The Literature Workshop: Authentic Interpretations

Here are some of the highlights from Sheridan D. Blau's chapter "Where Do Interpretations Come From?" in his book The Literature Workshop. In this chapter, Blau addresses the need for students to build confidence in their ability to "interpret" literature on their own.

"Scholes (Robert Scholes 1999) urges teachers to rescue literature from test makers and from student indifference by helping students see how it speaks to them as human beings rather than as test takers and technical analysts. And the first step toward that goal, for many teachers, he says, is to drop those writing assignments that focus on technical features of literary works (irony, theme, symbol, ect) " (102).

As a teacher of writing, I have lamented (and have heard lamentations from many other writing teachers) the lack of engagement and critical thinking that my students display in their writing. I twist every little sentence out of them, and by the end of the writing unit, I've been put through the wringer as much as they have. I'm exhausted, and I still don't feel like the student writing shows what my students can do because the ideas (and even some of the words and sentences) are mine - if I'm being honest with myself as I grade. What would my students do if I asked them to reflect authentically on a piece of literature and to write about their own personal interpretation? Would they have the confidence to do so? Would they flounder in a bewildered manner, beseeching me for an interpretation because the freedom and the faith in their thinking would be so unfamiliar to them? Blau argues that we should build confidence in our students by giving them the freedom to think about their reading and to form their own interpretations of the literature.


"First, it (the workshop) usually shows students that they are experienced interpreters of stories and that interpretation is not an activity that necessarily requires specialized training in English classes. Second, they see that their interpretations did not tend to focus on literary devices, and that what they did have to say was generally more important to say and more respectful of the story as an engaging narrative than any schooled observations they might have mechanically offered about literary devices" (114). 

Are we de-valuing literature when we ask our students to read a narrative and then ask them what they noticed about the tone? Didn't the writer intend for a more purposeful response than that? Literature seems to me to be one of the most natural subjects to lend itself to relevancy as students make their own connections and their own interpretations, yet we as teachers so often ignore this teaching opportunity. In addition, we want our students to think, and yet so many of our lessons and assignments strip our students of authentic thinking opportunities because we merely ask them to regurgitate what was lectured in class or what can be found on Sparknotes. I get the dilemma here. We often provide those stilted prompts because we have standardized tests to prepare these students for. They're going to see questions about tone, theme, symbolism, irony, ect. and we need to get them ready for those questions. Yet, Blau challenges us to expect more of our students and to prepare our students for bigger and better things than questions on the standardized test. By asking them to build confidence in their own interpretations, we're preparing them for a life of critical thinking and joyful reading.