Their whole hearts: Formative reading in the young adult classroom

There exists a lively ongoing conversation in professional trade books about teaching literature to adolescents. Compared to the conversations in literary theory that have been part of my own formative experience as a college English teacher, this conversation is both accessible and pragmatic, often referencing big theoretical ideas, but otherwise narrowly focused on the daily tasks of the classroom. And while it lacks the boundless scope and philosophical ambition of “high theory,” it may be the most granular and concrete ongoing discussion of how and why to encourage formative literary reading in the classroom.

There also exists a lively contemporary conversation about Christian approaches to literary reading. ¹ Some of it is focused on reading as a battleground for a Christian worldview, and some of it on the potential for reading as a practice of Christian love, or an occasion for spiritual formation. Some of the themes of this discussion have gathered around key binary oppositions: slow and attentive vs fast and inattentive, for instance, or formational vs informational, or postures of humility vs mastery. Others have advocated a stance of love and charity toward authors and their works, of reading as respectful dialogue. Still others have emphasized the importance of rhetorical analysis, as either a defense against or a means of appreciating the power of a text. Important tensions have emerged in these discussions as well, as in the call to maintain charitable openness to a text while still employing a theological interpretive schema, or the call to “playfulness ² ” in a literary classroom that also promotes rigorous rhetorical analysis and defense of a Christian worldview.

The central tensions and binaries of the young adult pedagogy books have been somewhat different, focusing most prominently on the distinction between immersive reading and textual analysis, between teacher control and student ownership of reading, or between encouraging the love of reading or encouraging forms of critical thinking. And while the Christian reading discussion often seems to imagine Scripture reading as a template for its literary paradigms, novel reading seems to be the touchstone experience for most of these classroom theorists.

The critical discussion I want to engage with in this article largely represents a revolt against the analytical, detached, skills-based emphasis of the dominant paradigms of teaching and testing in the schools. It is explicitly interested in promoting formative reading encounters, not just formative class discussion or formative textual analysis. It generally has little interest in promoting specifically theological insight, but it makes ongoing claims to promote formative reading encounters for students in ways that would certainly be of interest within a broad Christian understanding of human personhood and development. I will argue in the end that these encounters are usually left under-theorized, that they cannot altogether be accounted for by the principles being articulated within this paradigm. But this discussion also has the capacity to unsettle and raise some fresh questions for Christian approaches to literary reading. For one, it forces us to consider the place of schemas and analysis for engagement with literary texts that invite prolonged immersion and personal and emotional absorption rather than—or at least in advance of—study and analysis. More broadly, it also invites us to respond not only to modern and secular hermeneutical shortcomings, but also to a more successful model of formative literary engagement that is not yet easily contained by many of our emergent Christian models and categories.

In the schoolroom, as in the college classroom, the principal rival to an emphasis on experiential, formative reading is an emphasis on formative post-reading analysis. It is not really possible to understand the pedagogical movement I want to describe without first characterizing the regimen of classroom literary analysis against which it defines itself. Since about 2010, the principal embodiment of this regimen has been Common Core State Standards (CCSS). For those (like me) whose knowledge of that document have amounted to little more than vague rumors, the document was developed and funded by private organizations and commissioned at the state level. It has since been adopted by the educational boards of all but a few states.

The Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading consists of ten single-sentence standards, divided into the following four categories:

Key ideas and details

Craft and structure

Integration of knowledge and ideas

Range of reading and level of text complexity.

These standards are supplemented by some ancillary text and a series of grade-specific elaborations.

Many pedagogy theorists have been critical of the CCSS, although most of them balance their occasional overt criticism with the practical task of preparing teachers to teach. Their books are not, after all, works of speculative theory but “how to” books for working professionals. Most criticism of these standards has something to do with a lack of attention to reading engagement. For instance:

While I was writing this book, almost every state adopted the Common Core State Standards … It ignores or blatantly dismisses decades of research in child development, educational psychology, and reading instruction. (Miller, 2014: xix)

In high school we study literature, we don’t read and enjoy books. (Kittle, 2013: 19)

The importance of local context, student interest and engagement, and the affective aspects of reading has been ignored in the CCSS and accompanying documents. (George and Shoffner, 2018: 196)

If you’re in a state that has adopted the Common Core State Standards, you know that the standards “virtually eliminate text to self connections.” (Beers and Probst, 2013: 39)

These complaints seem largely justified. The extreme emphasis on analysis of the written text and on a certain kind of attention to textual evidence simply turns the clock back on several decades of literary theory, with neither comment, argument, nor acknowledgment. In particular, it ignores decades of reader-response theory, perhaps most notably the influential work of Louise Rosenblatt (1978), which emphasizes the reader’s role not only in constructing meaning but even in “evoking” the text from the non-sensory symbols on the page. By contrast, the CCSS demand that students learn to “determine the central ideas or themes of a text,” and to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” Meaning is presumed to reside on the page, and the student’s job is to use post-reading textual analysis and logical inference to piece it together.

Many of the CCSS are directed toward post-reading analysis of literary elements, a common practice for literature teachers. It is important to clarify, however, what the purpose of this attention should be. Are students to learn more about how texts work in order to become better readers, or is reading just a necessary precursor to the classroom endgame of analysis? As Beers and Probst (2013: 111) say about their own contrasting approach to literary elements, “The purpose is not to collect signposts but to grow alert to significant moments in a text. There is a subtle but important distinction to be made between search for and be alert for.” In other words, if the end goal is good reading, the point is to equip students to notice and respond appropriately to such literary elements as plot, diction, scene, or narrative voice as they read, as they “evoke the text” and engage with what is written line by line, page by page. In the CCSS, literary elements are to be taught as argumentative elements for the rational construction and defense of textual meaning, a practice that has little to do with reading.

In general, the CCSS are directed toward producing students with complex decoding skills who are good at breaking a whole into its constituent parts and at forming arguments about the relationships among parts and wholes. Those are useful skills, but they are certainly not comprehensive reading skills. The side notes to the standards do genuflect to the “classics of American literature, and the timeless dramas of Shakespeare,” but frankly the standards themselves could just as well be exercised on any other works of sufficient difficulty and complexity. A Shakespeare or a Melville becomes a “classic” writer because people have been moved when they read them or witness their performance. That is not what the standards are asking students to do. In the CCSS, it is classroom practices of analysis that are to form students, not their experiences reading books.

Sandra Stotsky (2012: 190), who writes in favor of this kind of analytical approach to literature in the classroom, makes a rationale for this emphasis explicit: “For teachers who faithfully followed what Louise Rosenblatt has written, there may not be a contradiction between close reading and a reader-response approach if they taught students to read a text closely after an initial response to it in order to arrive at a justifiable interpretation.” For Stotsky—and for producers of the CCSS—the approach of reader-response theorists, including Rosenblatt, is experienced primarily as a threat to and potential inferior substitute for the serious academic work of close reading analysis. Yes, it is necessary that students cultivate an “initial response” to a text—that is, actually read it—but the real work of education begins when students backtrack from that initial encounter and begin using literary analysis to construct a rationally “justifiable” interpretation, which evidently may or may not have much to do with their original reading experience. Again, what is to be formative here is not reading itself, but a separate regimen of analysis and rational argument.

One problem with this model of literary analysis is that most students do not particularly enjoy the task of reading an assigned historical novel of high verbal complexity and spending weeks analyzing literary elements in pursuit of a rationally compelling thematic interpretation. Or perhaps the task of not reading the novel: Penny Kittle (2013: 115), for instance, claims that “teachers tell me they think about 20% or fewer of their students actually read the literature assigned.” As Thomas Newkirk (2012: 35) puts it, “the dirty secret about high school reading, particularly book reading, is how much of it is faked—listen to class discussion, SparkNotes, Internet summaries, and you can not only get by but often do well.” An ongoing complaint of engaged reading theorists is that the system seems designed to take the enthusiastic young readers of elementary school and slowly grind them into the grudging readers, fake readers, and non-readers of high school. So one question is whether it is the job of a middle or high school English class to provide a foundation and motivation for adult reading habits. Or is literary reading just a school-age lesson in civics, reasoning, and decoding skills, something good for you that you go through once and then leave behind with childhood? Outside of professional literary critics (and not many of them, frankly), the practices encouraged by CCSS are not the practices of adult readers. They are not an introduction to any discernible program of lifelong reading. They may even be playing a key role in inoculating would-be readers who are learning in high school that literary reading is not for them.

A source of tension for many teachers is that formative experiences of literary reading are likely to have helped steer them to teaching in the first place, and they generally have a strong desire to encourage enthusiastic and lifelong reading practices in their students. For a great many English teachers, then, their own deep professional aspirations are in tension with those of the CCSS, or at least need to be cultivated in left-over time, and perhaps in tension with the reading culture of classic literature analysis. There is clearly a strong market for writers, mentors, and workshop leaders who can help teachers synthesize these potentially conflicting demands.

A predominant goal, then, among engaged reading theorists is to create a classroom counter-culture that will encourage students to become self-motivated and “passionate” readers. Pernille Ripp (2018: 89), for instance, dreams of a classroom community in which

… all children will find a personal reason to read, will experience how reading can change them, and will also know that they are not alone in this quest. Therefore, creating conditions in which students can uncover their reading identity, so they can strengthen and further it, it is vital that we try to create passionate readers.

In this vision, “text to self” connections take center stage, and the development of long-term readers becomes a central goal. As Donalyn Miller (2014: 161) puts it, “what children read shapes the men and women they will become, but what I want most for my students is the discovery that reading is a well that never runs dry.” The CCSS and high-stakes testing culture of our schools encourage little interest in such objectives, so teachers who value them either need to create parallel classroom activities or find ways to engage in such standards-inspired activities as close reading and the reading of classic American literature in ways that simultaneously promote these alternative objectives.

They do this in a number of ways. One is by giving students choices about what they read. Many books discuss the ins and outs of creating an effective classroom library, managing quiet reading time, and mentoring and creating accountability for individual readers. Such practices are designed to encourage student ownership of reading. As one writer puts it, “Owning your reading means being an initiator of your own intentions as a reader. It is being engaged and feeling in charge of your purpose and process of reading” (Goldberg, 2016: 14). And if the long-term goal is to produce independent adult readers, then finding and selecting the right books to read is itself a key reading skill. Teachers will want “to help students become self-sufficient readers that can walk into any book environment and successfully select a book that will matter to them” (Ripp, 2018: 108). This means both learning how to choose the right book, and developing networks with readers and other resources in ways that help them plan and procure future reading material.

It also usually means taking seriously the large and growing body of adolescent or young adult literature. Traditionalists might view young adult fiction as a species of popular literature, but these writers are more apt to classify at least the best of such work with literary fiction. Moreover, literary experience is measured by the formative quality of the encounter, or “transaction,” with the text, not just by its reputation or abstract literary potential. And adolescent students are most apt to have a formative literary encounter with “literature that names what they themselves struggle to understand” (Kittle, 2013: 22). Adolescent literature is important because it “encourages students to experience the world around them in ways that authenticate their own life experiences” (George and Shoffner, 2018). Clearly it also matters because many students enjoy reading it and find value in it.

These pedagogical writers often promote the value of giving students choices in their post-reading response activities as well as in the texts they read. Rather than require that a reading experience culminate in “the answering of authority-generated questions about a reading” (Wilhelm, 2008: 181), students may be invited to share a quote on a classroom wall or an idea about a book’s meaning with future readers in a class notebook. Or perhaps nothing at all. As Ripp (2018: 83) puts it, “It is not that we shouldn’t have students reflect when they read, it is that we make these one-size-fits-all requirements where students cannot discover how they would like to digest their reading.” Once again, self-sufficient adult readers are the model, who almost never follow up their own reading experiences with bouts of intensive writing and analysis.

The teacher’s role in such a program becomes one of facilitation, scaffolding, or curation in support of student-driven activity. The program casts student activity less as work and more as play, but play as framed by the influential Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky:

play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all the developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development. (Yandell, 2018:142)

Ironically, students may be reading adolescent literature rather than “adult” classics, while attempting to model themselves after adult rather than school-age reading practices.

In contrast to standards-driven practices that suppress personal reading response in favor of dispassionate analysis, student work in this paradigm emphasizes emotional investment, affect, and personal connection. Multiple writers make positive reference to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of “flow” to characterize the kind of deep immersion they hope for from readers. A literary text is measured by its ability to provide “a particular reader with a deeply engaging aesthetic experience. This potential depends largely upon the reader: her interests, abilities, preoccupations, experiences as they are brought to bear on the literary transaction in a particular moment of time” (Wilhelm, 2008: 47). Literary analysis, “Instead of staying firmly anchored within the text itself … shifts the focus, making space for the personal” (Marchetti and O’Dell, 2018: 221), as well as requiring that “the writer bring his experience to bear on the text and build connections about how the text impacts people, communities, and our world” (Marchetti and O’Dell, 2018: 24).

Other instructional elements common in standards-based teaching are present but re-imagined within this alternate paradigm. Discussion is envisioned not as a contest of argumentative reasoning among competing interpretive ideas, but as a means of building a community of readers and helping students “clarify and deepen their understanding of what they read” (Miller, 2014: 98). Close reading is not practiced as just a narrow exercise in textual analysis. More broadly, it is made to include: “close attention to the text; close attention to the relevant experience, thought, and memory of the reader; close attention to the responses and interpretations of other readers; and close attention to the interactions among those elements” (Beers and Probst, 2013: 36–37). Rigor does not just mean reading level, since “avid readers do not always read at the edge of their competence, traveling through increasingly more difficult texts as leveling systems prescribe” (Betty Carter in Miller, 2014: 63). “Rigor,” Beers and Probst (2013: 20) explain, “is not an attribute of a text but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text.”

I do find this emphasis on the primacy of reading engagement to be compelling. That emphasis seems crucial if, as theorist Deanne Bogdan (1992: 228) puts it, “literature will be accorded its educational value, within and outside English studies, not as cultural ornamentation, indoctrination, nor as a sub-species of critical thinking, but for the ethical import of its moving power, which in its promise to apprehend the world differently, can help make it a better place.” If I have to choose, I would much rather face students in my college literature courses who have a school history of personal engagement with imaginative literary works than a room full of a few dispassionate symbol hunters and a critical mass of bored post-readers.

At the same time, many emphases of our emerging Christian literary pedagogy feel out of their element in this engagement vs analysis theoretical discussion, in part because of its focus on novel reading. What, for instance, does the distinction between slow and fast reading mean in this context? What does it mean to caution against Jacobs’ “Quixotic” temptation—the temptation to merge the author’s perspective with our own—for a literary text that specifically invites the self-forgetful blurring of boundaries between text and reader ³ ? How is deliberate attention to the rhetoric of the text anything but a post-reading exercise for a fully engaged reader? In what complex ways would a “theological schema” influence such a reading experience, and is interpretation of the text even an appropriate and natural endgame? In other words, in light of these school pedagogy debates, many of these principles of Christian reading seem either genre-specific, or else problematically aligned with the CCSS/post-reading analysis camp.

This is not to say that proponents of the engaged reading paradigm of literary pedagogy are themselves successfully answering all the questions they raise. For one, who exactly are the adult readers after whom the experiences of these students are being modeled? What adults are actually modeling the formative readers we want our students to become, and under what conditions? How can we be sure that the teaching of active, passionate, self-motivated reading in the schools actually translates in the long run to formative reading of a kind worthy of our educational attention, Christian or otherwise?

One complicating question is that it is easy to conflate formative reading with other things. In the classroom, for instance, it is easy to conflate reading that forms students as persons with reading that merely forms them as readers. Consider again this quote from Ripp (2018: 89), who imagines

… a community where all children can be supported and challenged in their reading journey. Where all children will find a personal reason to read, will experience how reading can change them, and will also know that they are not alone in this quest. Therefore, creating conditions in which students can uncover their reading identity, so they can strengthen and further it, is vital as we try to create passionate readers.

Is the “quest” here one of personal growth, or of developing a passionate “reading identity”? It’s hard to tell. Maybe this feels like a false dichotomy in an English classroom, but as we imagine these students moving into adulthood the distinction would seem to matter. Formative reading should be about more than just reading itself.

Another ambiguity has to do with disentangling formative reading from formative classroom practices. I am convinced that a good deal of formative reading is going on in these classrooms—perhaps even more here than just about anywhere else. But I suggested earlier that standards-driven teaching seems more interested in formative classroom practices than in formative reading. It is only fair to ask the same question here. In the student-centered literary classroom, teachers work to build a supportive learning community. They establish classroom practices that promote choice and independence, self-awareness, personal confidence, and individual worth—all very good things. But in the end, are students formed by the hours they spend transacting with books, or by the classroom practices themselves? And even if it is their reading experience that forms them, how important to the process are elements of classroom culture and practice that might not travel with students into independent adulthood?

The phrase “adult readers” encompasses many different reading behaviors. Much of it is surely informational internet reading, and most reading of imaginative texts is in popular genre fiction. Do we teach students to become readers so they can read a romance novel on the beach or devour mystery novels or thrillers? Moving beyond reading, do we get excited about the educational value of adults getting lost in the “flow” when they are binging on Netflix or watching the latest action film? There can surely be value in these activities, but to what extent are these people—or those engaging in other common adult reading practices—experiencing transformative reading of the kinds teachers celebrate in the classroom? If classroom teachers are going to kick the can down the road by claiming to produce adult readers, what are those adult readers doing to justify that kind of educational investment?

In her book Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen (2007: 39) points out that “the novel as a form currently enjoys the best press of its three-century career. Novels get credit for the character-building renovation of readers into open-minded, generous citizens.” It was not always this way. Karin Littau (2006: 40) quotes critic Adam Bergk, writing about novel reading in 1799: “The consequences of such tasteless and uninspiring literature are therefore senseless squandering, insurmountable shunning of all exertion, limitless predilection for luxury, suppression of the voice of conscience, world-weariness and an early death.” Littau is referencing a longstanding philosophical debate about art and affect. The problem—particularly for those of enlightenment sensibilities—is that “to watch a film or read a novel with pathos means being acted upon, that is, to receive passively, and thus forsake self and reason” (Littau, 2006: 8). Kant, for instance, “proposes that artworks be contemplated for their beauty disinterestedly, that is, dispassionately. The moment of contemplation requires that a distance be established between the self and its everyday interests and the object that might serve those interests” (Littau, 2006: 93). Those same criticisms of novel reading in its early days have since been applied in turn to film and television, and to such emergent media as virtual reality. They also recur, of course, in current debates between the rational analysis of the New Critics and the CCSS on one hand, and the emphasis on affect and “flow” on the part of the literary engagement pedagogical movement on the other.

Novels (and more modern visceral media) have had their philosophical defenders, among them Nietzsche, who believed that “affective charge sets us free from rational and moral constraints” (Littau, 2006: 75). Some postmodern feminists have likewise been interested in the ability of visceral media to deconstruct our “mind-body dualism.” But these defenses seem a long way from the hopes for formative life and literature connections expressed by our engaged pedagogy advocates. Novels are, of course, our dominant genre of imaginative reading, and women are by a large margin their biggest consumers. Keen’s (2007: 66) own survey data, however, suggest that “adult women readers in particular resisted the sense that novels were supposed to be doing anything more than interesting or entertaining them.” There are many reasons, then, to question whether the independent practices of adult readers characteristic of our culture have much to do with formative reading, and whether preparing school children to take on such practices later in life is by itself a worthy educational goal.

Does this bring us back to the likes of the Core Curriculum, which at least promotes textual and classroom practices in support of well-defined educational objectives? Or does it suggest an end to literary reading altogether, as the fantasy of a personal, formative encounter with a literary work gives way to a Hobson’s choice between arid rationalism and trivial affect? Or (as I believe) do we need better models for understanding the preconditions and structures necessary for formative literary transactions to take place? The truth is, we all have experiences as readers and as teachers that confirm the power of literary reading—not just of discussion or interpretive analysis but of reading itself—to change and form people. People do get formed, after all, and in large measure with words, and our relationships with language and narrative are key components of who we are and become.

At this point, some helpful perspective can be gained by touching base with a few pre-modern practices of formative reading. Consider, for starters, the following passage:

[Brian] Stock compares the goals of modern readers to those of ancient readers like Seneca and Augustine, who believed in the reader’s “ethical responsibility for post-reading experience.” For them, the hard work began after the text was read, in applying its vision to gain self-awareness and to grow in the virtues. From that position individuals could make meaningful contributions to the polis. The modern reader, on the contrary, locates the work to “some kind of interpretation, that is, to expounding, clarifying, or explaining the text.” The ancient question of the good life is “left behind, and interpretation has become the only widespread post-reading activity.” (Lake, 2013: xv)

Three things are worth noting. First, these conversations are said to take place in the context of a life project that involves both these individuals and their communities. They come to their reading and are brought into conversation with others not just by their love of texts, but by their mutual investment in a common project. Their reading lives are grounded in meaningful life issues that raise questions about the cosmic order, the good of their communities in the context of that order, and the conduct of their individual lives. They care about reading because they are deeply invested in something outside of reading.

Second, post-reading conversation does not focus on interpretation as the natural “digestion” activity of a reading experience. For another example, Gerald Bruns (1992: 103) points to Philo, for whom the goal of hermeneutics “is not the production of interpretations but just the living of the contemplative life to its proper end, call it ‘abiding in wisdom.’” Even for us today, normal conversation about books begins not with a focus on the written text, but on the text as already evoked by each reader and considered in connection to a shared realm of significance. We can perhaps imagine some initial give and take about what the common text is actually saying, maybe a brief argument or two, or a possible reference to a counter passage. But as anyone who has been part of a focused reading group can testify, conversation begins by sharing personal encounters with a text that has already been digested and connected to the broader questions at hand. And over time the conversation moves away from the text and—if people are not just there for snacks and chit chat—more deeply into the shared interest or project around which the group has gathered.

Third (and less obviously), we should consider the structures necessary to frame such discussions and help make them possible: friendships and reading communities, the right kind of leisure, and space for dialogue; if not a canon, at least shared mechanisms for knowing which books to read; education in literacy, certainly, but also education that generates enough shared understanding (or at least established disagreements) about the cosmos, the “polis,” and the ways people should live to ground a shared discussion. It may be here, even more than in various textual disciplines or obligations to authors, that a deep Christian understanding should be shaping readers the most.

For another ancient example, we can turn to the medieval tradition of Lectio Divina. In the version famously articulated by Guigo the Carthusian in the 13th century, this ancient practice moves (loosely and reflexively) through four stages: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Once again, textual engagement and study are concentrated at the start of the process, and the reader moves outward from the text into contemplation—not of the text, but of God, the cosmos, and the reader’s place within it. Lectio Divina serves a purpose—that of knowing and serving God—and it takes place within a well-developed communal infrastructure that includes a shared sense of Christian history and destiny. But within the boundaries set by those aims, practices, and beliefs, readers in Lectio Divina exercise radical subjectivity in their textual responses. In this sense, it treats reading as play, in a way most Protestant approaches to reading Scripture decidedly do not. This reading process is bounded by its infrastructures, not disciplined by its hermeneutic, and it is willing to trust in the heart and receptivity of the reader to take what is needed from the text.

In these models, reading with its affective responses and subjective evocations of text and meaning move seamlessly into contemplation of what matters to the reader and the reader’s community. There is neither a breathless and unreflective tumbling from one vicarious reading experience to another, nor an awkward retreat from subjective engagement to dispassionate, disciplined analysis. In many ways, these ancient reading regimens sound less esoteric than the reading regimens of the CCSS, and more like what people do naturally when they take a book seriously, and read a book formatively. They provide, often from within our Christian tradition, a model for engaged and formative reading that does not depend on subjecting literary experience to a disciplined hermeneutic, or the reader to an endgame of textual analysis.

All this is to say that these engaged reading models of literary pedagogy might generate genuine centers of formative reading, not because they prepare students for “independent” and “adult” reading, but because they have the capacity to provide the community, infrastructures, and sense of deep purpose such reading requires. Adolescence is inevitably a time of great change, confusion, introspection, and of many developmental tasks, and it is not surprising that students can often find books relevant to urgent life projects: friendship, puberty, sexual identity, life and death, and many others. As Kittle (2013: xvi) says, “Kids show me again and again that they’ll find time to read if given books that name what’s in their hearts.” In the learning communities of the engaged pedagogy schoolroom, students are freed to invest in and respond to their reading experiences on their own terms rather than always backtracking to the “textual interpretation” endgame, or to the immediate task of writing to defend a position. Their reading is done in learning communities and supported by strong institutional structures, and they are guided by caring mentors who instruct and encourage them while respecting their choices, their responses, and their “hearts.”

Less clear is whether and how, in the pluralistic environment of a school classroom, adolescent students can at least glimpse a social and cosmic order that might inspire them to use a book to mediate between themselves and a larger vision toward which they might turn their hearts and pattern their lives. That ideal might sound more like religious reading than literary reading, and certainly miles away from the world of analytical standards. But ideals of literary reading have always been haunted by the practices, or at least the dreams and memories, of religious reading. And the structures that support formative reading have always looked a lot like the structures that support religious reading.

Obviously, these public-school teachers do not try to establish a religious or “sectarian” context in the classroom. But they do talk about helping “our students to become the caring, involved, empowered citizens necessary to a democracy made up of diverse people and voices” (Wilhelm, 2008: 201). They organize their libraries around such categories as “Books That Build Communities … that Value All Members,” and “that Care About the World” (Miller, 2014: 110–112). They dream of their English class inspiring students to “be the best human beings they can be” (Ripp, 2018: 137). They teach literary elements in ways that highlight their relevance “not only in texts but also in life” (Beers and Probst, 2013: 74). They seek to help their students prepare to live as “democratic citizens and lead more cognizant and, possibly, fulfilling lives” (Smith and Wilhelm, 2010: 100).

The word “democracy,” in particular, is a remarkably rich and flexible term of high currency among both teachers and educational theorists, sometimes suggesting merely the need to train up rational voters, other times sounding more like an idealized mash-up of Seneca’s ideal polis, Augustine’s Kingdom of God, and Guigo’s Holy Church, with a bit of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood thrown in for good measure. In Vygotsky’s developmental paradigm, school becomes an occasion for supplementing the “everyday” concepts of childhood and home with a more abstract vocabulary that integrates rather than supplants their earlier experiences (Hedegaard, 2007). In what individualized ways are middle and high school students making sense of their lives and their worlds? How are they making use of and filling in the gaps of the ideals and discourses presented to them in school? In what ways might many of them, at least for this season of their lives, be capable of generating a conceptual framework that can sustain formative reading?

This is not quite the same thing as tapping into the “passions” of adolescent students, which may in general not be that interesting. In their quest to help their students become more personally invested in writing research articles, Marchetti and O’Dell (2018: 165) claim to have “studied all the different kinds of texts that real writers are exploring today; then … narrowed the list to reflect the topics our students are most passionate about:

Movie and television analysis

Music analysis

Sports analysis

Video game analysis

Literary analysis.”

One wonders a bit about the sincerity of that last item! But the moment-to-moment “passions” of adolescents might very well just turn out to be their pastimes, their virtual lives, their narrow obsessions. As these authors (Marchetti and O’Dell, 2018: 245) say later on, “So why not steer [a student] away from the go-cart analysis he dreams of writing and instead encourage some good old film analysis? Because while he might love his favorite movie, his heart—his whole heart—is invested in something else. That’s what you want him to write about.” All things equal, maybe you do. But formative reading can be much more than another opportunity to rehearse a current passion. It has the capacity to build bridges between someone’s felt experience and the broader ideals and order to which that person might aspire. It can take a person beyond their immediate “passions” and put them in touch with more substantive elements of their life drama. And merely having students talk about topics and issues that seem important in our society and that we hope might interest them is not the same as helping them use formative reading to build their own connections among the concrete, felt experiences of their lives and the larger ideals to which they are learning to aspire.

It would not be difficult to start making a list of the various forces and factors that inhibit formative reading, that can make it both fragile and temporary in our cultural context: school objectives, certainly, but also pluralism and fragmentation, the lack of compelling adult role models, secularism, individualism, postmodernism, cultural obsession with the trivial, the therapeutic, those annoying cell phones—plug and play your own favorite cultural jeremiad. And English teachers in the schools do need to balance multiple, sometimes conflicting demands: student readers need to learn to decode, to construct a “story world,” to respond to literary elements, to reason and analyze, to prepare skills for the world we live in. But when we see formative reading happening, it is worth noting, celebrating, and naming properly. It is not just what happens naturally when readers get to choose. It is not just what happens naturally when students encounter a rigorous curriculum built around worthy texts. It is a multivariable accomplishment, and sometimes it happens in our schools and for our students. It's also a site where Christian educators can profit from attending to the successes as well as the shortcomings of some “secular” practices of contemporary literary pedagogy.