Reading to Teach: Toward an Ordinary Pedagogy

It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.

—Stephen Mallarme, Selected Letters

The Scene

A young teacher stands at the podium that supports a large, cumbersome volume angled toward her face. Her inquiring finger points to the open book, searching for the important lines. Today she is teaching Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4, the “Banquet Scene,” where Banquo’s ghost returns to haunt Macbeth.

The students are astonishing. Their answers are more than the teacher’s questions can hold. Shakespeare demands from us, perhaps offers to us, the occasion for re-reading, of savoring language, and the possibility that behind the next line awaits yet another question. The students seem to accept this offering; the teacher makes it possible by asking questions that create a space and time for inquiry. She is a midwife of reading, not an obstacle to it. She moves, in a patterned rhythm, away from the podium and toward the students clustered in groups of four. They discuss Macbeth’s guilt and sanity and the realness of Banquo’s ghost. After venturing forth, she returns to the podium to consult her text and notes.

Her teacher’s edition is easily visible from anywhere in the room. It is close to 1,500 pages. But there is another text that the students cannot see. Inside the copy of the teacher’s edition is a small paperback copy of Macbeth that the teacher has purchased for herself prior to reading and teaching this play for the first time. After the lesson, I notice the “secret volume” and inquire about it. The teacher picks it up, moving her hands across the cover. Using her thumb, she flips through the pages, revealing her extensive notes in the margins and extra scraps of paper she has inserted, making her copy one that holds the time and diligence of her study. “I tried to read this version,” she says and smiles. I nod in agreement. Of course.

Behind the Scene

The teacher’s decision to engage this other text, her text, in preparation for teaching can be read, perhaps obviously, as a move of convenience. Who wants to tote a heavy teacher’s edition from home to car to school and the places in between? More provocatively, reading and marking her own copy can be read as the preservation of her intellectual study. She has cleared a space for reading and thinking, for gathering texts together to interpret Macbeth and imagine pedagogy for others.

Against this text of invitation is the teacher’s edition, the text that cradles and swallows her paperback. Every page contains the text under study and, in the margins, teacher cues that highlight discussion questions, comprehension strategies, and reminders about the “big question” raised by the literary work. Ask students to use prediction strategies here. Ask students if they, like Macbeth, have ever felt ambitious. In addition to framing pedagogy as a problem that has already been overcome—and thus the teacher as the belated reader and deliverer of a resolution—the marginalia at once forget and nail down the text. The emphasis on reading strategies suggests that this particular occasion for reading is (only) valuable as preparation for a future occasion of reading where strategies such as prediction and summarizing can be efficiently deployed. The essential question and forced connection—Have you (the reader) ever been ambitious?—focuses yet limits the interpretive conversation. Macbeth, somehow, has been forced into submission and disposed as another occasion to practice strategy development.

Folded inside this text of foreclosure, the teacher’s small paperback gathers the history of her intentionality, her noticing, and her questions, and brings them to pedagogy. Her experience is shaped by her intentions to teach this play, but not without invoking her direct relationship to the text itself. This becomes her experiential preparation, as in theater workshop (Goorney, 2008) and improvisation (Spolin, 1999).

The simplicity of her copy—the notes tucked inside, her thoughts scrawled in pencil—gestures toward an ordinary pedagogy. Grumet (1998) notes that “ordinary” has etymological ties to “laying the warp” and domesticity...