Ideaphora Insights

Due to their cost-effectiveness and convenience, digital texts are becoming as popular inside classrooms as they are outside school walls. Students will increasingly encounter digital text in their academic, personal and professional lives, so it's imperative they learn how to read proficiently in both print and digital formats.

A growing body of research indicates students read differently online than they do in print. Students tend to consume ebooks and other digital materials, such as online articles and videos, passively, skimming the material rather than deeply engaging with it. Studies have shown students' comprehension suffers when reading online. Research by the Schugars, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and others, as detailed by Education Week, indicate that the same attributes of ebooks that increase students' motivation to read also create distractions for students, affecting the way they read. 

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

In 1871, the poet and thinker Walt Whitman wrote:

… the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That [would result in] a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers. 

When we picture a reader, we imagine a person leaning over a text, still and silent. However, if we could peek into the reader’s “thought bubble,” we’d see instead someone wrestling with ideas, leaping between past experience and new applications, and dismantling words and phrases. Reading isn’t a passive endeavor.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

It’s been a long time since I was a student, yet every year as autumn approaches I become nostalgic for the days when my only job was learning. I’ve been very fortunate in my teachers, but the highlight of my student days was surely the three years I spent at the University of New Hampshire studying under the guidance of Donald Graves and Jane Hansen. I ended up with a lot more than a Ph.D.

In the late 1980’s, literacy studies were undergoing a renaissance, and UNH, home of the Reading and Writing Process Lab, was at its center. Graves and Hansen were pioneers in new pedagogies that emphasized students’ abilities rather than their deficits. They also knew every other literacy guru—Jerry Harste, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Frank Smith—and made sure that we knew them too. One of the most influential for me was Louise Rosenblatt, author of The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

The skies are blue, the temperatures are edging up and summer is poised on the horizon: it’s that great time of year when we take down our bulletin boards and break out our (metaphoric) surfboards. There’s nothing better than those first days of vacation when our minds drain of the agendas and administrivia of the classroom, and it’s okay to pick up a book with a plot instead of a matrix of standards.

That feeling doesn’t last forever, though. After about three weeks, I get bitten by the teaching bug again. I remember the faces of all those students who never quite engaged, who might have excelled but didn’t, and I start wondering what I can do in the coming fall to address their needs. That’s when I do a different kind of summer reading—titles from the annals of pedagogy. My favorite kind of education book is passionate, based on experience in the trenches and reflective of what the writers believe about learning, not the “how to” books of which there are so many. Here are a few of my favorites: