Northwest Education

Fall 2006 / Volume 12, Number 1.

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Redefining Literacy for the Adolescent Learner

A Conversation With Jeffrey Wilhelm

Jeffrey Wilhelm is an award-winning author, researcher, and university professor. A high school language arts teacher for 13 years, Wilhelm has drawn on that experience in his subsequent work, which seeks to improve the literacy of reluctant adolescent readers. In books such as Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men (Heinemann, 2002), which won the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in English Education, and You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents (NCTE and Teachers College Press, 1997), Wilhelm offers groundbreaking research, innovative teaching strategies, and provocative insights. Currently a Professor of English Education at Boise State University, Wilhelm is nationally known for his high-energy presentations and professional development trainings. He spoke with Northwest Education Editor, Rhonda Barton, during a training visit to the Vancouver (Washington) School District.

Do you define yourself as a literacy coach?

Definitely. One of the things I’m doing is helping to coach the coaches. It’s about creating multiple layers of support. I’m there to assist teachers, but I’m mostly there to help the coaches assist teachers. They need support for continued development—thinking about how to coach, how to do mentoring, that kind of thing. I don’t see this as tangential to the overall literacy program. I think it’s smart to create multiple layers of support for both the teachers and for the coaches who support the teachers.

For a literacy coaching program to be effective, does it have to be implemented at the district level or can a single school implement lasting change?

I think an individual school could do it, but you have to have a great principal and a great staff who are willing to make the changes. I’ve worked with individual schools where the principal had a vision and had a good staff, and I think some really tremendous changes were made. But I like it best when it’s at the district level—when there is total buy-in. The Alpine School District in Utah is a place where, from the superintendent on down, they basically said, “We have this vision for the kind of instruction and learning we want to occur.” They’ve been very proactive with the community and with the media in communicating that vision. And they’ve made tremendous changes over the last three of four years. It’s a big district, so it’s affecting a lot of kids. That’s the kind of initiative I like to be involved in.

Do you recall how you first developed a love of reading? What made a difference for you, as an adolescent?

My mother was a reader. We read a lot at home. There were books around. I had great teachers. I had fabulous English teachers who encouraged me to read and lent me books. I was very fortunate. I feel like the reason I’m a reader and love reading and care about reading and study reading is solely attributable to the teachers and family I had.

In your book Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys, you say that we need to redefine our perception of literacy.

I think we’re really stuck in traditional notions of what literature is. And that makes kids very cynical, because the literacy they see practiced in school is not the kind of literacy they see practiced in their lives.

How hard is it for today’s teachers to incorporate those other kinds of literacy, such as blogs and Podcasts?

I think it’s mostly a matter of will. It’s not that hard to learn, and the kids will help you. I mean, the kids still need you to frame instruction—to help them read and write—but they can help you learn how to blog or how to use a Web cast. It’s a matter of teachers being willing to learn from the kids, and being open to what their literacies are and how to incorporate them in the classroom. Some of the responsibility to do that falls on the district. They have to realize that there’s a wider literacy, and they need to help teachers adapt to it.

One of my worries is that I see a lot of electronic media being integrated in school, but it’s basically glorified electronic worksheets. [MIT Professor] Seymour Papert says that the computer is the world’s greatest research tool and the world’s greatest construction kit, but we rarely use it that way.

In Maine, we had the Maine Laptop Initiative. Every seventh-grader for several years in a row got a laptop from Apple. And one of the things we were very careful about was to train the teachers so that they would use the laptops as a construction kit and a design tool and a research tool, instead of as a glorified electronic worksheet. I think that’s an issue. A lot of what computers are being used for is, in my opinion, just worse than nothing. It’s the same old, regressive, information-driven curriculum, [except that it’s] on a computer.

Another thing you talk about in your book is the idea that there’s a privileged set of literature—a kind of literary canon for adolescents— that gets taught even though it may not have any relevance to the kids. But you also point out that, with the right teaching methods, you can make almost any piece of literature come alive for students.

The idea that there’s a set list of literature that must be taught, I basically reject that. And the boys in our study certainly rejected it. They wanted to read stuff that mattered to them and that had a functional value in the here and now.

Another thing I’d say is that we choose these canonical pieces of literature because they were written for adults. They require highly nuanced interpretation, which means they’re not written for kids. They’re too hard for most kids. So what are we saying to kids when we teach that kind of text? That literature is too hard? That they can’t get it on their own? That they’re not good readers? I’d much rather see teachers teaching young adult literature, which can be great literature. It’s written for the kids at their ability level and to their interests and their point of need, right now. If you do that, it’s much more likely that they will go on to read adult-level literature when they’re adults. There was a study done by the NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] about the reading of literature, and what they found is that the time in which you’re least likely to read literature is the five years after you leave your formal schooling. It’s almost as if schooling totally kills the urge to read literature.

I thought it was interesting that so many of the boys you studied didn’t define themselves as readers when in fact they were.

That’s because they accept the school definition of a reader as a reader of traditional kinds of literature. Boy after boy said, “We’re not readers,” and then you’d see them reading video manuals and magazines and Web sites—all kinds of things. But the school defined them as non-readers because they didn’t acknowledge or recognize that kind of literacy. That puts them in a double bind, because not only is the literacy they practice marginalized, but then they’ve also lost the only resource they have to get better at traditional, school-type literacy.

Do you think that the gender gap is going to continue?

What we found in our study is that it’s entirely within the control of schools and teachers to close the gap. Because when teachers taught in a way that met the conditions of flow—such as inquiry methods—the boys would engage with any kind of literature on any kind of topic. That’s within [the teacher’s] control to change. So the question is: Do teachers have the will? Do schools have the will to reframe this kind of transferal of information-style of teaching that dominates American schools into a more inquiry-oriented curriculum? That’s the question.

You’ve worked with both high schools and middle schools. Are there different issues at those levels? Or is it just a question of the magnitude of the problem?

The issues are similar. Obviously as students go through school they’re reading harder and harder kinds of text and getting less and less support in how to read that text. And I think motivation also becomes a bigger issue as you go along. I think kids are more and more cynical about school the longer they’re in it.

Are the strategies that you train teachers to use your own invention?

For the most part, no. Thinking aloud has been around, obviously, for a long time. Others, like the symbolism strategy, I came up with. It’s a matter of emphasis. I think the focus in reading is almost always on general processes—activate knowledge, summarize, monitor, predict—which are all good things. They’re necessary, but they’re insufficient to good reading. If you’re reading at the high school level, you’ve got to know about symbolism, irony, multiple narrators. You’ve got to know about ironic monologue satire. You need to know all these task- and text-specific strategies, which hardly anyone talks about and hardly anyone teaches. And that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been working on: How can we utilize drama to teach those kinds of things? I can’t think of anyone, except David Booth in Canada, who works on using drama strategies as reading strategies.

How did you hit upon that? Do you have a theater background?

No. I hit upon it because I was teaching reluctant readers and I was studying what made for an engaged adolescent reader. And I saw that every engaged reader had this participatory stance. They basically imagined they were a character or imagined they were an unmentioned character or imagined themselves going through a kind of parallel universe to the story. So I saw that what good readers did was highly dramatic in nature. And I asked myself the question: What would happen if you used drama strategies in that setting—to help the poor readers take on those same stances and strategies? And I did a series of studies, which I wrote about in You Gotta BE the Book and Imagining to Learn. [Those studies] demonstrated that it was tremendously successful. And I’ve been working on it ever since: How can I develop drama techniques—or adapt drama techniques that are already out there—in order to develop student reading strategies?

What impressed me was the idea that the student could adapt a persona, which provided a safe place to respond from.

Right. That’s the power of literature. You can explore your own feelings about relationships through Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. You can think about relationships by using Friar Laurence and Father Capulet. But we often miss that in school. We ask information-driven questions: Who were the two families? What was the prince’s name? And we miss what matters most.

Bibliography

You Gotta BE the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents by Jeffrey D Wilhelm. New York, NY: Teachers College Press; 1996,1997.

Imagining to Learn: Inquiry, Ethics, and Integration Through Drama by Jeffrey D Wilhelm; Brian Edmiston. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann; 1998.