The Reader's Apprentice: Making Critical Cultural Reading Visible

One of the central goals of undergraduate courses in literature and cultural studies is to help students become skilled readers. Of course, that means more than simply decoding words and phrases. We want students to learn to ask good questions about texts, make inferences and connections, develop interpretations, use research and critical thinking effectively to develop their own answers, and write essays that engage with the critical conversation of the field. These are the central practices of literary study, the elements of what Robert Scholes (2001: 138) calls the "craft of reading." They also reflect the habits of mind that Gerald Graff (2003) suggests define academic culture—questioning and arguing—habits that do not come easily or naturally to many of our students.

Most of the time, we teach these skills and ways of thinking through demonstration. Through a combination of presentation and dialogue with our students, we model the process of critical cultural reading, weaving together inquiry, evidence, and theory. As we discuss a text, we pose questions about it, and we invite students to ask their own questions. We guide the class through the examination of evidence, focused on the text itself. We use lectures to provide background information, perhaps about the historical context or the literary form or genre. We draw upon our preferred theoretical models to explain the relationship between aesthetics, experience, and society. At best—and I think we often achieve this—witty lectures and discussions that move from explication into more complex analysis make learning exciting and engaging. Yet these same practices, in part because they are funny, smart, and sometimes fast paced, can leave students with the impression that the process of analyzing cultural texts is natural and instinctual. Unintentionally, we hide the effort involved, making textual analysis seem simple and straightforward.

We then ask students to develop their own readings of texts and present them in papers. And all too often, we are disappointed with the results. Students may succeed on the level of explication, but they encounter difficulty when asked to position texts in their cultural or critical context, to apply theory or use critical sources to deepen or complicate their own readings, or to generate their own inquiries. Great lectures and discussions work on many levels, but they do not provide students with sufficient guidance in how to read cultural texts critically and contextually.

I don't want to suggest that we should not give engaging lectures or lead exciting discussions; they are important elements of the learning process, and they're enjoyable for everyone. However, we cannot assume that students will learn the process of critical cultural reading by observing or even participating in these classroom demonstrations (though some will). Nor is it appropriate (though it may be tempting) to blame students for not reading well enough, not trying hard enough, or simply not being smart enough. Graff (2003: 44) suggests that part of the problem is that many students see "standard academic practices" as "bizarre, counterintuitive, or downright nonsensical." Students don't value the process or the outcome, the academic argument about ideas, nor do they know how to use the "conventional formulations that characterize written argument" (168). Yet before they can formulate an argument, students need to develop critical interpretations of texts. However, as educational psychologist and historian Samuel L. Wineburg (2003: n.p.) suggests, we also don't teach this adequately: "Professors may assume that their students are stupid or suffer from a learning disability. Often the truth is much simpler. No one has ever bothered to teach them some basic but powerful skills of interpretation." If we want our students to develop the ability to read, research, and analyze cultural texts, we need to employ more strategic, deliberate methods of teaching.

This goal may sound simple, but like literary analysis, it's harder than it seems. Simply articulating what constitutes good reading is challenging enough, much less identifying clearly the cognitive strategies we use to perform that task. Add to that some misconceptions and bad habits that create difficulties for our students, and "teaching some basic but powerful skills of...