Reader Response: A portal page

An awful lot of alliteration there!

As I look for material on reader response to use in the Native American course, I keep running across a website called The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature in High School produced in 2003 by Thirteen/WNET New York in collaboration with the National Council of Teachers of English. It's pretty extensive, and I need to make a project of downloading it and reading it. But in the meantime, here are a few quotes I've come across -- copied here just so I'll know where they are.

Here's the disucssion that got me started. It's from an introduction to reader-response theory in the first lesson module:

Language arts teachers at all levels now widely accept central tenets of the theory, particularly the notion that learning is a constructive and dynamic process in which students extract meaning from texts through experiencing, hypothesizing, exploring, and synthesizing. Most importantly, teaching reader response encourages students to be aware of what they bring to texts as readers; it helps them to recognize the specificity of their own cultural backgrounds and to work to understand the cultural background of others.

It was that cultural angle that first attracted my attention. But I got the feeling a lot of the students haven't done much in the way of reacting to the arts in general.

Another passage I stumbled across in a Google search, from the fifth program on cultural studies in the classroom, suggests how cultural studies and reader response might work together:

Cultural studies ... is particularly valuable for teachers of multicultural literature because it focuses on the social divisions of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Cultural studies looks at the ways in which meanings, stereotypes, and identities (both collective and individual) are generated within these social groups. The practice of cultural studies almost always involves the combination of otherwise discrete disciplines, including literature, sociology, education, history, philosophy, communications studies, and anthropology. An interdisciplinary approach is key to an understanding of these issues, because it allows students to study and compare multiple, varied texts that deal with the culture and history of a particular group.

And a bit that I particularly like expands the definition of "text" to something more like what I want to do in the humanities courses:

The central teaching strategy of cultural studies is intertextual reading: comparing each literary text to culturally related texts. By reading literature in the context of other cultural works, students learn how the literature they study both creates and reflects cultural beliefs.

Texts for this practice may be drawn from almost any source: advertising, television, historical documents, visual artwork, legal documents, theological writing, etc. It's best to contextualize literature with primary sources or compilations of primary sources. Teachers should also look for texts that raise issues with which their students can identify. For example, in this session, Ishmael Reed's poetry and Graciela Limón's novel both look at transformative journeys, which students may relate to their own experiences.

When using this intertextual approach, teachers will want to brief students before giving them materials to read. It's usually helpful to explain that students will be asked to look for ways in which the different texts address similar issues; it's also useful to explain that students will be asked how these texts reinforce or challenge our ideas about those issues. Teachers may also want to offer general information about the texts: when they were written, by whom, for what purpose, etc. Finally, teachers may want to provide background about the characters and images they'll find. For example, when teaching Reed's "Railroad Bill, A Conjure Man," teachers can describe the trickster figure and his role in African stories, African American folklore, and legends before encouraging students to look for trickster references in the poem.

I like that. "Intertextual response." Is that the word I'm looking for? More googling is in order I guess, to find out what, if anything, "intertextual" means in literary theory.