There's a Literacy Crisis. One Classroom Solution Should Be Obvious.

"We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, well before it was published, we started hearing from education scholars training high school teachers, and high school teachers themselves, who had caught wind of the book through advance essays and word of mouth."

"They were interested in how we describe close reading, the tools we provide for teaching it, and the claim we make for its importance. They pulled us into their own conversations: the debate over testing, skills, content, and, burbling up into mainstream discourse right now, whether to teach whole books, whether it's too much to assign entire novels, all of a nonfiction book, or a play from beginning to end."

Close reading is framed as the fundamental skill of literary studies and as a teachable method to enable students to read whole books in high school and college. Debate over teaching excerpts versus whole texts has intensified because of phones, COVID, and the Common Core. The Common Core's emphasis on multiple‑choice testing using excerpts incentivizes excerpt-based instruction, displacing whole books. Students increasingly struggle to read long texts, and teachers face discouragement from requiring full-length works. A pedagogical approach focused on close reading aims to restore sustained engagement with entire novels, plays, and nonfiction.

Read at Slate Magazine