text” (7). 

- “being in and moving through an envisionment” in which readers are “immersed in their understandings, using their previously constructed envisionment, prior knowledge  and the text itself to further their creation of meaning” (7).

- “stepping back and rethinking what one knows” in which readers “used their envisionments to reflect on their own previous knowledge or understanding” (7).

- “stepping out and objectifying the experience” in which readers “distanced themselves from their envisionments, reflecting on and reacting to the content, to the text, or to the reading experience itself” (7).

 

Recognizing the limitations of traditional reader response approaches.  It is also important for PTs to recognize the limitations of reader-response approaches that focuses only on students' subjective or shared autobiographical  experiences without fostering critical analysis of how they are being positioned by texts and social contexts.  For example, Cynthia Lewis (2000) argues that, in responding to multicultural literature, students need need to recognize that they cannot necessarily identify with characters who are the targets of racism when they have not had similar experiences. 

 

    To do so, PTs could reflect on how their constructions of the roles, rules, norms, beliefs, and attitudes of text worlds both draws on and differs from their construction of lived worlds (Beach & Myers, 2001).  For example, in studying characters’  roles, they may ask, “What roles/identities do participants or characters enact in a world?  How do these roles/identities vary across different worlds?  What practices or language do they employ to enact this role or identity?  What are their feelings about being in a role/identity?”  Or, in studying characters’ or people’s rules or norms, they may ask: “What is considered to be appropriate versus inappropriate behavior?   What rules does this suggest?   Who do you see as following versus not following these rules?    What do these rules suggest about the type of world the characters inhabit?”  For example, constructing of the world of Pride and Prejudice involves applying a different set of cultural norms related to gender construction than is operating in their own contemporary world.  

 

    And, PTs need to recognize differences in characters' perspectives about these roles, rules, norms, beliefs, and attitudes operating in a text world--the fact that Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice held a different set of attitudes about women's role in society than did her mother or sisters.  And, they need to be able to identify the competing worlds operating in text worlds, competing worlds that create tensions for characters.  PTs could then develop activities designed to help students learn how to construct text worlds as constrasted with their construction of lived worlds.

    PTs could reflect on how texts are positioning them in terms of the ideological stances they are being invited to adopt (Althusser, 1971). They could reflect on the stances they adopt in terms of three alternative positions described by Stuart Hall (1993):

1).  Dominant-hegemonic reading: students may simply accept or identify with the dominant value stance without challenging that stance.

2).  Negotiated reading: Students may negotiate or struggle with the dominant stance, applying some of their own value stances. 

3).  Oppositional reading: Students resist, challenge, disagree with, or reject the text's invited stance.  By recognizing how they are being positioned, students may identify the ideological forces operating in the text or context that serve to position them in a certain manner, forces tied to cultural and institutional systems.  As Hicks (1996) notes, "reading involves a set of cultural practices, as integrally embedded within webs of relationships as any other social act of being and knowing" (p. 221).  For example, in responding to  the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, students may consider how asusmptions about race and class operating in the world of the novel serve to position them.

 

    PTs could also reflect on how their own discourses of race, class, and gender influences their interpretation of texts.  They may also note how these discourses, for example, discourses of "whiteness," reflect institutional forces designed to benefit whites as a group.  This may then lead them to a critique of the institutional racism operating in much of Western literature related to portrayals of non-white characters.

 

    PTs could also analyze the cultural models (Holland and Skinner, 1992) that consist of ideologies and hierachical categories for judging or labeling others in text worlds.  Group members share expertise and knowledge of a cultural model are familiar with appropriate social practices constituted by a cultural model. PTs could then, drawing on poststructuralist theory, examine how these language categories shape characters' perceptions of reality.  For example, they could examine how essentialist categories of “male” and “female" or "white" and "black" influences characters' attitudes towards each other, as well as how their own categories shapes their own responses.  In recognizing how their beliefs and attitudes shape their responses, PTs may then be more aware of differences between their responses and those of their students as shaped by discourses and cultural models.

 

    PTs could also reflect on how characters' ations are shaped by social genres as certain consistent ways of acting or being (Bazerman, 1994), for example, genres for engaging in relationships, social interactions, ceremonies, rituals, productions, etc. For example, they could examine the various social genres involved in romantic relationships, as well as the cultural norms and attitudes shaping those genres.  And, they could note instances in which these norms are violated, leading to conflict and issues of resolving those conflicts. "forms of life, ways of being, frames for social action.  They are environments for learning" (Bazerman (1994, p. 1).   Defined as such, genres are very similar to the description of discourse-practices we have described in this book. As familiar patterns of social interaction, genres function as tools to organize activity, identity, and relationships within a social world.   For example, within the world of a religious ceremony, participants use recitations, songs, and sermons to represent their roles and beliefs as consistent with the traditions of their own denomination or sect. Likewise, a group of African-American students may employ "signifying" or "he-say/she-say" gossip exchanges to construct their belonging within a shared social world (van Dijk, Ting-Toomey, Smitherman, & Troutman, 1997). 

 

 

Reader Response in Action. This project invites you and your students to retrospectively analyze their own literature discussions. From this analysis, you will create a short five-minute video documentary of how your students’ respond to literature in your class and what you learned from this study. Two parts comprise this project: 1) The edited video; 2) reader response analysis.

 

In the video, plan to include still photos of your students as they engage in literature activities (i.e., literature studies, activities, small, pair, large group), as well as short video snippets of your students as they respond to literature. The video should have music to accompany the video. In the video, include short clips of the literature discussion you analyze. Include in this video both students' discussions and your own voiceover narration of what you noticed about their discussions.

 

With the reader response analysis, you will conduct one literature study with your students, video record the entire discussion, and choose ten minutes of this discussion and transcribe it. In the margins of the transcript, analyze students’ responses, your responses, and the overall discussion in light of Rosenblatt’s theory of reader response. At the end of the transcript, include an overall analysis of your students’ discussion (several paragraphs) and whether they moved through the layers of response that Rosenblatt describes. Consider questions such as What types of responses are my students saying? Are they attending to superficial aspects of text or are they talking about issues that they believe the author raises? What is the percentage of teacher talk? What is the overall percent of student talk? Based upon these two components (video/photos) and the reader response, edit and create a short five-minute video of your students’ study of literature (Windows movie maker or iMovie). Integrate photos, music and/or voice over narration that capture the essence of what you learned from your study of your literature classroom. Include the transcripts and video tape for this project.

 

Further reading on reader response theories and literary critical perspectives:

Appleman, D.  (2000).  Critical encounters in high school English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents.  New York:

    Teachers College Press.

Beach, R.  (1993). A teacher’s introduction to reader response theories.  Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Carey-Webb A.  (2001).  Literature and lives; A response-based, cultural-studies approach to teaching English.  Urbana, IL.:

    National Council of Teachers of English.

Eckert, L. S. (2006).  How does it mean?: Engaging reluctant readers through literary theory.  Portsmouth, NH:

    Heinemann.

Ellsworth, E.  (1997).  Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. New York: Teachers College

    Press.

Johnston, I.  (2003).  Re-mapping literary worlds: Postcolonial pedagogy in practice. New York: Peter Lang.

Lewis, C. (2000). Limits of identification: The personal, pleasurable, and critical in reader response. Journal of Literacy

    Research, 32(2), 253-266.

Pace, B. G. (2006). Between response and interpretation: Ideological becoming and literacy events in critical readings of

    literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(7), 584–594.

Poyas, Y. (2004). Exploring the horizons of the literature classroom: Reader response, reception theories and classroom

    discourse.  L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 4(1), 63-84.

Probst, R. E. (2004). Response & analysis, Second edition: Teaching literature in secondary school.  Portsmouth, NH:

    Heinemann.

Richards, I. A.  (1965).   How to read a page.  Boston: Beacon Press.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (Ed.). (1995). Literature as exploration, 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association.

Rosenblatt, L. (2005). Making meaning with texts: Selected essays. Heinemann.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Scholes, R. (2001). The crafty reader. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Schweickart, P. P., & Flynn, E. A. (Eds.).  (2004).  Reading sites: Social differences and reader response.  New York: Modern Language Association.