An English Teacher Stumbles Upon a Way to Bring Close Reading to Life
In this article in Transformations, Anne Bruder (Deerfield Academy) describes a pedagogical breakthrough that occurred a few years ago. She was teaching American Literature at Berea College in Kentucky and getting discouraged that her students weren’t reading much outside class, engaged minimally in class discussions, and were reluctant to have sustained, face-to-face conversations. It seemed, recalls Bruder, “almost as if my students’ neck muscles have frozen at forty-five degrees, their eyes locked in the phone-viewing position even when the device is not there.” She felt herself slipping “into nostalgia for an imagined, fantastical period when students carefully and pleasurably read everything that we assigned.”
One morning as her course neared the end of an examination of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, Bruder arrived in class, fired up her laptop, opened a PDF of two paragraphs from the penultimate chapter, and turned on the projector so she could lead a close reading of a shared, visible text. But when she pulled down the screen, she pulled too hard and it came off its moorings and crashed to the floor, much to the amusement of her students. Disaster! But there was a large whiteboard behind where the screen was supposed to be and the Douglass passage was clearly visible. Bruder realized she could continue with her lesson plan.
But as she aimed her laser pointer at a key phrase, another glitch intervened: the battery died. “In that moment,” she says, “I saw that the whiteboard meant that I could manually annotate the text as I had in my own paperbacks.” She went to the board, picked up a dry-erase marker, and underlined Douglass’s phrase white with sails. But wait a minute! Bruder realized that if she could annotate the text on the whiteboard, so could her students. She opened her bag, took out a bunch of dry-erase markers, tossed them to students, and asked them to come up and join in analyzing Douglass’s passage.
Then Bruder improvised another element: students would work in silence, “speaking” through their markers. A student jotted by the phrase Bruder had underlined – white with sails – this comment: pure; not tainted w/ slavery. Other students started writing. “Some focused on single words,” says Bruder, “others on religious language or syntax, one on places where Douglass pivoted his argument. Several students posed questions of the passage and their classmates began to compose answers.” As students stepped forward to write and stood back to consider, they got a “visual and kinesthetic sense of how a fruitful discussion unfolds.”
The silent discussion continued for fifteen minutes, says Bruder, “making this hybrid practice far more collaborative and inclusive of all students than a traditional close reading aloud.” The jottings only stopped when a student said that he couldn’t find room for everything he needed to say on the board and asked politely if they could all sit down again. “The discussion took off,” says Bruder, “and every student participated in one of those generative conversations that ends two minutes after the class period is over and only because we all really need to get to our next class… By looking closely without distraction and then working collaboratively in discussion, my students began to find – or hear – meaning in Douglass that they had passed over earlier.”
As a follow-up, Bruder had students write a paragraph response to a classmate’s close reading observation that confused or intrigued them, and an observation that opened up for them a new way of thinking about Douglass. These responses became the seeds for analytical essays students drafted the following week. “By launching their writing from their own curiosity,” she says, “and having practiced an effective method to generate necessary raw material (copious, slowly gathered observations), they were significantly better able to support more-nuanced claims in their analytical essays. And happily, I wasn’t drafting essay prompts that bored my students or resulted in superficial treatments.”
After this serendipitous breakthrough, Bruder continued to use collective close reading. When she was assigned to classrooms that didn’t have a whiteboard, she taped big sheets of paper on the wall, which had the advantage of allowing students to write with finer-pointed markers and get into more detail. “Collective close reading,” she says, “slows, captures, and solidifies our work together. It powerfully reveals to students a productive space for independent reading. Likewise, I’ve found that after several iterations of CCR, my students take better notes as they read…” At the end of each class, Bruder takes a cellphone photo of the annotated text and posts it on the course management site. Students also take photos of marked-up texts (see the actual annotation above).
“The irony here isn’t lost on me,” she comments. “While I have been suggesting that digital culture challenges rigorous and careful reading, it has also, of course, produced the tools that make this pedagogy work: the PDF file on my laptop, the digital projector, the cellphone images, the course management site.” But all this is in service of the human connections of real-time, collective annotation – the “cultivation of substantive, memorable dialogue between students.”
“Like many teachers,” she says, “I work against my students’ inclination to address their ideas and questions to me alone. I’m most frustrated with my teaching when it feels like nothing more than a tennis match where I’m always the opponent.” In collective close reading, “my students address one another because each one has taken some sort of visible stand on the board that everyone else can see and can refer to as the discussion deepens. In other words, they all have skin in the discussion game, and no one can disappear on the sidelines. My most reluctant students haven’t yet flinched at this kind of visibility, and I suspect that’s because what they get in return for their observations is real engagement from their peers.”
“In my own classroom,” Bruder concludes, “CCR has finally begun to convince my students once again that Frederick Douglass may have been on to something when he suggested that reading and writing is the surest way to transform yourself.”
“Slowing Down and Speaking Up: Collective Close Reading in the Digital Age” by Anne Bruder in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, September 2020 (Vol. 30, #1, pp. 47-56); Bruder can be reached at abruder@deerfield.edu, summarized Marshall Memo 1065 www.marshallmemo.com