On reading (aloud) together…

As an educator who enjoys reflecting about pedagogical practices, today I am thinking about how I engage with reading in the classroom. By reading, I mean the act of reading together a text, not necessarily for the purpose of dissection, examination, analysis (though we do all of these in the writing classroom) but to create that space of shared community in the classroom.

I get to listen to my students’ voices pause, linger and express as they read out aloud, popcorning to the next student colleague and that’s gives me a glimpse into their personalities, perspectives and (sometimes) understanding the class dynamics. As my students read out aloud a sentence, we listen and follow along. And it is in these moment of reading and listening that I find communities being created in the classroom

There is such an extensive scholarship on how to build community in the classroom but I think the process of simply reading a text together creates an immediate sense of community. Simple practices does make a lot of difference in the literature classroom.

To be honest, this practice is something that I have learnt from my middle school years, theatre and being part of movement spaces where reading is used to build modes of solidarity and comradeship. Each of these spaces have taught me different things about reading out aloud. In middle school, or at least in the school that I went to, it was always a select few who were asked to read ( I was one of them. Did I tell you all that I wanted to become a RJ in my middle school?).

But as I look back at it today, the practice of only asking a select few to read a text in the middle school is not something that I would do as an educator because I think that it evokes a strange sense of competition and complex among students. I definitely did not want to be hailed as the model student who read very well. There are caste and class implications that come with “reading well.” A number of people were made fun of when they read out aloud, sometimes for their accent, at other times because of a disability. Quite messy, to be honest.

I try to ensure in my practice today that everyone gets a chance to read aloud, unless they absolutely do not want to read. Voice is a part of the pedagogical method. There are often unfamiliar words in non-Anglophone languages in the texts that I teach. I invite grace, patience and a sense of negotiation with these words as they read out aloud.

And I will always aim at creating and modelling such spaces…