How Am I Reacting to the Text I’m Consuming?
This is Marilyn’s fourth in a series of articles about the 5 Questions teachers can use to help students become more critical readers with any text in any format. For more background about this, please see her previous articles: Introduction: 5 Questions to Help Kids Become Critical Readers | Question #1 – What Am I Reading? | Question #2: What Is the Text Showing? | Question #3: What Is the Text Hiding?
By Marilyn Pryle
In my previous article, I examined the question “What is the text hiding?” and looked at what a text might be deliberately suppressing, and how we can make space for students to follow their hunches on this. For Question #4, I want to create space to investigate how they are reacting to a text as they consume it.
Question 4: How Am I Reacting?
In education we often push feelings to the side in favor of analysis. In fact, we teach students to do this.
Much of the work we do as English teachers asks students to consider what they think about a text. We guide them to trace plot, analyze main points, or identify craft. But when we’re consuming things in the world, our emotions often flare up – positive or negative – within the first five seconds. This affects how information gets into our brains. To deny this in favor of analysis is unrealistic and damaging.
A text that resonates with us might make us view its arguments in a more positive light than we otherwise would, and when we’re angered by a text, it’s difficult to weigh the merits of its points.
Psychologists who study how disinformation works note that when people are in a state of heightened emotions – whether positive or negative – they’re more likely to believe fake news and less able to discern fake from real news (DeAngelis 2023). They can’t detect that hunch from Question #3, or see the larger picture from Question #2 or the deeper intention of Question #1. Our emotions just hijack the process.
One way to take back control of our reading – and of our own emotions – is “affect labeling,” or naming the emotions we’re feeling as we’re feeling them.
Research has shown that simply identifying our own emotions in the moment can attenuate not only our emotional responses but also our autonomic functions and neural activity, giving us the space to think clearly and consider other viewpoints (Pogosyan 2021).
What does this look like for our students as they read? Perhaps, while reading a text, they notice they feel uncomfortable, or they feel resistance. Perhaps they feel that they are not the intended audience, and this brings up feelings of exclusion – or maybe they feel the opposite, that the piece was created for them.
Perhaps the text immediately creates a connection to something else they’ve been thinking about. Perhaps it elicits a strong response of agreement or disagreement, or disgust, or joy. Maybe the text generates a question within the student that they want answered. Maybe students simply feel awed by something beautiful in the text – its message, its form, its visuals, or something else. Perhaps they feel a desire to act.
By naming these feelings, students are able to more skillfully recognize the effect a text is having on them, and why. Instead of finishing a text and feeling confused, angry, or excited and not knowing why, readers can take a step back, look at how they’re feeling, and start to dissect it.
Texts will always have power, but readers can have skills for monitoring their own emotions, and thus, actions. For example, instead of feeling angry and searching for the next article to fuel the anger, readers can pause and inspect their emotion, identify the root cause, and make an informed choice about how to act.
As students practice how to notice their reactions, they will not only become more critical readers but more emotionally mature human beings. Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl taught: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Teaching students to create that space as they consume texts – a guided and safe practice – will contribute to their growth and freedom as readers, thinkers, and people.
Using Reading Responses to Implement This Question
If you are new to my method of Reading Responses, please see my previous articles about it, as well as my book Reading with Presence. In short, a Reading Response consists of an original thought, a metacognitive category, a cited quote, and five sentences. In my class, we do at least one a day, thus making it a constant, low-stakes writing practice.
To implement Question #3, I give students Reading Response categories such as:
- Recognizing My Reaction
- Holding Up a Mirror
- Make a Current Connection
- Give a Reflective Opinion
- Informed Inquiry
- Appreciating Beauty
- Imagining Action
Each of these categories comes with some prompting questions to help students explore their thinking on the topic, and students can always choose the category they want to respond in. Explore how each of these categories connect to Question #4 – How am I reacting? Students are given space to ask themselves what they are feeling or thinking, to name it, and to express it more fully, anchoring it to the text as they do. Consider the prompt and student example below for Holding Up a Mirror:
Holding Up a Mirror
As you read, ask yourself: Am I positioned as an insider or outsider of this text? Am I part of the intended audience for this text? Why or why not? How do my own identities shape my reading of this text?
Student Example:
Holding Up a Mirror for the book Color Me In. By Imani.
As a Black and White biracial individual, I feel as though I am positioned as an insider in this text. This is because I am able to relate to many of the experiences the character discusses that relates to her racial identity. For example, on page 15 of the book, Nevaeh discusses how it frustrates her that her mother’s side of the family believes she has hair that’s easier to manage than theirs: “‘Hey, Ney, how come you’ve got down hair?’ Jerry asks.” (15); however, Nevaeh expresses that she wishes she could have hair like theirs (Diaz, 15).
In my own life, I have also had struggles coming to terms with how my hair is different compared to many of my other friends, which is something I had to adapt to on my own growing up. My own experiences, and racial identity, shape my reading of this text because it allows for me to feel more connected to the story.
When I read this, I was grateful that my student Imani trusted me enough to share this experience in a Reading Response. I told her that I appreciated her openness about her personal connection to the book. I also asked if this was a common experience for her; we discussed the need for representation in books, especially books that are stocked in schools.
This level of self-awareness – seeing how one is positioned as a reader – reinforces critical reading in two ways: First, the student learns to see themselves as individual consumers of text, with specific experiences they bring to the reading. Second, the student may realize that other readers bring other experiences – some people may not feel like insiders, for example, but outsiders. The insight that texts reflect different parts of ourselves, and that these parts are different for different people, opens doors for significant social understanding.
Look at another example for the category of Appreciating Beauty:
Appreciating Beauty
The craft of this text strikes you as exceptionally well-done or simply beautiful. Explain it, and try to guess how the author did it. What factors contribute to the excellence? What is the effect of this on the piece as a whole?
Student example:
Appreciating Beauty for the story “Thirst.” By Stephen.
While there are many examples of amazing and creative writing, this one from the article “Thirst” stands out to me: “It was not much to look at, just a simple pump protruding from the ground. But it meant everything” (Lewis 8-9). Through this quote we can imagine the boring looking pump, one that might seem like nothing to someone in America. However, it is much more to someone in Natata’s village. The beauty of the quote comes from this being told, and how it was told. We are first told about the image of the pipe, then a period to have us pause, then the contrast with how much this water means.
Here, Stephen has space to pause and consider the impact of the sentences he quoted, and how that impact happened. He gives an excellent analysis of imagery, pacing, and juxtaposition. He identifies not only the beauty in the meaning but the beauty in the words themselves – the craft of the author. This is significant because understanding the connection between beauty and craft is essential to understanding how art works.
Beautiful created works – literature, film, photography, painting, and so on – are not beautiful by accident, but by craft. Critical consumers of texts are able to sense and identify this, and it works both ways: If a text evokes disgust, resistance, anger, or fear, a critical mind will inquire how it happened instead of becoming blindly swept away.
* * *
We have to make room in our schools for our feelings. They’re there, and they’re being used against us in the outside world, by companies, politicians, and conspiracy theorists, to name a few. We must teach students how to observe, identify, and manage their emotions when they encounter a text if they are to become not only stronger critical thinkers, but better citizens and human beings.
References
DeAngelis, Tori. “Psychologists Are Taking Aim at Misinformation with These Powerful Strategies.” American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, January 1, 2023. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/01/trends-taking-aim-misinformation#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20studies%20show%20that,%3A%20Principles%20and%20Implications%2C%20Vol
Pogosyan, Marianna. “Why It Helps to Put Your Feelings into Words.” Psychology Today, September 16, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/202109/why-it-helps-put-your-feelings-words
Find all the Five Questions articles here.
Marilyn Pryle is a National Board Certified secondary public school teacher (English/Language Arts) with experience in middle and high school. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum & Instruction and was the 2021 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year and a Fulbright Scholar in 2021.
Marilyn is the author of many books about teaching, including Reading with Presence: Crafting Mindful, Evidence-Based Reading Responses (Heinemann, 2018) and 50 Writing Activities for Meeting Higher Standards (Scholastic, 2017). Her new Heinemann book is Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation: 5 Questions for Any Text. Learn more about her work at her website and read her many articles for MiddleWeb here.
This article is adapted in part from material in Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation ©2024 Heinemann Publishers.
