Responding+to+Literature

toc =Responding to Literature= Imagine a classroom where the students are really interested in the text they just read, where discussion and interaction with the text's main ideas are student led - and where the teacher is too preoccupied with the skill set that the students must learn to pursue the earnest dialog. Sadly, most students have been in a classroom similiar to this; where the teacher makes the rules and decisions. The rest of the class follows unenthusiastically down the path. Robert Prost in his article, "Dialog with a Text", encourages teachers to focus more on students responses to literature than a predetermined skill set. He suggests that when students can make meaning of a text based on prior experience and their lives, they will more fully engage with, interpret, and understand the literature.

He offers a list of questions to help students engange with the text as they read with a partner for discussion.



Engaging Students
For students to respond to the texts they are reading it is important for them to feel engaged--that the words are/will jump from the page and come to life. This is done through various ways: discussions, predictions, visualizing, etc. Great educators utilize these diverse formats in order to engage their students' attention. If the student is not engaged then the student will have significant difficulty responding to the text. Furthermore, students can engage more with texts when they are allowed to develop their own ideas, rather than have the teacher subscribe the answers or go only give them the teacher's personal reading of the text. One way, to have students engage with the text is to set up debates with no right or wrong answer that can be supported by the text. For example, is Holden in //The Catcher in the Rye// crazy?

So What?
Gallagher offers eight answers teachers often give when students ask, "Why are we reading this?" They include: "because it's a classic.' He describes this list as how not to answer that question, because they do not address the student's real question: "What's in it for us? Why should we care about this book? Why is it relevant? What will we get out of reading it?" In other words, the students really want to know, 'So what?' Gallagher recommends asking oneself, before teaching a book, instead of 'why am I teaching this?' instead ask, "What do I want my students to take from this book?", because it is this that will allow a teacher to give a real, meaningful answer to the question, 'Why are we reading this book?'
 * 'you want a good grade, don't you?'
 * 'We have always read this book at this school.'
 * 'Reading this book will make you more culturally literate.'
 * 'This book is required in the curriculum.'
 * 'This book is number nine on the one hundred greatest book list.'
 * 'We're reading this book because (__author's name__) is an important writer.'
 * 'Because I am the teacher and I said so.'"

Reflection
Gallagher recommends asking the students to reflect on what they read in order to help them reach a meaningful answer to the 'so what' questions they have about the work. He posits layers of reflection for the students, starting with self, moving to family, then peers, then community, country, and finally humankind. He offers seven strategies for encouraging reflection:

1. Three Degrees of...
He suggests students search for a main idea in the work, and then search for contemporary examples of it in degrees (with first being worst, third being least bad, as in legal jargon). His example is racism after reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

2. The Most Valuable Idea
Students decide on the most valuable idea in a work and then make a t-chart of examples in the work and the real world.

3. Theme Notebook
Students brainstorm themes in the work they are reading, chose one, and gather contemporary evidence of their theme in seperate sources (Gallagher requires ten).

4, Casting Call
Student cast real people (famous or not) for the roles of the characters in the work. There must be a solid connection between the person and the character (fame or physical appearance are not enough).

5. Theme Layers
Each student identifies a theme and then connects it to each of the layers of reflection.

6. Anchor Questions
Students begin reading with an overarching question in mind, a question asked by the teacher (Gallagher's example is a unit on irony and the question, "Can irony make us better people?"). A variation on this is the unit question.

7. The Hunt for the Author's Purpose
Assign the final exam question before reading the book: "What was the author's purpose in writing this book? In an essay, explain the purpose the author may have had in mind. Cite specific passages to reinforce your thesis. Discuss why this purpose is still relevant to the modern reader."

Written Responses
High school English teacher, Bonnie Warawa, tells of her exeriments in asking students to respond to literature by writing their own stories. She explains that, “Much expositiory writing… is objective. Just as the product is dehumanizerd, the writing of such stuff is dehumanizing. No wonder that the prodcut and process are boring”. Some examples of her “story” assignments:

*reading a scary story and asking students to respond by writing their own scary stories

*reading Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and asking students to write their own version of the story

*reading __Macbeth__ and asking students to retell a significant episode from the point of view of one of the main characters

It’s important that while asking students to read literature, we are also encouraging them to //write// literature. By letting them writing stories, a teacher allows her students to experience the fun and creative side of writing, while still responding to the reading.

Christian Knoeller also advocates for more of an emphasis on creative writing as a reading response. He says that “English teachers typically have been prepared in programs that place a premium on a single, specialized form of prose, the critical analysis essay, to the exclusion of imaginative genres and creative writing. Even though creative writing can provide an ideal vehicle for responding to literature in personally meaningful ways, most high school students all too rarely have the chance to write imaginatively.” He breaks possible creative responses into five categories:

*Responding by writing narrative



*Responding by writing poetry


*Responding by writing in multiple genres
===Each of these genres can be used to encourage creative writing response to literature for students. ===


Knoeller, Christian. (2003). “Imaginative Repsonse: Teaching Literature through Creative Writing”. English Journal. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/0925-May03/EJ0925Response.pdf




===Another idea in using writing to respond to literature is writing letters to fellow students in response to a prompt about the reading. The prompt could be anything from “Do you like the character of Beowulf? Why or why not?” to “Based upon our ongoing discussion of the hero, is Huck Finn heroic?”. The students then exchange letters with a partner and they take time reading and then responding. In this way, they are engaging in a discussion while practicing writing about a text.

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<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Using Metaphor to Make Meaning
<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">According to Kelly Gallagher, "Bringing metaphorical thinking into the teaching of literature provides two benefits: (1) students are more readily able to reach deeper levels of comprehension when they understand metaphor in challenging text... and (2) repeated practice recognizing and analyzing enables students to generate their own metaphorical connection to the text and the world, thus sharpening their higher-level thinking skills." He recommends what he calls 'metaphorical graphic organizers to help students reach deeper into texts. Examples of these include: an iceberg, brake and accelerator pedals, target, proof sheets, snow globes, and a theater set. He insists, thought, that when using metaphorical graphic organizers, it is important that students use them metaphorically. In his example, instead of writing that Hamlet is 'sane', Gallagher had a student revise her organizer to draw in a calculator, to instead compare Hamlet to a calculator as he decides how to solve the murder of his father.

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===<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Gallagher also wants to make sure that teachers do not turn these metaphorical graphic organizers into worksheets; they are not one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter assignments. They need to be used with careful attention to which will best deepen meaning in a text. They also need to be kept new or the students will cease to gain from them.