Reading and Social Justice: A Local Perspective

I was asked to be on this panel today because of some research that my colleague, Annie Del Principe, and I have done here at Kingsborough focused on issues of student literacy. We were motivated to do this research as writing instructors, since Composition is often understood to be “preparing” students to engage in “college-level reading and writing,” generally without much information about what that reading and writing might actually look like.

I can sum up a little of what we found, but first I’d like to take a closer look at the ideas framing our conversation today: Reading and Social Justice. These are big and complicated terms. What is reading exactly, within the social context of Kingsborough? What do we mean when we talk about justice and equity? Are we considering the spaces of our classes? The college? The larger world? Or all of these at the same time?

Let me start to address these questions by offering a scenario:

I’m currently teaching Composition 1, the first of two courses in “college writing” and I’ve designed a curriculum around the topic of education. Students are asked to purchase and read one book, The Smartest Kids in the World, by the journalist Amanda Ripley. It’s about 200 pages, and we’ll read it in about a month, which comes to roughly 50 pages a week, or 25 per class session, which we’ll do while also working on a different essay.

I try everything to get them to read.

● Before we read, students begin a first essay, which is a personal exploration of the course topic, something I hope will “prime” them to engage with the ideas in the book.
● We begin the reading together and I try to model active reading: asking questions of the text, paraphrasing as I go, responding and making connections.
● When they start reading on their own, I urge them to annotate and flag parts that they find interesting or that raise questions, trying to motivate them by letting them know that this will help with the formal assignment at the end.
● I promise a “quiz” after each reading assignment, which is really a series of short writing prompts, sometimes open-book, usually including one question asking about what they flagged and why.
● When they do poorly on these quizzes, I shift things around, offering them the option to create their own questions as they read and send them to me before class.
● I make some quizzes collaborative, so they might be motivated to prepare and not let their partner down.
● And then, when we turn to the essay, I give them time to reread, to identify and fully grasp the parts of the text related to the topic that they chose. I model this by flagging all the parts of the book related to a topic I’ve chosen,

I’ll be honest, none of this is a complete success.

But how to get students to read and to read well within a particular educational context isn’t actually the question here. Rather it is: to what extent is justice served (or not) by this kind of reading situation? Am I advancing the cause of social justice by challenging (or pushing or prodding) students to read x number of pages? Or am I replicating a system of injustice in which students’ weaknesses as readers and/or reluctance to read impedes their ability to do well in my class and creates an obstacle to future educational achievement?

These questions can be considered on multiple levels.

I. On a micro level, in my own particular class, I try to attend to issues of fairness and equity. I choose a topic (education) that I think is relevant to students’ lives and something that they can respond to with some authority, because they’ve spent many years in school. I choose a full-length text because it gives them choices about what to write about, within a broad common theme. I use non-fiction because the writing models some of the academic moves I’m asking them to make in their essays. And, I try to pick a text that will allow as many students as possible to write the kinds of essays they need to pass English 12, as assessed by a cohort of readers.

But, what does this particular experience of reading have to do with social justice if we spin it out further?

II. In the context of Kingsborough, does the time and effort spent on reading in my class make students more productive readers in other classes? Does it help them succeed in those classes and graduate on time?

Or, is reading in this context primarily a hurdle, a way to weed out students whose prior experiences have not prepared them to complete this amount and level of reading, whose life obligations do not give them time to compete it, or who don’t share my values with regard to reading in general and this text in particular?

III. Moving further outward, does this particular reading experience make students better equipped to navigate the world outside of college? Does it help, in some small way, with their confidence as readers of the world? Does it make them better able demand respect and defend their rights? Does it encourage them to use texts in productive ways, as workers, as citizens, as individuals?

Or, are the weeks they spend reading (or not really reading) in my class fundamentally disconnected from such grand (or grandiose) ideals? Perhaps even disempowering? Is reading here, something students did (or didn’t do) because it was required, yet another instance of being asked to conform (or pretend to conform) to some strange and shifting set of expectations by a rotating cast of teachers?

These are the some of the issues that come up for me when I think of reading and social justice, and I really don’t think there are any easy answers to these questions. But they are questions each of us faces every day in our work as teachers at a community college because inequality is so central to our experience.

I don’t know that we actually need to turn to studies for evidence of inequality. We know that students’ prior educational experiences are often impoverished compared to what we ourselves have experienced and observed. We know they face economic demands and personal struggles beyond what many (not all) of us have encountered in our lives. And we know that their current educational experiences are not the same as those of their peers at more selective institutions.

But just to make this point more clearly, I’ll briefly share some of what Professor Del Principe and I found in our review of the literature on the subject and in our own local research.

With regard to preparation:

“Fact Sheet: The National Survey of America’s College Students.” (2014). American Institutes for Research, 2006, pg. 2. http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2006NSACS-CollegeLiteracyFactSheet.pdf.

● “Students entering two-year colleges have lower rates of prose, document, and quantitative literacy than their peers at four-year institutions.” (2)
● “White students also have the highest prose and document literacy among 2-year colleges.” (2)

With regard to the literacy requirements faced by community college students:

“What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The English Literacy Required of Community College Students.” (2013). National Center on Education and the Economy, http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NCEE_ExecutiveSummary_May2013.pdf.

● “[…] the reading and writing currently required of students in initial credit-bearing courses in community colleges is not very complex or cognitively demanding. While the information load of texts students encounter in community colleges is considerably more demanding than of those assigned in high school, students are not expected to make much use of those texts. The requirements for writing are marginal at best and the performance levels students are expected to meet with respect to reading are in many cases surprisingly modest” (7).

Del Principe, Ann and Rachel Ihara (2016).“ ‘I Bought the Book and I Didn’t Need It’: What Reading Looks Like at an Urban Community College.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 43, no. 3.

● Students in our study reported that some reading was required in only about 20% of their classes. (In some cases, reading assignments were listed on the syllabus, but students were told or determined on their own that reading was not actually necessary to do well in the classes.)

Schnee, Emily (2018). “Reading Across the Curriculum at an Urban Community College: Student and Faculty Perspectives on Reading.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice, vol. 42, no. 12, 825-847.

● 60% of respondents say that they are only assigned between 10 and 30 pages of reading per week for all of their courses combined.
● 70% of students report spending three hours or less per week on reading for all of their courses combined.
● Over half of student respondents indicate that they sometimes (38.3%) or often (16%) attend class without doing the assigned reading.

By way of contrast:

Arum, Richard, and Josipa Roska (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. U of Chicago.

● 92% of students at selective four-year colleges reported taking at least one course in the previous semester in which they were required to read forty or more pages a week (71).
● 62% of students at less-selective four-year colleges reported the same requirement (72).
● No data in this study on 2-year colleges, but we can extrapolate that the percentage was probably lower still.

So, what to do about this? How do we teach reading with social justice in mind when inequality is baked into the circumstances in which we teach?

I think one of the studies I cited above, does a good job of zeroing in on the essential dilemma. In a report for the National Center on Education and the Economy, the authors offer this by way of summary:

“Many will be very surprised at how little is actually demanded of our first year community college students. The natural reaction would be to call for raising the standards in our community colleges substantially. But we would urge caution here. They must, over time, be raised—greatly raised in fact—but it is very important to bear in mind that a large fraction of high school graduates cannot now do the work required of them in the first year of the typical community college program” (“What Does it Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready” ii).

In brief:

Asking a lot of students who are academically underprepared can set them up for failure. Asking too little replicates the impoverished educational situation that has led to their lack of preparation for more challenging work in the first place. We risk perpetuating injustice either way.

Let me go back to my original scenario, which considered the question of social justice from three interrelated perspectives: 1) the hyper-local context of the classroom, 2) the larger context of Kingsborough, and 3) the impossibly large context of the world.

I still feel most at ease within the first context. Since reading and writing are part of the outcomes for the course I’ve discussed, I have a curricular imperative to continue to work on helping students advance in these areas. I’m supported in my department by a portfolio assessment process that sets certain standards for student reading and writing.

However, that particular learning environment cannot really be isolated from the larger contexts.

At an institutional level, it would be nice for me, as a composition instructor, to be able to say that assigning reading and writing in Composition helps students do well in their current and future classes. But that isn’t really supported by the evidence I cited above and my own research. As long as students aren’t actually required to do much reading outside of Composition (and when they are assigned reading are often asked to read in very different ways, as Annie and I found) then assigning reading in Composition cannot be justified on the basis of what students will need to do in the immediate future. And the same is true for those teaching in other disciplines who choose to require reading. (That apparent disconnect speaks to me of a need to more fully align educational goals across the curriculum, so that courses are more clearly seen to be reinforcing one another, but that’s a different issue.)

However, right now, I find myself looking even further ahead, which leads me to my final thought on the subject of reading and social justice.

Maybe, in order to speak clearly about how education advances social justice, we need to know a lot more about the larger context beyond Kingsborough: how what we currently ask students to do in our individual courses connects with (or doesn’t connect with) what they need to “succeed” in the future.

Getting back to the question of justice: as long as “successfully passing a class” is the goal, it is justifiable to set low expectations to maximize “success.” We are addressing the injustice of students’ prior experiences by giving them a break. And if students don’t need to read a lot to do well in the majority of their classes, then assigning reading in a few just makes those classes harder to pass.

But if “success” is understood much more broadly as succeeding at life…? Well, then, those of us who assign reading need to know more about students’ lives after they leave our classrooms. We need to know what varieties of success look like for them years from now. We need to have an image of a more just and equitable world in mind as part of our larger goal as educators. And we need to know how reading and the other things we ask of students serve that larger goal.

We have our work cut out for us!