Morrell on Reading the Word AND the WorldRead former NCTE president, Ernest Morrell's short article, "English Teaching as Teaching Students to Read the Word and the World" (2014). In it, he establishes how teaching reading goes far, far beyond teaching students the mechanics of reading.
What does he mean by teaching students to read the world? How can we do this in our classrooms?
7 Comments
Abbi Griffin
2/28/2017 07:38:19 am
Morrell argues that reading skills require that students engage with texts and “demand meaning;” students must also compare the text to their lives and experiences and use that to think about their ideas about the world. Students can then use words to glean meaning from the world and see how the world uses words to shape society. Morrell also shows how words shape the world in terms of race: people have made race into just black and white, not taking time to look into the gray areas, or rather, the beige and brown areas. Black and white are only words, but we must show our students how these words shape the world and how we see the people around us, as well as how they shove people into meaningless categories. Students must not only read the words, but also see the messages that they send and the world that they come from, as well as the way they change society. This means taking a book in the classroom and leading students to find out what message that book sends, whether it is conscious or not. Reading classic literature can “open up our students to brilliant and poetic reflections upon the human condition,” but they also can reflect the stereotypes from the author’s time. We must teach our students to be aware of these messages in the texts so that they can have a dialogue with whatever they are reading and determine for themselves whether or not they choose to agree. No matter when a book was written, every book that we bring into our classrooms can lead into a powerful discourse on the human condition, and that discourse is part of our duty as teachers.
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Madeline Binney
3/6/2017 11:45:56 am
In “English Teaching as Teaching Students to Read the Word and the World”, Ernest Morrell advocates “reading within” the piece. He claims that in order to be able to discern the meaning of a piece and understand it fully, the student must be able to use information from the piece itself, information about the author, and information about the context of the piece as well as other texts written in the same time period. By using these techniques, students are able to understand why the author includes certain information and why he or she has certain beliefs.
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Alyson Driscoll
3/12/2017 03:04:39 pm
In the article "English Teaching as Teaching Students to Read the Word and the World", Ernest Morrell argues that the words we use as a society enforce values and that we must teach students to understand beyond the face value of words themselves. He argues that powerful reading is something that must be taught and retaught at all levels in order to reinforce students' ability to interrogate the texts and read beyond the surface.
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Emily Etheridge
3/22/2017 10:08:27 am
I found the article exceptionally interesting. The idea that kids today may in fact write more than kids in the past stumped me for a moment. I remember reading so many historic novels and how each one referenced letters and writings that the people in those time periods did back then and I thought "how could we possible be writing more now a days when the classic letter, and journaling is nearly extinct." But it's not quite extinct. They have been reversed into the mediums that we now use. Texting, and emailing in the place of sending out letters and updating statuses on social media in the place of journaling. If you look at the accumulation that way, then I can defiantly see how much writing that kids do.
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Emily Etheridge
3/22/2017 10:11:37 am
Okay, so I wrote this under the wrong article comments section. This was meant as a response to the "School Writing Vs. Authentic Writing" article. My apologies.
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Dena Stanley
3/23/2017 02:24:55 pm
This article offers a lot of insight on the importance of reading in regards to the real world. In the article, the importance of “teaching students to read the world” is frequently addressed. What the author means by this is the importance of equipping our students with more than just general knowledge on how to decode texts; we must enable our students to read and understand the world on a deeper level in order to promote social change. Societal change can only be accomplished through knowledge, and in this specific case being addressed in the article knowledge through reading. Students need to learn how to read powerfully, not just to get by. The media is everywhere in life outside of school, and the media takes advantage of the ignorant in order to exploit certain groups. In society, language is also used to promote ideas and values, whether those be good or bad. As teachers, we must equip our students to learn in the real world and to truly understand the world in which they are living. This goes far beyond any test or curriculum. We cannot strictly teach them what to learn; we must teach our students how to learn as well. In our classrooms, we can do this through debates, real world application, and the sharing and promotion of individualized ideas on topics of the media. All of which is done by reading and analyzing, as well as forming individualized responses and ideals. This type of instruction is extremely important and is not taught nearly enough, the next generation must be equipped with the proper knowledge to enact positive change throughout the world. This can very well start with our reading instruction being taught in our classrooms.
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Dalvin Armstrong
4/18/2017 09:10:29 am
In “English Teaching as Teaching Students to Read the Word and the World”, Ernest Morrell illustrates, how reading different things has convinced students that reading is something that needs to be re-taught at every level of education. Morrell teaches us to think about world more as words and how we apply them to daily routines.Just because kids have learned basic decoding and comprehension skills in elementary school does not mean that we don’t have to re-teach reading at the middle and high school levels. As educators, we must engage students in texts, in order to interrogate texts, demand meaning from texts and connect them with their lived experiences,encounters,and the world.Ideally we want our students to understand the power of the word to shape meaning and belief and we want them to understand how society uses language to promote certain ideas and values. I plan to use these tactics in my classroom, by having the students bring in a list go home language words an use them in their reading, writing and expressing the importance of home language. We must know our own worlds before we live in someone else's.
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