Rationale
My students are intelligent, curious, and passionate. As teachers, I hope we can all say such wonderful things about the students we teach; consequently, I hope all of our students believe those things to be true about themselves. Too often, I see my students' intellectual curiosities stymied by pressures that seem insurmountable, especially those driven by a culture of standardized testing. I am a believer in using data to guide planning for my students, but I also want to make sure that they never lose those three attributes to which I referred at the beginning of this paragraph. So, the paradox lies within having to serve two purposes: We must satisfy the standards-based moment we live in— educationally; and—this is the more important purpose, I think—we must prepare our students to participate as citizens of the world.
For my students at Chicago Academy High School, being prepared for the world also means being prepared for college. Our small public high school is one that prides itself on its college preparatory curriculum and has sent students to the likes of Knox College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and—just this year—Pomona College. We are growing in our capacity to prepare students for increasingly selective institutions. One of the most frequently recurring themes that graduates of my school come back to discuss with former teachers is whether or not they have been prepared to tackle a variety of texts with confidence. Many feel that, although they wrote many papers and had ample opportunities to read, they didn't learn to read deeply until they reached college. This was my own experience as an undergraduate student, and one that perplexes me: Why is deeper (or close) reading of texts delayed until post-secondary study?
The very act of interpretation is often isolated from other "tasks" (chief among them, comprehension) in the English classroom. It is almost as if one expects students to function as separate machinists on an intellectual assembly line; there is one place for comprehension, another for interpretation, and so on. Texts, then, are frequently selected for a given task: a nonfiction passage is chosen for comprehension-focused instruction, or a poem is picked for interpretation. It seems illogical to separate comprehension from interpretation. And if it isn't how we think, then why do we—as teachers—ever structure our reading instruction in this way?
What Is Interpretation?
"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." — William Shakespeare, Hamlet(8)
One meaning of the word interpretation is "a teaching technique that combines factual with stimulating explanatory information."(9) Denis Donoghue asserts that interpretation is simply what occurs when one notices things in a text.(10) Those things, though—according to E.D. Hirsch—are a part of a hermeneutic circle; that is to say, one must know the whole before one may get to know the individual parts, yet one cannot know the parts without figuring out its situatedness within the whole.(11) Shakespeare (via Prince Hamlet) even throws in his two cents, suggesting that the act of cognition alone creates meaning. All of this might make one's head spin—especially when adding in the great dispute about whether or not the intention of the author matters (see "The Intentional Fallacy").(12) Therefore, I do not propose defining interpretation along any of these existing lines. Instead, I think it would be best to use a "non-example" to express what interpretation is not.
One of the reasons some of my colleagues and I have previously shied away from teaching entire units on poetry is this: they are loath to begin a dialogue where anything goes in terms of interpretation, and they—by and large—associate the "anything goes" attitude with poetry, specifically. Yet, along with so many of my colleagues, I to want to empower and give voice to the amazing young people we teach. If a poem is about a ghost, how can we compassionately lead a student toward an interpretation that extends beyond "It is a poem about my summer vacation" if that summer vacation was more about reading ghost stories and less about actually experiencing supernatural occurrences? How do we deftly and thoughtfully guide our students toward more "correct" interpretations, even while allowing multiple interpretative perspectives to flourish in our classrooms?
Laurence Perrine(13) suggests that an interpretation is not valid if it can be contradicted by any detail. So, interpretation—to be correct—must be sound enough to rely only (or mostly) on what exists within the text itself. This baseline will allow us, as teachers, to make sure that our students understand that—to return to the example—a ghost might be a ghost in a story (such as Hamlet) as long as someone else cannot make a more compelling, text-based argument that it is something else entirely. Then, both in my own opinion and in Perrine's, the interpretation would need to be amended to account for the more correct information. The trick is in guiding our students to that point—in teaching our students to think less like people who arbitrarily circle "C" on standardized tests and more like literary critics.
Teaching Students to Think Like Literary Critics
As we—across the nation, the state of Illinois, and in the city of Chicago— shift our thinking toward embracing the Common Core Standards, it is even more imperative that students be able to think like literary critics. That is to say, students must be versed in the craft and structure of literature and they must possess the necessary skills to comprehend, analyze, and interpret texts. This type of thinking expands far beyond what many are used to in this era of standardized data-driven culture. My ninth grade students, fresh off what many in Chicago (and the entire state of Illinois) refer to as "an ISAT"(14) year, are not accustomed to thinking of texts beyond multiple choice and specific, guided "extended response" writing passages.
When I ask my students to engage in freer, more authentic responses to literature using the methods of Sheridan Blau (and his groundbreaking 2003 text The Literature Workshop), I guide my students through a series of mental gymnastics. I am as uncomfortable in leading these activities as they are in participating them. I hold an undergraduate degree in English, have been teaching now for three years, and have attended numerous professional developments on secondary English teaching methods; so, what is the problem? My problem has been in making my own thinking—my metacognitive process— accessible for students. This unit is designed to unpack the cognitive process that one goes through when reading and interpreting any sort of text.
In my own experience, I really began to understand what it meant to "interpret" a text in a modernist poetry course during my sophomore year of college. I was able to dig deep into smaller chunks of text— working my way up through longer poems (T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," for example) armed with my new interpretative toolkit. Though I'd heard terms like "metaphor" and "scansion" before, I had never considered why they mattered beyond imagining that, perhaps, the poet just liked those things. So, as an eighteen year-old (not much older than the students I now teach) I was finally having an experience I might have been able to have earlier if a teacher had known how to guide me through it at a younger age.
The 2013 Yale National Seminar I was a part of, entitled "Interpreting Texts, Making Meaning: Starting Small" emphasized the way in which one can apply the tools and language of literary criticism to a variety of texts. We began by looking at children's picture books, then working our ways through increasingly longer texts: first, a haiku; then, a stanza-long poem; next, a multi-stanza poem; and—eventually—a Shakespearian tragedy. Along with the teachers with whom I was so fortunate to collaborate, I became more aware of my own thinking as a learner. I was no longer just wearing the "teacher" hat; I was engaged in the process of interpretation with other National Fellows, and was re-immersed in the interpretative process as a teacher-learner. I have synthesized strategies I had already used and formed new understandings of their usefulness in my classroom and their implications for others' work in classrooms across the country. As a result, I have selected from my repertoire of borrowed strategies and favorite texts to settle upon a few that seem most appropriate for modeling and working through the act of interpretation, considering this unit's aims.
Comments: