Books – The way we navigate the ground between school and the real world

Books as both mirrors and windows

‘A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleases, through it pass, And then the heav’n espy.’

This is George Herbert. When we engage with literature it helps us to see ourselves and others more clearly. Someone else’s internal world transports us and offers a vision of other lives and vistas. Malorie Blackman says much the same when she says that books can be ‘mirrors and windows’. Windows can reflect our world back to us, or we can see through them to the other side. They can help us understand ourselves and the things that our times throw at us, or they can show us what lies beyond. We can find ourselves through reading, but we also might find the selves we might become. Reading has the potential to take us into new worlds. It’s about vision.

For this journey to begin well, students need to find textual confidence. This is about uncovering a deep and broad reading experience together with sufficient levels of challenge. Textual confidence takes a while to build. It won’t ‘just happen’ when it is needed for higher levels of study. The cultural capital to be accrued through reading any sort of text cannot be underestimated. It enables us all to be able to situate texts, dilemmas and contexts. The books adults introduce to learners need to provide a frame of reference, a cultural paste to build new ways of seeing, thinking and, in the end, learning.

We often enter a particular story as a kind of escapism. A journey into another world, into ‘a secret garden’. Adolescents, in particular, often read as part of a personal questioning of values and meaning. The book soon becomes a conspiracy between reader and writer. For this to happen, we need texts that do not do our thinking for us, where the world isn’t reduced to binaries. Binary thinking promotes fixed ideas and inflexible people. The characters and situations we meet through reading teach us how we might think and live – and adapt – in the modern world. 

Reading develops our agency

If stories are the engine, reading and books are the route; absorption, talk and writing are the destination. 

Is it reading (above all things) that stimulates learning? Michael Rosen believes that reading is no less than ‘…how we develop our autonomy and agency…and in doing so, we get more confident to surf, scan, ‘plunder’ texts for what we need and want.’

‘Agency’ here suggests an individual’s ability to interact with the world, to guide and monitor their learning, to make decisions about how and what to learn. This happens to a large extent through empathetic curiosity – and empathetic curiosity is triggered through reading – and through a process called ‘semantic contingency’ – where adults deliberately add more elaborate language to what the student has said. It’s about providing a ‘linguistic fingerprint’ within the classroom – a culture of reading, talking, and thinking. 

Reading is much more than a ‘decoding’ exercise used to access knowledge in a mechanical way. Instead it is the means to explore shades of meaning, to reach a place where students can interpret the words as well as read them? David Holbrook said it perfectly: ‘The hidden planet we have been searching for is meaning – once we accept that man’s primary aim is for meaning, then we can find a better basis for our work.’

We learn in a ‘multimodal way’ in that when we learn language, learn through language and learn about language, we come to understand things in more than one way. Participating in stories, questions, interactions, finding ways to scaffold understanding,  talking about vocabulary, comprehension, developing confidence, fluency, inference and most of all, interpretation – are  not only about reading aloud, they are about dialogue. It is not simply about checking for understanding and delivering knowledge, it’s about testing and questioning experience. It’s laying the foundations for how students can engage with and negotiate unfamiliar materials. It’s about watching each other tap-dance with tongues, challenge each other, and slip and slide from story to story.

Preserving the good alongside the unfamiliar

By way of a warning – or a prediction – or a promise – it is interesting to tweak the way Alfred North Whitehead writes about civilisation and apply it to individual learning and growth:

‘The major advances are processes which all but wreck the societies (or classrooms/schools) in which they occur. Those (schools) which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.’

The journalist Nesrine Malik clarifies this idea when she writes, that ‘… the only way to preserve the good, is to allow it to multiply in ever more unfamiliar iterations, rather than jealousy guard it.’ Don’t let the curriculum be subsumed in ‘useless shadows’ – reinterpret, adapt, adopt, develop. Enter into that conspiracy between reader and writer. 

How are you going to change the world?

This question comes from one of Jason Reynolds’ interlinked series of stories called Look Both Ways. They are spoken by a strange woman who shouts this question at various children as they make their way home from school, a woman who ‘sings old songs like they are new songs… does old dances like they are new dances…wears old clothes like they are new clothes’. As the story goes on the woman’s entertaining and reassuring songs and dances are replaced by frantic shouts of ‘How are you gonna change the world?’ She can sing, she can dance, she can dress in strangely engaging clothes, but she cannot answer the question that haunts her – and will come to haunt the bemused school students as they make their individual ways home. How are they going to navigate the ground between school and the real world? In school, the old songs may well have become new songs and old dances, new dances, but to what end?  

The writer, Alberto Manguel clearly thinks that we get nearer to seeing that end through reading. Not only does it reach out towards the distant ends of the reader’s universe, it goes beyond. He uses the story of Pinocchio to explain. In his attempts to become a real human being, he says, Pinocchio the wooden puppet, needs to learn to read. Learning to read is about: 

• First, the mechanical process of learning the code of the script in which the memory of a society is encoded.
• Second, the learning of the syntax by which such a code is governed.
• Third, the learning of how the inscriptions in such a code can help us to know in a deep, imaginative and practical way ourselves and the world around us.

The first and the second of these processes are comfortably dealt with in practically every piece of government guidance that is generated. It is Manguel’s third learning process that is of particular interest. It points us towards the idea that education is not ‘conferred’ but ‘released’. Teaching reading is about more than teaching how language works, it is about what that language points towards for the child in his or her immediate life and world. It’s about hearing those ‘resonances’ that will in the end turn us into human beings who can respond to ourselves and the world around us – and maybe change it, or at least develop it, in some way.

Michael Rosen spells this out when he writes that reading… is a process to do with weighing up possibilities, probabilities, figuring out meaning, coming up with feasible conclusions. It’s a key part of our survival…to enable and foster interpretation… we should go with the flow of the writing and explore how we think and feel – and why. Finding the links to other things we’ve read and our own life experience and back to the writing in question is one way of doing that.

Of course, Pinocchio never does become a real boy; he never reaches Manguel’s third stage of learning. The mechanistic stages of reading have assumed far too great a significance. Maybe, as in many contemporary classrooms, they have become subservient to the political cause of bringing all students up to a common standard. 

Reading resonates. It leans. Inwards and outwards. And when we ask ourselves, ‘How are we going to change the world?’ – reading gives us the answer: ‘We will’. 

If you are interested by any of the ideas above you can discover what they look like in far more detail in ‘Redefining English for the More Able: A Practical Guide’ By Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Redefining-English-More-Able-Education/dp/081535309X/)