Reader Response Theory

Great Essays
This course has facilitated opportunities to experience novels of all different types, as well as different styles of teaching. I have had the opportunity to look critically at different theories, as well as a variety of hands on activities. With the culmination of the semester, I have come to the conclusion that students must learn to engage with literature in a meaningful way so they can apply that skill more broadly in life and use it to think critically about government and societal situations as a whole. My thoughts are supported by Louise Rosenblatt’s reader response theory (1995), Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in High School English (2014), Rick Allen’s Looking for the Literary Canon (2011), and H. Lynn Erickson’s Concept-Based …show more content…
Some, such as professor Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas, argue that there is no longer any literary canon based on a study Stostsky completed (Allen, p. 1). Rather, English teachers around the nation are trying to reinvigorate curricula with new novels. Even texts that are still taught regularly enough to be considered canonical are only taught in 25% of classrooms in the nation (Allen, p. 1). I would be one of those instructors including some historically canonical texts but also bringing in new and fresh reads. Reading novels that challenge a norm or talk about situations or people that are usually swept under the proverbial rug will force students to acknowledge ideas they may not have thought of or not wanted to think about. When choosing these books, I must be careful of my own bias. It would certainly never be my intent to stereotype people or simply choose one novel to represent an entire group of people, ethnically or otherwise. One of the ways I will avoid this is by shaping units around big ideas such as transformation or silence, rather than reading a book for its emphasis on African American or LGBTQ individuals. This idea comes from a combination of experiential knowledge implemented by Dr. Clar Baldus of the University of Iowa and theoretical knowledge gleaned from H. Lynn Erickson’s Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom (2006). For a unit on transformation, I could easily include Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The first involves struggles for Native Americans, the second for high school boys dealing with peer and parental pressures in the face of homosexual desires, and the third for adolescents fighting oppression from the government. These novels contain

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