Repairing a Reading Identity

by Kim Ralph, middle school teacher at Wiley Middle School in Leander ISD. She is also a writer, bookseller, and curious person. She lives by a river and accepts all the metaphors such a setting inspires. 

School librarians and English teachers know that they will reach the students who love reading with their programming and lesson planning. We cherish the ecstatic moment of handing off the next book in a series that is long-awaited, to the squealing happiness of a twelve-year-old. I’m smiling just thinking about how Andrew* whisper-shouted his experience of finishing The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen, adding, “I need you to read it, Ms. Ralph. So we can talk about it.” And you know I did.

There’s another group of students we serve, too. At the beginning of every school year, I’ve had students answer the question: Are you a reader? Of course, this is not a pre-assessment of skills but rather one of identity. Without explanation or preamble for this expectation, my middle school students know what I mean. Some years, I have 20% of them circle “no” or “sometimes”. Other years, the percentage is much greater. One year, I had only nine students choose “yes”. On the first day of school! More than 90% in that group did not begin the year with a reading identity. So where can we possibly go from there? How do we reach the students who don't think they belong in the Library?

Penny Kittle talks about shifting student perceptions of reading in Book Love, published in 2013. I have seen the proof of her opening statement: “Teenagers want to read—if we let them… The pathway to difficult reading begins with books they enjoy.” So I begin by asking students about their last good reading experience. And here is the most important shift—not in the students, but one that has to occur in the educator—I have to be ready to celebrate and inquire into whatever it is that comes out of their mouth! Whether that’s No, David! or the subtitle script of Among Us or their required summer reading of Into the Wild. There cannot be a hierarchy of high- and low-value reading experiences. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that taught them not to claim “reader” as an identity trait. (And I know I don’t need to wax poetic for this audience about the importance of engaged literacy for every human being.)

When we legitimize a student’s reading experiences in this way, and know our libraries (virtual and tangible) well enough to point them to next options, we show them how to begin seeing themselves as a reader. When Malcolm loved No, David!, I showed him how to request it from the elementary Iibrary. I think he was trying to figure out if I was kidding the whole time. But when it arrived, he read it, as a 13-year-old, and reflected on how much he connected with the character. We as a class celebrated the heck out of that. He found the graphic novels shelf and read Pusheen the Cat. Later, I pointed him to iFunny and The Terrible Two. He did a book talk for the whole class in January about the latter. Malcolm’s example of increased engagement with reading is what Randy Bomer, in Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms (2011), explains: “There is only one choice: to lower the level of difficulty until the reading experience is meaningful for the reader and then to gradually raise it again… Difficulty is not really something contained inside the text; rather, it names something in the relationship between the text and the reader,” (78). To bring more readers into our community, we have to change their expectations of who belongs in our community. We have to openly redefine what is meaningful.

Because who are we to decide what is meaningful to another human being? But I know there are a lot of community stakeholders, including parents, administrators, and other literacy educators, who have a stagnant view of what is “rigorous” reading selection for our programs. You might have been asked to show students how to search for books within their Lexile, or to recommend chapter books to students asking for Wimpy Kid. Next time, maybe ask why. Maybe ask a student, do you think you’ll read this, really? Maybe read a page together, modeling how you choose books for your own reading life. The only thing a person learns from being forced to read something that isn’t meaningful to them is that they don’t like reading. What I have learned from almost a decade of this work is that the kids always know more about what they will find interesting than I can accurately guess or preselect. They surprise me every year. When I take their perspective seriously, without shaming or silencing them, we have a way to begin our work together.

*all student names are pseudonyms