Reading and Curiosity

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To observe that curiosity is central to reading is not unlike observing that breathing is necessary to life. But what is curiosity? And if it is so important to reading, how can we as teachers foster it? Artists, philosophers and scientists have long been interested in curiosity and have frequently associated it with appetite. Edmund Burke claimed that curiosity “has an appetite,” and we speak casually of a hunger or thirst for knowledge, of curiosity as something beyond our conscious control and demanding to be satisfied. Philosophers speak of curiosity as a desire to know that exists independent of the utility of knowing and therefore is different from a simple need for cognition. We might feel the need to know how to complete a form, but that is not curiosity. We might feel the need to know whether Bono has a real name, but that too is not curiosity. In the first case the desire is instrumental and in the second it is essentially generic, part of the general stockpiling of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Curiosity requires what philosophers call a motivationally original desire to know something. In other words, curiosity is a desire to know that originates with and belongs to the individual. It is my desire to know. It is essentially involuntary, non-utilitarian, and deeply personal.

And therein lies the problem. As commentators on and reformers of education have noted at least since Socrates, curiosity is central not only to reading but to the active intellectual engagement with the world that is the ultimate goal of education. But as most of these same commentators have noted, educational institutions seem perversely designed to stifle curiosity. According to one expert, the teacher’s goal ought to be “to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming ... fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.” That one hundred years ago John Dewey needed to emphasize the importance of inquiry and that one hundred years later these same words seem to speak directly to our times suggests either that there really is very little new under the sun or that fostering inquiry and curiosity is something we find easy to claim but difficult to enact.

Perhaps here as elsewhere we can trace our Anglo-American roots. Matthew Arnold, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, noted that the word “curiosity,” which in other languages was used positively to denote “a high and fine quality” of human nature, was in English a negative term associated with idleness. It was the English after all who made curiosity fatal to felines. We might disagree with Arnold’s comparative linguistics, but his observation that we are uncomfortable with curiosity—the “free play of the mind on all subjects”—and too easily satisfied with “very inadequate ideas” should strike us as all-too-familiar.

Curiosity, with its tendency to ask questions and to question the answers, discomforts the status quo and dissatisfies the self-satisfied. Dewey wrote one hundred years ago, “In the feeling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.” We might ask ourselves what we do in the classroom to encourage this dim feeling, to help students form the authentic questions that will help them satisfy their motivationally original desire to know that belongs only to them. We might ask ourselves what we do to protect the spirit of inquiry and each student’s curiosity.

From John Stuart Mill

Last year marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. The following is taken from the conclusion, where Mill addresses the possibility of state-controlled education and warns of its dangers if it becomes too focused on basic skills and vocational competencies.

“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of [each individual’s] mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish” (Chapter 5).

Engaging with Texts

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We spend a lot of time in the English Department thinking about texts, whether they are in the form of a physical book written by a famous writer or in the form of the world as a text. We teach texts and produce texts. We require students to read texts and we hope that they will produce texts of their own. Given our passion for texts, is it any wonder that our composition courses focus on helping students engage with texts. In fact, our recent revision of the ENGL 096 scoring guide associates strong writing with meaningful and appropriate “engagement” with texts and adequate or inadequate writing with routine or minimal “response” to texts. But what exactly is the nature of that engagement? What are we asking students to do?

At least part of what we expect students to do is very mechanical. Quotation, paraphrase, and summary, the differences between them and their appropriate uses often occupy parts of several class meetings and feature prominently on learning objectives for first-year writing courses. Then there is the arcane and seemingly impenetrable world of citation and proper bibliographic format. MLA, APA, Chicago, ACS, CBE, ASCE, IEEE, AIM, AIP and other equally mysterious conventions probably strike students as cruel and perverse. Certainly some part, perhaps an inordinate part, of what we expect students to do with texts is mere machinery.

We also expect students to be capable information gatherers. Texts represent repositories of information, data that students hopefully transform into knowledge. But as students become more experienced readers and writers, they hopefully become more analytical and critical as both readers and writers. Texts that stood before as irreproachable in their authority might be subjected to increasing skepticism when viewed against a background of contradictory texts, conflicting perspectives and controversy over what counts as “fact.” Once the bulwark of unthinking deference has been breached, texts become less and less pronouncements from on high and more and more lived rhetorical documents governed by the very real human concerns of purpose, audience and conventions. It is finally at this stage that we encounter something that looks familiar to experienced readers and writers.

Rather than asking what we expect students to do with texts, perhaps we should have started by asking what we do with texts, or even more simply, why we read. Readers might respond that they read because they want to know, learn, feel, experience. “There is no frigate like a book,” according to Emily Dickenson. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from reading comes from the raising and satisfying of this curiosity that appears at the center of our reading experience. Reading, as Peter Brooks notes, might be tied up with desire, a kind of “epistemophilia” that motivates us to become involved and invested in the text.

Curiosity it seems is at the center of our reading experience. Without curiosity and the pleasure that goes with it, students will struggle to move from passively “responding” to texts to actively “engaging,” becoming entangled in and grappling with texts. Active reading strategies can help students enter into a conversation with the text. We can also help by modeling the kinds of conversations we have with texts, and by facilitating the kinds of conversations we want to have about texts. Most important though might be helping students recognize their own curiosity and the pleasures of asking the right question.

Encouraging Active Reading and Inquiry

• Before beginning a new reading, especially one in a new genre, it is important to create the context for the reading. Why are students being asked to read this text? What kinds of questions might they have? What might prove difficult to them?
• Encourage students to read actively, making notes and carrying on a conversation with the text.
• Encourage students to record their initial impressions and questions immediately after reading. What were they thinking about at the end? What did they find satisfying? What did they find unsatisfying? What questions do they still have?
• Encourage students to relate the “knowledge” of the text to what they already know. What did they read that was new? What was surprising? How has the “knowledge” of the text altered their thinking?
• Encourage (or require) students to prepare “authentic” questions for sharing with the class. An “authentic” question is the student’s own question—one is which he or she is invested and to which he or she is likely to persist in seeking answers.

Recap of Composition Conversation-Effective Writing Assignments

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on one of the most rewarding and difficult tasks faced by teachers of writing: designing effective writing assignments. Many of the ideas that emerged in the discussion applied not merely to designing writing assignments but to good teaching practice. Two key insights dominated: developing good assignments takes time and frequent revision, and students benefit when challenged to come up with their own ideas and their own way of presenting them.

The conversation began with a litany of best practices, some obvious, others less so. All agreed that assignments should be in writing and that instructors needed to devote sufficient class time to going over the assignment. The assignment should focus on what students were supposed to do (not simply what they were not supposed to do). If the assignment required a specific process, the assignment should specify those steps as explicitly as possible. As much as possible, the criteria to be used to evaluate the work should be made clear at the time of the assignment. One participant noted that students often use an assignment sheet like a recipe—the clearer and more explicit we can make our instructions and expectations, the better the results.

Where do the good assignments come from? Most participants could recall starting with writing assignments of their predecessors, colleagues, and possibly teachers. “The best teacher is the best student” is one formulation of this common adage. Another is “the best teacher is the best thief.” But participants noted that while good teachers might start with the work of others, they also personalize and refine assignments over time. Everyone could recount some terrible essay assignment they inflicted on students, but everyone could also recall “fixing” the “bad” topics through revision. One participant offered this instructive advice: make notes on a topic as you read student responses to it. These notes might address what students do well, what they do poorly, and how students might have misread the topic. The notes might be simpler: “Never use this topic again!” The key is recognizing that developing a good assignment is not very different from developing a good technical document—the teacher needs to know his/her purpose, his/her audience, and must be willing to test the document on actual users to find out whether it works, and use the feedback of readers to improve each draft.

What characterizes a good assignment? All agreed that good assignments allow students to develop their own ideas and their own ways of presenting them. Usually from the best of intentions assignments become overly directive and limiting, and substitute the instructor’s thinking for the student’s. “Helping” easily slips into “doing for.” Sometimes students are given little or no choice in their response and struggle to work within the narrow limitations of a single topic to which they must but cannot respond, or an overly simple task that leaves them with little to do other than repeat the argument of the assignment. Some participants noted that some students imaginatively go beyond a topic, but by doing so produce an essay that runs the risk of appearing “off-topic.” In portfolio-assessed classes, the danger is other readers might see such license as signaling an inability to respond to an assignment. But teachers can usually distinguish between innovation and inability. in short, students benefit from our high expectations and suffer when we oversimplify what is in fact complex.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without limiting them?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps or process that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment?
  

Questions a Student Might Ask of an Assignment

• What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What am I supposed to demonstrate?
• What exactly am I supposed to do?
• What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
• Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
• How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
  

Stretch Composition

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The Composition Committee has presented to the English Department a proposal to pilot stretch composition at CSULA. Much remains to be resolved and many levels of approval are still required, but the initial response has been encouraging.
Some might wonder why the department is considering changing its developmental writing program. A recent assessment found that CSULA students were effectively placed, successfully prepared, and ultimately retained at a higher rate than non-developmental students. While the success of the current program is impressive, stretch composition offers the promise of even greater successes while retaining what has so far proven most effective.

First implemented in the early 1990s at Arizona State University, stretch composition is based on a simple principle: some students need more time and more experience to develop competence in and confidence with academic writing. Stretch composition takes the “content” of a first-year writing course (such as ENGL 101) and “stretches” it over two or three quarters of instruction. The “content” of ENGL 101, of course, is not so much a thing or even a skill—it is a complex intellectual, social, and cultural activity best developed in communities over time.
Time and community are two of the three characteristics found in all stretch composition programs. When given more time to write, revise, and discuss writing, students do better with their writing coursework and feel better about their learning experience, especially when that experience takes place within a community of writers. Cohort models, where students stay with the same instructor and same students, lead to effective learning (and writing) communities and allow the instructor to determine pacing and even curriculum appropriate to a specific group of students. The third key characteristic of stretch programs is college credit for all writing classes. College-level work should be rewarded with college-level credit. Since both the stretch version and the un-stretched version of ENGL 101 achieve the same learning objectives, stretch courses should be credit-bearing.

Research from the last decade conclusively supports the effectiveness of the stretch model. Programs that have adopted stretch models have seen a conclusive rise in student retention, pass rates, and performance. These benefits can be traced to the following:

• Because stretch programs are “college-level,” students are no longer stigmatized as “remedial.”
• Because stretch programs use cohorts, student engagement increases.
• Because stretch programs keep students and instructors together, classes are able to build on content and skills from prior quarters and achieve nearly seamless curricular alignment.
• Because the stretched nature of the courses effectively teaches writing and revision as a task to be completed over time, students perform better on writing tasks in their majors.

Much work remains to be done, from data gathering and report writing to course design and development. Course design begins with a relatively easy question: What would a two-quarter or one-year ENGL 101 look like? We often think to ourselves, “If only I had these students for a little longer...” With the stretch model, we will have them for a little longer. What will we do?

The Simple Principles of Stretch Composition

• Separate developmental courses imply well-defined points that divide one writing course in a sequence from another. This assumption, drawn from other disciplines such as developmental mathematics, does not take into account what the research shows—that writing and language competence develops recursively, not linearly and incrementally.
• Students can be offered different paths to the same end-point. Some paths might involve a single course, others more than one course.
• The most important determinant of the effectiveness of writing instruction is time. Some students need more time to attain competency; others can achieve it in less time.

The Design of the Pilot

The initial pilot would involve less than 300 students out of an incoming first-year class of 1,800-2,000. Six sections of ENGL 110ABC and eight sections of ENGL 112AB would be offered in 2010 2011.

ENGL 110ABC: Stretch Composition (30-week first year writing course)
ENGL 112AB: Accelerated Stretch Composition (20-week first year writing course)

Reading Strategies Revisited

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Repeatedly in the Composition Conversation on invention, participants called attention to the centrality of reading and discussion as an invention strategy. The most recent Composition Conversation focused specifically on reading and the strategies that teachers employ to help students become better readers.
In a recent survey of first-year writing students at CSULA, 30% of respondents characterized their reading ability as average or poor with that figure rising to nearly 50% for students placed in ENGL 095. Given this level of dissatisfaction, it isn’t surprising that, as one instructor stated, students often claim to “hate” reading. Clearly for many students, reading is difficult and a source of frustration. To overcome those frustrations, participants offered a range of strategies.

First, participants noted the importance of making reading explicit and devoting class time to discussing the reading and how to read the reading. One place to begin is the course reader. Most composition readers and reader/rhetoric texts contain an introductory section on reading strategies, such as “Getting the Most Out of Your Reading” in Models for Writers, or “Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process” in 50 Essays. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum not only devotes an entire chapter, “Critical Reading and Critique” to the subject, but discusses effective reading processes and strategies in virtually every section of the text. These resources provide effective overviews of the reading process and the practices of effective readers.

But simply asking students to read about reading isn’t enough. Participants agreed that significant class time must be devoted to discussing texts and modeling strategies for understanding texts. We might take for granted that students have read and understood the assigned reading, but while they might have “read” it, they often have not understood it in the ways we expect. Some students might struggle to understand what they have read because they have limited active vocabularies, which as one instructor noted can be addressed through explicit attention to vocabulary development through journal writing and even instruction in using a dictionary.
Other strategies focus on more global understanding of texts. Some instructors ask students to write summaries of texts, a task that is common in the classroom, but universally acknowledged to be more difficult than it appears. Some have students “quickwrite” about a reading at the beginning of class to help them focus on the key questions of the text. Others use “recollection” units, where small groups are asked to come up with global summaries of a reading.

All students, however, benefit from focused attention to questions of meaning and significance. What is the writer saying? What is the significance of that? Questions of the first type ask for summary and focus on what might be called the information content of the reading. Questions of the second type ask for analysis and draw attention to rhetorical purpose and the writer’s strategic choices. Discussion that focuses on questions about meaning and significance, and small groups that enable students to discuss such questions, produce two key results: students come to a shared understanding of a text, and students begin to understand that meaning is constructed through deliberation and conversation.

Basic Reading Strategies

• Good readers preview the reading by reviewing the table of contents, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. They attempt to understand how the text is organized before they start reading.
• Good readers identify a purpose for reading: Why am I reading? What do I hope to get from the reading (information, ideas, pleasure)? How will I know when I’ve accomplished my purpose?
• Good readers place the reading in context. When was it written? By whom? For what purpose? What genre does it belong to and what conventions are associated with that genre?
• Good readers read quickly but are prepared to re-read. Does the writer always use topic sentences? Are paragraphs mostly filled with different kinds of evidence all supporting the same claim? Can parts be skipped or quickly skimmed?
• Good readers engage with the text, ask questions of the text, agree with it, disagree with it, relate it to other readings, and note when it confuses them.
• Good readers are able to summarize the text and frequently will reflect on the experience of reading. What is its main point? What was most/least effective about it? What problems did I encounter while reading?