CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: H.12 Writing From and For Reading: The Challenge of Difficult Texts This was a very well attended session with a strong interactive component. There were also very interesting correspondences between the first two papers, many of which Irene Papoulis, the second speaker, picked up in during her remarks. As with other sessions, the biggest drawback was the terrible acoustics. The speakers made good use of the available sound system—a rarity at the conference overall. But since the room housed two separate, large sessions divided only by a curtain, we were frequently overwhelmed by the speakers and audience from the neighboring session. I’m fully aware that the late change of venue—made for good reason—was responsible for a loss in aesthetics. But I’d estimate that at least 15% of the discussion was lost in the best-heard session I attended, and closer to 60% in the small rooms with no acoustical support. Several speakers ended up reading papers, essentially, to themselves, despite having a good-sized audience in the room. I would gladly have paid a $10 supplement to subsidize the rental of portable speakers and microphones for all the sessions. Sheridan Blau presented“Writing and Interpretive Community into Being: Situated Learning in the Literature Class.” Blau’s presentation was very lively and interactive. He presented ideas from his well-known work on allowing students to work their way to understanding literary texts, through writing and discussion. He had us work on a sample passage from Walden, and the prompts, small group talk, and subsequent full-group discussion were stimulating and enjoyable. For those less familiar with collaborative learning techniques, this presentation could well be epiphanic. But while I found the presentation entertaining, I was disappointed. None of the techniques could be considered new or surprising. Barring that, I expected more critique or reflection. I suppose it’s useful to have some CCCC sessions as high quality staff development workshops, but I generally hope for more argumentative or exploratory presentations. The best part of this session was the discussion of where the teacher’s special expertise fits into a class discussion, and Blau spontaneously discussed ways that he adjusts the workshop when he finds that a group isn’t quite ready to take full advantage of it. Irene Papoulis presented “Blocks to Access: Emotional Barriers to Reading Difficult Texts.” This talk was the highlight of the session. Papoulis argued for recognition of what she termed “reader’s block,” an analog to writer’s block: a range of emotional and cognitive obstacles that can prevent students from engaging texts. As appropriate to the session title, she also spoke humorously and frankly of her own emotions as a teacher in the class, running from joy to despair, as students struggle, fail, and succeed in pushing themselves beyond their limits. This presentation makes a valuable contribution to previous studies of the affective components of teaching and learning, and Papoulis advocated a careful, restrained invitation to help students take control over their development as readers through acknowledging their feelings about and long-term relationship to it. As noted above, Papoulis’s presentation was enlivened by her easy notation of connections to Blau’s work, and by her great good humor as a slightly Eeyorish reader of teaching stories. Jane Danielewicz presented“Theoretical Texts as Scaffolds for Writing Autoethnography.” Danielewicz’s presentation was smart and clear, but perhaps a bit narrow for the venue. Her talk focused on methods of teaching autoethnography, a genre that combines autobiographical elements with an attention to cultural context. The connection to the session’s larger theme seemed to be the difficulty students have reading some of the theoretical texts that help give context to their memoirs, but Danielewicz seemed more interested in the progress-narrative of one student who became more aware of her culturally-conditioned racism. From the presentation, however, the student’s growth seemed driven more by her peers’ responses and the reflections prompted by writing her own story than by any outside text. In this sense, the paper did not shed much light on difficult texts, and would probably have had more power if recast as a study of the difficulty we have “reading” our own lives as texts. |
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