Liz Collins Jaimee Gillon Christin Vasilenko “You Gotta BE the Book” TE 408 PROFESSIONAL READING

This book outlines Wilhelm’s attempts at encouraging and engaging middle school readers. It focuses much of its information on reluctant readers and includes a lot of Wilhelm’s own experiences with students. Wilhelm uses the book to try and encourage teaching practices that will make students BE part of the literature through their use of drama and art. Overview of the Book

Introduction: Really Among School Children Teaching is always evolving 8th grade remedial reading changed his perspective couldn’t interest them Key question: “What experiences did they lack that might help them to develop a love of reading like my own, or at least to glimpse the potential of stories? How might I change my teaching, adapt my chosen modes of curricular transportation, to make the students active planners and participants in their own sojourns?” p.5 To his daughter, neighbor, and nephew the books were more than just words Reading is producing meaning, and texts are really pre-texts

Plato’s definition of a slave: someone who does someone else’s work Phonics doesn’t help with meaning making New Criticism – receiving someone else’s meanings Answers are right or wrong Reader-Response – like what he does with his daughter Rosenblatt’s theories - relating student experience to the text Efferent vs. aesthetic stance – “find out stuff” vs. “live through” Students “missed irony, didn’t understand unreliable narrators, didn’t fill in textual gaps, didn’t seem to converse with or critique characters, authors, or other readers” Margaret Meek says we must make public “those secret things” that good readers do. Moving Toward a Reader Centered Classroom

 Real reading lives of students took place outside of classroom (disconnect)  School texts are boring/not meaningful  Individual nature of reading to specific human beings  Put students in touch with a variety of texts  Comics, magazines, comedies, romances, newspapers, etc.  Develop readers who can recognize books that can be their “personal axes”  Need to become teacher-researchers to avoid becoming prisoners of tradition Looking at Student Reading

Three Dimensions of Response Evocative (literal/characters/ images) Connective (elaborate/connect) Reflective (significance/conventions/ author) Develop a classroom where students are asked to explain, understand, reflect on process of reading Interviews, literary letters, think-alouds, SSR Focus on process of reading helps both teacher and students Teacher: how can I build on what they do? Students: gained vocabulary, compared reading habits with peers, understood their thought process better The Dimensions of Reader Response

Reader must be in control and use text as a jumping off point to remember past experiences Comparison between reading and drama: “We accept the fact that the actor infuses his own voice, his own body, his own gestures – in short, his own interpretation 0 into the worlds of the text.” Text is filled with gaps that the readers must fill in to create a “virtual world” Reading is dramatic in nature Drama turns reading into an active process, which helps with comprehension The Eskimo story – trouble making links between reading and real life List of good dramatic activities for the classroom Using drama helped students enter the “story world” even days after the dramatic activity Drama helped students form relationships with characters Using Drama to Extend the Reader

Students do not know how to create a “secondary world” while reading because they can’t visualize the text (162). Outlines Visualization Project designed to convince reluctant readers that reading involved seeing, and to find ways that would scaffold and support that sort of “readerly” visualizing and image-making for the students (161). Project included:  Symbolic Story Representations  Visual Protocols  Reading Illustrated Books  Illustrating Books  Picture Mapping  Collages Reading is Seeing

Expanding Concepts of Reading, Response, Literature Discusses how Wilhelm and his students came to focus on the how and why of using various reading responses and strategies instead of just the what of that response (188). He expanded his concepts to include: Reading as engagement Alternate texts as literature Expanding reader response by including art and drama

Our Thoughts  Great approaches to getting students engaged with literature  Awkward flow and writing style hard to digest because written as Wilhelm's thesis Resources Case studies Embedded Quotes Ex. Student work, teacher journals, etc