Last week I returned to two pages from one of the core texts of our 2019 summer course on the Secondary Reading and Writing Workshop.

On p. 8 of Workshopping the Canon (2017), Mary E. Styslinger writes:

Along with the above, when structuring reading and writing workshops around classical works in middle and high school classrooms, it is important to keep in mind the stages of reading literature suggested by Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (2012). They proposed four stages of reading literature: (1) reader response, (2) interpretive community, (3) formal analysis, and (4) critical synthesis. This four-stage construct moves student readers from responding personally to sharing and deepening these responses within an interpretive community, to illuminating them through formal analysis, and toward synthesizing critical perspectives into their own interpretation. Milner et al. (2012) explained the teacher’s role during the initial stage of reading as nurturing unmediated, unencumbered, felt responses to the text. Once students have responded to the text personally, they are ready to move into an interpretive community, as teachers facilitate engagements that bring students together to unravel the text. During formal analysis, we help students explore the craft of the text read, noting such elements as plot, character, setting, point of view, tone, style, themes, or symbols. In the final stage of reading literature, critical synthesis, the text is considered from the perspectives of varied schools of literary criticism, such as historical/ biographical, moral/philosophical, archetypal, feminist, Marxist, or Freudian.

And on p. 49 of Workshopping the Canon (2017) Styslinger continues:

While the more text-centered theory/pedagogy of New Criticism may seem at odds with reader response, it does not have to be. As Rosenblatt (2003) clarified, “Emphasis on the reader need not exclude teaching criteria of valid interpretation or application of various approaches, literary and social, to the process of critical interpretation and evaluation” (p. 7). In the workshopping classroom, we begin with reader response, allowing and encouraging students to bring prior knowledge—their personality traits, past events, present needs, physical conditions, moods, and preoccupations—to the text. These initial associations form the foundation on which we build, establishing an interpretive classroom community through sharing of personal responses, then engaging in more formal analysis and critical study. During formal analysis, we guide students in understanding how a text achieves its effects and, often, its meaning. When we embark on critical study, we view a text through one or more literary theories (e.g., historical/biographical, moral/philosophical, Freudian, feminist, archetypal, Marxist, formalist, rhetorical, deconstructionist, new historical, etc.).

As I look at these different lenses, I find that I am more comfortable using the Feminist and the Social Class lenses. When I was teaching AP Literature & Composition, I used the Postcolonial Lens during our critical study of The Heart of Darkness. Now as I’m confronted with an Equity Challenge by my administration, I’m thinking that my application of the Postcolonial lens to just The Heart of Darkness was too limiting. So I’ve been re-viewing my teaching practices. What teaching strategies do I need to return to and to strengthen for contemporary use? How can these lenses work with nonfiction? If my teaching is too myopic, perhaps this is just the prescription that I need.

One text that influenced me in the past was Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015). In her third edition, Appleman includes these two strategies for exploring the Postcolonial lens:

1. 1. Search the text for references to colonization or current and formerly colonized people. In these references, how are the colonized people portrayed? How is the process of colonization portrayed?
   2. Consider what images of “others” or processes of “othering” are present in the text. How are these “others” portrayed?

And Appleman goes on to write: “Analyze how the text deals with cultural conflicts between the colonizing culture and colonized or traditional culture” (p. 203).

So this week I’m turning my attention to the “processes of othering” that are present in our culture, in my school and in my classroom. I’ll try to give a vision update soon.