Remember encyclopedias?
In Chapter 2 of Burke’s (2001) book, “How to Teach Students
to Read the World” he continues the discussion on technology with “Reading the
Internet.” I think that this chapter can tie pretty directly to the question,
“What is the difference between learning to read and reading to learn?”
I was born in 1977. Therefore, much of my initial research
in my K-8 education was done using encyclopedias that we had in the house, and
taking trips to the library to look for books that may have been relevant using
a librarian and the Dewey Decimal System. In high school I used the school
library and the neighborhood library to find what I needed. Burke discusses the
use of technology for students and the ways in which they can negotiate
web-sites to find out what is reputable and how to read critically about the
information on these sites. This got me wondering, how did I learn to discern
which books were useful in the library? Did I read the entire book? Did I
examine the background and/or motivations of the author? Did I look into who
had funded the author’s research? Was I thoughtful in analyzing whether both
sides of an argument were being offered, rather than a single biased view of
information? I don’t remember being taught to do these things, and I don’t
think that I would have had the time to do all of this additional research on
top of the research for the paper, if it simply meant reading more books. What
teenager wants to do all of that?!!?
However, with so much information accessible to students
online for research, it not only becomes easier to find source information but
it is also easier to do a quick search to find out who the author is, what
sources of funding are being pumped into this site, etc. Therefore, it becomes
a matter of teaching students how to look for these things. Our students know
how to read. They’ve had their phonetic instruction, they’ve gone through the
process of identifying site words, and putting together sentences. On all types
of different levels they understand that the purpose of writing is to deliver a
message, and the purpose of reading is to receive that message. However, in
order to teach students to read to learn they have to understand the
comprehension aspect. They have to be taught how to sort through information
and make sense of the multiple messages being put out there and decipher what
is fact from what is someone’s truth as that person has identified it.
Reading to learn means asking pre-reading questions and
having those questions guide the reading along the way. Burke identifies these
as asking what the information being sought is being used for, what terms to
use in the search to narrow the focus, and to have criteria established for
selecting particular documents (Burke, 2001, p. 24). Our students are not using
hard-copy encyclopedias, but their access to information online is so much
broader, more comprehensive, and in some cases erroneous. It’s amazing to think
of all of the resources at their fingertips, but it also puts a lot of responsibility
on students to sort through and make sense of information that I could never
see myself doing with hard copies as a teen. We want critical thinkers, but we
need to develop critical readers at the same time; and the way to do this is to
consistently be aware of the questions that experienced reader researchers ask
themselves almost automatically while reading, and to teach students to set up
an automatic process in their brains to use pretty consistently as well.
When I was a kid my Mom purchased, or perhaps was given, a 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I learned about helicopters, George Washington Carver and mitosis in those pages. Like you my childhood proceeded the a the advent of the world wide web. I am teaching to students who have very different access to information and who have to consider, as you said, the source and motivation of each writer in ways that I certainly did not consider as a high school student. I really like that you raised this point.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about the kids in my classroom and their phones, the number of times a day that they are distracted by texts, snap chat etc, I used to see a bunch of students who were off task. While the kids are certainly off task, I also see that they are engaged in informal writing. As a 45 year old, I find that I use texts mostly to ask my husband to pick up milk on the way home, or see if my friend is up for an evening walk, and snap chat is undiscovered country. But, are there ways that teachers can capitalize on this type of informal writing that students do all the time? Could they pay a lightening round of texting-style jeopardy questions? What about google classroom? Even if a writing assignment is informal and short, it is a way for kids to think and make connections.
I feel like judging the reputability and accuracy of encyclopedias and library books was something that was not really on our radar, because we were working on the assumption that published materials were inherently accurate. While that may or may not have been true back then (there had to have been published materials written from a particular bias), there was at least a review and acceptance from a publishing entity. Now anyone can go online and create any kind of content that they want, and there are no third party checks. Now the reader has to be able to think critically about the information and the source themselves. Online content creators make that difficult, as they become more and more capable of making their information look legitimate. So it becomes more and more essential that students are taught these critical skills.
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