Category: Reading as a Social Practice

The average professorial laments – and remarks on reading. A reply to Steven Hales

Currently, there is a piece on “the average college student” (in the U.S.) making the rounds. It’s sparking both frustrated nodding about the problems in student performance and some eye-rolling about professorial arrogance.* Although I have met a number of students from the U.S., I have taught mostly in the Netherlands and in Germany, so my more positive experience might be owing to regional differences. But I’m not entirely sure. What’s perhaps most striking about the piece is that its merciless judgements are based on, well, not much exactly. In what follows, I’ll focus on Steven Hales’ remarks on reading, point out some problems, and then make some suggestions.

Hales’ section on reading starts by pointing out that “most of our students are functionally illiterate.” This is a drastic remark. Did he do tests? We are not told, but we get something like a definition detailing that this status amounts to being “unable to read and comprehend adult novels”. How the heck does Hales know? If he has any ways of learning about his students’ reading habits, he keeps them to himself. I’m left wondering how I would figure out what my students read. Well, of course I could ask them and sometimes indeed do. Could I judge from such conversations whether they “comprehend” the texts in question. That depends: partly on my own comprehension skills and partly on what students like to disclose. I remember my first shock when coming as a postdoc to Cambridge and being told by students as well as some colleagues that they had given up reading novels because there was only so much time – and that had to be spent on professional reading. What I’m saying is that there might be reasons for changing one’s reading habits, especially in academia, and it might be quite hard to figure out what a student actually thinks about their reading for pleasure, especially in a conversation with a professor. It’s not that I don’t believe Hales that at least some students don’t do the reading; it’s that Hales’ doesn’t tell us how he knows.

I’m not saying there are no ways of knowing or at least making educated guesses at what people read and comprehend. We do that all the time. So I’m not saying you need rigorous testing or anything like it to get an idea of whether someone read something and whether their reading aligns with yours. But given the drastic type of judgment, I’d expect a modicum of information about such ways. What this lack of information leaves me with is the assumption that the conversations informing Hales’ inferences about adult novels might have been quite superficial. Talking to my 8-year-old daughter about how she feels, I often get the reply “good”. If I don’t inquire further and about particular details, I’ll be left with that. More to the point, I know from my own student life that when a professor asked me something about my private endeavours or my thoughts on a text, I could become so shy that I would respond with utter nonsense. What now? Well, perhaps Hales did have thorough attempts at conversations about Richard Powers’ novels and he just doesn’t tell us. Perhaps some of these conversations didn’t go very well. The question to ask is: why! I’m not saying that Hales’ judgment is necessarily flawed, but I would expect it to be based on something – and the mere assertion that the average student is functionally illiterate suggests that something else is lacking here.

Since I like to inquire about reading habits among students and colleagues, I know that people can be become somewhat monosyllabic when you ask them about how they read. “I just, well, read,” is the reply I get most of the time. It takes time to tease out actual expectations from a genre or assumptions about the texts at hand. So what do you do when you think your students are bad at reading?

  • First of all, ask them about it. Better still, start a conversation. To steer such conversations, it’s helpful to bear in mind that acts of reading are first and foremost defined through the interaction between readers. Reading is as much about belonging (to a certain group) and relating to styles and attitudes as it is about texts. So when it comes to conversations, the ‘text itself’ is a long way off. It’s the interaction between readers that settles important prior questions: Whether you belong to the same group, share expectations or desires or frustrations etc. Above all, it takes trust to converse about literature.
  • A second point to bear in mind is that there is often a stark difference between reading, talking about reading, and performing relatedly in class. I might read all night through but never establish a comfortable way of talking about that in a semi-professional environment. Talking in front of peers or judgmental professors is quite different from enjoying reading. So, encourage such conversations very gently.
  • Finally, what we Gen X people recognise as a reading culture does not immediately translate into the contemporary environment rich with gamification of interaction. Hales is ready to identify phones as the culprit, but that strikes me as too quick. Even if it feels very alien, we have to make an effort to find the reading culture outside of the places in which we expect it. Even social media foster reading, e.g. in the form of “BookTok”.

So on the whole, many of the problems described might be owing to expectations being at odds. Of course, some people really don’t like to read. But if you call them “illiterate” it strikes me as setting a problematic example if all you offer is your very own word for it.

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* See also the blogs Daily Nous and Leiter Reports for extensive discussion.

Does reading involve texts? Reading as a reciprocal process between readers

It goes without saying that the title question is a bit of a provocation. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that reading is first and foremost an interaction between readers and the ‘text itself’ comes second. It’s not just one of those weird hear-me-out appeals. Rather, I think that this insight should have repercussions on our practice of teaching and, perhaps, of reading.

Early Beginnings

Come to think of it, before you even learned to read, you probably have been read to! Be it by your parents or by mischievous siblings. At least I remember that, before I ever set eyes on a text myself, my mother used to read fairy tales to me, hoping I’d fall asleep. So my first encounters of reading were actually interactions, not so much with the text, but with the special reading voice of my mother. A reciprocal interaction: My mother would read; I would listen. My mother would stop; I would plead. Tell me, gentle reader, is my listening already a form of reading? I’m not sure. – Anyway. Likewise, learning to read at school involved first and foremost interactions with the teacher and the class. Here, however, the reciprocity would become slightly asymmetrical: I would not just try to make sense of the letters on the blackboard; I would be judged on my performance. I don’t remember much of it, but I still feel the excitement of internally gliding along with my inner voice trying to remember the alphabet correctly: A, B, C, D, E, F, G … H? I don’t actually remember whether we also had to learn to write the letters when learning to read them, but it feels like it must have been a related process. In any case, reading is taught through an interaction between teachers and pupils (and asymmetrically so), when actual texts are still a long way away.

Tacit Agreements in Reading

Let’s slowly move on to my claim then. My thesis is that at least a crucial part of reading consists in partly tacit and partly explicit interactions between readers. Why would this be so, though? Doesn’t reading mainly consist in grabbing a text and reading it? Well, before you actually pick up a text, you’ll be fed with assumptions about the genre. So you’ll know what to expect before you set eyes on the actual page or screen. If you enter a restaurant, for instance, the items on the menu won’t come across as strange poetry. Conversely, if you picked up a book from a poetry section, you wouldn’t take the text to offer a menu, even if there was talk of pizza and pasta on the page. And if you enter a philosophy class, you’ll of course expect to be offered philosophical texts. In any case, the habitually familiar settings already stir tacit expectations about the texts in question. I consider such settings tacit agreements between the reader and the provider of texts.  If you enter a restaurant, you’ll expect a menu. If you enter a literature course, you’ll expect a literary text (or at least one dealing with literature). Questions (mostly on genre) will be raised if these expectations are frustrated. At this point, the crucial stages of interaction are about seeing whether expectations of genre are met or frustrated.

The Topic of Texts

Philosophical and certain literarary texts often thrive on a certain openness or even ambiguities. Unlike manuals or menus their understanding is not exhausted by being able to act on their content; that is, to build the shelves or order the soup successfully. This means that it’s often an open question what’s going on or what the text is actually about. Deciding on the precise topic of a passage or paper or book is thus often a matter of debate. This can even be true of your very own texts. (Agnes Callard once gave a nice example of her book as an Ugly Duckling by reporting on how she started out thinking it was on the weakness of will when it later turned out that she was really talking about aspiration.) So even if we’re clear about the genre of a text, we might remain unsure about its topic. In such situations, we might recommend all sorts of scholarly remedies: such as looking into the text in question, comparing it with other texts or some such straightforward means. However, what I think is really doing a great part of the work is the interaction with other readers. This doesn’t mean that the text plays no part in it. But the attempts at settling the topic will crucially involve an attempt to reach agreement with other readers, be they alive or part of a tradition of reading texts in a certain way.

The Triangulation Thesis

This idea has its roots in Donald Davidson’s so-called triangulation argument: Understanding linguistic utterances or the beliefs of my interlocutor involves not just understanding what object these utterances are about. Rather I need to interact with my interlocutor to fix the object in question in the first place. Jeff Malpas puts this point as follows:

“Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the bird outside my window). Identifying beliefs involves a process analogous to that of ‘triangulation’ (as employed in topographical surveying and in the fixing of location) whereby the position of an object (or some location or topographical feature) is determined by taking a line from each of two already known locations to the object in question – the intersection of the lines fixes the position of the object … Similarly, the objects of propositional attitudes are fixed by looking to find objects that are the common causes, and so the common objects, of the attitudes of two or more speakers who can observe and respond to one another’s behaviour.” (Italics mine)  

So while the object or Ding an sich is elusive, it’s being fixed in the interaction with the other. Similarly, I think that the topic of a text is elusive. Determining it requires triangulation with other readers. Once we admit that, we’ll see that becoming clear about our interlocutor’s assumptions and authorities as well as their relation to our own take on the text is a crucial element in reading.

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Part of this idea has been presented at an interdisciplinary workshop on “Reziprozität” at the FernUniversität in Hagen. I’d like to thank Dorett Funcke for inviting me to present my musings at this occasion. Special thanks to Christian Grabau, Irina Gradinari, Irmtraud Hnilica, Tanja Moll, and Marija Weste for further discussions of this idea.