Teacher Resources: Things That Work

WORKING WITH KEY PASSAGES
by Bob Roecklein

Group-work periods are often allow a teacher to address some special attention to the problems that not all students share, without disrupting the class flow. When the students are having difficulty penetrating the ideas that an author presents, I sometimes assign them a number of conceptual passages to read, deliberate on (in pairs), and discuss. After a couple of minutes I ask some questions about the specific passage, and then assign another one to look at.

The purpose of this exercise is to make the students aware of how locating and re-reading key passages tends to help un-lock the thinking process so crucial to composition. By leading the students to passages which move in different conceptual directions, it is hoped that the students will begin to recognize both that there are choices to be made in terms of the subject of their essay, and that the essays do contain diverse areas of conceptual depth.

When I use this exercise, I am careful to choose passages that call the reader's attention to premises, key concepts, and diverse examples. Needless to say I try to avoid selecting passages where the author indicates a conclusion. That sort of passage, as assigned by a teacher, would seem to me more likely to arrest the student's thought process, if indeed said student is working from the foundation of passive summary. It also  seems undesirable in that referring the student to declaratory passages may suggest that this is the teacher's preferred reading of the essay.

This technique can help students to recognize just how much work is involved in thoroughly reading a text, preparatory to writing a composition. I may use this approach a couple of times during the early and middle part of the semester, but it is expected that it will have served its purpose before, say, the fourth essay is assigned.

Generally, if I take Fishman (from Literacies) as an example, the passages I refer students to ask them to consider conceptually different aspects of a single text. For instance, on p.244 (this is my current 100R course): 
 

More important, Eli learned that literacy is a force in the world-his world- and it is a force that imparts power to all who wield it. He could see for himself that reading and writing enable people as old as his parents and as young as his siblings to fully participate in the world in which they live.

This passage, which students may easily breeze through on a first read, really contains many insights into Fishman's working ideas. Literacy as a force, as linked somehow to 'participation', these phrases may evoke some deeper reactions from students if they are called to the students' attention. I do not spend much time on any single passage, and all of the responses are from the students. I stay with the passage just long enough to see a couple of the students begin to open it up. 

By contrast, a passage that I would not be likely to ask students to consider, might be one like the following, on p.249: 
 

Had any of these things happened, I suspect that Eli would have had to make some difficult choices that would have amounted to choosing between what he had learned and learned to value at home and what he seemed expected to learn at school. To conform to his teacher's demands and values, he would have had to devalue or disavow those of his parents...

Now, in this passage Fishman speaks pretty directly to a policy issue such as 'how should we mainstream communities like the Amish'. It is not a conceptual dead-end, but it focuses rather narrowly on Fishman's own concrete answer to a question which really is only peripheral to a conceptual question like: 'what is literacy?'  In my experience calling attention to this sort of passage leads students to think that they too should be addressing the specific issue of how to resolve the schooling issue for the Amish, inevitably summary. Other instructors certainly could use such a passage for some worthwhile close-reading exercise, but for this particular exercise that I have used I tend to avoid them. I look for the passages which suggest possibilities, if that is any clearer than my last description.