The reader/text/activity dynamic and Mr. Rogers 🐯🎶 (Blog Post # 5)

While reading the Buehl chapter for this week, I kept thinking about Catherine Snow’s heuristic model for understanding reading comprehension. The model illustrates that reading comprehension is an interactive dance between characteristics of the text, reader, and literacy activity – all sausage-cased by the larger sociocultural context in which all of these factors exist. Similar to Buehl’s argument, it understands reading comprehension not as a static or objective skill, but as a fluid dynamic between multiple factors, including the reader (who brings their own background knowledge and capacities) and the text (which brings its own content and discourse). This feels like an important acknowledgement of the power dynamics that shape disciplinary reading comprehension in schools. There is often a massive chasm that exists between the formalized texts we privilege in academic contexts and the extensive informal “funds of knowledge” that so many of our students/readers bring to school.

Given this idea of reading comprehension, I think it’s helpful to think about our locus of control as teachers:

• We can’t really manipulate the “reader” — our fundamental job, as teachers, is to meet students where they are and as they are. 

• We can sometimes manipulate the text (for example, using text-free or text-light sources or programs such as Newsela to adjust reading levels), but Buehl and many others make a strong case against forfeiting our responsibility to help students build comprehension skills that will facilitate access to knowledge in school and beyond. 

• We definitely can and should manipulate the activity in which the text is embedded – that is, the learning and instructional context in which the text is being read. 

Buehl gives us a pretty good place to start in this third bucket: build background knowledge by leveraging students’ personal, textual, and world experiences outside the classroom to generate new understandings. In ELA this probably looks a lot like:

•  Drawing connections between universal human experiences (e.g., rejection, love, fear, etc.) and themes in texts

•  Drawing connections between the functions and properties of informal texts kids “read” outside of school (e.g. movies, songs) and those read inside of school (e.g. novels, poetry) 

• Drawing connections between their understandings of the world (e.g. the everyday vocabulary they use) and new discursive practices (e.g. tier 3 vocab)

Okay, so what’s any of this have to do with Mr. Rogers a.k.a the greatest man who possibly ever walked this earth? Well, for one, he never bemoaned his “readers” (a.k.a kids) and always maintained the deepest respect for what they brought to the table. Second, he never watered down the “text” (i.e. the topics he spoke about) and believed that kids were capable of grasping/talking about complex and abstract concepts. And, third, he did an incredible job situating texts in “activities” (i.e. songs, demonstrations, puppetry, inquiry, conversations) that leveraged universal childhood experiences and mundane everyday situations to help kids understand larger concepts. Mensch extraordinaire!