Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century

Recovering and Transforming the Pedagogy of Robert Scholes

Ellen C. Carillo

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781646421183
• eBook ISBN: 9781646421190
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Robert Scholes passed away on December 9, 2016, leaving behind an intellectual legacy focused broadly on textuality. Scholes's work had a significant impact on a range of fields, including literary studies, composition and rhetoric, education, media studies, and the digital humanities, among others. In Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century contemporary scholars explore and extend the continued relevance of Scholes's work for those in English and writing studies.
 
In this volume, Scholes's scholarship is included alongside original essays, providing a resource for those considering everything from the place of the English major in the twenty-first century to best practices for helping students navigate misinformation and disinformation. Reading and Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century not only keeps Scholes's legacy alive but carries it on through a commitment, in Scholes's (1998) own words, to "offer our students . . . the cultural equipment they are going to need when they leave us."
 
Contributors:
Angela Christie, Paul T. Corrigan, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Doug Hesse, Alice S. Horning, Emily J. Isaacs, Christopher La Casse, Robert Lestón, Kelsey McNiff, Thomas P. Miller, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christian Smith, Kenny Smith
 

Part 1

Transforming Scholes’s “Canon of Methods”

1

Reading’s Many Branches

Robert Scholes’s “Canon of Methods”

Paul T. Corrigan

DOI: 10.7330/9781646421190.c001

When I touched the ancient tree, placed my hands on its rough bark, emotion swelled inside my chest and moisture welled up in my eyes. Standing at Angel Oak’s enormous trunk, among its endless limbs, under its nearly half acre of green leaves, I suddenly felt I had to change my life. How could a tree do this to me? Allergies? No, my reaction followed from and flowed back into my reading of the tree in that moment—that is to say, the meaning I constructed out of what was unfolding before and within me. Namely, having traveled there purposefully as if on a pilgrimage, I read the tree as a sacred entity and my being present to it as a sacred event.

Now, some time later, my training as a scholar and teacher of English allows me to step back and consider what went into that reading. Yes, the tree itself, its physical presence, influenced my interpretation, but so did the many associations I brought with me—my sense of the usual size of trees; my memories of trees I loved and climbed during childhood; the oak at the nearby plantation I had visited just hours before, upon which humans had lashed other humans during slavery; and the many books I had read that taught me the value of “standing still and learning to be astonished” by the natural world (Oliver 2006, 1). All these went into my reading. Likewise, I can also step back and see how others interpret the tree differently—how my daughters who were with me, playing in the leaves, just found the tree a lot of fun, whereas the company Allstate, featuring the same tree in an ad selling insurance, took it as a chance to make a profit.

In considering these and other factors surrounding my reading of the tree, I can come to understand more deeply and complexly both the tree and myself. In doing so, I follow Robert Scholes (1989, 19): “We do well to read our lives with the same intensity we develop from learning to read our texts. We all encounter certain experiences that seem to call for more than a superficial understanding.” I likewise follow Scholes (1989, 78) as I turn, now, to add something to the “text” of the tree that was not initially there, “exceed[ing] it in some way.” I am making the tree a metaphor for reading. This metaphor helps me speak of the many ways of reading that exist, varied practices for making meaning with texts, as Louise Rosenblatt (2005) would put it, that have developed in different times and places but that are all part of the same larger category we call reading. Such a metaphor for organizing ways of reading is one way of helping ourselves and our students practice what Ellen Carillo (2015, 2018) calls “mindful reading”—developing a metacognitive awareness of what we are doing as we read, what we could do differently, and why.

More specifically, for my present purposes, the metaphor of the tree of reading offers a structure for mapping out Scholes’s work on the teaching of reading and for building on that work. In this essay, I sift through Scholes’s major pedagogical works, written over a span of decades, from Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English in 1985 to English After the Fall: From Literature to Textuality in 2011, with other monographs, articles, and textbooks in between. My purpose is to read Scholes as Scholes reads reading. I identify in these works the core tenets of Scholes’s theory of teaching reading—the “roots” of the tree of reading—and I catalog the many different ways of reading that he advocates or, in some cases, warns against—the “branches.” Because this essay synthesizes a large body of work, I proceed by way of cataloging more than arguing. But the heft of the resulting catalog does imply an argument about the breadth and depth of Scholes’s contribution to our understanding of the teaching of reading. Meanwhile, several gaps in the catalog also give occasion for an additional argument, that we ought to build on what Scholes has left us by attending to a still broader range of ways of reading than those confined to the “limb” of critical reading.

Roots: The Tenets of Scholes’s Theory of Reading

Before cataloging the many ways of reading Scholes advocates, I want to spell out the tenets I see grounding his work, his root principles, the reasons for naming ways of reading to begin with. The first tenet is simply that we should indeed teach reading—that we should make the teaching of reading the defining practice of our work as English teachers. “As a teacher I have for years,” he shares in The Crafty Reader, “seen a major part of my task as helping students see reading as a craft, a set of methods or practices that can be learned, a skill that can be improved by anyone willing to make an effort” (Scholes 2001, 139). Later in that same book, he urges other English teachers to follow suit: “start taking reading seriously” (Scholes 2001, 215). He calls for nothing less than “a constant and prevailing emphasis on the process of reading” from English teachers (Scholes 1998, 169).

He justifies this emphasis in several ways. First, teaching reading represents a better model of education. A way of doing, teaching reading contrasts with the more common “coverage” approach: “It is not what students have been told that matters but what they remember and can do” (Scholes 1998, 149, emphasis added). Thus, instead of “produc[ing] ‘readings’ for our students,” we should “give them the tools for producing their own” (Scholes 1985, 24). Second, teaching reading fulfills an overlooked need. Though “we do not see reading,” he declares, “if we could see it, we would be appalled” (Scholes 2002, 166). In short, we need to teach reading because many students read so poorly—or at least not as well as they could. Third, by teaching reading, we help students make meaning in their lives, and that, thereby, lends meaning to ours: “helping students learn how to understand texts more fully” is a crucial aspect of helping them “develop better intellectual equipment” for life (Scholes 1998, 32, 142), including the “power to change the world” (Scholes 1985, 165). For this reason, during the social upheavals and struggles for social justice in the late 1960s, Scholes found justification for his life as an English professor in the fact he “taught reading and writing” (Scholes 1998, 32).

The second tenet is that all readers at all levels can grow. On one end of the spectrum, Scholes works to help first-year college and even high school students read better (Scholes 2002, 1998). On the other end, even after decades as one of the most accomplished scholars in English, a discipline based on reading, Scholes himself still wants to grow as a reader. He seeks “to make the practice of the craft . . . more open to use by those who, like myself, still hope to improve as readers” and “to sharpen my own command of the craft of reading—to become a craftier reader” (Scholes 2001, xv, emphases added). Indeed, the limits on our growth as readers are the same as the limits on our mortal lives: “we may continue to improve as readers until age begins to weaken our powers” (Scholes 1989, 18).

A third tenet is Scholes’s concept of a canon of methods. This canon is the major way he envisions us placing the teaching of reading at the center of the discipline of English. In short, we must “replace the canon of texts with a canon of methods” (Scholes 1998, 145). Although we are all more familiar with the concept of a canon being formed around content—a set of texts that define our discipline—Scholes explains that canons have been and can be formed around methods: a set of ways of doing that define a discipline (Scholes 1998, 109, 111). He writes: “A canon of methods, unlike a set of texts, must be conceived in terms of competence. There is no point in introducing students to the writing of Jacques Derrida, for example, if they finish their study unable to deconstruct a text and unaware of the strengths—and the limitations—of deconstruction as a way of reading and writing. A canon of methods must be organized in terms of enhanced capabilities that students will take away from their studies” (Scholes 1998, 149). How would we form such a canon? By “simplifying and clarifying the ways of reading we have already learned to use in our studies of English literature and culture” (Scholes 2001, 215). By such simplifying and clarifying, we could come up with a set of “intellectual tools” students can use or “intellectual moves” students can make while reading (Scholes 1998, 149, 167). We could break reading down for students into “discrete” intellectual moves—“just as certain movements in dance or sport” are often broken down (Scholes 1985, 21).

However, if we must simplify reading, then one more tenet is that we must not oversimplify it. In Protocols of Reading, Scholes (1989, 2) writes: “I should say at once that I have no simple system to propose. Reading is indeed learned and taught; it is done well and done badly; but it has too much in it of art and craft to yield entirely—or even largely—to methodization. Still, education amounts to taking method as far as it will go and then finding some way to go a bit further without it.” The canon of methods will not be absolute or final. It will be an open, evolving canon. “Each of us,” he adds elsewhere, “must develop the craft of reading in a way that suits our needs and capabilities. There is no single method” (Scholes 2001, 242). Yet there are methods, many methods, and his work over many years has unpacked a great number of them for us. Let us turn to cataloging them now.

Some Branches: A Sprawling Catalog of Reading

In surveying Scholes’s work, I had initially hoped to lay out a tidy taxonomy. But I found this impossible. An early draft of the following catalog included over seventy ways of reading. Although I have tried to group closely related ideas together, the best groupings were not always obvious. I have settled on three broad categories, ways of reading related to different intellectual moves readers might perform, purposes readers might have, and types of texts readers might read—reflecting that our ways of reading vary according to what we do while reading, why we read, and what we read. Still, because such facets of reading cannot always be pulled apart neatly, the catalog remains sprawling, its categories loose, porous.

One more thing to note is that this catalog stands in contrast to an anticatalog we also find in Scholes’s writing, ways of reading poorly that he cautions us against: we should not read or teach students to read with “an attitude of reverence before texts” (Scholes 1985, 16), nor with “unearned certainty” about meaning (Scholes 2001, 219), nor ignoring “the complexity of the texts themselves, their histories, and their present situations” (Scholes 2001, 219), nor to find “the correct interpretation” (Scholes 1985, 13, emphasis added), nor merely to find and identify literary devices (Scholes 2001, 24). We should avoid the “selective literalism” of fundamentalist reading, whether of a political or religious variety, which “force[s] closure upon” texts (Scholes 2001, 223). Instead, we should practice and teach “crafty” reading—many varieties of which appear in the following catalog.

Ways of Reading Related to Moves

The first section of this catalog includes ways of reading that Scholes advocates in which readers make particular intellectual moves—such as contextualizing, moving among layers of meaning, and writing back. These methods are actions readers perform to make sense of texts.

Reading, interpretation, and criticism. The most prominent breakdown of reading in Scholes’s work entails these three parts, appearing first, as far as I can tell, in Textual Power (Scholes 1985, 21–35) and reappearing, in sometimes adjusted form, in most of his pedagogical books thereafter. These three terms represent a progression of reading moves where readers first see what a text says (reading), then suss out what it means (interpretation), then decide what its implications are (criticism). While interpretation takes on its usual meaning, the other two terms take on somewhat specialized emphases: “reading” has a lot to do with connecting a text to other texts, while “criticism” requires speaking from a particular group’s perspective (in the way that feminist criticism, for instance, speaks from the perspective of that larger group, i.e., feminists) (Scholes 1985, 35). Scholes initially describes the progression through these three moves in terms of a shifting balance of power: “In working through the stages of reading, interpretation, and criticism, we move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an assertion of power through opposition in criticism” (Scholes 1985, 39). In his final book, English After the Fall, he makes one major revision to the scheme, swapping out “reading” for “reaction” (Scholes 2011, 50–51). More attuned to how students experience texts, this revised sequence begins not with technical textual analysis but with careful consideration of a reader’s initial, spontaneous response to a text and then works from there.

Reading toward and from the text. Scholes also often breaks reading into two parts or directions. In one place, he describes these in terms of “centripetal” and “centrifugal” impulses (Scholes 1989, 8). In the first, readers try to adhere as close to the text as possible, trying to get as close a sense of the writer’s intention as they can (Scholes 1985, 15; Scholes 2001, 230; Scholes 1989, 51). In the latter, readers step back and consider the larger implications of the text for their own lives and values. In The Crafty Reader, Scholes (2001, 197) describes how the reader falls “under the control of the writer’s vision” but only “temporarily.” Afterward, “the reader’s critical faculty comes into play.” He describes elsewhere these forms of stepping in and stepping back as a dialectic between reading “sympathetically” and “unsympathetically” (Scholes 1998, 169) and between reading “respectfully” and “disrespectful[ly]” (Scholes 1989, 78). In the one, readers try “to get inside” the text and “understand the intentionality behind” it (Scholes 1998, 169). In the other, readers try to also “get somewhere . . . [to] open a new perspective on the text read, and not simply double or repeat the text” (Scholes 1989, 78).

Reading in context. “Situate, situate” acts as a refrain for Scholes (2001, 67). Putting texts in context in order to understand them better is one of the reading moves he touts most often. He writes, “A large part of the craft of reading is the ability to ‘place’ or ‘situate’ any particular text” (Scholes 2001, 139). No text exists in isolation or comes from n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Transforming Scholes’s “Canon of Methods”
• Part 2. Extending Scholes’s Scholarship on Dispositions and Habits of Mind
• Part 3. Thinking About Disciplinary Issues Alongside Scholes
• About the Contributors
• Index