Ellen C. Carillo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the Writing Coordinator at its Waterbury Campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (Utah State UP, 2015) and A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading (WAC Clearinghouse, 2017). Her book entitled Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (Utah State UP) will be published this year.
In light of studies indicating students’ poor critical reading abilities (The Citation Project; National Assessment of Educational Progress; ACT Reading Portion and SAT Verbal/Critical Reading Portion scores), including the most recent findings (Stanford History Education Group Study) that students are largely incapable of discerning the credibility of online sources, I will argue for the importance of teaching critical reading. Foregrounding and teaching the interpretive practice of reading in the academy is one way of responding to the diminishing value assigned to this complex interpretive work that is crucial to participating in an information-rich democratic society. In our current climate, wherein facts and evidence no longer matter, this response is especially necessary as readers are under unprecedented pressure to navigate the range of texts (broadly defined) that vie for their attention and acceptance. As literary scholar and educator Robert Scholes has pointed out, though, reading is more difficult than writing to teach because reading is an invisible practice. As such, in order to work with students on their reading abilities, instructors need to make reading visible.
Teaching targeted forms of annotation (and the critical reading practices they represent) is one way to make reading visible so that instructors can work as consistently and as comprehensively on reading as they do on writing. Moreover, with their annotations in hand, students can share their readings with each other (in print or digitally) the same way that they can share their writing. Annotation also allows instructors to see students’ reading so they can intervene in the process the same way they intervene in students’ writing processes.
A second approach to making reading visible that I will discuss involves using models of reading in the classroom. Taking inspiration from rhetoricians Frank Farmer and Phillip Arrington’s pronouncement that “imitation might be seriously rethought,” “Foregrounding and Teaching Critical Reading: Preparing Students to Navigate our Post-Truth Culture” explores the opportunities that open up for literacy instruction when we think beyond imitative writing practices (officially rejected by Composition, although still very much used in classrooms) and consider what it might mean to make reading visible by modeling sound reading practices for our students, models that take into consideration multiple and competing perspectives while challenging those widely circulating, oversimplified and impoverished “post-truth” models of reading that eschew the importance of evidence and credibility.