Week 9: Reading Response

     Bean's article describes the problems and possible solutions associated with helping students read complex texts.  Bean explains a variety of reasons as to why students have trouble engaging texts in varying discourses.  He critiques the pedagogical strategies of reading quizzes and text-centric lectures, explaining how the way teacher's instruct and evaluate influences students to read at surface level.  He also cites a lack of prompting and preparation as a cause for students' comprehension issues.  Without understanding a texts context: the discourse to which it is a part and the concepts elevated therein, Bean argues that students fail to encode (or consider) the relevant information in ( or the appropriate response to) the text.  He proposes a series of possible homework strategies that emphasize "deep reading" and dispose a student to a critical response.  Bean also argues that, showing students how you, the professor, take notes and approach varying genres will help them in their own engagement with assigned texts.
     The Bunn article emphasizes the idea of "reading like a writer" or RLW.  Mike Bunn's article uses a series of paragraphs, each with a prompting question, to form his argument about RLW.  The main assertion of his argument is that if a reader becomes consciously aware of the techniques, structures, contexts and arguments being used by an author while they read, then in turn that reader will learn about how to properly read and write texts in the future.  He proposes this conscious approach to reading gives students and writers the ability to discern how others writing can benefit their own.  Over time an observant reader will encounter  many examples of effective and ineffective writing techniques, in various contexts, which can be used (or not used) in their own writing.
     Each article discussed topics I have studied in the past.  The ideas of deep reading and RLW discuss a type of reading similar to the close reading described by UWM's own Jane Gallop.  Both articles emphasize in their own way, a strategy for reading that is conscious of the text's artificiality.  That is, readers should know that what they are reading is the creation of another human being, and that person lived and wrote at a specific time for a specific purpose.  The importance of this perspective is finely articulated in Bunn's article.  He actually quotes Nancy Walker on the topic saying that when reading like a writer, “the work ceases to be a mere artifact, a stone tablet, and becomes instead a living utterance with immediacy and texture."  The work ceases to be a stone tablet.  How elegantly true.  Reading like a writer is an important development for any student, because it signifies a conscious movement from outsider to member.  If we RLW, we read as a peer of the author instead of a member of the audience.  I hope to use the information in each of these articles to reinforce a critical approach to my own writing.  The Bean article is extremely helpful if I should some day become a teacher, but for now it serves a reminder of the importance of knowing your audience.  From a writer's perspective Bean's article reminds me that depth and implicit meaning can often be overlooked if the reader does not expect or if the reader lives in a context different from the expected audience.  Bunn's article help me in the future to develop valuable analytic questions when reading other texts.