Readers Changing, Changing Readers: Exploring Reading Biographies

It is time for another YA Wednesday. If you would like to help teachers in Southern Louisiana replace classroom libraries let me know at [email protected].

​If you have an idea for a blog post, I would love to have you contribute. Just send me an email.

For the second time, Crag Hill will be our guest contributor.  Crag is a great friend and we continue to work together on several projects when we get the chance. Currently, Crag and I, along with Leilya Pitre are the editors of the emerging young adult journal--Study and Scrutiny. If you haven't visited that website, please do. The first issue of the second volume is waiting for your approval.  

​Crag has done significant work as an editor of two books. The first book was The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature. I was one of the reviewers of the book for the publisher and was thrilled to write the forward. The second book is released today! It represents Crag deep interest in teaching and studying Comics. The title is Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses. This week, Crag discusses an assignment he uses with his pre-service students in a YA course. If you would like to read Crag's first posting just click here. 

Readers Changing, Changing Reader

I would love to know of a research study that explores the attitudes pre-service teachers have about young adult (YA) literature before and after taking a YA literature course. Even more so, I would be interested in how these attitudes have shifted, if at all, in the last 15 years. Had I a research mindset when I was first enlisted to teach YA literature in 2000 at Washington State University, my research questions would have been: What attitudes do pre-service teachers have concerning YA literature? What experiences with YA literature have pre-service teachers had in class and out of class? Had I a research mindset then (if that was possible adjuncting this YA literature class on top of full-time high school teaching, starting a doctoral program, as well as being a father of two young children), I would have started collecting data for this kind of research study.

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Below is the assignment, a reading autobiography, I have given at the start of my YA literature classes for over a dozen years (I do not have copies of syllabi for all the YA courses I have taught, so I cannot say when I first assigned this). I have not been fortunate to teach this course every semester, but over a two-year span I generally have taught it three times. Average class size has been approximately 25, so every year on average I taught 37.5 students. Over that dozen years, then, I have taught approximately 450 students. To have 450 reading autobiographies now would be a robust data set to analyze.

Alas. But I can summarize what I have been reporting back to my students after reading their autobiographies, the patterns that are so deep they are inescapable ruts. English majors tend to start school as avid readers, reading with family and independently through elementary school. Perhaps half continue in this vein into middle school, growing into and with a community of peer readers, while the other half scale back on their reading because of the pressures of extracurricular activities (e.g. sports). 

This photo is linked to Kelly's webpage

Most, however, hit a wall in high school. Extracurricular activities increase, but the number of assigned books also increases. The work—and an overwhelmingly number of students report it as work—makes reading onerous (Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide). Independent reading precipitously declines. That pattern continues—and intensifies—as these students, against all odds, decide to become English majors and read many more assigned books in college English classes. Too many have reported that they cannot remember the last time they read a book of their own choosing. And they have forgotten that reading can be a pleasurably activity​.

When I first started teaching the YA literature course the resistance was palpable. My students were English majors who went from reading chapter books and/or series to reading the classics, The Babysitter’s Club to Jane Eyre. YA literature was never an option. I remember in the first week of class a student asking pointedly, “Why are we reading kid books in a college English class?” But then the students who read the Harry Potter series growing up arrived. The resistance became non-existent. Now my students come with extensive experience reading YA literature in and out of class (Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and many, many titles and authors I have not heard of). So rather than skipping over YA literature, they have read it alongside the classics they love.

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As a way to help you get to know your students as readers (or non-readers), I offer the assignment below for both high school and pre-service classes. I offer it, too, to those who would like to research the changing of reader’s attitudes over time. I contend that if we can document when/where/how readers turn toward or against reading, we can more strategically implement the ways to turn more readers toward rather than against reading that Terri Lesene, Donna Miller, Penny Kittle, and so many others have been proposing. For me, I want to start with pre-service teachers who have been changed as readers (or who have been renewed at the very least) changing the readers (or non-readers) they encounter as teachers.

Short Paper #1: Reading Autobiography

 Reading is breathing for some; for others it’s a chore. For the majority of us, reading falls somewhere between those two poles. By way of introducing yourself to the class, to provide me with a background of your reading, write an autobiography of yourself as a reader (see below for an example). Write about your reading experiences; highlight significant books, ones that influenced you or taught you or nudged you in a new direction, that opened up not only the world of reading but the whole shebang; focus on one stage in your reading life, e.g. elementary school; write a survey of your reading from the time you started reading through last semester; or answer one or two or all of the following questions: What do you know about young adult literature? What young adult authors do you know? In what ways has the field of young adult literature shaped you as a reader? Who are you as a reader?

 All papers will be read in small groups. Together, they will give us a portrait of the class as readers as we begin our exploration of young adult literature.

Example: My Life as a Reader: Detours and Landmarks

I’ve been a reader as long as I can remember, a memory that recalls watching JFK’s flag-draped caisson crawling toward Arlington Cemetery on the boxy black and white television crowding the living room. Actually, I can’t remember how I learned to read, or when (or if one ever stops learning to read). It seems as if I always have been reading, an act as organic as walking, as vital as breathing.

My earliest memories of reading consist of those times I volunteered to read aloud in class. Maybe this was in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade, I can’t pinpoint it. I took this classroom exhibition as a moment to seize the English language – I have always robustly loved the sounds of words - to project it through my voice toward my peers. To embody language. Or maybe I was just a show off.
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I read the funnies, comic books, the sports page, the backs of baseball, basketball, and football cards, and I read biographies of athletes I wanted to emulate – Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Bart Starr, Jerry Kramer, Gale Sayers, or short novels about the sports I played such as The Catcher with the Glass Arm by Matt Christopher. These show what kind of reader I was – looking through print to measure and extend my world, to entertain me but also to point me toward something beyond myself, seeking ways to better myself. Reading to know.

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As a young adult, reading – and then writing – saved my life. Pushed off center by things I am finally beginning to understand, reading – and writing – anchored me. I read widely, wildly perhaps, voraciously – over fifty books in the year after I barely graduated from high school – poetry by Ginsberg, Sexton, Richard Hugo, Frost, Robert Bly, Wallace Stevens, novels and short stories by Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, plays by Eugene O’ Neill, and criticism on poets such as Lord Alfred Tennyson and Ezra Pound (way above my head!). I read on my job at Mirror Aluminum (manufacturer of cooking pans) when I could steal five or ten minutes; I read off the job, often skipping parties or other social events to read. The words on the page made more sense than my life. Then the practice of making meaning from these stories helped me make sense of my own story. 
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It hurts to say reading drove a wedge between me my peers, from my friends, but what I was learning about the world and myself always felt right. Eventually, reading led me to a way to make a life, to make a living, to living a life, vocation and avocation hand in hand. After ten years of working jobs I came to despise, the obvious overwhelmed me: I had to find some way to do everyday – to get paid for – what I did everyday, what I had to do everyday – read, think, read, imagine, think, read, and imagine. Teaching rose to the top of a short list of possible jobs (editor, literary agent, journalist) because I also realized I didn’t just want to work with texts; I wanted to work intimately with readers and writers of texts; I want to be a positive trigger for how readers responded to texts.

My first blush with young adult literature was in 1988 (when the Gipper was President). I’d now been a reading snob for years – reading must be profound or it was a profound waste of time. The young adult lit course I took at San Francisco State, however, blew the doors and shutters off my snobbery. I will always remember standing up in Muni wishing the streetcar would slow down so that I could read more from Dragonwings or Captives of Time or Tuck Everlasting (still some of my favorite novels). I had no idea that literature could be so simple – written for adolescent readers – yet so resonant, so profound. And I had no idea that heroin addiction or other controversial topics – could be a topic for a young adult novel. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich is as profound as it gets.
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Not only was the course an eye-opener for me as a reader – or an eye-blurrer, reading a book a week on top of my other classes – but that course did more to prepare me to work with young readers than any other class I took as a pre-service teacher: it gave me rich resources to draw from at the beginning of my teaching career, a list of books that my students found both challenging and rewarding (even as they struggled with the other reading – Shakespeare, Oedipus Rex, Toni Morrison’s Sula – that I was required to assign). 

Teaching high school English for 18 years (most recently for twelve years at Moscow High School in Idaho) reinforced those findings. Many high school readers crave the intellect and the emotive – Ayn Rand’s Anthem, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Yet for every self-motivated reader of utopian novels, there are ten readers who would rather do any thing with their time but sit down and crack a book. Knowing Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, escaping genocide with three children in Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath, inhabiting the segregated south of the past of Stella By Starlight by Sharon Draper, I have some other stories I can suggest. If one book sparks these readers’ interests, then there’s hope for a fire.

When I was asked to design and teach the young adult lit course at Washington State University in 2000 (shoot, that was already more than a 15 years ago?), I was ecstatic. I had been away from young adult literature for a few years, my reading focused on poetry and adult fiction and non-fiction, and I quickly found out I had missed much, including the Harry Potter rage (I caught the fever the summer the fourth book came out). But I also found out that what I was missing could be easily made up by a summer of reading into the wee hours of the morning. Blurry eyed again!
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Young adult literature is thriving. I can’t wait to meet new friends – many works that you will introduce me to – and to re-acquaint myself with the old. As a teacher, and now it comes down to that, I aim to facilitate. I want to provide students with the opportunities to learn as I have learned, through reading, what they do not think they want to learn.

It is time for another YA Wednesday. If you would like to help teachers in Southern Louisiana replace classroom libraries let me know at [email protected].

If you have an idea for a blog post, I would love to have you contribute. Just send me an email.