I think Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading is an important read for teachers of any experience. The opening NCTE Policy Research Brief on Adolescent Literacy is a great base that preservice and veteran teachers alike should familiarize themselves with in order to communicate the necessities of teaching reading to peers, parents, and outsiders.
The book, as a whole, does not have the heavy appendix of discussed strategies and activities as the other Appleman text does, but this serves to focus the teacher in pursuit of what it means to teach the English Language Arts tripod of reading, writing, and literature.
My general sense of my own experience was that I was acting as primarily, if not exclusively, as a literature teacher, not because I didn’t think that reading and writing instruction were not my job or were not important. I didn’t feel confident in teaching them. What would I have to offer? How much of an impact could I have made in their last years in high school? I don’t know how I learned to read or write, so how could I teach someone else?
From what I understand in the case study and other examples Appleman provides, I will call the inquiry-driven, student-centered instruction that gets students "reading well" a deliberate shotgun approach. Teaching reading is not a random, throw all your options out there and hope something sticks method, but rather a necessary breadth of activities and angles designed to meet the variety of researched findings on the teaching of reading over the last 20 years.
Something that kept me from pursuing the deliberate teaching of reading in the high school classroom was my view of reading as an isolated and discrete skill. I didn't think it as simple as that. I felt reading was responsible for the base necessary for other learning, but the instruction component was so frustrating in "how to teach reading" that I was not comfortable in actively taking time in class to do such work - worried that I would become a drill and skill teacher. But reading is not just something to teach in a block of minutes within the period. “Factors including family literacy patterns and opportunities, community and individual identity, and membership in groups that traditionally had been marginalized or disenfranchised in school and society” (18) have been left out of understanding the reading equation. Not everyone learns to read in the same way and are not coming to school in an equitable fashion. Not only is reading not an isolated skill within the classroom, it is not isolated from life. And if I am learning anything, it is that students' lives and choices must have prominence in the classroom. And I think that takes levels of organization (outside research and preparation), foresight, and risk on the part of teachers that I was not comfortable with, and I wonder if others would take such risks as well when they feel their jobs are tied to state tests.
To me, this work revolves around helping students know themselves within the context of the world, and sociocultural conversations are a necessary part of that. Reframing the classroom in ways similar to those on page 20, lead to being able to then allow students "to discern the text’s purposes: the intentions of its creators, their desired responses, and their ideological premises" (27). Teaching reading is teaching reading meaning in all things, especially society since "today’s students must be able to recognize social assumptions and cultural presuppositions and must be aware that such cognitive operators are ubiquitous and inescapable" (27). So, there at least must be a concern for teaching reading, especially since I desire to help students be observant of and alert within the world around them. I still don't feel great about teaching the alphabet-decoding aspect of reading, but for possibly the first time, I want to be.
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