MCC Daily Tribune

Composition Cemetery: Myths About Composition Debunked

Myth #4: “Our Students Can’t Read”

              We hand out a reading on a current topic or an article of interest speaking to a class theme. We are excited about the author’s new take, find the expert’s research insightful, and/or enjoy the elegant prose ourselves. We want to share it. Some students embrace and engage along with us. Wonderful. Then, it’s true: not all students read it. They don’t take the time, don’t have the attention span for it, aren't skilled in the tools needed to get through it. The damn internet. It’s google—it’s making us all stupid. How frustrating.

I share these frustrations. Reading texts is a passion of mine, has deep merit, builds mental muscle, and develops one’s mind. It’s important. And yet, there is nothing new or particularly insightful about this observation that students “can’t.” Teachers and adults since the dawn of time fall into the trap of bemoaning what a younger person “can’t” do. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker notes this same rhetoric has been repeatedly exhorted in the 1850s, the early 1900s, during the mid-1950s, and 70s, and on and on during a talk with the Royal Institution on “Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century” and encourages us to keep in mind that literacy “is and always has been hard.”  Literacy has always offered a challenge; making an effort is a process for students and ourselves in this changing landscape.

An asset-based approach would ask us to consider this: what can our students do? What might be an actionable way to increase literacy, to lead students from where they are to where they might go? Students in the information age of the world wide web can and often do read, just perhaps not in the ways or for the purposes we might assume. What might a digital landscape hold for readers in the world? And what challenges might this ask us, as educators, to meet? In a January 2014 working paper group collaborative called “What is a Reader? A White Paper on Undergraduate Literacy and the Future of Literary Studies,”  Professors Tyrus Miller, Juan Poblete, Deanna Shemek, Cynthia Scheinberg, Juliana Spahr, and Jennifer Summit urge us to consider these questions: “what do shifts in reading modes, media, and practices mean for college literature departments, for which reading has been and remains a central concern? By extension, how should college and university courses and curricula register the fact that today’s young people are reading in ways that their professors couldn’t have imagined when they were students themselves?” We are indeed in a brave new world that has seen literacy shift radically over the course of the past 20 years: reading that includes massive multimodality as well as text has more to digest and needs more tools to examine. Here lies our opportunity.

Check out the tips and ideas from your colleagues in the pages that follow under “Types and Kinds of Reading Instruction” here in Comp Notes. Next, to what ends might we consider how the scope and possibility of reading “texts” has changed?  Might we meet our students by engaging in what reading looks like to them? Multimodal projects where students get to shine are commonly assigned at 2 and 4 year schools across the country. Check out Georgetown University’s Writing Program (https://writing.georgetown.edu/resources/assigning-and-assessing-multimodal-projects/); innovative podcasts and videos published by students with Prof. Casey J. O’Ceallaigh at UVM (https://dc.uwm.edu/english_eng102-community/#:~:text=Research%20%3E%20English%20102-,English%20102%3A%20Community%20Engaged%20Research%20in%20First%20Year%20Composition,the%20University%20of%20Wisconsin%2DMilwaukee); and the E-Portfolios of students at Salt Lake City Community College and LaGuardia Community College (http://www.slcc.edu/eportfolio/index.aspx and https://eportfolio.laguardia.edu/). 

Want more? Check out Comp Notes, Fall 2022.

Angelique Johnston
English/Philosophy
11/01/2022