Learning With Text in History

• In Event: Adolescents Learning With Text in the Academic Disciplines

Abstract

I explore two adolescent student protocols for what they tell us about literacy practices both outside and inside a discipline (if I can put it that way) and what they can teach us about more or less satisfactory ones. I am working from an assumption that reading history texts is a pathway toward building deeper and more powerful understandings of the past. Such understandings, in turn, enable readers to make better sense of themselves because that knowing of the past helps at least partially situate identity within a historicized context. Situating sense of self (a text) within history (many texts) holds the potential to elide parochial tendencies and extend and sharpen self in relation to the world—an important accomplishment. Historical learning and the reading that enables it is good at that, perhaps more so than most subjects studied in school with the possible exception of the humanities, of which history might be thought of as one
Following Robert Scholes, I want to and will maintain implicitly or explicitly throughout that all reading is intertextual. A reader’s text/story about the world and the single text that she may be reading at a given moment involve a transactional process. Protocols for reading in history form out of this intertextuality. It can be loud, noisy, difficult, cumbersome, and challenging because the relationship of signs to signifieds (words to what they stand for) is a slippery, elusive one at best.
All texts can be construed as hypertexts at some level. What demarcates some texts from others is their degree of hypertextuality. There are simply different levels of access to the other texts that a present text invokes (immediate or distal, direct or more indirect, both on a continuum). The more immediate and/or direct the access, the more challenging the load because the reader has to engage in increased monitoring to attend to the task and ward off possible distractions the increased hypertextuality presents. This assumption is important for understanding that protocols of reading in history all depend to one degree or another on this hypertextuality, and more of it may not necessarily be a better thing than less, but sometimes can be.
Finally, in history I am assuming that virtually all types of sign-signifier media need to be read in order to develop deeper historical understanding. For example, a student needs to read a teacher’s history lecture even if it is delivered only orally (i.e., sans the ubiquitous Powerpoint presentation, but if the lecture does include one, it is simply another text to be read). A historical painting and a pottery shard must be read as well as do photographs, Internet iconography, and mass culture symbols on billboards or boxes, wrappers or webpages. In short, I am assuming here that reading in history involves a very broad definition perhaps one bordering more on the idea of a multimodal literacy when we think of all the different types of texts that can be read for historical understanding to grow and deepen.

Author

• Bruce A. VanSledright, University of North Carolina - Charlotte