Earlier this week I spent an afternoon period with Peggy Turlington and one of her seventh grade literature classes. The group is currently closing its study of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, so I was treated to seeing them discuss the novel’s themes with a confidence and sophistication that signaled their “acquisition” of the text. Kathleen Andrasick, in her book Opening Texts: Using Writing to Teach Literature, defines acquisition of a text (and I’m paraphrasing) as the student’s unique and idiosyncratic yet textually grounded relationship with a text.

Huh? I encourage you to read the book yourselves, as my formulation of its ideas risks sounding like jargon. What does “unique and idiosyncratic” mean in this context? It means that the student bores into a piece of literary writing with few preconceptions (TKMB is about racism, or Othello is about jealousy) and is guided through a series of reader-response and journal writing activities which help the student build a reading of the text that addresses her own questions, her own frustrations, her own curiosities, and her own enthusiasms, the very ones she experiences on a first or fifty first engagement with a given book. What does “textually grounded” mean here? It means that, while students are encouraged to come up with diverse and even competing takes on a given text, they must build their interpretive practice on careful and precise explications of how the author uses language and narrative strategy to create meaning.

It’s important to keep in mind that Andrasick teaches Upper School students and that, regardless of students’ age/development, the qualities of text acquisition I paraphrase here are ideals. Those of us in interested in teaching toward this notion of acquiring texts would do well to accept and celebrate incremental achievements and to respect the age-specific challenges and talents our students present. Nonetheless, consider this abbreviated list of themes in TKMB Turlington’s students identified as most important to them: the seeming randomness of violence and consequence or how the innocent are often punished, Dill as a “pure” character untouched by the prejudices and popular opinions of a community, the importance of empathy as a prerequisite for judgment and as a prerequisite for intimacy, social stratification in the Jim Crow South, etc. I was impressed with this range and with the earnest way students articulated the theme each had identified and pieced together through his or her study of the book.

As the students and Turlington told me about the writing they’d been doing, it became easy for me to see how the group had arrived at this level of text acquisition. Adam Holt, Turlington’s counterpart in our composition program, had each student write a character sketch for one main figure from TKMB. Stopping there would have been a fairly traditional approach to teaching literature. Instead, Holt is having his students design the basic structure of scenes (situation, character list) they will then adlib (all of this was in progress the day I visited). However, each actor will behave in line with the character sketch they constructed through a careful analysis of the novel. In other words, the kids will adlib but within strict confines determined by the work of Harper Lee itself.

This kind of exercise is play but it is serious and valuable play. Using live theatre techniques respects the imaginative act of reading literature. As professional teachers of literature and writing we are often called to account for the value of our work. Why should we take time to read and write in schools when national trends point toward falling achievement in math and science (the implication here is that math and science lead to innovation in industry and thereby increased wealth production)? Why should we take the time to read and write in schools when the professional world asks so little literary reading and the only writing we have to do is the occasional email? Why should my child take an afternoon to read, ruminate, and write when her club sport requires her to be at an all-day tournament where she’ll learn valuable lessons in team work – an important experience employers seek in candidates for leadership roles? Too often such challenges put us in a defensive position and in our rush to advocate for the value of our work we speak of critical thinking and reasoned argumentation.

There’s no doubt the serious training in the craft of literary criticism helps our students to develop these competencies. But building the value of our discipline on critical thinking and reasoned argumentation is a slippery slope. Do we really train our students to solve complex problems with multiple values and contingencies any better than, say, a calculus teacher? Does asking a student to prove his assertion that Hester Prynne is a Christ-like martyr by explaining a piece of textual evidence any finer a method to teach reasoned argumentation than asking that same student to use information found in epidemiological case studies to prove why Fort Worth ISD should or should not close down operation due to an outbreak of swine flue?

Holt’s assignment suggests what is unique to literature and thereby points to a firmer grounding from which to educate or remind parents, administrators, and the public at large as to the value of our work: the transformative power of stories and, more specifically, the imaginative effort it takes to inhabit a story’s various perspectives. Holt’s seventh graders had to study Harper Lee’s rendering of a character’s speech and actions in order to infer a character’s values and beliefs. Now they have to bring that information to bear on wholly new scenarios that require them to interact with other characters from the novel (other roles performed by peers). These students had to perform precise literary analysis but only as a means of inhabiting the character, a powerful method of codifying something as intangible as empathy.

But the project offers more than this. Remember your experience of being read to sleep? Remember your experience of being read to by your teachers? These are pleasures – the pleasure of identifying with a character and then imagining oneself in the world of the story. It’s too easy to dismiss these experiences as lower-order thinking, as passive, and thereby relegated to the status of watching a television sitcom. Should we be teaching pleasure? Well, yeah! If we want our students to be “life-long learners” and “life-long readers” we should most certainly reinforce, value, and teach pleasure. But as our students age and develop their capacity for abstract thought, they give us the opportunity to add consequence to that pleasure.

Holt and Turlington’s seventh graders got to have their imaginations and the pleasure these produce validated, indeed, exercised. But they will also have to bring those imaginative play sessions into dialogue with some very serious questions and ideas. As mentioned above, among the themes students found in TKMB was the social stratification in the fictional but nonetheless segregated and economically depressed town of Maycomb, Alabama. When one student named this as the most important idea in the novel, Turlington was careful to pause and ask the student to be more precise. A nuanced conversation ensued about the difference and overlap between racial and economic stratification, between the educated and uneducated, between the insider and the outsider.

Turlington was able to push for specificity and then tease out nuance because she had laid some careful groundwork. Earlier she had facilitated a discussion on various characters’ definitions of “folks” – notice she did not “teach” her students that Lee’s novel presents us with a critical take on social stratification, instead she began with the text itself, its unique diction, and asked the students to read more closely than they first had. She then asked them to write a brief essay on these various ideas of “folks” and provided them with an age-appropriate outline structure in which the students had to draft out their ideas. Students created the outline in class, peers edited and commented on each other’s outlines in class, then students wrote their essays in class. I love Turlington’s emphasis on in-class writing because, for one, it introduces the important skill of timed, focused writing, a skill our students’ college professors will have expected them to master. Also, it weaves writing into reading as an integral and necessary tool. But I also love this approach because it creates a community of writers and thinkers. In the act of editing and commenting on each other’s outlines, students refine their own ideas. Lastly, students get to produce writing of consequence. Audience = consequence (as Monica Bullock pointed out in an earlier conversation with Joel Garza and myself), in other words, we care about what our peers think, we find ourselves learning from the writing of our peers and thereby developing a sense of what qualities in our own writing may prove instructive to our peers. So Turlington’s assignment seems to me an economical way to create audience and consequence, practice editing skills, and create safe conditions for collaborative learning. But it also simultaneously teaches the two qualitities of Andrasick’s notion of text acquisition: that students should get “there” on their own but they should do so by being responsible to the words on the page.

Now, imagine what Turlington will be able to do after her students go through a few of their scenes in Holt’s class? Suddenly students will be able to speak authoritatively from the “I perspective” when they discuss racial and economic stratification and the various privileges such systems afford their dominant members. They’ll be able to more sharply assess Harper Lee’s work if, for example, they chafed under the particular way she imagined a given character and found themselves wishing they could behave differently, if only they’d had the freedom to choose their behavior for themselves. Imagine what it would feel like to be their teacher when you get to remind them they do.