A reflection on reading comprehension, disciplinary literacy and equity

    In the process of reflecting on the first three week of activities in this course, I had one major takeaway which stemmed from the readings, discussion boards, and live Zoom session.  That takeaway presents itself in the form of a somewhat tongue in cheek question, “How does society function at all considering the countless different processes, lenses, and ways to approach reading?” As I thought about the readings I went down multiple rabbit holes, and several detours each of which seemed to complicate reading comprehension even more.  Ultimately, I believe that among the mitigators of all of this complexity is the common goal of the many ways to engage with a text and the diligence of teachers in finding helping students find the commonality in their understanding. Now, how did I get there?

    During the first week I was immediately impacted by Buehl (2014) and the description of “a reader thoughtfully engaged with a written text” (p. 4), and the longer explanation of connecting with previous knowledge, asking questions, visualizing the scene, inferring meaning, determining importance, synthesizing new understanding and self-monitoring the process (p.5)  All of this was amplified by the RAND Reading Studies Group (2002) report which laid out comprehension being influenced by what the reader brings to the process, the characteristics of the text, the type of reading being engaged in, and the sociocultural context of the process (p. 12).  Already, the seemingly endless combinations of experience, context, activities, questions, visuals, inferences etc. it becomes clear that no two people will understand exactly the same thing after an initial reading of a text.  Then I went off on a tangent which seemed even more worrisome.  I recalled two different methods of Bible study which were really reading comprehension models.  The first Lectio Divina is similar to visualizing how the text relates to you individually, it entails reading the text, meditating on it, praying about it, contemplating its meaning to you, and acting upon it (NABRE 2010, p. iv).  The second, the Interpretive journey process, takes more of the contexts into account looking at the context of the original audience, the difference between that and current context, the principle that remains between contexts, and how to apply that principle in the current context (Duvall & Hays, 2008, pp. 14-19).  While these processes are intended for reading The Bible, they could easily apply to any reading and seem to prioritize different aspects of the Buehl and RAND approaches, further complicating shared comprehension.  Then during the live zoom session, we discussed the concept of disciplinary literacy, and that different academic disciplines prioritize different components of the processes.  After looking at the PowerPoint slides from Dr. Coiro which illustrated this, I found that may background as an engineer impacts how I read even when it is for an education course, or an international relations course, and that how an international relations scholar reads differs from the way a historian reads, and things become more complicated.  In the following week when reading about the lack of equity in many of the sociocultural contexts that our students are reading in, the complexity increases even more, and Hammond’s (2020) description of culturally responsive education which attempts to bridge some of these complexities I realized how complicated comprehension is.  Next, in week three Baron (2021) references the idea of “The New Criticism” (p. 11), that the text must stand alone unrelated to the writer, which I struggle to totally embrace, because the if context is part of how we decode the message, how can It not be part of how the author encoded the message.  All of these complexities exist in the process of comprehending printed text, and do not even include the additional complexities which we have only begun to discuss related to the nonlinear aspects of digital texts with multiple hyperlinks where various students will choose different combinations of links to follow to varying depths outside of the main text.

    Having firmly established that the possible complexities associated with reading comprehension are basically innumerable, I was able to shift my reflection do we actually arrive at a basically shared understanding a text.  My first realization stems from my previous knowledge as an International Relations student specializing in language, education and identity.  From this perspective I recognize that much more of our identity and understanding is shared within cultures, and even across cultures which helps to close the understanding gaps.  Also, having studied as an engineer and social scientist I was able to think through the comprehension process from two different perspectives within the charts of disciplinary literacy and see how they can achieve a similar understanding despite focusing on different things during the process.  I ultimately recognized reaching back to the Hammond article, and the RAND study that the classroom activities of interacting with other students and instructors help to mitigate these very complexities.  Students especially younger students have a more or less standard curriculum, and discussions between students from diverse backgrounds can help them to visualize from differing perspectives, ask questions about inferences other students make, identify bridges between cultural interpretations and build a shared understanding of a single text.  The process of comprehension is complex and the socialization of our individual understanding is what keeps society functioning.

References

Baron, N.S. (2021). How we read now: Strategic choices for print, screen, & audio. Oxford University Press.

Buehl, D. (2014).Classroom strategies for interactive learning (4th Ed.). Stenhouse.

Coiro, J. (n.d.). Dimensions of disciplinary literacy: What makes academic texts so challenging? [PowerPoint slides].

Duvall, J.S. & Hays, J.D. (2008) Journey into God’s word: Your guide to understanding and applying the Bible. Zondervan

Hammond, Z. (2020). A conversation about instructional equity with Zaretta Hammond. Collaborative Classroom. https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/blog/instructional-equity-with-zaretta-hammond/

New American Bible Revised Edition (2010). American Bible Society.

RAND Reading Studies Group. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension.