The Writing Program at BSU

Teaching Reading Strategies

Purpose: in the narrative that follows this activity you'll find Michelle Payne's explanation for each step, but the general purpose here is to show students that we "read" our everyday world constantly, and those strategies are what we need when we read texts. It makes the students slow down their reading process and think about how they draw conclusions about what they read. This also demonstrates the dialogue journal process that you may expect them to use when they read.

Materials: bring in your own briefcase, wallet, or even a random collection of things from your office; you can also bring in objects that belong to someone else

Steps:

• First, have your students get their notebooks out and make three columns: Evidence (What I See); Assumptions (What I have to believe to draw these conclusions); and Conclusions.
• Hand out the pieces in your briefcase or wallet. Some instructors just pull out what is in the briefcase and name it for students, others let students actually go through the bag. Know beforehand whether there are things in there that could make you or your students uncomfortable, and know that at this stage you'll have some students who are hesitant to go through your stuff. That's okay.
• As they go through what's in the bag, have them fill out the left and right columns (What I See and Conclusions).
• Get a master list of their conclusions on the board and draw lines between the columns to connect the "evidence" with the conclusions (the concrete with the abstract, the sea of detail with the mountain of reflection). Prompt students to tell you why they came to the conclusions they did.

Reflection

Have students pause and reflect on what they've just done. In their journal or notebook, have students fastwrite for five to seven minutes on this activity, using any of the questions below as prompts to get them thinking.

How quickly were you able to draw conclusions about me after you skimmed the list of what was in my bag? What surprised you as you went through this process? In what ways did your ideas about me change after talking with your group and having to come up with the most "reasonable and persuasive" conclusions? As you reflect on what's in the "assumptions" column for your group, what did you learn about yourself and your beliefs as a result of having to think about why you came to the conclusions you did?

Then, have students look back over their fastwrite and underline anything that surprised them or raised interesting questions for them. Then, ask students to try to summarize in a sentence or two what they've learned from this activity that they didn't know before they started it.

Work with what doesn't belong (you may not have time for this part of the process, but it's a good way to begin talking about how to rethink the ideas and details that don't seem to "fit" in an essay-a process which can lead to new understandings in our reading and in the subjects we're writing about.

Have students make a list, as a class, of all the items in the bag that don't fit with the picture they've developed of you. What doesn't seem to make sense? Then, discuss why those items don't fit. What information would you need in order to figure out how those items might fit? What questions would you want to ask me? How do these odd items revise the picture the class has developed about you at this point? In other words, how does this tangential information revise the reading they've developed?

Discussion:

By Dr. Michelle Payne

originally drafted for a textbook on reading and research

Like most professors, I have a tattered briefcase I carry around everyday, and it is usually bulging with student papers, my lunch, or one too many books. For years I didn't carry a purse because everything I needed was in my briefcase: pens, band-Aids, aspirin, notebooks, keys, paperclips . . . . It was my walking office, like a laptop computer, ready to work wherever I needed it to. All I had to do was unzip it, lay it flat, and pull out whatever file I needed, whether I was in a plane, in my office, or at the park for some reason, waiting for a ride. Now I'm sure you are already making all kinds of assumptions about me just from this vision of a professor toting her work around like those students in high school who used to do their homework during lunch hour (yes, I did that, too). What DO you usually think about when you see someone with a briefcase? Since a lot of your professors probably use them, think about the ones you know who carry hard case leather briefcases. What do you assume about them, about their personalities, their attitudes toward students, their income? What about those faculty who carry soft leather briefcases, the ones that have shoulder straps and look like book bags? Or those faculty like me who have canvas bags that zip and could pass for carry-on luggage? What do you usually assume about someone based on what they carry around with them?

Every semester I ask my students these questions and then I let them go through whatever I have in my briefcase that day. I have to do this early in the semester, before they know much about me, or it doesn't work as well. Why? Because I want to show them how they read.

Writing Exercise 3.1: Reading People

Skeptical? Well, let's try it. Get out a sheet of paper, whether from your journal or a notebook, and draw three columns like this:

Ignore the middle column right now. In the left-hand column I've already started a list of what's in my briefcase (you can also do this exercise with someone else's bag, or any other item that we generally use to draw conclusions about people; it is often easier to do this with items from people we don't know or who are not in the class). In the right-hand column, I'd like you to brainstorm all the conclusions you come to about me based simply on what's in my briefcase. Do this quickly, without thinking about it too much. For example, I carry about six credit cards in my wallet, many from department stores-what do you make of that? I don't carry pictures of my family, and I'm stocked with lip balm, aspirin, pins, needles, a whistle, hair brush, and , sometimes, foot spray. What do each of those things say?

After everyone in the class has a good list going, share your conclusions in small groups. On newsprint, draw the three columns and begin with the right-hand column (Conclusions). As a group, decide which of the conclusions you've reached are the most reasonable and persuasive given the evidence. You aren't able to talk to me or ask questions, so all you have is what I've told you is in my bag. Someone in your group, for example, might have concluded from the number of credit cards that I spend a lot of money I don't have-that is, I'm in pretty serious debt. Someone else might think, though, that I carry them around for emergencies, or simply as a way to maintain a credit history. Which of these conclusions seems the most plausible? What other information would you need in order to feel more confident in your interpretation? Write the agreed-upon conclusions in the right-hand column and list the items in the briefcase that support them in the left-hand column.

Now, in the middle column, take one conclusion at a time and determine what you have to believe in order for the item in my bag to correspond to the conclusions you've reached. Here's an example: let's say you've decided that I have so many credit cards because I don't have a lot of money and sometimes I need things I can't afford. The evidence for this is not only the cards, but the fact that my bag is tattered and old and I seem to collect things I might need instead of buying them as the need arises. Everything in the bag is worn, so you conclude that I don't splurge when I buy things. Now, what are you assuming about credit cards that leads to these interpretations? These assumptions will come from your own experiences with credit cards, what you've seen your parents do with them, your friends, and from your own values about money and how to spend it. If you know people who use credit cards and rack up huge debt, and those people tend to always be wearing the newest fashions and/or have high-priced things like big-screen TVs and jet skis, yet they work at McDonalds (to exaggerate a little), you would be looking for evidence of similar behavior in my briefcase. And what you see doesn't fit with that experience, so you conclude I might not be in serious debt. Now, I know you don't have all the information you need about me to be sure, but that's always true, isn't it? We make these kinds of assumptions about people all the time, without the benefit of talking to them or taking a tour of their homes, and that's what I'm asking you to do here.

Now I'd like you to pause and reflect on what you've just done. In your journal or notebook, fastwrite for five to seven minutes on this activity, using any of the questions below as prompts to get you thinking.

How quickly were you able to draw conclusions about me after you skimmed the list of what was in my bag? What surprised you as you went through this process? In what ways did your ideas about me change after talking with your group and having to come up with the most "reasonable and persuasive" conclusions? As you reflect on what's in the "assumptions" column for your group, what did you learn about yourself and your beliefs as a result of having to think about why you came to the conclusions you did?

Now, look back over your fastwrite and, as in Exercise 1, underline anything that surprised you or raised interesting questions for you. Then, in a sentence or two, try to summarize what you've learned from this activity that you didn't know before you started it.

So far you've tried to build an interpretation of me based simply on what's in my briefcase. To do this, you began by making quick impressions, then you talked with others about what you were concluding and thought a little more carefully about whether you had enough evidence to draw the conclusions you were. We sometimes do this kind of talking with our friends after we've met someone new. But the last part of this exercise asked you think a little more carefully about why you perceived me as you do right now. Asking that kind of question is a characteristic of academic thinking, and it's part of being a good researcher, too. We need to know why we respond the way we do so we can be more ethical in how we present our ideas and more open to learning things that we otherwise find threatening, upsetting, or difficult. You'll notice that ethnographers Mark Constas and Wendy Colyn write quite a bit about how their personal beliefs and emotional responses affected the research they were doing in South Africa. They needed to understand why their research project "failed," and their reflections taught them how to enter an unknown culture differently the next time. It also changed how they see the research process. Part of exploring with wonder and curiosity is understanding how our assumptions, beliefs, and socialization affect what we see, what we take for granted, and that can be an opportunity to raise new questions. You may have experienced this when you were talking with your group about the assumptions that inform your interpretations of my briefcase. Some of you may have revised your conclusions based on those discussions and experienced just what I'm describing here. Asking questions of our own beliefs can lead us to revise our ideas and come to even greater insights than we might have otherwise.

Exercise 3.2: One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Let's try one more thing with this briefcase exercise. I want you to make a list, as a class, of all the items in my bag that don't fit with the picture you've developed of me. What doesn't seem to make sense? Then, I'd like you discuss why those items don't fit. What information would you need in order to figure out how those items might fit? What questions would you want to ask me? How do these odd items revise the picture the class has developed about me at this point? In other words, how does this tangential information revise the reading you've developed?

As may have already guessed, I'm trying in this exercise to pay attention to things that don't seem to fit in the research and reading you may be doing. We have a tendency to ignore material that doesn't seem related to our evolving hypothesis or that seems to undermine our interpretation of a text. But a vital part of dialectical thinking is the willingness to allow contradictory information to revise our evolving ideas.

Here's what my students usually focus on when they do this exercise: my apprentice plumbing license. They have already decided that I'm an English professor who cares about her appearance, who likes to be prepared for anything that can happen, who fancies herself organized but is really a clutter bug. They've learned that I teach lots of writing courses and train teaching assistants. But they can't figure out why I have that plumbing license. As we talk, I ask them why that doesn't fit. They laugh like I'm asking a stupid question. "I can't see you bending over a toilet," one of my students said. "Professors don't work with their hands like that-I can't see you getting dirty." I usually press my students about why they are so startled, and eventually we come to the key assumptions that create so much dissonance: plumbers are usually men, and although they may make a lot of money, they are considered working class; and professors, no matter how much less they may make, are considered at least middle class. Plus, I'm a woman. The assumptions we make about my gender and social class influence what seems to "fit" into a description of who I am. So what do we do with that plumbing license?

My students ask me a lot of questions about why I have it, and although the texts you read can't answer similar kinds of questions, I do. What they learn is that my father-in-law is a plumber, and before my husband went to college, he too was a plumber. I couldn't stand not knowing what the two of them were talking about when they discussed my father-in-law's business, so I was invited to come on a job and learn. Then came the plumbing license-a piece of paper that simply means I'm learning to be a plumber. I'm usually very curious and interested in learning new things, and I can be fiercely independent when it comes to taking care of everyday things like my car, my water heater, my plumbing. So I solder copper pipes and run PVC when I'm able to with my father-in-law, and my husband shows me how to repair the drip in the shower faucet. Usually my students come to see the connections between their initial conclusions and the reasons I have a plumbing license-they both reflect my attitudes toward students, learning, and active, independent thinking.

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