Deep Reading, Deep Learning

This new volume and our own professional development as teachers and scholars owe a great deal to the individuals whose work is featured in this new volume. This work addresses the urgent needs of an increasingly diverse population of students and the related pedagogical and cultural crises of this moment. Most crucially, this work addresses the broad question of equity and social justice in the acquisition and practice of literacy. This work also addresses the global problems of sustainability, violence, and trauma that contemporary composition scholars have begun to examine. One of our goals in this volume is to map the multifaceted lived reality of identity, culture, and positionality as experienced in the classroom and in daily life.

Although this new volume reflects a subtle shift in our attention toward the experience of learners in the classroom, we do retain an emphasis on the interanimation of reading and writing as foundational tools for meaning-making and knowledge building. We believe that deep reading and what Maryanne Wolf, in her Foreword to this volume, calls its “filial counterpart, the writing process,” are crucial to the intellectual, civic, and ethical life for us all. The work featured in this volume helps us examine these luminous human capacities in important new ways.

Theoretical Considerations

While our first volume was informed by a conception of reading as transactional and constructive, and highly dependent on the reader’s active process of meaning-making, this volume (taking the transactional and constructivist model of reading as a given) reflects a growing body of research that has sought to map the complex nature of the reading process itself. This process is informed by a great variety of often intersecting and overlapping variables, including memories, personal history, prior knowledge, past experiences, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, historical contexts, situational conditions, cultural knowledge, communities of practice, sponsoring agents, culturally-inscribed and culturally-sponsored reading practices, socially sanctioned interpretive conventions, ideologies, politics, power relationships, material conditions, social customs, other texts, genre, agency, rhetorical situations, race, class, gender, ability and disability, identity, positionality, intersectionality, exposure to trauma, language(s) spoken or not spoken, physical spaces, religion, geography, and other factors as well (Sullivan “World,” 115; see also Horning et al.; Tayles; Wolf Proust; Wolf Reader; Wolf Tales). We are only beginning to understand how extraordinarily complex the act of meaning-making with texts is.

We acknowledge that reading, language, and writing shape identity transnationally (Pandey; You), and that reading and writing are not—and never have been—politically or ideologically neutral activities. Furthermore, we acknowledge that teaching reading and writing is not—and never has been—a politically or ideologically neutral or unracialized activity (Baker-Bell; Blau “Politics”; Canagarajah; Feldman; Hardy and Bobes; hooks Teaching to Transgress; Kareem “Critical”; Kendi How; Kynard; Inoue Antiracist; Inoue “Teaching”; Kirkland Search; Ladson-Billings Critical; Ladson-Billings “From”; McNair, et al. Becoming; Minor; Paris and Alim; Perryman-Clark et al.; Piepzna-Samarasinha; Seltzer and de los Ríos “Understanding”; Waite; Young et al.). Intellectual and pedagogical work, including literacy instruction, is always situated within historical, cultural, national, local, ideological, and institutional conditions, traditions, and values. Thus, race, class, gender, neurodiversity, ability and disability, and positionality are always present in the writing classroom when students read.

As we know, literacy acquisition continues to remain stubbornly stratified by race and class in the U.S. (Cahalan et al.; Hung et al.). As Deborah Brandt notes in Literacy in American Lives,

Brandt’s book is now twenty years old, but current data confirm her core claim: that literacy acquisition—and the opportunities, privilege, and upward mobility that result from such acquisition—continue to remain highly stratified (Cahalan et al.; Hung et al.). We regard our discipline’s discussion of deep reading and deep learning, therefore, as a high stakes enterprise. We believe deep reading pedagogy has the potential to be a powerful liberatory classroom practice that promotes social justice (hooks Teaching to Transgress; Ladson-Billings “From”), equity (hooks Teaching Community; hooks Teaching to Transgress), empathy (Mirra), intellectual generosity (Blau “Performative”), and civic mindedness (Dewey Experience; Dewey “Need”; Freire). We also believe that the deep reading pedagogy we are theorizing in these volumes promotes a conception of students and teachers that is itself humane, resilient, liberatory, ennobling, and intellectually and politically responsible.

We are also teaching, learning, and reading in a post-truth world, a political environment where asymmetrical relationships to power and wealth continue to be more extreme and more consequential for the nation and the world than perhaps ever before (Carillo Teaching; Carillo and Horning; Sullivan Economic). Reading is a key variable in this regard as well. We take very seriously the conclusions drawn by the Stanford History Education Group in their recent report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning (2016), which evaluates students’ ability as readers “to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers” (Wineburg et al. 3). In terms of these high stakes reading skills that are essential for a healthy democracy, the news from this report is not comforting:

When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks there are endless variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle school, high school, and college—these variations paled in comparison to a stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak. (4; emphasis in the original)

This Stanford study and others like it highlight the need for teachers across disciplines and at all levels of instruction to understand the complex nature of reading more clearly—and to develop strategies for teaching deep reading and deep learning practices across the curriculum and across institutional boundaries (see Mehta and Fine; Wineburg and McGrew). Ellen Carillo’s recent book on teaching reading in “post-truth America” suggests that deep reading pedagogies can help prepare students to thrive in this fraught, highly-politicized, and high stakes public space. Carillo and Alice Horning’s recent special issue of Pedagogy (21.2, 2021), Reading and Writing in the Era of Fake News, and Andersen et al.’s special issue of poetics today, Modes of Reading (42.2, 2021) suggest that the need for this work continues to be urgent. Our volume seeks to contribute to this conversation and to address these challenges directly.

Positionality

As we have noted, one of our primary goals is to explore in this volume how cultural identity positions shape reading experiences for students. Our student contributors offer literacy professionals at all levels of instruction a unique opportunity to hear directly from students themselves about this important subject. For example, Yana Rankine’s essay in this volume, “Reconciling with the Lack of Diverse Literature as an Afro-Caribbean American,” reveals what often remains invisible in the classroom—the damage done to students in school settings who do not see themselves reflected in reading assignments or course content:

Since I was a child, I was encouraged to read every day even if four-year-old me didn’t notice it. My bedroom was stocked full of books, and if that wasn’t enough, my bulky desktop computer was just one-click away from online reading games. I read every day as I anxiously anticipated visiting the public library with my mother and siblings at the end of the week. Soon, what was once a leisure activity after visits to the library would turn into goal-oriented reading selections once I started elementary school. Anticipating passing the Florida Comprehension Assessment Test—the Florida standardized test at the time—my classmates and I were repeatedly assigned various class reading selections with corresponding short responses and quizzes. Assuredly, I didn’t have the capacity to criticize how the repetitive assignments and lack of diverse literature contributed to the suppression of my identity beginning when I was 7 years-old. Instead, I just simply hated reading.