Reading this made me thankful to be a middle school teacher! I felt successful as a teacher of eighth graders balancing the teaching of reading through introduction and practice with reading strategies and what the author calls "critically engaging with textural material and assuming an interpretive stance" (p. 111). To ignore one would be to ignore many students because their ability levels were so varied. In middle school, (which may not be the case in high school) no one assumes all kids can "read." Many students struggle to decode while others are able to interact with the text in meaningful ways.
The author makes the case for reading across the curriculum in the way the writing across the curriculum has become more prevalent in middle school classrooms. It can no longer be only English/language arts teacher introducing students to analysis and interpretation skills. I agree that developmental reading instruction and interpretative reading instruction should be linked in all core curricular courses.
I disagree with what literary theorist Eagleton (1996) described as the "state of reading ...as one of intense attention...a state in which the text works on us, not we on it" (32). Not all reading is the same. And some reading does not require our "work." This is particularly true for students asked to read multiple texts for multiple reasons. Some of the reading they do requires them to be more active than other reading.
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