If the text is a cage...do teachers just open the door, or should learners find the key?

 One common question often asked to learners by teachers of literature is: What is the theme of this text? (or any variation like ‘what is this text about?’). Sometimes, learners will be given a choice of possible answers, or asked something like: ‘Which of these four answers best expresses what the text is about?’. There is a problem, though, with this type of questions, however you frame them. In fact, there are two problems that I can see.

The first problem is that this does not encourage readers to generate their own interpretations: if you ask them ‘What is this text about?’, you plant the idea in their minds that there is only ONE answer possible. That, in turn, makes the reading feel like a treasure-hunt, except you’ve got no map, no shovel, and the island you’re on is the size of Australia. Good luck.

If you ask: ‘Which of these answers correspond best to the theme?’, you again deny the readers the right to generate an interpretation themselves, and you run the risk of turning the reading into a…reading comprehension exercise – or perhaps a deductive one, not the worst thing in the world perhaps but is that what you wanted?

In both cases, asking What is the text about? often runs contrary to the idea of ‘All interpretations are valid’.

The second problem is slightly different, but equally relevant: by asking what the theme is, you start at the highest conceptual level possible, at the most abstract way to think about a particular situation or problem. For example, if you’re doing a War Poem (something very frequently done at schools) and your theme is ‘War’, then I think you’re making your life – and that of your learners – extremely difficult. The point here is that you can’t get at interpretation in one moment: interpreting is not a matter of suddenly ‘seeing the light’, or of being struck by inspiration in an act of quasi-revelation – an epiphany of sort. Interpretation is a question of time, observation and it is an inductive process that takes time.

Federico Zeri, the Art historian, insisted that reading a, say, 16^th-century painting is a deductive process because you first see the whole of the painting before turning your attention to individual parts of it, noticing this colour or that character, the symmetry or the relationships between parts. We first see the totality of what there is to see, and it is only later, by paying attention to details and the different facets of the painting’s construction, that we can begin interpreting the whole of the painting. Making those connections between the idea we have of the whole and its various parts is a process of interpretation – of giving meanings, or potential meanings, to that totality not as itself but as a web of relationships between the parts.

Reading, though, is an inductive process in that we do not see the finished product – the novel for example – until we reach the end or, at least, have read a good chunk of it (unless it’s a poor novel of course). And so while we read we must accumulate clues and collect hints,  and remember events, characters, what those say and how they interrelate. This process of accretion leads to interpretation because we amass knowledge and experiences of the text bit by bit, one event, one character at a time: it’s like silt settling, adding depth to itself, becoming richer by the page. In the beginning, the text makes little sense but then it starts to acquire meaning because each page brings new information, new perspectives, and those in turn modify our perception of the text’s meaning. It’s like blending ten different colours, starting with two of them and adding one each time: first you have blue and yellow, you mix them and you get a new colour, then you add a third, and a fourth, and each time the colour you created becomes something else, with new nuances and new hues. In the end, you have a colour that not only did not exist at the beginning, but that has become richer, more complex than any of the ten you started off with.

That’s what reading and interpreting actually means –  click here for some more on this idea.

And that is why you cannot reduce interpretation to a discussion on a theme (or one of its topics) because the theme is the result of interpretation, not the other way around. Of course, when you’ve found a theme it can lead to various interpretations of that theme, but you must not confuse that with interpreting a text as such. A reader’s real freedom is first and foremost to make sense of the reading, it is not simply to discuss a theme laid out by someone else – what I’ve written about before under the name of ‘co-creation(click on this link)’.

That is where teachers must make a choice:

• Limiting their literature class to a discussion around a theme they decided beforehand, or
• Discussing the interpretations of learners regardless of what the teacher really thinks the text is about.

I recently discussed teaching material with students, and one of them showed us an example of a lesson he’d given at school: a text and some questions. What struck me was that he wanted to discuss a specific point (a topic: a worked-out theme) but in so doing, he wasn’t giving any space for learners to generate their own interpretation. The teacher certainly wanted to encourage discussion, but he was not really interested in what the learners made of the text themselves: the text had become a place to find information usable for the discussion – it had ceased to be a place of interpretive freedom. And that struck me all the more since to my eyes, the text wasn’t really interested in that teacher’s topic at all, and the main thrust of the text seemed to be something rather different. I may be wrong, he may be wrong…but that is the point here of course: I wouldn’t have been given an opportunity to express my interpretation in his class, I would just have been asked my thoughts on his topic, his ideas.

Now, it’s important to note here that I am not actually condemning his approach: I am pointing out the difference between lesson aims. ‘Discussing citizenship-related notions’ is an aim that does not automatically involve the interpretation side of reading.

Yet it is equally important to note that generating interpretations is what learners struggle with the most. Making sense of a text, giving it meaning(s), answering the dreaded question ‘What is this text about?’: all this is difficult in itself, it requires reading experience, mental resources, focus, and the understanding of a few basic notions (e.g. a text is a long metaphor; elements function on two levels: the story’s, and more broadly; questions of different types should be asked of the text (click here for types of questions). All this is therefore very, very hard to do if you don’t read much, have no idea how to approach a text, or think that the text is self-contained and cut off from the real world (or a simple echo of one situation: see my text on 'character development').

That is why, while I know I often fail at being as inviting of ideas as I would like to be, my first aim with my own lessons is not to discuss one theme or one subject: it is to help and encourage the students’ own understanding of what they read. I cannot count the number of times one of them came up with a reading I had never thought of, or an interpretation that made complete sense which I hadn’t seen. So the best I can do is be as prepared as possible (click here to see how) for anything: identify as many themes and related topics as I can in the texts I use so that I can respond to – or rebound off – what students see in those texts. Of course, I also steer the discussions sometimes, but as much as possible only in terms of reading skills; for example, by trying to ask relevant questions rather than ones that take us away from interpreting the text. I’m sure it doesn’t always work and that I come across as wanting something in particular, but that is not always my intention, even though it’s unavoidable at times (which might be my own fault in having selected the wrong text).

All this reminds us that what we want, ultimately, is that our leaners can independently make sense of a text, that they can generate meanings from that text, so that they have something to reflect on. Asking someone to give their ideas about one particular subject is NOT the same as asking them to make sense of information. Inductive reading is making use of many aspects of thinking,  but it’s also strongly connected to critical thinking in that it requires collecting information to complete an overall picture: not simply thinking from partial information, not having an opinion on a subject one knows very little about . As teacher we must beware that we don’t make that mistake by just asking for opinions on an poorly understood subject, but, on the contrary, by asking for the complete package: obtaining information, thinking about that information, and then formulating an opinion.

That's the ultimate power of literature of course, and that is why I - and many others - still believe it's important to bring it to learners, and to bring learners to it.

Zeri, F. (1990). Behind the image: the art of reading paintings. NY: St Martins Press