Deep reading, p.24
Deep Reading, page 24
I (Roberts) have long admired an essay by Stephanie Paulsell called “Writing as a Spiritual Discipline,” and I use this essay regularly in a junior-level course called Literary Research.93 In this essay, Paulsell considers the communal aspects of academic writing, challenging writers to “[hold] potential readers, and the other writers with whom we think and write, in our hearts,” and to “write towards others.”94 In other words, when we write, we do so not in isolation but with care for our audiences and with concern for how they receive our work. This posture is similar to the focus on others in conversation that Edwards and hooks write about, noted above.95 In addition, Paulsell offers the idea of “writing as a way of reading,” a way to process what we read.96 Both of these ideas provide fertile ground for conversational practices, where written as well as spoken responses to texts can become part of a generous and caring conversation, inviting readers to learn from and with the writer. “Writing as a way of reading,” as Paulsell puts it, can also contribute to acts of deep reading by which our understanding of a text expands.97
We often think of writing about our reading as a formal act, such as for an essay or review; however, we can also practice informal writing as conversation. I (Roberts) use a variation on the reading response in my sophomore-level literature classes, where I ask students to choose among a list of questions for a 250-word reading response at regular intervals. The important thing about these questions is that they are almost always a repetition of major discussion questions from class. For instance, when I teach Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, I set aside some class time to discuss with my students why I’m teaching a play about demon-summoning at a Christian university. For that class, one of the possible discussion questions is on the same topic: “Should we, as Christians, even be reading a play that includes devils among its main characters? Do you think Marlowe’s play poses any danger to its readers? Conversely, do you think this play can be instructive to Christian readers?” Students thus return to a question that is somewhat familiar from class discussion (most students do these responses after the class period) and consider their personal reactions and feelings. When I ask at the end of the semester which assignments helped them learn the most, students frequently mention these responses, saying that the repetition of concepts helps them sink in. Thus, students’ informal writing may form another aspect of class conversation—in this case, repeating information from class while giving each student a chance to respond individually. Less formal reading groups could consider using written follow-up responses, perhaps in a text or email thread, giving participants the chance to respond after the in-person meeting has ended. In addition, individual readers can use reading responses as a conversation with the text; whether in a private journal or an online forum, readers can respond thoughtfully to questions about the text—perhaps even questions they have generated for themselves. This type of repetition resists consumerism, particularly the curious appetite, which is always looking for something new, by asking readers to return to ideas again and again.98
Planners of events that center reading and writing, such as academic conferences for scholars and educators, can also resist consumerism by shaping panel discussions that emphasize extended engagement with other participants rather than individual performance. For example, I (Ooms) attended a conference a few years ago that featured panels unlike those I had seen at other conferences.99 One such panel, a book review panel, involved four participants; three had written and were presenting reviews of the same book, while the fourth participant was the author of that book. After the reviewers had read their reviews, the author responded to those reviews, and all participants obviously viewed the conversation as an opportunity to more fully understand the author’s book and engage with its ideas as members of an intellectual community. In another panel, three presenters each gave their own papers, after which the chair of the panel began the Q&A with thoughtful questions tailored for each panelist, whose papers he had received and read in advance. These conversations took time; the first panel was entirely devoted to returning, again and again, to the same book, while the second panel’s chair had invested extra thought and attention to the participants’ essays. But the result allowed panelists and audience members to engage more fully not only with each other’s ideas but with each other. Rather than viewing their engagement with each other’s work as fodder for another line on their CVs, the panelists modeled academic writing as conversation and engaged generously with each other’s ideas. Although many conferences do involve these kinds of conversations, the structure of these particular panels made the practice of generous conversation their purpose, and whatever published writing occurred as a result of these conference papers likely reflected the communities that helped shape them. Writing with our fellow readers in mind can thus form us away from competitiveness and toward generosity.
Concluding Reflection on Conversation as Gift Giving
In a world in which neither the church nor the proverbial ivory tower of academia protects us from an onslaught of consumerism and its accompanying competition, individualization, and utilitarianism, generous conversation in reading spaces offers an opportunity for reciprocity, insight, and delight. However, this conversation cannot arise without intentional practices on the part of reading communities to create a gift economy that involves listening attentively and responding with charity to each other. When a community is filled with opportunities to see conversations enacted in a variety of ways, and when instructors and leaders are mindful of their responsibility to introduce a diversity of interpretation without exploiting participants, readers can enlarge our capacity for deep reading and the virtues it offers. Conversation is simultaneously one of the most natural, the most carefully balanced, and the most powerful practices by which readers can connect with themselves, with each other, and with key texts in a gift economy where reciprocity, not competition, is the primary motivator.
SUMMARY of SUGGESTED PRACTICES
Ask questions, particularly open-ended discussion questions, about the texts you read. Write them down so that you can return to them at a later date and consider how your responses evolve.
Practice bringing open-ended questions to group conversation, resisting the urge to find a particular answer.
Use a think/pair/share model to allow for both individual and whole-group responses to discussion questions.
Deliberately seek voices and perspectives on the text beyond your own and your immediate circle’s. Read a wide variety of responses, invite a guest conversant or lecturer, or become an “advocate” for the text.
Discuss expectations for conversational postures in your conversation group—these might involve looking at the speaker, putting away phones, or sitting up straight rather than slouching. Try out these conversational postures and see if they change the conversational dynamic.
Rearrange the classroom, reading, or conversation space and see what effect the new arrangement has on conversation; or deliberately rearrange the conversation space to embody an experience related to the text, such as a banquet hall, courtroom, or theater.
Write a response to a text you have read; or, write a response to another reader of this text, within or outside your usual reading group.
REFLECTION and DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
In what ways do you see the effects of consumerism in your life? Consider especially its effects on your community, classroom, church, or social media experiences.
In what ways do you see the effects of consumerism on your reading practices?
Have you experienced generous, nonhierarchical conversation in some context (as a student, at a conference, at church, in your family)? What factors made that conversation possible? Conversely, when you have experienced conversation that did not allow for generous expression of your own views, what factors prevented your participation?
How do you define “conversation”? How might thinking of conversation as a “gift” change your definition or practice?
How can you create an environment of trust and equality in your reading space or classroom? Consider both what you might say (modeling listening or conversation) and what you might do (sit in a circle, invite a guest).
What body language, to you, conveys a listening posture? How can you practice adopting a listening posture in conversation?
Whom would you like to invite into your reading conversations? Remember that “conversation” might mean reading, writing, or speaking, so you are not necessarily bound by time or distance.
1. A plethora of sources exist on this topic. For a recent study, see Pike, “Depressive Symptoms Linked to Social Media Use Are Higher among Girls,” 1.
2. Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, 143.
3. Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, 117.
4. Swagler, “Evolution and Applications of the Term Consumerism,” 354.
5. Mohawk, “Western Peoples, Natural Peoples,” 265.
6. Coontz, Way We Never Were, 179.
7. Fletcher, “Laboring in the Garden,” 183.
8. J. K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 117.
9. Fletcher, “Laboring in the Garden,” 184.
10. See, for example, “Average Hours per Day Spent in Selected Household Activities,” https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-hldh.htm. This data shows that in 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated that women spend, on average, 2.33 hours a day (2 hours and 20 minutes) on household tasks while men spend 1.54 hours (1 hour and 32 minutes). This division is particularly stark for the household chore of laundry; women spend, on average, 0.27 hours per day on laundry (16 minutes), while men spend 0.08 hours (just under 5 minutes). For one important study on the racial component of domestic and reproductive labor, see Parreñas, Servants of Globalization.
11. Edmundson, Why Read?, 9. See also Carey, “College Consumerism Run Amok?”
12. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom, 21.
13. See Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, 80: “We tend to think of reading as a means to an end. Like driving, it gets us from here to there. We do it, often, in order to have done it. . . . Ours is a checklist sort of culture.”
14. For some discussion of “task completion” in the digital age, specifically the classroom, see D. I. Smith et al., Digital Life Together, 130–33. See also Chavez, Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, 36, on the problems with a “product-based mentality.”
15. Bilbro, Reading the Times, 67, provides helpful definitions of “kairos” and “chronos,” terms used in the New Testament: “Kairos refers to the propitious time, time that is right for a certain act,” and is “rhythmic, cyclical, seasonal,” while “chronos . . . is closer to our modern understanding of time” and sees time “as quantifiable duration, as something that is linear and sequential.”
16. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 1.
17. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 20.
18. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 21.
19. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 72.
20. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 73.
21. See also Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 163, which ties capitalism and racism together.
22. Edmundson, Why Read?, 10, also suggests that apathy is an effect of consumerism in the classroom. He describes his students as “devotees of spectatorship and of consumer-cool,” reluctant to engage in a meaningful way with the texts offered in his class. See chapter 6 of this book for a discussion of counteracting apathy through enjoyment.
23. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom, 21.
24. Chavez, Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, 12.
25. In Exiles from Eden, 82, Mark Schwehn distinguishes “productive conflict,” with a positive effect on learning, from “covert competition,” with a negative one.
26. Song, Restless Devices, 86.
27. Song, Restless Devices, 86.
28. Song, Restless Devices, 101; emphasis original.
29. Song, Restless Devices, 182.
30. Kristin Kobes Du Mez discusses the role of marketing and consumerism in white evangelicalism throughout Jesus and John Wayne. See particularly 63–64, 85–86, 158–66, 220.
31. Metzger, Consuming Jesus, 9–10.
32. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom, 21.
33. Katelyn Beaty, herself an acquisitions editor for a Christian publisher, provides a nuanced examination of the pitfalls inherent in Christian publishing in chapter 5 of Celebrities for Jesus, 95–115.
34. McEntyre, Caring for Words, 92.
35. See also Perkins, “Reading Meaningfully,” 37, where she writes that “interpretation is dialogue rather than monologue.” Making conversation includes making meaning.
36. Smith and Carvill, Gift of the Stranger, 67, 69, 71.
37. Smith and Carvill, Gift of the Stranger, 67, 72. See also Chavez, Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, 18, on “deep listening.” We also discuss attention in chapters 1–2 and listening in chapter 3.
38. Smith and Carvill, Gift of the Stranger, 69.
39. Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 28.
40. McEntyre, Caring for Words, 105.
41. hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 45.
42. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27.
43. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 28.
44. For an application of this idea in classroom discussion, see Bonwell and Eison, Active Learning. Bonwell and Eison write that instructors “must be knowledgeable of alternative techniques and strategies for questioning and discussion . . . and must create a supportive intellectual and emotional environment that encourages students to take risks” in order for discussion to be “preferable to lecture” as a classroom activity (5–6).
45. hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 87.
46. Edwards, “Religion, Reluctance, and Conversations about Vocation,” 292.
47. This group studied Vocation across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education, ed. David S. Cunningham. I (Roberts) am particularly grateful to InterVarsity’s Women Scholars and Professionals organization and to our book group leader, Jasmine Obeyesekere, for this example of generous conversation.
48. hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 45.
49. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 79.
50. Bell, Storytelling for Social Justice, 13, notes, “Storytelling and oral tradition are also democratic, freely available to all, requiring neither wealth and status nor formal education.” Conversation, likewise, can be an equalizer when undertaken with care.
51. Edwards, “Religion, Reluctance, and Conversations about Vocation,” 293. See also Bell, Storytelling for Social Justice, 17, on the importance of “acknowledg[ing] differences in power and privilege” when setting the scene for dialogue.
52. Chavez, Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, 17.
53. hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 114. See also Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 73, 80.
54. hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking, 114.
55. For example, hooks notes that “as the classroom becomes more diverse, teachers are faced with the way in which the politics of domination are often reproduced in the educational setting. For example, white male students continue to be the most vocal in our classes. Students of color and some white women express fear that they will be judged as intellectually inadequate by these peers.” Teaching to Transgress, 39.
56. Wolf and Barzillai, “Importance of Deep Reading,” 33.
57. Howard, Discussion in the College Classroom, 5–6.
58. Simon, Disciplined Heart, 89.
59. Call, “Rough Trail to Authentic Pedagogy,” 64.
60. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “docility,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/56261.
61. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II.49.3 (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). See also Griffis, “Reformation Leads to Self-Reliance,” 30.
62. DeMarco, Many Faces of Virtue, 22.
63. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II.49.3 (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province).
64. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 80.
65. Ameeriar, “Pedagogies of Affect,” 468, 484.
66. Ameeriar, “Pedagogies of Affect,” 484. See also Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 73.
67. I (Roberts) would like to thank Simone Waller, who in a conversation at the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar: Printing and the Book during the Reformation gave me a timely reminder about how virtues like civility can backfire into silencing certain voices. Docility seems to be another such virtue, and finding the appropriate focus requires thoughtfulness and care.
