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notes from 7/18:

Blau's voice:

• although he forwards the importance of "fallibilism" (p 46) he comes of as pompous or lacks humility at times a need for controlsnip
• illustrating the theory from practice model in his chapters
• slowing down reading and thinking
• too present--always positioned as the central facilitator
• there is one best interpretation "facts" p 52 vs. admits his own style (sonrisas -- looking up the word--p 39-40)

 Things we like:

• having students drive discussion through questions
• The concept of letting go of authority inteaching (in terms of interpretation)
• focus on metacognitive process on interpretation
• poetry is written to "slow down to cognition"
• snipits of dialouge that the teacher can use to open up discussion
• Use the "literature workshop" to treat the process of reading like the process of writing
• psuedo literacy vs. counter literate (pg. 101)

Ideas for book review:

• read this, skip this (read: the introduction a thorough review of theory and main ideas of the book)

Ideas for institute presentation:

• do a practice activity of interpreting a text
• "countrapuntally reading" alinear reading/countrapuntal writing

Paragraph on the book.

Blau's book, The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers,  offers a refreshing apporach to teaching literature in the high school and college classroom.  Based on his years of work as a university professor of English, Blau has found that students learn the skill of interpretation only through the intellectuall work of having to do interpretation for themselves.  Paradoxically, our classrooms often feature the teacher in front of the class explaining the interpretation to their students rather than students doing it themselves.   Blau hence claims that "as long as teachers are teaching, students are not going to learn" (2).  To address this quandry, Blau forwards the workshop model, a process oriented practice commonly used in writing pedagogy, as an approach to helping students learn the skills of literature interpretation.  Blau then exemplifies this workshop technique in chapters that follow, each taking on a different aspect of the interpretive process.  These chapters include rich dialogue from discussions of texts in his literature classes.  Personally, I've enjoyed these dialogues. Rich in detail and student voice, they help to place me in the workshop structure of Blau's classroom.  In many cases, I am even drawn to the way that Blau's dialogue navigates across and sometimes interweaves the competing interpretations.  What I am most frustrated by are the prose sections of the book which, in my view, serve a different purpose than that established in the introductory chapters.  While Blau claims that he wants to put interpretation into the hands of his students, it is he who ultimately usurps the student's interpretative efforts by presenting his own interpretation at the end of the discussion.  Furthermore, he frames many of his questions in a way that presents them as having a correct answer (see chapter 3 and note "dangeling carrot" aspect).  This structure, in my words, does not help students to become critical thinkers, rather it trains them in a methodical process of literary analysis.  While he presents the evidentiary reasoning of literary analysis as skills of salvation, his dismissal of other forms of interpretations speaks against his initial desire to let students  interpret texts.