The Child As Critic

Telling the Stories of Our Readings

One common complaint some adults make about looking at children's literature in the ways described in the previous section is that they don't like forcing meaning or imposing one particular view onto readers. Sometimes the complaint is followed by the statement, "I prefer to let children explore their own meanings in a story." Well, we all prefer that, too. However, the perspective this course takes is that children do not "naturally" look at a story in any particular way. Instead they learn ways of reading stories from more accomplished readers, especially teachers, parents, and other adults.

A researcher conducting research on children's responses to literature in a second/third grade classroom spent a semester in the classroom observing the children and their teacher read, talk, draw, paint, and write about the stories they were reading or having read to them. What the researcher noticed was that the children were keenly attuned to their teacher, searching for cues as to how they should approach their stories. This teacher was big on connections and asked the children if they could see any connections in a story to another story or connections to writing. So, during independent reading time the researcher saw many children looking for connections, especially to their writing. But there was one connection that was even more prevalent--connection to the present unit of study. If they were studying the weather, the teacher often picked books that had weather related themes and the children would make that kind of thematic connection in their reading. It's often the exception that proves the rule. The researcher asked two of the third graders about Ramona and Her Father, one of the books the teacher read aloud to the class. The researcher knew from the teacher that she had picked this book simply because she enjoyed it and wanted to share that enjoyment with her students. Two very sharp girls saw it differently. They were adamant in their interview with the researcher that their teacher chose Ramona and Her Father because it was connected to their current unit of study. Since this unit of study was "rocks" and since the girls were having such difficulty making a connection between "rocks" and Ramona, they decided that their teacher must have begun a new unit of study. Since they had just finished the chapter where Ramona tries to persuade her father to stop smoking, the girls decided that "not taking up smoking" was their new theme of study.

What all this suggests is that children are very sensitive to the cues more accomplished readers give as to how to read a text. If children don't look for connections in their reading to the craft of writing, it's because they've never been asked to consider that connection. If children don't talk about the differences in what boy characters and girl characters do or don't do in books, it's because they've never seen anyone looking at a book that way. Children will engage quite profoundly with stories in fairly sophisticated ways if they are shown how to engage and then be supported in their efforts. What's happening is this: the teacher is providing a frame from which to look at a story. Reading literature, even or especially children's literature, becomes so amazingly rich when we can use multiple frames. In other words, the more varied the adults' reading repertoire for literature is, the more varied the repertoires of the children that adults reads with will be. We will spend much of our time in this course looking at ourselves as readers of literature, because the best way to have children reading more richly is for the adults in their lives to become richer readers themselves. It is the perspective of this course that in order for children to change, adults must change first.