As someone who thinks of himself as a fast walker, I’ve noticed a definite slowing of my pace since I arrived at The Lawrenceville School for the Klingenstein Summer Institute. Every conversation, discussion, lecture, or reading has weighed heavily on me between sessions. To acknowledge Dr. Pearl Rock Kane’s opening address, I have been complicated. This sends me on wild spirals of self-doubt and despair, but also brings me great moments of affirmation. Overall, I think it balances out into that much-needed sense of discomfort that propels me to be better.

A fairly simple, yet incredibly insightful tool was tabled today by Liz Perry and Eder J. Williams McKnight, the English lead teachers. It simply involved the following drawing: 

Using any amount of manipulation we wanted, we were then asked to try and represent the relationship between the author, the text, and ourselves as the reader. My personal model initially came out like this:

Crude drawing aside, I wanted to capture the following points:

• The relationship between the reader and the text is ongoing and the reader has to keep constructing meaning within that relationship.
• The author created the text and must be humanized and involved, to some extent, in the understanding of that text.
• We can understand the author, to some extent, through the text and then use that understanding to inform our understanding of the text.
• We can understand the author, to some extent, outside of the text (research, etc.) and then use that information to inform our understanding of the text.

Feeling like I had done a good job accurately portraying my understanding within the model provided, it was so great to see the different models put forward by my colleagues. One went very meta and added in so many other possible manipulators on the text, including cultural, historical, and linguistic factors as well as institutional factors such as publishers, translators, and academia. Another wanted to ensure the larger community of readers was included in the diagram.

Already, diverse thinking about these relationships had been made visible. Next we were challenged to discuss how we thought that relationship would change if we drew from the perspective of a student. While it didn’t involve the same sharing of pictures, it did involve some amazing insights that translate into powerful take-aways. I’ve tried to recreate some of these relationships in images.

(Above) Liz Perry stated that she often saw her students trying to grapple with the idea of an author as larger than life and somehow the text was coming at them like this giant, incredible force and it was their job to try and catch it and absorb that huge impact.

(Below) Other teachers saw students as believing that they needed the passion and insight of their teacher in order to effectively access the text. 

(Below) Still other teachers saw students as trying to remove the actual engagement with the text from the equation. Instead, students utilized summaries and opinions to try and “get” the text without having to construct any textual meaning for themselves. 

From my perspective, I see different students in each of the models presented. The importance of this exercise is not to think we now know how our students think, but to point out that there are so many different ways to envision the relationship between author, text, and reader. Even amongst the expert readers in my curriculum group, there existed incredible diversity and varying theoretical lenses. The important first step is making those lenses clear to ourselves – to make our own thinking visible. I am excited to go through this exercise with my students to help them uncover their own thinking. This is where we can spot misconceptions and better prepare our readers to see that reading is an act of authorship and that students are not just passively receiving the text, but trying to position themselves in relationship to the text. Meaning is not revealed to students, but constructed by them.