Reading and Knowledge

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

I had the pleasure of spending the better part of a week with Annie Everall – CILIP School Libraries Group (SLG) Conference Organiser – at the IFLA 2019 World Library and Information Congress in Athens. A topic of much discussion was reading for learning from information, a discussion that resulted in a keynote at the SLG National Conference 2020 – Shaping Their Futures.

My description of the keynote, which I needed to submit in October 2019, looked like this:

Enabling understanding through reading: the development of a reading mind | The FOSIL Group

According to Saul Bellow in his Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, Balzac declared that the world belonged to him because he understood it. This means that the world and the fullness of its possibilities is open to our students to the extent that they understand how it works, or closed to them to the extent that they don’t. Our role in their reading journey from information through knowledge to understanding is a complex one, and the focus of this keynote.

As this is a very important topic, and a complex one, I had always intended to involve members of the FOSIL Group who I could learn from, colleagues such as Alice Visser-Furay. Alice (@AVisserFuray) is the Literacy Coordinator and Reading Intervention Specialist at King Alfred’s Academy in Wantage, Oxfordshire. I first made contact with Alice after she shared her Literacy key questions and strategies 2019-202 on Twitter (this now also features on Alice’s excellent website – Reading for Pleasure and Progress). What struck me, from the perspective of a school librarian, was Alice’s emphasis on academic reading [for progress] in addition to her emphasis on reading for pleasure, as well as how highly regarded she is for her work on developing both. This made Alice the obvious choice for the keynote, and I am delighted that she agreed.

Alice introduces herself in the Staff/Common Room here.

I am also delighted that Alice has agreed to think through the keynote with me in the Forum, because an important function of the Forum is to make the thought behind what we do explicit to the benefit of the community – as Doug Engelbart said, the better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better. So please join us in the discussion.

To get things going I share the following from Reading nonfiction : notice & note stances, signposts, and strategies (2016, Beers & Probst, p. 4):

A stance is required for the attentive, productive reading of nonfiction. It’s a mindset that is open and receptive but not gullible. It encourages questioning the text but also one’s own assumptions, preconceptions, and possibly misconceptions. This mindset urges the reader both to draw upon what they do know and to acknowledge what they don’t know. And it asks the reader to make a responsible decision about whether a text has helped them confirm prior beliefs and thoughts or had enabled them to modify and sharpen them, or perhaps to abandon them and change their mind entirely.

This is so much more than getting children to read and/or like reading, and strikes me as more even than just developing their ability to read. Where to begin?

[Alice Visser-Furay Participant]

Thank you to Darryl for inviting me to speak at the SLG conference. I very much look forward to exploring the development of the reading mind with Darryl and anyone else on the forum.

I am delighted that Darryl’s first volley was Reading Nonfiction by Beers & Probst; the book that first got me thinking about the reading mind, especially in the context of struggling readers, is called When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do and it is by Kylene Beers (2002). This book has been a metaphorical bible for me as a teacher and intervention specialist looking for ways to improve the academic and life chances of students.

Beers and Probst have another book, Disrupted Thinking: Why How We Read Matters (2017). In it, they talk about reading as more than retrieval and extraction; they advocate interaction with text – teaching students how to read with curiosity, how to ask questions and how to let what they read change them. They conclude by stating (p. 162):

Perhaps, therefore, the most important thing we do with children is to ask them to consider how they might have revised their thinking as a result of reading. ‘How has this book or story touched you, made you think again about who you are or what you value? How has this text changed your thinking?’

As educators, we need to teach students how to develop the ability to allow text to ‘disrupt’ thinking – and we need to provide a multitude of opportunities for them to engage with challenging fiction and non-fiction from a variety of viewpoints. In our keynote, I am hoping that we can provide practical strategies that librarians, leaders and teachers can use to develop the reading mind.

 

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