Teaching Students to Read Textbooks Critically

Teaching Students to Read Textbooks Critically

In the opening of his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson provides a rationale for his narrative-driven account of scientific history. He recalls a story from his elementary school years, when he discovered a picture that “captivated” him: “a cutaway diagram showing the Earth’s interior as it would look if you cut into the planet with a large knife”:

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In his account, this image enamored him. “I clearly remember being transfixed,” he explains; “my initial interest was based on a private image of streams of unsuspecting eastbound motorists in the American plains states plunging over the edge of a sudden 4,000-mile-high-cliff running between Central America and the North Pole.” Following this imaginative exercise, a million curiosities about the makeup of the earth spawned from his observation—but the book failed to answer them:

It didn’t answer any of the questions that the illustrations stirred up in a normal inquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it is burning away down there, why isn’t the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isn’t the rest of the interior melting—or is it? And when the core at last burns itself out, will some of the Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant sinkhole on the surface? And how do you know this? How did you figure it out?”

Bryson’s anecdote resonates because we’ve all had this experience. Time and again, we’ve encountered textbooks that take subjects that inspire in us a sense of awe and cosmic wonder—and reduce them to something altogether uninteresting.

Textbooks are a genre. They’re not a particularly elegant or popular genre, but they are one nonetheless. Genres have a particular form they have to follow. The moves textbook authors make on every page are preordained: by the books they have read, the expectations of publishers, and the culture surrounding textbooks. The genre has several rules:

1. That information be conveyed dryly and without personality.
2. That information be presented authoritatively and objectively.
3. Relating to #2: That information be presented without controversy.
4. That the idea of “information” is, itself, the end goal of education: something to be retained, remembered, and repeated, at least until the exam at the course’s end.

Some textbook authors avoid these rules—but I wouldn’t exactly call what they’ve written “textbooks,” since in the process of breaking the rules they’ve also in some ways avoided writing a textbook at all. And so, for the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to just say that all textbooks are dry, personality-less, authoritative, uncontroversial, and strictly informational texts. I recognize that my argument is tautological. But be kind here—I’m stepping into dangerous territory.

I'm Going to Make People Angry

I place this note up front because this post asks us to read our communication textbook—Berko, Wolvin, Wolvin, and Aitken’s Communicating: A Social, Career and Cultural Focus—critically. I want to be very clear that I am not singling out this textbook as a particularly bad or problematic example. Frankly, as textbooks go, it’s pretty good. At my previous graduate program, I had to review about six different introductory communication textbooks. While some are better than others, they are all unequivocally members of the textbook genre—and thus guilty of everything I listed above. And so let’s all give Berko, et al. a break here—they’re confronted with a quite complex set of generic and cultural constraints.

In short, I’m not trying to be the Howard Zinn of critiquing the Fundamentals of Oral Communication textbook. I’m not trying to blaspheme or overthrow the textbook in the name of some other text.

I do, however, think it’s essential to teach our students to think critically about the concepts in the textbook as they read. There are two reasons for this:

1. In their feedback on the course last semester, some students expressed (I’d argue fair) concerns that the textbook oversimplifies issues of race, class, and gender in some of its discussions of these concepts. Anecdotally, I’ve had some students suggest to me that they find some of the models of communication in the book over-simplistic.
2. We desire in this class that students develop skills not just as speakers and persuaders, but also as critical consumers of the messages they encounter. Training them to critically interrogate the messages we place in front of them—rather than embrace them as pure “factual” content to regurgitate back to us on tests—is an important way to move them toward this outcome.

An Example of Critically Engaging the Textbook on Issues of Race

In Chapter 2: Foundations of Verbal Language, the authors of the textbook provide a discussion of “Nonstandard English Dialects.” Below, I provide you with a few possible techniques you might use to get students to critically engage with this topic.

Before I start, though, a warning. Any time you dig into issues of race, you risk prompting a heated discussion. I would recommend that you precede this conversation with some “ground rules” or expectations for treating these topics respectfully and tactfully.

1) Prompt students to think about the complexities of code-switching.

Before you even introduce the concept in the textbook, it helps to prime students’ thinking about a topic with a concrete example to provoke an inductive conversation. While they’re probably all too young to know who Dave Chappelle is—my God, did I just say that?—I find that his interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio still eloquently leads into a good conversation on the topic.

Link to the Chappelle clip.

(The video should jump straight to the relevant part—if not, it happens at 7:06.)

There’s a lot going on in this video for students to unpack. First, Chappelle calls out the ways that others in his own area of business automatically stereotype him and start talking to him in a different way. Likewise, he establishes how he can switch languages on a dime depending on the social circumstance he enters. The guiding question here is simply: is this okay? That is: Why does society privilege certain types of speech over others? And how should students grapple with this fact as speakers?

To add more complexity to this—if you’re comfortable enough discussing issues of race in class—you might also bring up some of Chappelle’s own reasons for leaving the comedy career back in 2005. As he has recounted on several occasions, he often felt a discomfort when white fans would quote some of the racial language in his show back at him, or laughed a bit too hard at some of his jokes. There’s not really a specific answer to this, or a specific takeaway students should have. Students should appreciate that Chappelle’s discomfort with a white person yelling the N-word at him makes sense. More importantly, it adds another layer of complexity to this already complex issue.

2) Help students think through the considerations authors make when they write textbooks.

As you instruct students to review the section of the textbook on page 48-49, you’ll want to prime how they’re thinking about it first. Students may not always consciously recognize textbooks as authored. After all, they’re deliberately written in an objective tone that causes the authors to recede as far into the background as possible. A first set of questions can concern this point:

• Why might different dialects be a difficult issue for a textbook author to write about?
• What cultural or political pressures do the textbook authors face when they sit down to describe this topic? 
• If that previous question proves difficult, prime students with this follow-up: What expectations does this university have for students coming out of this class? From the perspective of the people who run the university, how should everyone perform, talk, and so on upon leaving this class?

The goal is, of course, to get students thinking about the bind the authors of the textbook face as they write. Even if they want to explicitly write: “The United States has a long, sordid history of racial injustice and cultural intolerance,” they can’t actually do that. The expectation for students coming out of these classes is that they’ll be able to speak in a particular way that’s sought by employers, non-profits, and others in that big, neoliberal “outside world.” And so the textbook has to toe that line.

Whether you agree with what I just wrote or not, the important thing is getting students to think about the sorts of challenges textbook authors face. Helping students understand why this issue is complex and difficult for the authors can, in turn, provoke them to think about the complexities and difficulties of these issues themselves.

3) Encourage students to evaluate and weigh the logical linkages and strength of ideas in the text.

Here’s the passage in question, which student should discuss with their nearby peers:

Recent studies have reinforced the concept that for those living in the United States, speaking a nonstandard dialect rather than Standard American English can be detrimental to a person’s educational and economic health. The message seems clear: “You need to speak right to go to college, to get a good job.”

Children entering schools with weak Standard American English skills are at a definite disadvantage. Since they may not know the alphabet or have the vocabulary, learning to read and understanding class discussions become extremely difficult. They often tune out and eventually drop out. Research shows that ‘while 75 percent of white students graduated from U.S. high schools, only 50 percent of all Black students, 51 percent of Native American students, and 53 percent of all Hispanic students got a high school diploma. The study also found that the drop-out problem was even worse for Black, Native American, and Hispanic young men at 43 percent, 47 percent and 48 percent, respectively.

In economic terms, nonstandard speakers are given shorter interviews and fewer job offers than Standard American English speakers. When job offers are presented, nonstandard speakers are offered positions paying as much as 35 percent less than jobs offered to Standard American English speakers.

In social terms, speakers of nonstandard dialects often are confronted with mistaken, negative assumptions concerning their intelligence, dependability, and creativity. Many different languages and accents make the United States a rich tapestry; however, people speaking dialects should be aware that in some instances, education and speech therapy can make alterations in their vocabulary and speaking patterns if they desire change. That desire is usually based on a person’s awareness that his or her career and social goals include particular language requirements that the person does not possess.

Discussion around this topic can address several points of critique:

• The idea of “Nonstandard” Dialects. From the get-go, this language suggests that some dialects are standard and others are abnormal or different. Prompt students to consider why this might be problematic.
• Its problematic logic. Students should quickly spot the logical leap that occurs in the second paragraph. The authors jump directly from a statement that students with “weak Standard American English skills are at a definite disadvantage,” before jumping to a set of statistics about dropout rates and job interviews. The paragraph proceeds on a logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after, therefore because of). It implies that a lack of Standard American English skills are to blame for the high dropout rates among certain populations—while disregarding that countless other systemic, institutional, historical, racial, and economic problems contribute to the poor education and societal mistreatment of these populations. Again, link this critique back to the challenges the authors face in talking about these problems in the first place.
• Its (mis)use of research. Students should be directed to the textbook’s citations on page 448-449. The relevant citations are endnotes 68-72. Students should recognize a few things about these citations.
• First, the authors cite a specific scholarly study: Walsh, S. (2010). Which English? Whose English? An investigation of ‘non-native’ teachers’ beliefs about target varieties. Language, Culture & Curriculum, 23(2) 123-137. The article is available online at this link. Students should recognize the limitations of this research, and what gets lost in translation as the research is subsumed into the textbook genre. In the study, the authors have a solid sixteen pages to qualify and nuance the results of their research. They also can specify their methodology—in this case, a focus group study of twenty-six teachers. In the textbook, all this complexity gets boiled down to a single sentence.
• The citation also has some highly misleading interpretations. Berko, et al. write that “for those living in the United States, speaking a nonstandard dialect rather than Standard American English can be detrimental to a person’s educational and economic health.” But the study doesn’t analyze teachers from the United States at all—Young and Walsh are both professors at Newscastle University in the UK, and the teachers focus grouped for the study were “from countries in Europe, Africa, and West, Southeast and East Asia” (see page 127, bottom). Clearly, there are some misleading assertions being made in the text!
• Note that the quotation from the text comes from a newspaper source in the Washington Post. Students should consider the credibility of this quote lifted from a newspaper article published in 1998 as an authoritative statement on this topic. To what extent should this person be taken seriously?
• We also do not know much about the symposium lecture delivered by Mims, H.A. (2000) at Cleveland State University. Because it’s a lecture, it’s not actually published, and so we cannot access it to determine whether it actually supports or strengthens the authors’ claims.
• How it avoids controversy. This loops back into the points addressed above with the Chappelle video. The authors avoid digging into topics of code-switching, and pretty explicitly (albeit carefully) urge those without standard dialects to “make alterations in their vocabulary and speaking patterns if they desire change.” Rather than confront the controversy or complexity that characterizes issues over dialect in the United States (and these issues are, indeed, endlessly complicated), it brushes over them. This isn’t the only textbook guilty of this, but students should be critically aware of it as they read nonetheless.

Taken together, a critical interrogation of this passage can have two effects for students. First, it can help them engage more intelligently with the material they’re consuming not just in this textbook, but all of their research. Remind students that these problems with citations are not isolated to the texts they read for class, but are also prevalent on Wikipedia and other sources they encounter online. Secondly, it can prompt a more robust discussion in class around issues of language diversity. Rather than brushing past the concept, it can lead them to contemplate it on a deeper level.

But Wait: How Can I Test Students on the Textbook if We Spend Classtime Criticizing It?

I have three responses to this question.

1. If students walk away just thinking, “Man, this book sure is bad!” they will have missed the entire point of this exercise. The point isn’t that the book itself has issues; it’s that all kinds of things students read uncritically every day are chock full of issues just like these.
2. I’ve selected a particularly egregious example of textbook problems to focus on here. Plenty of the book doesn’t deal with such controversial themes, and for the most part it does a perfectly reasonable job of laying out important elements of oral communication.
3. But yes, this does mean you’ll have to change the way you think about examining students on these topics. Rather than a few multiple choice questions regarding “Why Nonstandard Dialects are bad,” you’ll instead pose short answer or essay questions that require students to grapple with the complexity of this topic. You might…

• Ask them to explain why language diversity is a controversial issue in the United States.
• Have students articulate a few different perspectives on language diversity.
• Have students take a stance on “code-switching.”
• Ask students to explicate how these considerations should factor into their speeches and/or interactions with peers on campus.
• Frame a scenario for students that features a conflict around language diversity and have students unpack the perspectives of different interlocutors.

The bottom line is that the world is a complicated place and that students need to learn to treat it as such. Reading passages from their assigned textbooks critically is an excellent entre point for developing this skill.

One last note: I’ve uploaded with this post a PDF of the section of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything I cited earlier. I recommend giving it to students as a supplemental reading (it’s only a page, after all) to prompt conversations around two points. First, it’s handy before the Informative Speeches to help get students thinking about how to make their arguments more engaging and interesting. Secondly, it obviously helps prime students to think about textbooks as authored and deliberately written in a particular way.