soTL Project Wisconsin Teaching Scholars Program, 2012-13Dr. David M. JonesDepartment of English/Women’s Studies AffiliateEDI/Honors Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Close Textual Reading in a Composition Course (Historytelling)

Close Reading: a Threshold Concept

Close textual reading: practiced across disciplines.

What methods are used to teach and assess close textual reading as a core competency?

How do we define, model, practice, and develop close reading skills over time?

Intervention: to provide detail on intended outcomes, methods, and definitions for close textual reading, and to practice these skills in first-year composition.

Approach I: “Friendly Amendment” to “New Critics”

John Keats and Cleaneth Brooks revisited: close reading uncovers truth and beauty and offers aesthetic pleasure.

Pattern recognition – consistency and contradiction

Regaignon: “to teach [students] how to find traction – how to rough up the source’s smooth surface, identifying the fissures and bumps, the lacunae and aporias, that demand further discussion.”

Approach II: Identity Formation and Critical Consciousness

Professional literature in Cognitive Psychology and Cultural Studies emphasize close reading as a tool for critical consciousness:

Subjectivity: empathy, identification, and resistance

Self-knowledge

Approach II: Identity Formation and Critical Consciousness

Close reading and empathy: “…the act of reading carefully trains us to listen to other people, a skill that comes in especially handy when we encounter those whose experience of the world is markedly different from ours” (Robson, et al., 386).

Close reading and critical consciousness: “…the experience of consciousness results from complex relationships with the cultural web, both visible and invisible” (Robson et al., 386).

Approach III: Rhetoric and Information Cycles

Argument, evidence, reasoning, and audience appeal

Context: influence of events over textual content

Goal of broad academic literacy

Paul and Elder, “All knowledge exists in ‘systems’ of meaning, with interrelated primary ideas, secondary ideas, and peripheral ideas.”

Cultivating complexity: avoiding “black and white” conclusions to identify contradiction and original thinking.

Openness to paradigm shifts

Attention to rhetorical approaches within fields of study

Project Design Study participants were

enrolled in a “historytelling” course (Intro to College Writing) with a theme of “true crime.”

Study participants completed a roster of activities related to close reading: multiple definitions, exercises in summary, and short papers.

Two sustained writing exercises were collected to assess student improvement in close reading.

Targeted skills included:

Summarizing and evaluating secondary sources

Understanding information cycles

Identifying and supporting a “third way” of thinking about crime stories

Using clear reasoning and quotation to demonstrate ability to make inferences from sources and form original hypotheses.

Evidence CollectedFor each set of

samples, a rubric was used to assess student proficiency in close reading, which will yield quantitative results for measuring improvement in these areas.

Two undergraduate research assistants explained the study to students, administered and collected the close reading exercises.

A panel of 3 colleagues will rate the writing samples, and I will average them to measure the results.

Reviewers noted modest student growth in close reading skills from the first to the second exercise, based on areas identified in the definitions.

Sample size was small (7) and the majority of students declined to participate in the study. So, replication would be needed for statistical validity

Project yielded concrete language for explaining the goals of close reading.

Results: