In the Age of Analytic Reading: Understanding Readers’ Engagement with Text by Colleen Pennell

MICHAEL

Yeah, you’re twins.

LUCAS

But you have different opinions. You have different stuff that you like.

MICHAEL

Like you like Luigi and you like Mario.

SEAN

Yeah, but we’re different people. Like I’m more quieter than Jacob.

JACOB

We’re separate people.

TEACHER

So, does same have to do with how you look?

SEAN

No, it means how your actions and things, how you act.

MICHAEL

Not always.

TEACHER

Why not?

GRADY

Not always because you can, you can look the same, and you can kind of act, but you don’t think the same.

So in this example, students relied on knowledge both in and outside of the text and began to build a nuanced understanding of how the characters, Little Blue and Little Yellow, manifested. Initially students defined the characters only by their color. However, the fluidity of the text allowed students to move in and out of its pages and reflect upon the individuality of Jacob and Sean. In effect, this allowed them to recognize how one’s actions could further define the characters. Through a staircase of dialogue, Michael concluded that the way an individual thinks is the essential quality that defines someone.

Exchanges like this demonstrate how the text’s positioning was critical to meaning making. For students who struggle with comprehension, the fluid nature of the text provided alternate routes of interpretation and further allowed students to imbue the stories with relevance. In sum, these transactions rendered a rich, meaningful, and thoughtful analysis.

Readers’ Experiential Knowledge

Philosophical inquiry not only positions the text as fluid, but inherently allows readers to leverage experiential knowledge for meaning construction. Rosenblatt (2004) argued that the text is necessary for interpretation but insufficient on its own “…the teaching of reading and writing at any developmental level should have as its first concern the creation of environments and activities in which students are motivated and encouraged to draw on their own resources to make “live meanings”” (p.1389). Throughout the intervention, students frequently culled memories and outside sources of knowledge that complemented the text’s philosophical themes. Consider the following vignette where Sean provided a personal anecdote to support his argument that the characters, Frog and Toad, were brave to go up a dangerous mountain even though they experienced fear while doing so: