Meeting #3 12/13/21

11:30 am

Reading: Bob Fecho – Literacy Practice and the Dialogical Self: Isaac Making Meaning

At our third and final meeting of the fall semester, we read Bob Fecho’s piece on the relationship between reading, the dialogical self, and acts of making meaning. The beginning of our discussion circled back to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, addressing how meaning making relates to Bakhtin’s idea of “ideological becoming” as well as the ongoing and unending process of development and evolution that we all live within as students, teachers, and people (all of which serve as avowed and ascribed identity positions – a topic we discussed in meeting #2).

We read Fecho’s methodology closely, considering how his study reflected findings based off of his participant, “Isaac’s” experiences with literacy practices. Here, we entered a discussion about “wrestling” with reading and concluded that one can easily fake enthusiasm about a piece; it is much more difficult, however, to feign confusion. Confusion, we agreed, often requires assessing a text from a range of perspectives, effectively “trying on” a variety of identity positions to attempt to find meaning, purpose, and value in a text.

We ended our discussion by considering a variety of texts for spring 22.

Meeting #2 11/22/21

11:30 am

Reading: Dawan Coombs – School Culture, Struggling Adolescent Readers, and the Dialogical Self

Our second discussion centered on exploring the concept of identity in relation to both the act of teaching reading as well as in the act of reading itself.

Participants shared anecdotes about their own experiences as developing (and continuing to develop as) readers. In particular, we discussed the nature of “ascribed” vs. “avowed”identity positions – those identity positions given to us (ex: someone may be ascribed the identity position of “developmental” or “basic” reader) vs. those identity positions we choose (ex: we might choose to identify as athletes, musicians, artists, etc.).

This discussion dove deeper into the work of Hubert Hermans and Dialogical Self Theory and examined the way these identity positions shape our reading experiences. We also spent time thinking about how reading—itself—can function as a force molding one’s identity. Reading, we understood, is not a neutral act. It makes a palpable difference in the reader. Thus, the teaching of reading must also consider how our experiences with learning to read academic texts can shape not just our attitudes toward reading but also forge complex and durable attitudes about ourselves as readers and students.

In our next session, we look forward to reading Bob Fecho’s article, “Literacy Practice and the Dialogical Self: Isaac Making Meaning.”

In the last meeting of the semester we reflected on our experiences using Blackboard’s newest tool, Hypothes.is annotation software, and discussed ways to support and expand its use among interested Kingsborough faculty.

In our second meeting of the “Does Reading Matter?” FIG, we experimented with how we might use Google docs, a free and widely available platform with which many of our students are familiar, as a tool for collaborative annotation in our classes. The FIG facilitator shared her students’ work on collaborative annotation using Google docs and we discussed the importance of both annotation assignment design and annotation assessment to the success of such strategies. We briefly discussed this piece from The New York Times Magazine on the power of collaborative annotation as a way to make reading more of a social activity.