Are We Having Fun Yet? Students, Social Class, and the Pleasures of Literacy

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© 2004 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 338–342)dio:10.1598/JAAL.48.4.6

Are we having fun yet?Students, social class,and the pleasures of literacy

Bronwyn T. Williams

L I T E R A C Y & I D E N T I T Y

I’m like most teachers I know; my reasons for en-tering this line of work were a mixture of aspira-tion and circumstance. And, like most teachers Iknow, no small part of my aspirations was to beable to work with ideas I loved. Like most teachersI know who read this journal, my love was writtenwords. Fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, plays—Ilove to read and write. It is a passion for me, and Istill find it surprising some days that I am fortu-nate enough to be able to do what I do for a living.As a senior colleague said to me recently, mar-veling on the good fortune of a professional lifethat had taken him far from a childhood of urbanpoverty, “I would never have dreamed that Iwould get to spend 40 years with literature.”

Though sentiments like these often treadclose to wearisome clichés about passions forreading and the unnamable, compelling desire towrite, they are no less true for being familiar. Andit is these passions and desires that make it all themore dispiriting when our enthusiasms for read-ing and writing are rejected by some of our stu-dents. Although it doesn’t surprise me, my heartstill sinks when, after assigning an essay, poem, orstory that I love, the best a student can do in classthe next day is to shrug and tell me it was boring.I feel the same way when there is an exchange likethis one from a class last year:

Student: Do you really like this story?

Me: Absolutely. One of the perks of teaching isthat I get to assign the pieces I like so I havean excuse to read them again.

Student: You like this stuff? I would never want toread it again.

I’ve been teaching too long to expect univer-sal love from my students for my class, teachingstyle, or the works I assign. But that doesn’t meanI’ve stopped hoping. Although many studentsclearly love to read and write, and others findworks during a class that surprise them by ignitingunexpected pleasures, for some there is never aflicker of pleasure in their eyes. Reading and writ-ing are chores to be accomplished, tasks to be en-dured. Even if students do meet the pedagogicalgoals of the course, there is no love for the work.

Yet I know that these students find greatpleasure in other activities in their lives, includingones where they make meaning from texts—inmagazines, on television, in movies, on theInternet. When students talk about engaging withand interpreting other forms of communicationthe boredom slides away, and they speak with in-sight and delight about what they know. What,then, is the difference between the texts they en-dure in class and those they embrace outside of it?

A sense of playPleasure, as a concern in education, is somethingthat may get talked about in elementary grades,where there is a great deal of effort and discussionabout how to get young students to “fall in love”with reading and writing. Indeed, regardless of thepedagogical approach, literacy pedagogy foryoung students often takes the form of games andplay. But by middle school the sense of play andpleasure all but disappears as an explicit area ofconcern in teaching writing and reading is re-placed by a focus on “competencies” that allowstudents to complete their “work” (and preparefor the workplace) and then have their competen-cies assessed. Such a transformation is intensifiedby the growth of standardized testing and the at-tendant anxieties such tests visit on both studentsand teachers. By high school and university, pleas-ure and school are often seen as mutually exclu-sive (Williams, 2003a). As Johnson (2003) noted,“Ever since Plato banished the poets from his idealrepublic and blasted the sophists for trafficking ina similar brand of ecstatic make-believe, the acad-emy has frowned upon pleasure as an ‘unprofes-sional’ consideration” (p. xi). Yet if we wantstudents to embrace print literacy, to excel at itand make it a part of their lives, then competencyis simply not enough. We must find ways to helpstudents discover pleasure in reading and writingwell. If we don’t consider pleasure more thought-fully and talk about it with students more explicit-ly, we should not expect students to love what welove just because we tell them they should.

Control, competence, and challengeFinding pleasure in an activity is not simply amatter of chance. Research into the activities thatgive people pleasure, including literacy and popu-lar culture practices, suggests that people findpleasure in activities over which they feel theyhave competence and control and that providethem with a challenge they feel they can meet

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Smith & Wilhelm, 2002;Williams, 2003a). People find competence, con-trol, and challenge in those activities with whichthey have substantial experience. That is certainlyhow I feel about reading and writing and someother activities. I return to those activities withwhich I have experience or that potentially offerthe reward of competence and control if I contin-ue to gain experience with them (writing, music,cooking, and cycling). I tend to avoid those thatseem impossible and that would make me feelfoolish or incompetent even for trying (painting,ice skating, and plumbing). All I have to do to un-derstand how some of my students feel aboutreading and writing and pleasure is to imaginehow frustrated and inadequate I would feel with apaintbrush in my hand in front of a blank canvas.To put me in that situation as a student in a class-room, with its attendant judgments and punish-ments, would make me weak in the stomach. Ican envision my fellow students painting away,somehow understanding what the teacher wantsand enjoying their work, while I would stay in theback of the room using resentment and resistanceto mask my feelings of intimidation.

Of course, I could learn to paint and per-haps eventually feel some competence and con-trol (and pleasure) in doing so. But the real issueis experience. The more I put paint on canvas thegreater the chances I would improve and enjoywhat I was doing. The implication for students isthat what they have experienced, can control, andcan be competent in but challenged by will pro-vide pleasure. That much seems obvious.

But if we are talking about the nature ofstudents’ experiences, we are also talking aboutsocial class. This issue often makes teachers un-comfortable, particularly in the United Stateswhere they are caught in the paradox of a suppos-edly classless society that allows social mobilitybut also implicitly regards working class and poorpeople as if they are inherently less intelligent.Such simplistic perceptions are not helpful. Still,if we want to consider how experiences of read-ing, writing, and other forms of popular culture


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influence students’ perceptions of pleasure andliteracy, social class has a role to play. Intelligenceand pleasure obviously have no class boundaries,but the experiences students have with differentforms of texts and communication often do havethem. For example, 96% of households in theUnited States own at least one television. Theconsequence of this is that most people havesome experience with television. Many studentshave a great deal of experience with television(even if they don’t have one at home), and theyfeel competent and in control when they watchtelevision and can talk about programs with con-fidence and pleasure (Williams, 2002, 2003b). Bycontrast less than half of U.S. households pur-chased a book last year, and that half had a highermedian income and level of formal educationthan the population at large (AmericanBooksellers Association, 2003). Quite simply, stu-dents who live in print-rich environments have abetter chance of having more experience withprint, develop more of a feeling of competenceand control, and talk more about pleasure inreading and writing. Students from affluent fami-lies have a greater chance of living in a print-richenvironment. Almost all students can talk abouttelevision with authority and pleasure, but farfewer can switch to talking about print literacywith the same level of experience and pleasure.

To close this gap would seem simple. Themore the literacy experiences that we provide stu-dents lead to competence, control, and challenge,the more students will find pleasure in readingand writing. What is troubling, however, is that weoften unwittingly play into these expectations ofpleasure and social class in how we identify, label,and teach students in school. Because we oftendon’t acknowledge how social class influences ourpedagogy and curriculum, our courses and ap-proaches often reinforce existing student expecta-tions and perceptions of literacy and pleasure.

In part, this is a result of the way that socialclass can shape how we perceive students. For ex-ample, there is often an implied class label inidentifying students as “basic” readers and writ-

ers. Asked to characterize students with “basic”literacy skills, most teachers would probably notdescribe such students as affluent. Indeed, whenaffluent students struggle with literacy the initialassumption is often that there may be some kindof learning disability—that the problem is some-how biological rather than social.

Literacy for work or for art?In terms of pleasure, however, social class is moreinfluential in terms of course goals and pedagogi-cal approaches. Pleasure is not a word that imme-diately comes to mind in regard to basic literacycourses. Such courses are assumed to be moreconnected to skills and competencies than to thepleasures of reading and writing. What is deemedmost important is to help students attain the lit-eracy skills that will allow them to work effective-ly, whether in the classroom or on the job.Literacy in such contexts is a tool of economicempowerment and social mobility, and it needsto be focused on the practices that will enablestudents to achieve both of these ends. There isno doubt that sophisticated literacy skills canbenefit poor and working class students in tangi-ble economic ways. It would be unethical to denystudents who have been marginalized economi-cally and educationally the opportunity to devel-op literacy practices that will offer them greaterchoices in their work and school lives. In U.S.higher education such an approach extends be-yond basic literacy students to provide the philo-sophical foundation for many university first-yearwriting courses. The explicit goal of such coursesis to teach students acceptable academic writingconventions that they can take to other classes inorder to succeed in their university careers. In allof these courses, pleasure is rarely discussed andseems frivolous to even consider in the face ofsuch “serious” issues of economic and socialinequities.

By contrast, affluent students are often of-fered ways to bypass such courses by testing outof them. They are also encouraged to take courses



in writing and reading where the goal (often theexplicit goal) is to engage their imaginations andminds with humanity. They learn to “expandtheir horizons” and even to have fun and findpleasure in reading and writing. Such courses inhonors programs or in creative writing are recog-nized as reserved for the elite. First-year composi-tion may be required for the masses, but creativewriting and honors courses often require ademonstration that students have risen abovetheir peers and are deemed worthy of being re-warded with the fun courses. Students from dif-ferent social classes can and do get into thesecourses, although my experience in teaching suchcourses at public and urban universities and inworking with K–12 teachers is that honors andcreative writing courses tend to be dominated bystudents from more affluent backgrounds.Teachers also prize being assigned such coursesand administrators often hand them out as perks.If the goal of basic writing or first-year composi-tion is to indoctrinate the masses into the institu-tions of education, the goal of the creative writingcourse is to give the elite a place to have fun, cre-ate art, and set their souls free. There seems to bean implicit barrier between workplace literacyand art, between economic development and in-dividual growth, and between improving skillsand improving souls.

Such barriers influence not only who gets totake what courses but also pedagogies and expecta-tions of students and teachers. For example,though individual teaching styles vary, basic writ-ing and first-year composition courses tend tohave a more traditional pedagogical culture of ateacher in charge of a roomful of students.Creative writing courses, on the other hand, tendto operate on the model of the master artist with aroomful of apprentices who someday are expectedto be artists on their own (Schweitzer, 2004).Honors courses also often have more of a seminarfeel than a traditional classroom. Having taughtwriting in all of these settings—basic writing, first-year composition, creative writing, and honorsseminars—I have fallen into these same assump-tions about writing goals, pedagogy, and pleasure.

Basic writing and composition courses, like bad-tasting medicine, are regarded as necessary coursesthat students are required to take for their owngood, even though they won’t like them much.Honors and creative writing courses are electiveand done out of a love for reading and writing.

Encourage studentsAn increasing number of teachers are rethinkingthe role of pleasure in teaching reading and writ-ing (Johnson, 2003; Schweitzer, 2004; Tobin,2004) as well as examining their assumptionsabout social class, literacy skills, and pleasure(Alvermann, 2004; Coles, 2001; Smith &Wilhelm, 2002). What they and others advocate isbreaking down the barriers by encouraging allstudents to find pleasure in their reading andwriting as well as economic and cultural empow-erment. They advocate finding ways to make allstudents find writing and reading intelligent, en-gaging, and enjoyable.

Taking pleasure seriously (if that’s not anoxymoron) in the literacy classroom is not a mat-ter of making everything a game or being rigor-ous in teaching. It is a matter of realizing that allstudents deserve the opportunity to do creativework that feeds their souls as well as work thataddresses their material conditions. It is a matterof encouraging all students to find the pleasure incritical, intellectual work that teachers and schol-ars do. And it is a matter of encouraging studentsto bridge the supposed barriers between creativeand critical work and to understand how pleas-ures in interpreting and creating texts of all kindscan connect to building pleasure in academic literacies.

Most of all, what teachers need to do ishelp students understand the sources of pleas-ure. If we offer students assignments and oppor-tunities to recognize that what brings thempleasure is connected to experience, compe-tence, and challenge, we can make a better casethat the more experienced they become in read-ing and writing, the more pleasurable they will


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find the activities. If we help students recognizehow they find pleasure in the intellect they bringto activities involving sports, cars, cooking,films, fashion, and so on, we can make the casethat more experience with literacy practices willhelp them find pleasure in intellectual pursuitsat school and beyond. Finally, we need to createassignments and courses that offer students notonly challenges but also some control in howthey meet those challenges as a way to help themfind the pleasure in writing and reading cre-atively and critically.

When I get my students’ teacher evalua-tions once a course is finished, there are manycomments that I hope to find in terms of whatthe students learned, which assignments theyfound valuable, and how they liked my teachingstyle. Yet perhaps the ones I like the best, thecomments that make me feel I am doing my best work as a teacher, are like this one I receivedlast year:

I never imagined I could ever like writing or be anygood at it. And I know you made us work hard, but bythe end of the semester I felt like I really liked what Iwas writing and that I kept wanting to do it.

REFERENCESAlvermann, D.E. (2004). Adolescents and literacies in a digital

world. New York: Peter Lang.

American Booksellers Association. (2003). Adult book pur-

chases up two percent in 2002. Retrieved June 6, 2004,

from http://news.bookweb.org/news/1782.html

Coles, N. (2001). Joe Shakespeare: The contemporary British

worker-writer movement. In J. Trimbur (Ed.), Popular

literacy: Studies in cultural practices and poetics (pp.

189–208). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal

experience. New York: HarperCollins.

Johnson, T.R. (2003). A rhetoric of pleasure: Prose style and

today’s composition classroom. Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann.

Schweitzer, L. (2004). Writing in the crossroads: Examining

first-year composition and creative writing. Unpublished

doctoral dissertation, University of Louisville, Kentucky.

Smith, M.W., & Wilhelm, J.D. (2002). “Reading don’t fix no

Chevys”: Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth,

NH: Heinemann.

Tobin, L. (2004). Reading student writing: Confessions, medi-

tations, rants. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Williams, B.T. (2002). Tuned in: Television and the teaching

of writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Williams, B.T. (2003a). The pleasures brought to class:

Literacy, popular culture, and the middle school class-

room. International Journal of Learning, 10, 965–976.

Williams, B.T. (2003b). What they see is what we get:

Television and middle school writers. Journal of

Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 46, 546–554.



The department editor welcomes reader comments on this column. E-mail [email protected]. Mail Bronwyn T. Williams,University of Louisville, Department of English, Humanities Building, Louisville, KY 40292, USA.

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Are We Having Fun Yet? Students, Social Class, and the Pleasures of Literacy