I began with Sherry Linkon this week and paused mid-article to write down my thoughts. I pulled three quotes from Linkon’s “The Reader’s Apprentice: Making Critical Cultural Reading Visible” that inspired my blog post for this week:

1. p. 248: “Great lectures and discussions work on many levels, but they do not provide students with sufficient guidance in how to read cultural texts critically and contextually.”
2. p. 251-2: “Good critical readers are conscious of the difference between their own experience and worldview, the culture in which the text was created, and the world represented in the text.”
3. p. 252: “Good readers draw on their existing knowledge of that cultural moment, and they seek out additional information about everything from the issues of the day or the artist’s biography to cultural practices about art and publication, everyday life, attitudes, and behavior.”

These ideas made me think about the University of Oxford’s tutorial system, and about the English Faculty Library at Oxford. You may be familiar with Oxford’s tutorial system, but if you’re not, the short-ish version: It’s basically founded on the idea that for whatever you choose to “read” (major in), you’ll have a certain number of tutorials per term paired with lectures in your discipline that you’ll attend. The tutorial sessions are literally an hour or so a week with an Oxford don (professor), usually one-on-one, but occasionally two students::one don.

So, when I studied abroad there, I had two tutorials: One on the 19th century British novel, and one on postmodernism. I met once a week with each of my two dons. I was basically reading a book per week and writing a paper on it for each session. The sessions consisted of my don tearing apart my paper, asking “Why this?” “What about that?” and “You didn’t support this idea with any evidence,” &c. My tutorials in particular were almost as much about writing as they were reading.

Now, one awesome thing about Oxford is the faculty libraries. There is essentially one for each major discipline, and the English Faculty Library is literally heaven on earth for any English major or book nerd. It’s organized by period and by author. So, when I was writing a paper on George Eliot, I could actually go to the George Eliot section and find tons of criticism on her (including historical/cultural context), information on her relations with contemporaries, biographies of her, her collected journals/letters, &c. It was amazingly easy to use and made so much sense. I wonder why we can’t create libraries like that here. How often have you gone to Fenwick for a research project and had to travel to three different floors to find books on the same idea?

Anyway, I bring up Oxford and these faculty libraries because I think the way they have their system set up is pretty ideal, especially for accessing cultural and historical contexts when reading. I distinctly remember getting a paper back in an English lit. class in undergrad (with John Foster here at Mason) with comments about how my paper would have been X% better if I’d considered the social/historical events going on at the time and how they influenced the writer/the text. Yes, he’d lectured a bit about these things in class, but relating them back to the text in an informed and intelligent way would have required a little extra reading, and honestly, as an undergrad, I wasn’t totally sure where to go to find that information.

As an eager little English major, I was actually willing to go the extra mile to include “extras” like this, but I suppose we must consider the general apathy of some students, esp. in high school, and the attitude of doing just enough to get by. Are high school/college students in the U.S. willing to be so self-motivated? Not sure. How can we make such information easily accessible to students without having to count on ourselves (as teachers) to “lecture it to them,” likely ensuring they won’t listen, will forget it, or won’t realize the connection between it and the text — or, by requiring “eight outside sources” without showing our students where to go find helpful sources and what tools to use to evaluate and engage with those sources?

As Linkon says in “Reader’s Apprentice,” “critical cultural reading emphasizes inquiry” (251), and, like we talked about in class Wednesday, what are the things we should be saying to students before/as they read texts to get them to (1) ask questions, and (2) seek answers through considering their own prior knowledge and looking for social/cultural/historical context in other places?

(added:) Now that I’ve finished the article, I want to comment on one thing that my experience with the Oxford tutorial system did not do: allow sufficient time to study any particular work in real, meaningful depth. I would argue that I enjoyed exploring those two particular genres in depth (and the works to some extent), but if I’m honest, as intense as each weekly study may have been, I may have gotten “inch-deep” kind of exposure. (One week is hardly long enough to study Middlemarch — it’s barely long enough to read it!) I loved reading about Linkon’s “inquiry project” — what a great way to achieve mile-deep knowledge, not to mention skill building! (I would like to elaborate on my opinion on the importance of skill-building (vs. simply “gaining knowledge”), but I think I’ve already doubled my word limit.)

(P.S. — I know this was really long, and I’m sorry!)