On the other hand, when problems are inventive they lead to new forms of life rather than the conservation of existing life, to proliferation. E.g., studying the problem of social media becomes a way of inventing new pedagogies and scholarly activities. Now that’s not to suggest that “solving problems’ is bad or that this latter approach does not solve problems in a sense (by creating contexts in which the problems are not encountered as problems anymore).

In part, I think the “crisis” in the humanities is a result of our problems not being problems anymore, at least not in the way we situate them. So maybe invention would be helpful. Of course, it would mean working differently. and that’s the challenge.

Not getting much playback on the calls for response as of yet, so it looks like nothing’s gonna change anytime soon. That’s likely a good thing. I’ve got other texts I should be figuring out anyway.

See you soon!

T.

So i have to other things to say:
(a) I will buy a T-shirt if it has a snarky hip saying on it.
(b) how are you using this blog — and how it might change to a multi-authored blog — to write about the future of the book in your diss?! ;)

c

We can continue this conversation over drinks soon. Looking forward to it.

T.

Judging by the conversation at the workshop, I think there’s another level to the “so they privilege it in a way that’s not necessarily useful to twenty-first century students.” Whether we are talking about Salvatori’s pen/paper approach, a digital approach, or an approach that invites as many textual marking strategies as possible into the classroom, we are ultimately talking about strategies. Strategies about engaging a text. Strategies for engaging a text so that a person (you as an author, a student as an author, etc.) can do something with a text. If we want to use Harris’s term, to do a “project” coming from a text. So, no matter the material/physical medium, we are ultimately talking about strategies for interacting with a text.

I think that’s fundamentally where you and I agree in regards to Salvatori’s work. It’s a work about 1) strategies, 2) reading and 3) texts. What’s interesting in the piece is that Salvatori reminds us:

“Nor – an important caveat – can these strategies be lifted out of the theoretical framework I have articulated here and seen as transportable tips or prescription; like all strategies, they make sense, that is, are plausible and justified, only within the particular approach to teaching that my understanding of ‘the act of reading’ and its connections with writing calls for” (446). For the purposes of our conversation, this reminder seems important in two ways:

1. Your point of departure, which is to consider how the “theoretical framework” she has articulated changes when we consider the technologies students use now to “mark-up” texts compared to 15+ years ago.

2. There are no guarantees about how these strategies will pay off. But, because she is coming from a specific “theoretical framework” there is the argument, at least for me, that these texts will never help someone (to summarize part of the workship) to figure out the “right/correct” reading of a text.

I think what this means is exactly what you are considering – that we have to consider how the physical/material approaches students take toward texts affect how they read the texts. That’s totally an inquiry point about strategies. That’s totally an inquiry point about complexity – i.e. how do we account for the multiplicity of ways in which students interact with texts. That’s what I was trying to say about my own pedagogy. I want to engage the strategies that students use because it is these strategies, regardless of medium, that allow them to interact with texts.

I continue to rely on pencil/pen, ink, and paper because, naively, I think eliminating complication (of material approaches) allows for a greater focus on the marking-up strategy itself. But, here’s where I add to your final paragraph and add my own “Okay, I’ll just get to it.” I think some instructors continue to push the ink/paper approach not merely because it’s what they employ, but because they think it’s the strategy they employ to “get the right reading of the text.” And that either 1) students won’t get the right meaning without this approach or 2) the teacher won’t be able to trace how they got a “wrong” meaning. It’s not the multiplicity of material approaches that scares them. It’s the idea that such approaches might get in the way of correctly reading the text. Hasn’t, Salvatori though, already reminded us that what we are working with here are strategies, not prescriptions?

Ultimately, it might be about time. That’s part of my fear. I say to myself: “OK, how does introducing this complication take time away from X or Y or Z.” If, though, we want to facilitate and develop the strategies students use to engage texts, I want to believe it is time well spent. On the other hand, we can continue to believe that the “correct interpretation” is more important than a nuanced, close examination of what it means to read and mark-up a text, an activity situated in the hope of opening, if just ever-so-slightly, the text up for our own work.

(Sorry to take so long to get back to you on this response. Louisville Conference is over, now, and I can give your comment to attendant response it deserves. And thanks again for taking the time to post!)

I sense in your response that you might be a little anxious about the level of complexity (confusion) that some of my potential strategies might produce (such a provisional statement!). Having students bring in laptops, kindles, copies with one page per sheet, with two pages per sheet, or needing to work in a lab to accommodate students who work on desktops only. And then having some of them marking up with Acrobat, or another sort of PDF reader. Some underlining, some highlighting, some dropping notes into the document margins, some writing notes at the end of the document. Some using pop-up notes. Some notes appearing over the text. Some students taking notes away from the text, as storing them elsewhere: notebook, voice recording, OneNote, Evernote, Txt file, Word file, etc. And this list is missing way more options than it actually contains. I can certainly understand an instructor’s hesitance to allow for the actual practices students enact to engage their texts. To tell you the truth, your note has even raised my own anxiety level about the possible implications of my proposed pedagogies.

And about your mention of “transfer,” my reluctance to the term is minimal, provided it operates within specific meanings. I haven’t read much on the idea of transfer in our discipline, so feel free to recommend something, but it seems that transfer is inherent in any classroom. Unless we’re teaching students only to be really good at performing in the classroom, there’s got to be at least a smidgen of transfer assumed. Although there are plenty of contentious debates about what sorts of knowledges/skills/practices are preferable or even possible in our classrooms, I don’t think it’s possible to talk about the value of what we do without acknowledging that we DO commerce in it to some degree. I just think it’s important that anytime it becomes relevant to our arguments, we are explicit about the types and degree of transfer we’re assuming. So your gesture toward print as representative/introduction to other textual engagement strategies does have serious merit. Certainly worth talking more about.

Maybe this is me trying to establish some middle ground, or at least meet you there. I think the paper-ink strategies, where everyone has the same book or the same photocopies could work. Really well, actually. But in my own classroom, I could only approach it this way if I carved out significant space in classroom discussions for how this particular strategy might galvanize some other strategies that students do, actually, enact. I still say that it’s limited in the ways I’ve articulated in the post above, but not necessarily to the degree I first suggested.

On the other hand it might be interesting to allow for a variety of textual engagement strategies, but to limit those options. Maybe print-ink, Acrobat, and notes in an associated text file. Or maybe just the first two. Then we could have lively discussions about the affordances/drawbacks/demands of each method.

So there are TWO patches of middle ground for us to cultivate. But there’s one more point I want to acknowledge/admit-to about my original post…

I don’t have a single criticism of Salvatori’s argument or pedagogy given it’s own context (read: early-to-mid ‘90s). However, it’s a much, much different pedagogical move to adopt a print-ink-marginalia strategy now in the context of increasingly digital-and-networked universities. There can be all sorts of reasons to adopt Salvatori’s practices as-is, but I’d be a little curious, at least, as to what would motivate an instructor to do so. Obviously, you’ve articulated some very good reasons in your own comment above, and there are many others that are just as good. I would hope that an instructor who does adopt these practices would be as thoughtful as you as to their own motivation.

… Okay, I’ll just get to. I fear that some instructors would employ this method for reasons I don’t find very valid. Maybe because this is how they, themselves engage the text, so they privilege it in a way that’s not necessarily useful to twenty-first century students. Maybe they’re unaware of other practices students are employing to engage texts. Maybe they don’t want to learn these alternatives. Maybe because they’ve just always talked with students about it this way. None of these suspicions are very generous. I’ll admit it. I just feel like it needs to be said.

I find the last sentence of section 2a to be the most interesting portion of your post. Maybe because I’ve heard the rest of it from you before!

It seems to be that in one way, your argument that teachers should “consider the material/physical aspects of a students’ reading processes as an additional factor affecting the “difficulty” of a text” provides a possible answer to ideas you are presenting in section 1a and on the other hand it speaks back to the complications you raise in the same section.

I, to use one of your phrases, “totally totally agree with you” that we need to make the material/physical aspects of reading/writing more visible to our students and need to draw connections between physical/material reading. So, the most obvious answer is to (in addressing 1a) invite students to bring all of their “material/physical” reading practices into the classroom. To be generous to Salvatori’s work, though, her focus is primarily in offering students strategies on how to approach a text (assumed to be the same for everyone). So, now my most obvious reaction to the idea of inviting all these reading practices into the classroom is to say, “No, we all need to do be working with the text in the same physical format.” And we all know that usually takes the form of traditional, printed copy (at least in my class!)

So, there’s the desire to invite in the actual “material/physical” reading practices that students actually use (and are too various to count). There’s the counter-desire to offer some form of sameness for the sake of focusing on the strategies to read the text. But, then there’s the counter-counter argument that the strategies are contextual to the physical/material conditions. And from there, questions arise along the lines of “OK, if I have them do it one way, will they be able to reconceptualize the strategy for their own purposes?” I almost just used the word transfer, but I think that would, in this context of digital/physical/material, border on offering the idea of linear application.

You know me (we’ve been friends for awhile even if you don’t want to admit it), so you know my interest is in the strategy. This focus is to the poin where, as a teacher, I want students dealing with the (same) physical, printed text. I want to believe that I can exclude issues of the material in favor of focusing on the strategy/approach. But, I’m pretty convinced that’s not how it should work. But to make it work any other way is to invite the complications you point out in 1a.

While more might not be better, is avoiding the physical/material just as not useful? I feel like I’m caught in a tension where I want to bring these difficulties related to the physical/material to the surface in my class, I just don’t want doing so to get in the way of the strategies I teach! Although, clearly, the physical/material is already present in the strategies even if I don’t want to admit it.

I think I’ve completed my circular journey now. I’ll be getting out of here now…

Thanks for writing a blog I could respond to.

And sorry for not adequately crediting the image. You’re right. I should have made a more clear reference to the picture’s source in the post. I figured that linking the picture directly back to the source would have been enough, but that was probably informed by the fact that it was a little easier for me to do it that way. As always, reader comments are helping to make this a better blog (and to keep me honest!)