 I don’t want to be a hostile reader, nor do I want that for my students. My aim is to be a charitable one, one who acknowledges that reading has the potential to form me and my students not only for the better but for the eternal. I know, however, that it is easier to aspire to this attitude than to consistently embody it.
Deep Reading: Practices To Subvert the Vice of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age (2024) shares this view by encouraging us as readers, thinkers, and teachers to develop “practices that help us tend to what we read, the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors.” Rather than viewing reading primarily as a means of getting students to arrive at the right beliefs or worldviews, authors Rachel Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel De Smith Roberts challenge us to view reading as a hospitable activity that might counter the age of distraction. Where has our ‘sustained, unbroken attention’ gone? In Part I, titled “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” training our attention becomes a way of fostering self-control, of “temper[ing] our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.” Ideal for new teachers, these first two chapters address attentiveness while reviewing common sense methods for encouraging it in classrooms and other reading communities. They describe the practices of discussion, annotation, and close reading exercises in effective classrooms. While they discuss ideas such as lectio divina, field trips, or reading aloud, the most helpful ideas for my humanities classes come from their reading reflection questions that ask us to consciously think through what our real reading process looks like. . . . Comments are closed.
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