Post #6

Beam's comment about schools rewarding this kind of superficial reading reminded me of times I have struggled to get my Rhetoric students to engage with texts and remember any more than the most basic concepts--I am definitely guilty of lecturing on the topic to make sure they have "learned" it, rather than trying to push for more reading comprehension with the time I have. I liked Yamane's strategy for this, I am now thinking about implementing it in my course for their next reading assignment, and having them work on it in small groups. The difficulty of contextualizing texts rhetorically is something that I do try to address in one of my assignments for the course, where they have to not only close-read and analyze a song, but situate it in a cultural context by analyzing the rhetoric of external historical sources. I had some challenges in explaining expectations, but more confusion seemed to stem from trying to put two texts in conversation with each other; outside of direct compare/contrast understandings, they didn't seem to understand what this "did" for the text, or why it was relevant. It has taken more time to explain this, and I hopefully will improve this assignment next semester, but I am wondering if deep reading factors into their reluctance to engage; I have had several students confess that they just "didn't get it" in readings we have done, without elaborating on what they didn't get.

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