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”:
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:
- That information be conveyed
dryly and without personality.
- That information be presented
authoritatively and objectively.
- Relating to #2: That information
be presented without controversy.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
(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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.