Sheridan Blau The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and

Their Readers
As English teachers we have long been aware of the dangers of
becoming the sage on the stage, telling the students what they
need to know about a work. It is worth thinking about this
conclusion, however, as we may often find there is a difficult
balance between exploration and a supposed need to get through
content. ne !uestion is certainly what is the content of a course
about language and literature" It is also worth revisiting the value
and nature of student work with literature in the classroom. #ead
the following excerpt and consider its implications. $ow do you use
exploration and group work in class" $ow do you work to make
students autonomous readers of difficult literary texts" $ow do you
approach your own reading and teaching of texts as a model for
students to follow"
from %lau, &heridan. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts
and Their Readers. 'ortsmouth, ($) $einemann, *++,. -./--.
Experienced readers know that their first vision of a text may be
entirely misdirected or so minimal as to appear worthless0%ut
they also know that such a reading is merely a 1ero draft, a
starting place for a series of rereading that will gradually yield an
increasingly more ade!uate and illuminating sense of a meaning
that they are constructing to reconstitute the text in front of them.
Inexperienced readers may regard all encounters with difficult texts
to be worthless, because they have never progressed beyond the
inchoate and apparently pointless 1ero draft represented by their
first reading. 2hus, based on their experience, they will declare
!uite accurately that for them the reading of poetry 3or most other
challenging texts4 is an utterly worthless enterprise.
#eading is, and needs to be in classrooms, a social process,
completed in conversation. &tudents will learn literature best and find
many of their best opportunities for learning to become more
competent, more intellectually productive, and more autonomous
readers of literature through fre!uent work in groups with peers.
2his principle, whose validity became at least partially self/evident
in our workshop, is supported by a long history of classroom
experience and by a si1eable body of research and theory 3see for
example, (ystrand and 5amaron 67768 &mith 677.8 'radl 67798
&choenbach et al. 67774. :onversation following reading is, of
course, almost a natural event or as natural as any ordinary
civili1ed custom feels. ;henever we are witness to aesthetic or
natural phenomena that take our breath away or that move us or
touch us powerfully, we tend to want to share the experience with
others, partly to confirm our own experience, partly to relive it by
recounting it and hearing it recounted by others, and partly to gain
the broader perspective that comes from such sharing. <ost
people I know would prefer to go to the movies or the theater or an
art gallery with someone else rather than alone, not =ust to have
somebody to hold hands with, but to have a partner for dialogue
about the experience that is shared and that may be different for
each of the parties. &o it is with books, which is why so many
readers belong to book clubs and love to encounter someone else
who has =ust read the same book they have.
;ayne %ooth, in The Company We Keep 367>>, ?+/??4, has
demonstrated that this process of talking with others about our
literary experiences and making literary =udgments is essential to
the making of literary knowledge, and he has further dignified the
process by identifying it as a socially constructed form of reasoning
that he calls conduction. :oduction differs from the more rigid
and interior processes of induction and deduction in two principal
ways) first, in the way in which it derives from conversation or a
kind of collaborative discourse or negotiation conducted with other
readers, and second, in the way it yields knowledge that is always
provisional, insofar as literary opinions and =udgments are always
rooted in comparisons with previous literary experiences and
change as our experience grows richer and more varied over time.
2he importance of a conversation to the making of literary
knowledge through conduction would alone make a powerful
argument for providing students with fre!uent conversational
opportunities among themselves, preferably in small groups,
where participation can be more fre!uent and intensive and where
the kind of conversation needed for negotiation about meaning and
value will not be suppressed by the derivative and nonprovisional
kinds of literary opinions that are characteristically delivered
through large lectures and the official curriculum. An e!ually
important and persuasive reason to have students talk to each
other about their reading, however, has to do with the nature of
texts and the limited attention of readers. @iterary texts are filled
with data. (ovels contain whole worlds. 5ood poems have more
going on in them than any single reader is likely to notice without
years of attention to the same few lines. 2he virtue of having
students 3or any readers4 talk to each other in groups is that they
can help each other notice what is worthy of notice and thereby
apprehend works of literature more fully 3as well as from multiple
perspectives4 than they might otherwise.
2wo additional purposesApurposes that seem to me most
important of all and that go far to address the problem that is the
focus of this workshopAare also served by having students work
in groups and talk about their reading experience. ne has to do
with the fact that most teachers of literature will acknowledge that
they did not become truly skilled and powerful readers of difficult
literary works until they found themselves faced with the task of
teaching such texts, including many that they had not been taught
in college. $aving to teach a text forces an interpretively
dependent literature ma=or to become an interpretively
autonomous literature teacher.