Supporting and Teaching Student Choice: Offering Students Self-Selected Reading

ALAN Review, Fall 2003 by Broz, Bill

Although I was a high school literature and writing teacher for 25 years, and began offering high school students young adult titles when The Outsider and The Contender were hot off the presses, I am now in my seventh year as a college professor of English education who also teaches such general education classes as Introduction to Literature. In that class I sponsor a reading workshop requiring response journals and student-generated items used for reading groups discussions. Because the texts I choose for the course (all novels set in Iowa) have no CliffsNotes or other commercial cribbing material and are not widely enough read to have their own Internet sites sporting paper ideas, students in these classes actually read the novels. This reading and discussion of popular rather than canonical novels (What's Eating Gilbert Grape and State Fair, for example) prompts in many students the curious reactions of confession and self-questioning. Semester after semester I read students' admissions in their response journals that go something like this: "This is the first whole novel I have read since middle school! - I never read the books assigned in English in high school. You did not have to. Listening in class and copying someone's study guide was enough to get by." (Here I note that The University of Northern Iowa has been ranked second in Midwest top public universities by U.S. News and World Report for six consecutive years. Our admissions are fairly competitive.) Like it or not, many good students do not read the books we assign in high school English classes if all they are asked to do is fill out a study guide and take a test on them.

The most interesting self-questioning comes from students who insist that they used to love to read in middle school. They will ask themselves in writing, "Why did I ever stop reading? I loved it then, and after reading some novels again, I can see why." When pressed to explain why they stopped reading, students offer the expected range of responses such as, "Sports and other activities took up all of my time" and simply "I had to work when I was not in school or studying." But a handful of introspective students have pushed a little harder on this question and made statements that I think may have broad reaching implications for this "stopped reading" phenomena. They said, "I don't know how to find books I like." By this, students do not mean they do not know the location of the nearest library or which mall has a Barnes and Noble store. Being in the library or the bookstore only heightens the problem. "There are all of these books. How do I find the ones I like?" From this picture it seems obvious to me that students who lack strategies for finding books they like have failed to learn an important skill integral to becoming successful, mature readers-and have, in the process, failed in developing the skill to learn from and enjoy books on their own outside of school.

In one chapter of Reading Stephen King: Issues of Censorship, Student Choice, and Popular Culture (reviewed by Susan Dunn at the end of this column,) Jeffrey Wilhelm celebrates the value of supporting and guiding student choice of reading:

"My point is that choice is a most excellent thing because it moves our students towards independence, towards agency, towards exercising their will, finding and loving their own questions, interests, answers, and pathways [. . .]. What we need is an intelligent balance and negotiation between shared and independent reading, a constant dialectic between guidance, preparation, and opportunities to fly on one's own" (41).

While I believe teachers of secondary literature who have contemporary practices are well-suited to foster and teach choice, I am not sure we have recognized the importance of students learning to choose as a foundational component of mature reading processes. While student choosing of titles to read is often and importantly discussed in terms of censorship and students right to read, I propose we talk about students' abilities to choose books for a variety of purposes as a fundamental educational goal to be attained by every reader. We will start the process of teaching choice when our students are choosing children's books and books for young adults. But we must continue this support through high school and college so students are able to find adult titles as well as great young adult titles such as Speak, for example.

For myself, even though I, as an English education professional, am definitely a slacker in terms of the volume of my reading for pleasure (perhaps twelve books a year), I do possess useable strategies for selecting appropriate reading materials. But I have come to understand that possession of these strategies that seem integral to mature adult readers may have come my way more through luck than through any design of my formal literature experiences in school. Using the behaviors of mature adult readers as a guide, we need to tease out the experiences that helped us develop our reading tastes and motivations and name the choosing skills that are based on those experiences and motivations. My last book was Holes, before that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on tape (17 tapes that my family and I listened to in the car all the way from Iowa City to San Francisco last summer), before that, Speak, and before that, Prey by Michael Crichton. My next book will be SeaBiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. These choices were all made based on my knowledge of how to choose to satisfy my tastes and my desire for social interaction with other readers, known and unknown, who were reading those books. I know that choosing reading materials to facilitate social interaction of many diverse kinds is one of the important reading behaviors we need to teach.