Comprehension as Feeling in Novel-Based Reading Curriculum

My Italian mother has been known to denounce, fervently, any recipe that claims to have a “special twist.” She prefers dishes that are simple and straightforward, that get out of the way of the main ingredient and let it shine. In response to dinner party guests oohing and aahing over a bowl of pasta, she shrugs. “It’s just four ingredients.”

Recently, I’ve adopted my mother’s way of thinking in my own work designing a novel-based curriculum. I’ve come to think that a unit of study should get out of the way of the novel so that kids can experience it in all of its rich specificity. When I feel the urge to put my own special twist on a unit or a lesson, I pause myself. Will my twist create an opportunity for young people to more fully experience the text, or will it be an unnecessary complication? Reading a novel is a practice of imagination, intellect, and heart, and layering our lessons with graphic organizers, text-dependent questions, and teaching points can threaten that practice. The “heart” is especially vulnerable to overdesign, a truth I learned recently while conferring with eighth graders as they read Elie Wiesel’s Night.

I sat down with Natasha just as she was reaching the pivotal moment in the memoir when Elie realizes he can no longer care for his dying father. I asked Natasha to share what she was thinking about as she was reading. “I’m just thinking about what it would be like to be in that position. He’s struggling so much, and he’s so sick, and Elie really is the only one who will take care of him and look out for him.”

I pushed Natasha to tell me what she was doing as a reader to make sense of Elie’s position. She said she’d been noticing how Elie was trying to take care of his father by seeking the doctors’ help and giving him his ration of food.

“What kind of thinking have you done about why Elie is trying to do so much to help his father?” I asked.

“I think it’s just his love and his connection to his father, and it’s really what anyone would do for family, so he’s just doing everything he can.”

At that point, I realized Natasha wasn’t catching an important point: that Elie was actually being pressured to stop helping his father. Elie’s experience is a common narrative trope: a protagonist makes a tough choice in the face of competing pressures, and the process of making this choice changes him. I drew on everything I know about narrative texts, reading skills, and comprehension strategies and named the work I wanted Natasha to try: to notice when and how a protagonist responds to competing pressures. I even rustled up a parallel example from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains to illustrate the work. I was proud of myself in the moment — I felt I had been unusually deft in developing a teaching point that would be meaningful to Natasha as a reader.

But later, listening to a recording of the conference, I was struck by how antiseptic my teaching sounded. There we were, talking about one of the greatest human rights atrocities in the history of the world — and how that atrocity was experienced by an individual we had come to care about — and I was carrying on about protagonists and competing pressures. I had sucked all the humanity out of the discussion. We could have been talking about any book, and, in fact, I had felt proud of myself for pulling in Chains, another book that depicts atrocity experienced as individual trauma. In our conference, suffering was exchanged for other suffering, human experience plugged into, and therefore subordinated to, a framework of reading skills and strategies.

After reflecting on this experience, I developed new habits as a curriculum designer and teacher. As I’m planning a unit, I ground my design of lessons in my own reading, identifying in advance which parts of the text elicit the most intense feeling for me. It’s important to recognize — and try to embrace — the fact that those parts of the text will need more time and a different kind of attention. Here are some specific recommendations to help with planning:

• Organize the unit to ensure that you don’t march forward when the text is calling you to slow down. Plan to read fewer pages when the text is emotionally intense.
• Avoid introducing a totally new strategy or concept on days when the text is emotionally intense.
• Be less prescriptive about what you ask young people to do with the text, including how they annotate, take notes, and respond.

It’s also important to keep the emotional intensity of the text in mind as you’re teaching:

• When you read and think aloud, narrate your feelings, not just your thinking. This might mean quick interjections as you’re reading (“Wow, it’s tough to think about how this must feel to Elie”), but it can be just as powerful to use your face, body, and breath to embody the emotion.
• Listen, look, and feel for the presence of emotion in young people’s talk and in their body language. Recognize that feeling isn’t expressed or embodied in the same way, so keep yourself open to recognizing feeling in all its forms. Affirm that students’ emotional responses are an essential part of understanding the text.
• Make discussions more invitational by giving young people options for how they engage. They should have the option of talking with a partner or small group rather than with the whole class, as well as the option not to talk at all.
• Allow young people to write privately in response to emotional parts of the text. Avoid evaluating their responses when the text elicits intense emotion.

We know that to comprehend a novel, readers must read strategically, track meaning across the text, and analyze the author’s choices, purposes, and messages. But comprehending a novel also includes feeling what it invites us to feel. If we’re to support our students in this sort of rich, multidimensional comprehension, it’s sometimes our job to get out of the way.

Mia Hood has been a graduate instructor at Teachers College, Columbia University and Assistant Professor of Practice at Relay Graduate School of Education. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at Teachers College, studying multimodal literacy, sociocultural and critical perspectives on literacy, and poststructural feminist approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. She serves as the Director of Middle School Literacy for KIPP NYC and consults with schools across the country on designing and implementing literacy curriculum that supports all readers and writers.