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Knowledge Quest on the Web:
January/February 2002

Special full-text reprint with embedded links of the "Homepage"
column "The Politics of Reading" (p. 7-8)
exclusively on KQWeb

The Politics of Reading 

Debbie Abilock, Editor

Literacy is power. In Gary Paulsen's searing novel, Nightjohn, a slave who returns to the plantation after tasting freedom in the north secretly begins to teach ten-year-old Sarny to read. As Sarny scratches the letter "A" in the dirt and sounds it out, she asks why this innocuous act should come with such severe punishments. Nightjohn responds:

Cause to know things, for us to know things, is bad for them. We get to wanting and when we get to wanting it's bad for them. They thinks we want what they got.1

Illiteracy is a form of oppression. Nearly two-thirds of the world's adult illiterates are women.2 Recently we have become aware of the restrictions imposed on Afghan women wrapped in burqas and banned from attending schools. Yet in the United States more than 20 percent of the adult population continue to read so poorly that they cannot "fill out an application, read a food label, or read a simple story to a child."3 Jonathan Kozol asserts that the denial of full participation in a democracy is "perhaps the single most consistent outcome of the education offered to poor children in the schools of our large cities."4

I ask myself if I am an unwitting accomplice. Do the decisions that I make each day subvert literacy? Have I missed opportunities to choose books by Latino authors to share with my California students? Does our biography section include role models from diverse backgrounds who value the importance of reading?5 After vigorously weeding our already meager collection of Islamic resources and ordering new materials from small presses and other countries, have I aggressively bundled these resources for teachers and students, as columnist Judy Freeman advocates?

We learn from Stephen Krashen and Debra Von Sprecken in this issue that recreational voluntary reading is linked to positive attitudes toward reading among students of any age, including adolescents. Some years ago Krashen established that free voluntary reading is the best predictor of reading comprehension, vocabulary growth, spelling ability, grammatical usage, and writing style.6 How forcefully have I protected free-reading time during scheduling wars at school? How often have I failed to read alongside my students during sustained silent reading (SSR)? Am I resisting the accountability measures that would undercut the value of SSR by making it more of a school task and less of a pleasurable activity?7 

Nancy Everhart and Kay Bishop's "Research into Practice" column presents us with evidence that student focus groups can supply us with evaluative information about our programs. In what ways do my students experience democracy in my classes or in the media center? Do I routinely request that students assess areas of our collection? Do I read the books my students suggest to me? Are they invited to make decisions on what books we discuss in our Literary Club?8

When my father was born early in the last century, he was judged literate when he learned to write his name. Today, basic literacy-the ability to read, write, listen, and speak-demands competence in the reading of multiple formats in many disciplines. Do my research projects require skill in various literacies-scientific, visual, information, cultural-with depth and complexity? For example, does my teaching of visual literacy include an understanding of audiences and contexts, and the knowledge of the ways in which media elements like typography, graphic design, maps and charts, photographs, and Web pages impact communication?9 Before ordering e-books, how carefully have I considered the nature of the online reading experience and how it differs from paper and print?10

We know that authentic learning sticks. Students who see the relationship between the tasks they do in school and those that they will do in life are likely to learn with a different intensity. Do I resist the time-saving temptation to use round-robin reading or reproducible forms to assess reading comprehension without a clearly developed instructional focus?11 Does preparation for school tasks such as standardized testing supplant the teaching of essential skills of the twenty-first century-to read critically, reason logically, write persuasively, and solve complex problems?

The teaching of reading is a political act. We are all accountable.

References and Notes

1. Gary Paulsen, Nightjohn (New York: Delacorte, 1993), 39.
2. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, United Nations Decade for Literacy, 7 May 2001, www.unesco.org/education/litdecade/introduction.html. Accessed 20 Oct. 2001.
3. National Institute for Illiteracy, Frequently Asked Questions, 6 Aug. 2001, . Accessed 20 Oct. 2001.
4. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1991), 83.
5. John A. McCrossan, Books and Reading in the Lives of Notable Americans: A Biographical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr., 2000); Jim Burke, I Hear America Reading: Why We Read, What We Read (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999).
6. Stephen Krashen, The Power of Reading (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1993).
7. Janice L. Pilgreen, The SSR Handbook: How to Organize and Manage a Sustained Silent Reading Program (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000).
8. Debbie Abilock, "An Overview of Literary Club," Nueva Library Program, 9 Sept. 2001, http://nuevaschool.org/~debbie/library/reading/litclub/goalslitclub.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2001.
9. To learn more about visual communication, see Paul Martin Lester, Visual Communication: Images with Messages, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/ Thomson Learning, 2000); Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Pr., 1997); and Ellen Krueger and Mary T. Christel, Seeing and Believing: How to Teach Media Literacy in the English Classroom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001).
10. David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade/Time Warner, 2001).
11. For practical suggestions on authentic responses to literature, see Michael F. Opitz and Timothy V. Rasinski, Good-Bye Round Robin: 25 Effective Oral Reading Strategies (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998); and Linda Hoyt, Revisit, Reflect, Retell: Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999).

Debbie Abilock, Editor, is the Assistant Head of The San Francisco School, San Francisco CA.

Copyright © 2002 American Association of School Librarians,a division of the American Library Association.