J· CURRICULUM STUDIES, 1993, VOL. 25, NO. 1, 1- 32

Reading research

CLEO H. CHERRYHOLMES

Researchers are experienced readers. 1 They read textbook after textbook as undergraduate and graduate students, they read the text of the setting within which they conduct research, and they read the research of others. But it is arguable that conventional empiricist readings of research shaped by methodological guidelines learned in seminars and apprenticeship display as much naivete as sophisticati~n. The characteristics of a sophisticated empiricist reading are well known. Researchers read to find generalizations for which empirical support has been collected. They read to assess evidence for and against hypotheses. They read to detect theoretical and empirical inconsistencies and gaps. But empiricist and theoretical readings do not exhaust the possibilities of reading research, to say the least. There are many ways to read and interpret and criticize. Some include attending to: sub-texts about gender; criticism of patterns of social dominance and oppression; rhetorical and logical coherence; metaphor, synedoche and other literary tropes; and textual structures .

A naive reading is deficient in informed judgement. All readings quite possibly can be better informed and in this sense all are naive. There are important differences in degree, however, and if researchers restrict them­selves to technical issues and fail to develop and use a wide-ranging repertoire of reading strategies their naivete is reinforced. The silence of the research literature on the textuality of research findings, books, monographs, articles, conference papers seems to presuppose that those who are ready to study research methodology and conduct research are already expert readers. A second presupposition seems to be that if one is skilled in research design, data collection, data analysis and hypothesis-testing, for example, one is equipped to read research. Key questions for those schooled in research traditions portrayed in leading us textbooks focus on reading research operations such as: was the sample appropriately selected, were the correct statistical analyses conducted, were the assumptions of the statistical tests satisfied? I submit and intend to show that these presuppositions, if anyone actually believes them, are mistaken.

Richard Rorty (1980: 203) states boldly the theme that I intend to develop:

If we get rid of traditional notions of 'objectivity' and 'scientific method' we shall be able to see the social sciences as continuous with literature - as interpreting other-people to us, and thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community.

Cleo H . Cherryholmes is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, 346 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1024. His interests include curriculum and instruction, social theory, research methodology and philosophy of social science . His most recent book is Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (Teachers College Press) .

0022- 0272/93 $3·00 © 1993 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

2 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

The belief that the social sciences are continuous with literature may not be widely shared. Complex research designs, ingenious measuring instruments, involved statistical analyses and formal mathematical models, at first glance, seem to have little in common with the stories that novelists tell or the images that poets invoke. If the social sciences are continuous with literature, then, it is incumbent upon those who believe this to explain what it entails and what difference it makes.

Research findings tell stories. Often, they are about putative causes and effects. Sometimes they are descriptive, sometimes explanatory. Research findings tell stories that are, more or less, insightful and useful in shaping what we think and do. The continuity with literature argument does not allege that social scientific research findings are another form of poetry or that they are structured like short stories or novels (see Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987 for an introduction to rhetorical analyses of the social sciences). The genre of social scientific and educational research is useful, as Rorty put it, in 'interpreting other people to us, and thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community'. They are more or less useful in helping us to understand our social world as we navigate our way through it. The stories in the descriptive, explanatory and causal accounts that researchers tell, among other things, connect to historical developments, highlight political agendas, point to 'deep' structure, or demonstrate that the stories told by research findings are fragmentary, contradictory, incomplete and dispersed. The stories that researchers tell are subject to multiple readings . How are we to read the genre that we call research? Is there a privileged way to read research? Repeatedly, I will return to the question: how to read

research? One approach to reading that surfaces from time to time but whose

usefulness is problematic at best is what Robert Scholes (1989: 52, 53) calls a 'fundamentalist' approach to reading, no religious connotation intended.

Textual fundamentalism is the belief that texts always say just what they mean, so that any honest or decent person ought to be able to understand this perfectly clear meaning without making any fuss about it . .. The fundamentalist view of interpretation requires two things: that meaning be fixed eternally, outside of time , and that texts in time­bound languages convey that meaning so directly that it can be discerned without interpretation. Fundamentalist attempts to fix the meaning of texts all - without exception - can be shown to require some timeless zone in which true meanings are said

to reside.

Researchers know full well that they can make quite a fuss when it comes to reading research but the fuss is usually in terms of specific methodological issues; for example, the sample was not representative , the observations were incorrectly coded, or the assumptions of the statistical model were violated. In the context of reading research fundamentalist readers require that the meaning of an observation be 'fixed eternally, outside of time', and that the 'time-bound languages' of research, for example, statistical, mathematical, verbal, or computer, 'convey that meaning so directly that it can be discerned without interpretation'. When a fundamentalist approach to reading is abandoned the pretences and claims oflogical positivism and empiricism and other accounts of the privileged status of scientific research findings erode. Logical positivism and empiricism have provided guidelines for scientific

READI NG RESEARCH 3

research and its interpretation for much of the 20th century but those guidelines have since been shown to be false and misleading (see Quine 195 3, Rorty 1980, Suppe 1977, Chalmers 1987).

One corrective for fundamentalist tendencies to view texts as autonom­ous is to read pragmatically. Reading pragmatically seeks to clarify meanings in light of our purposes with an eye toward consequences, even though rneanings may turn out to be exceedingly elusive. 2 Facts about objects and events are one thing, what they mean is something else. Pragmatic readers ernphatically deny that facts or narrative plots or theories or metaphors or statistical explanations or formal models ever speak for themselves. Fur­thermore, it is often the case that those who agree on accepted facts or theories disagree about what they mean. Reading research to clarify rneanings does not promise agreement or consensus but approaches to reading that do not seek to clarify meanings promise little indeed. To avoid confusion it should be noted from the outset that reading pragmatically, reading to clarify meanings does not refer to reading merely with an eye to problem solving, or for short-run instrumental gain, or for purposes of economic or social efficiency (see Cherryholmes 1988b: Ch. 8). Empirical researchers often seem to be searching for and attempting to produce texts that 'get things right', express truth, or ground meaning once and for all. But rnany philosophers and scholars, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, W . V . 0. Quine, John Dewey, Richard Rorty and Thomas Kuhn, to mention only a few, have argued persuasively enough for me and many others that truth (capital T) and grounded meaning in any final or transcendental sense are not within our grasp. Pragmatists suggest that we clarify the meaning of research by looking to the consequences of our findings. 3

Charles Sanders Peirce (in Thayer 1984: 493) was perhaps the first to state an idea that eventually led to pragmatism and his work provides the basis for this view of reading pragmatically. Here are excerpts from one of his discussions.

The word pragmatism was invented to express a certain maxim of logic ... The maxim is intended to furnish a method for the analysis of concepts ... The method prescribed in the maxim is to trace out in the imagination the conceivable practical consequences- that is, the consequences for deliberate, self-controlled conduct - of the affirmation or denial of the concept ; [emphasis added] and the assertion of the maxim is that herein lies the whole of the purport of the word, the entire concept.

From the outset pragmatists were concerned with the clarification of meaning. When pragmatic ideas are brought to the task of reading research the question is posed: if a research finding is affirmed what are its ~maginable, conceivable consequences? Consequences, of 'course, are of interest and can be assessed only in terms of purposes .

In order to explore some of the subtleties and complexities of reading pragmatically I begin by describing, often in the words of the authors a widely cited and highly respected empirical study of reciprocal teachi~g. Then, for purposes of illustration, I affirm and accept this account of reciprocal teaching and its effects (following Peirce above) . At that point a feminist, a critical and a deconstructive reading are provided. Each reading is off ere? to clarify the meaning of the research by tracing out the imaginable, conceivable practical consequences of reciprocal teaching (following Peirce's

4 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

maxim) in terms of particular aesthetic (feminist) or ethical (critical) or rhetorical (deconstructive) interests and strategies. These three readings do not exhaust by any means the possibilities of pragmatically reading research. If each reading exemplifies, if you will, one instance of reading pragmatically, taken together they create problems with which pragmatic readers must cope: can the readings be reconciled? Or, can they be combined? If not, how can we choose among them? What norms and standards are to be employed in such choices and attempts at combination? What processes and negotiations are suitable for their combination? Many other questions can also be posed. Some of these issues will be addressed in the concluding sections of this essay. We lost our way in reading research, I submit, when we, more precisely those who came before us and taught us how to read, became consumed with modernist illusions of describing a foundational episte­mology and of obtaining certain and objective knowledge that pragmatists deny. Paying attention to how we read, perhaps, can change the text of our research and our conversations about it. All texts, pragmatists emphasize, can be read differently, including the one you are reading.4

Let the reader be put on notice that I am not indifferent to alternative approaches to interpretation and criticism. M y position is not unlike that of Raman Selden (1989) when he explains and demonstrates 24(!) approaches to literary theory and criticism; I am not neutral when it comes to reading research. Feminist, critical and deconstructive approaches were selected, in part, because each has much of value to offer contemporary educators. The approaches to reading that I favour lean toward those that are: historical (missing in this essay), interpretive analytic and genealogical after Foucault (also missing), deconstructive, and critical to the end of promoting human dignity and community that are always being reconstituted (see Cherry­holmes 1988b: Ch. 8) among other values and ends, and not necessarily in this order. No claim is made that these readings reveal any 'essential' meaning of this research. The point of these alternative readings is not that they singly or jointly provide a 'correct' reading of the research nor that they outline the 'essence' of a feminist, critical, or deconstructive critique (the possibility of such essentialist or foundationalist reading is denied), nor is the point simply to demonstrate that empirical research can be given alternative readings, each of which has a constituent following. The point is that the paradoxes, ambiguities and contradictions that readers encounter in their attempts to clarify meanings require that choices be made. Where rational, these choices are pragmatic. 5

A comment about how the word reading is used. In Textual Power Scholes (1985: 24) describes three textual strategies that, for present purposes, I generically call reading:

Each of these can be defined by the textual activity it engenders. In reading we produce text within text; in interpreting we produce text upon text; and in criticizing we produce text against text. As teachers of literary texts we have two major responsibilities. One is to devise ways for our students to perform these productive activities as fruitfully as possible: to produce oral and written texts themselves in all three of the modes of textualization: within, upon, and against. Our other responsibility is to assist students in perceiving the potent aura of codification that surrounds every verbal text. Our job is not to produce 'readings' for our students but to give them the tools for producing their own.

READING RESEARCH 5

I believe with Rorty (1980) and others that scientific texts cannot be decisively separated from those that are non-scientific or that literary texts can be definitely and sharply set apart from non-literary texts. Or, that reading, interpretation and criticism can be clearly distinguished from each other (see Cherryholmes, 1988b: Ch. 8). Any of these various categories can be highlighted and emphasized but I believe it is a mistake to think that they can be delimited and definitively set apart from each other.

Interpretation and criticism are employed in varying degrees in the following three readings. Mailloux (1990: 121-122) writes of interpretation and the interpreter:

In its etymology . .. 'interpretation' conveys the sense of a translation pointed in two directions simultaneously: toward a text to be interpreted and for an audience in need of the interpretation . . . . It is the heritage of these two etymological senses -translation of a text and translation for an audience-that we might try to capture in a working definition: ' interpretation' is 'acceptable and approximating translation'. Each term here provokes additional questions: (1) Approximating what? (2) Translating how? (3) Acceptable to whom?

Interpretation, Schole's text upon text, always, in Mailloux's sense, approxi­mates something and is directed toward something. Furthermore, the persuasiveness and acceptability of an interpretation is audience specific. The three readings that follow attempt to achieve Mailloux's three goals of interpretation by providing a reading - interpretation - criticism that is acceptable and persuasive in terms of at least one strand each of feminist and critical thought and one deconstructive reading. Despite the fact that the following readings have been generated by a white male I reject the idea that there is a 'correct' feminist or critical or deconstructive reading. I do not believe,-for example, that a 'real' feminist could produce a non-problematic reading that would capture the 'essence' of feminist thought. The task is to explore some of the complexities involved in clarifying meanings of research as a premise for belief and action. Scholes (1989: 6) writes about reading:

To read at all, we must read the book of ourselves in the texts in front of us, and we must bring the text home, into our thought and lives, into our judgements and deeds. We cannot enter the texts we read, but they can enter us ... . Such reading involves looking closely at the text (so closely, perhaps, as to alarm its protectors); it also involves situating the text, learning about it, seeing it among others of its kind; and first and last, reading requires us to make the text our own in thought, word, and deed .

One point of Scholes's comment for a feminist, critical theorist, or ~econstructionist is that we must 'bring the text home, into our thoughts and hves, into our judgements and deeds'. How might these readers bring home the text of Palincsar and Brown?

The study

Annemarie Palincsar's and Ann Brown's (1984) study, 'Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities', was one of the most, if not the most, widely cited and discussed educational research articles of the 1980s. 6 It was influential in stimulating further research on reciprocal teaching that has subsequently been added to the

6 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

repertoire of many classroom teachers. It draw.s upon Vy~otsky's (1978) developmental theory and the importance he assigned to social context and

expert scaffolding. 7

Vygotsky believed that a great deal of development ':as medi~te~ by.expert scaffolding. Children first experience a particular set of cogmtlve act1v1t1es m the pres~nce of experts, and only gradually come to perform these functioi:is ~y th.e~selve~. First, an expert (parent, teacher, mastercraftsman, etc.) guides the child s activity, domg most. of the cognitive work herself. The child participates first as a specta.tor, then as a novice responsible for very little of the actual work .... The adult and child come to shar.e ~he cognitive work, with the child taking initiative and the adult correct~ng and ~mdmg where she falters. Finally, the adult allows the child to take over the major thmkmg role and adopts the stance of a supportive and sympathetic audience. (p. 123)

Here is their description of reciprocal teaching that was inspired by

Vygotsky.

The basic procedure was that an adult teacher, working individually wi.th ~seventh­grade poor reader, assigned a segment of the passage to be read and either md1cated that it was her turn to be the teacher or assigned the student to teach that segment. The adult teacher and the student then read the assigned segment silently. After readmg the text, the teacher (student or adult) for that segment asked a qu~stion that a teach~r or test might ask on the segment, summarized the content, discussed and clanfied .a~y difficulties, and finally made a prediction about future content. All of these act1~1~1es were embedded in as natural a dialogue as possible, with the teacher and student g1vmg

feedback to each other. (pp . 124-125)

The way summarizing was depicted provides imJ?ortant ins.ight into how they conceptualized reading and text. I~ the followmg q':10.tat10n and those that immediately follow it they explam how summanzmg w~s taught, assessed, and their evaluation of the students' ability to summarize.

The adult instructor .. . assigned a teacher for the first segment (usually a paragraph) and the group read the segment silently . Then the teacher for that ~e~ment proceeded first to ask a question, then to summarize, and to offer a pred1ct10n or ask for a clarification when appropriate. The adult teacher provided the guidance necessa.ry for the student teacher to complete the preceding activities through a vanety of techmques: prompting, 'What question did you think a teacher might ask?'; instruc.tion, 'Remeri:ib.er, a summary is a shortened version, it doesn't include detail'; and modifying the. activity: 'If you're having a hard time thinking of a question, why don't you summanze first?

(p . 131)

This is how they describe their assessment of summarizing. '_!'hey. w~re interested in measuring how students brought order to a text by 1dent1fymg what was central or marginal in it.

The students were given fifth-grade expository texts .. . two prior to and two after training. They were asked to indicate where any of five main condensing rules could be applied. The five rules were: (1) deletion of trivia; (2) .deletwn of redundancy; (3) superordination, where a list of exemplars was replaced with a superordmate term; (4) selection of a topic sentence to serve as a scaffolding of the summary, and ( 5) znventwn of a topic sentence for a paragraph where one was not explicitly s~ated . ... The students deleted .. . all sections they judged to be trivia, and . .. all sections they judged to be redundant. They also wrote in a superordinate term for any lists. They underlined appropriate topic sentences and wrote in inventions when they judged that a paragraph lacked an explicit statement of topic. (pp. 133- 134)

READING RESEARCH 7

This is how they describe their evaluation of assessing summarizing.

The major gains came in the deletion of redundant and trivial material (33%) and in the importance ratings assigned to their topic sentences (36%). It would appear that the continual instruction during training to paraphrase prose segments by concentrating on the main idea did lead to a significant transfer to a quite dissimilar task. (p. 150, emphasis added)

The emphasis these passages repeatedly give to eliminating trivia and redundancy, superordination and 'paraphrasing ... by concentrating on the main idea' portray a quite specific view of reading and text.

Two studies were conducted. In the first study six students were assigned to a reciprocal teaching treatment group; six to an untreated control group. At a later time six students were assigned to an alternative intervention group that focused on locating information; six to a control group that involved practice with daily assignments (p. 126). In the second study two classroom teachers and two resource room teachers were given three sessions of training in reciprocal teaching and, with the exception of variation in baseline instructions, four groups of students were given the same treatment. Major findings included: (1) 'improvement in the students' dialogues', (2) 'improvement on the comprehension tests [that] was large and reliable', (3) 'the effect was durable', ( 4) 'the effect generalized to the classroom setting', (5) there was 'reliable transfer to laboratory tasks that differed in surface features from the training and assessment tasks', (6) 'sizeable improvements in standardized comprehension scores were recorded', (7) 'intervention was . .. [also] successful in natural group settings conducted by regular teachers', and (8) 'teachers were uniformly enthusiastic about the procedure once they had mastered it' (pp. 167- 168). This research article tells an impressive story. An intervention designed to improve reading comprehension influenced, in part, by Vygotsky's work was successfully implemented with 7th grade students who had been poor readers. Impress­ive gains were measured on a variety of outcome measures. During a decade of reports of repeated failures in us education reciprocal teaching promised future successes.

In order to keep the following readings of manageable length for one essay only the dependent variable will be given detailed attention. In the language of research design I focus on the construct validity, if you will, of the outcome measures or dependent variables, comprehension skills in this case. An extended quotation reviews this aspect of the research.

One daunting problem for those who would engage in the explicit instruction of comprehension skills is that there are so many putative strategies, descriptions of which are often quite vague. There is, however, considerable agreement concerning what the most important underlying activities might be . In a review of both the traditional reading education literature and recent theoretical treatments of the problem, we found that six functions were common to all ... (1) understanding the purposes of reading, both explicit and implicit; (2) activating relevant background knowledge; (3) allocating attention so that concentration can be focused on the major content at the expense of trivia; (4) critical evaluation of content for internal consistency, and compatibility with prior knowledge and common sense; (5) monitoring ongoing activities to see if comprehension is occurring, by engaging in such activities as periodic review and self­interrogation; and (6) drawing and testing inferences of many kinds, including interpretations, predictions, and conclusions. For the purpose of instruction, we

8 C. H. C HERRYHOLMES

selected four concrete activities that could be engaged in by novice learners and that would embody the overlapping functions contained in points 1 through 6 above. These were summarizing (self-review), questioning, clarifying, and predicting. By asking students to summarize a section of text, one is simultaneously requesting that they allocate attention to the major content (3) and that they check to see if they have understood it (5). In requesting that students compose questions on the content, one is also asking for a concentration on main ideas (3) and a check of the current state of understanding (5). Asking students to clarify requires that they engage in critical evaluation as they read (4), and asking them to make predictions concerning future content involves them in drawing and testing inferences (6). All four activities involve activation of relevant background knowledge (2). In addition to the four strategies, points 1 and 2 above were addressed by embedding the instruction in the context of reading for the clear purpose of answering questions on the text, and by discussing relevant background knowledge at the start of each instructional period . . . . In summary, these four activities were selected because they provide a dual function, that of enhancing comprehension and at the same time affording an opportunity for the student to check whether it is occurring. (pp. 120--121)

Reciprocal teaching strives to produce the orderly consumption of well­organized texts. The four activities of summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predicting are conceptualized in terms of more or less well-formulated rules and procedures for bringing them about and for their assessment. This research documents its success in producing the desired outcomes.

One feminist reading

Feminist theory and criticism, the topic of this section, and critical theory and deconstruction, the topics of the following two sections, are each capable of producing multiple readings of a text. 8 The reading that follows is, for the most part, a cultural feminist reading. The reader is again put on notice that each of the following readings is only one among several possibilities.

A few comments about situating the research. Reciprocal teaching is designed for students who have difficulty reading. Feelings of concern and care about students who read poorly is embedded in reciprocal teaching. The rural or, at least, non-urban Illinois schools chosen for these studies reflect this. Furthermore, some of their anecdotal reports indicate how pleased they were as their slow-reading students learned to summarize, clarify and delete trivia. Beneath the technical language of quasi-experimental research there is a sub-text of helping; this was not simply a technical exercise in instruction or research. Furthermore, the article used non-sexist language throughout; pronouns were almost always female. But it is difficult to situate the research beyond these comments because the authors themselves chose not to so situate it. They chose the situation and distance of social scientific research. Put differently, the salient context for the authors was the literature of reading instruction and research.

But feminist concerns extend well beyond avoiding sexist language. Carmen Luke (1990: 1) describes the task that many feminist educational theorists set for themselves: they 'have tended largely to focus on critiques of patriarchal assumptions and practices in efforts to document the politics and institutionalization of gendered differences in educational settings and discourses'. Patriarchy, a system of thought or social organization that is

READING RESEARC H 9

arranged and ordered by recognizing the supremacy of the father or male, can exhibit itself textually in a variety of ways. One way is to decontextualize what is written. Decontextualization is particularly male, the argument goes, and is related to the mutual reinforcement of a number of historical lineages: science, capitalism and the rise of professionalism, if you will. Western thought has been dominated by men, white men. Both pre-modern and modern (before and after the beginning of the Enlightenment) discourses and practices have been patriarchal but the power and insight of modern thought derives, to a substantial degree, from its basis in formal rationality and science. Attempting to remove a text from its private context by appealing to the authority of formal rationality privileges male visions because generally it is men who are in positions of authority.

Decontextualizing a text invites patriarchal dominance by denying the connectedness of 'women's ways of knowing' (see Belenky et al. 1986). Sandra Harding (1987: 9) makes the argument like this:

The best feminist analysis ... insists that the inquirer her/himselfbe placed on the same critical plane as the overt subject matter . . . . That is, the class, race, culture, and gender assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors of the researcher her/himself must be placed within the frame of the picture that she/he attempts to paint . . .. We need to avoid the 'objectivist' stance that attempts to make the researcher's cultural beliefs and practices invisible while simultaneously skewering the research objects beliefs and practices on the display board.

We have some general information about the cultural beliefs of Palincsar and Brown through their commitment to a particular type of research set in rural Illinois but it was not situated in terms of class, gender, or ethnicity.

At the outset reciprocal teaching attends to private context by focusing on relevant background knowledge, it ends with relatively decontextualized public outcome measures. Reciprocal teaching begins, they write, 'by discussing relevant background knowledge at the start of each instructional period', and proceeds by 'embedding the instruction in the context of reading for the clear purpose of answering questions on the text' (p. 120). The goal of reciprocal teaching was to find the gist, the summary, the voice, the story in the text. They elaborate, 'Thus, closing one's eyes (metaphorically) and attempting to state the gist of what one has read, and asking questions of clarification, interpretation, and prediction are activities that both improve comprehension and permit students to monitor their own understanding' (p. 121 ). Their first two condensing rules for writing summaries; (1) 'deletion of trivia', and (2) 'deletion of redundancy'; also contributed to the push for decontextualized and public readings. On the other hand, detail, even if minor or repetitive, contributes to context and ambience, encouraging, as it were, possibilities for connectedness. The instruments were designed to detect whether students could produce an 'essentialist' reading.

Outcome measures of success were decontextual and public. Students were to monitor themselves in pursuit of external goals. The four activities of self-directed summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predicting is not a 'reading [that] requires us to make the text our own in thought, word, and deed' because these activities are undertaken ' for the clear purpose of answering questions on the text', for summarizing the 'gist of what one has read'. U nivocal criteria that determine whether a summary is correct or

10 C . H . CHERRYHOLMES

incorrect are public. What is private are the meanings generated when the text is made one's own. Susan Borda (1989: 260) gives one account of the modern origins of this distinction in her analysis of Descartes' Meditations.

A new theory of knowledge, thus, is born, one which regards all sense experience ~s illusory and insists that the object can only truly be known by the perce_1ver :-Vh~ 1s willing to purge the mind of all obscurity, all irrelevancy, all free 1magmat1ve associations, and all passionate attachments.

Concluding her argument in a way quite at odds with teaching for 'answering questions on the text', Bardo (1989: 263) continues:

Recent scholarly emergence and revaluation of epistemological and ethical perspectives that have been identified as feminine in classical as well as contemporary writing . .. claim a natural foundation for knowledge, not in detac~ment and distan_ce, but in closeness, connectedness, and empathy. They find the failure of connecu~n (rather than a blurring of boundaries) as the principle cause of breakdown m understanding.

The presumption that texts are univocal opens the door for distance, detachment and the belief that all valuable knowledge is public.

Texts that deny gender present themselves as generic. They pretend to speak the truth and truth is gender-neutral. Authoritative texts are ?is~an­ced, objective, have a single voice (otherwise they would not be a_ut~ontat1ve) are value-neutral, dispassionate and controlling. Androcentnc ts a name sometimes given to such texts. It comes from the combination of andro and centric where andro refers to man or male and centric means centred. Sometimes androcentric texts are called phallologocentric (Eagleton 1983).

In describing her efforts to avoid a generic and patriarchal voice for teachers and students in the classroom Elizabeth Ellsworth (1989: 321) argues against the push for common, consensual, correct textual interpretations

What would it mean to recognize not only that a multiplicity of knowledges are present in the classroom as a result of the way difference has been used to structure social relations inside and outside the classroom, but that these knowledges are contradictory, partial, and irreducible? They cannot be made to 'make sense' - they cannot be known, in terms of the single master discourse of an educational project's curriculum or theoretical framework.

This parallels Scholes (1985: 6) characterization of reading, where 'reading requires us to make the text our own in thought, word, and deed '.

A feminist educator might try to use reciprocal teaching strategies in order to understand a text on its own grounds, without agreeing with an author at the start or finish, although the idea of understanding a text is not well understood itself (see Gloversmith 1984 ). Feminists might revise or supplement reciprocal teaching along the following lines. To begin with, reciprocal teaching would not be driven by the educational product and outcome of answering questions on the text. If the four steps of summarizing, clarifying, questioning and predicting were not dropped altogether they would be augmented by having students and teachers interpret the text in terms of their experiences. Because one of the readings dealt with snakes (reported in the article), students and teachers could describe experiences each has had with snakes. Attempts would be made to situate the text and its

READING RESEARCH 11

reading in the immediate setting of the classroom making the stories and the ways in which they read less detached and distanced. Also teachers and students could discuss and explore the differences between reading for information and reading for pleasure while noting that a hard and fast distinction between the two cannot be sustained - acquiring information is often pleasurable and pleasurable experiences are often informative. A feminist educator might shift the emphasis from instruction to education or the locus from 'out there' to 'in here' or to relational or interactional meanings that are constructed among readers, students and teachers.

Reciprocal teaching is patriarchal instruction (not the same as education) because it teaches students to search for the voice in the text and because it values public over private meanings. The desire for agreement on textual meanings operates to stifle intuition, ambiguity, difference, contradiction, paradox and dilemma, to silence much that is called feminine. The slippery problem of construct validity, assigning words to measurements, functions in this instance to exclude feminine voices. Readers who score well on reciprocal teaching measurements learn to summarize, question, clarify and predict the story in the text while feminist theorists and educators claim that the stories of the West have been written by men who have kept women at the textual margins or have only referenced them in footnotes.

One critical reading

Critical pedagogy is neither well defined nor constituted by a tightly knit set of ideas and practices. I ts references have included at one time or another: the different versions of Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the work of Jurgen Haber:Uas, phenomenology and ethnography, critical ethnography, various approaches to literary criticism and theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism including the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and feminist criticism. Many differences exist within as well as between these schools of thought. In this investigation I treat feminist and deconstructionist thought (one form of poststructuralism) separately from themes developed in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that only for present purposes will I call critical pedagogy when applied to education. The themes and questions that shape this section are shared by many thinkers and will not, with only a few exceptions, be attributed to any specific writer. . Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School argue that knowledge is not independent of human interests, work and interaction. When it comes to what knowledge students learn, critical educators attempt to disclose the underlying arrangements of social and political power and their justifying ideologies. Attempts are then made to trace how power and ideologies of power weave through the hegemonic values and practices of education. Because critical theory developed in a Marxist tradition many of its analyses h~ve focused on the effects of social class on schooling; a well-known and ~tdely cited example is Jean Anyon's (1980) study of the effects of social class m five elementary schools. Sometimes critical educators focus on a crisis interpretation of contemporary society and schooling, where critical is

12 C . H . C HERRYHOLMES

defined as 'being in or approaching a state of crisis', or 'charac~~ri_zed by risk or uncertainty'. Or, sometimes critical educators focus on cnticisi:n, ~~ere critical is defined as, 'exercising or involving careful judgement or J.udi~ious evaluation', 'including variant readings and scholarly emend~tions , or 'critical may also imply an effort to see a thing clearly and truly in ord_e~ to judge it fairly' (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary). One critical reading of Palincsar and Brown follows.

To begin, the study is to be praised because it reports~ successful method of teaching aimed at increasing the reading comprehension ?f poo~ readers and reading achievement scores are positively correlated with social class. Furthermore, reciprocal teaching encourages, teaches and allo~s ~tudent~ to speak. Students assume the role of teacher. But, as the femn:iist reading pointed out, reciprocal teaching teaches student_s to seek. t~e. meanmg_ of_ a tex~ . Reciprocal teaching does not teach interpretation or criticism. Its limited, if laudable, goals do not include, 'judicious evaluation' or 'variant r~adi?gs'. Because reciprocal teaching portrays a text wit~ only one m~ssage .it fa~ls t~ help students, 'see a thing clearly and truly m .order t? Judg~ it fairly . Palincsar and Brown might respond that their relatively simple and uncomplicated texts were basically informative and contained only one message. Only for purposes of argument will this point be grant~d: It has several implications. If it is the case that students transfer summarizing an? questioning skills to other texts as Palincsar and Brown conclude and if students learn that texts have only one meaning then when they encounter a literary text or political text or social text they will expec_t t_o find and learn only one meaning. Critical educators might argue that this is an example of the hidden curriculum in operation where poor readers are taught the use _of a restricted linguistic code in the name of increased reading comprehension. Basil Bernstein (1979: 4 78) writes:

Restricted codes are more tied to a local social structure and have a reduced potential for change in principles. Where codes are elaborated, the _socialized has more access to the grounds of his [sic] own socialization, and so can enter into a reflexive relationship to the social order he has taken over. Where codes are restricted, the socialized has less access to the grounds of his [sic] socialization, and thus reflexiveness may be limited in range. One of the effects of the class system is to limit access to elaborated codes.

Even if differences between restricted and elaborated codes are neither as well defined nor as class specific as Bernstein suggested, reciprocal teaching, as described, improves the reading skills of poor readers but does not develop their ability to use elaborated codes. . .

One critical interpretation of the effects of reciprocal teaching goes something like this. Teachers desire to do the best job ~hey_ can an~ he~p students learn as much as they can. Reciprocal teaching is effective in enhancing reading comprehension of poor readers. Reciprocal teaching is used, it is effective, and students learn to look for a single story in the text and do not acquire interpretive or critical skills. Because textbooks and other authoritative texts are products of dominant classes and groups students learn hegemonic accounts of social relations. If the ins~ructi~n is succe~sful students will eventually act on the basis of these dominant interpretations and explanations. The critic continues t~at . this. i~ g_eneri~ . social reproduction - society reproduces itself along with its existing ineqmties and

READING RESEARC H 13

oppression because everyone acts rationally in their own best interest and by trying to ?o the best job t~at they can. It is arguable that reciprocal teaching is a dramatic or undramatic example, as you wish, of liberalism reproducing privilege and inequality. Another effect of treating texts as uni vocal is to reify them. If the t~xt is regarded as material or concrete, as naturally occurring instead of so~ially constructed, then texts have power over readers. The job of the reader 1s to learn the text and if the text presents a particular view of the social order it is the job of the reader to learn what this 'natural' social order is and adjust to it.

It is fashionable nowadays to speak of teacher and student empowerment. Some might claim that reciprocal teaching empowers students. This deserves some discussion. For purpose of present discussion power relation­ships are social, political and material asymmetries or inequalities that induce actions by providing rewards or negative sanctions (see Cherryholmes 1988b: Ch. 1). If the relationship between a text and a reader is considered in terms of power it is possible for the text to have power over the reader when students are rewarded or sanctioned depending on whether they answer questions on the text. Reciprocal teaching promotes the power of the text over the reader. Granted it is often useful to accede power to texts because texts, in turn, enhance the reader's power in other situations from how to drive a car to how to cook an omelette to how to pour concrete. But there is an obvious downside. Feelings of alienation and boredom can result if students are always asked to adapt to external texts including authoritative texts that often express different cultural, ethnic and class values from those of the student. Students experience textual power when their interpretative and critical abilities tilt the asymmetries and inequalities between themselves and the text_ in their fa~our. Feminist and critical pedagogues share many assumptions concerning textual complexity and complicity in arrangements of social and political privilege and oppression. One distinction between them, although many feminist educators think of themselves as critical edu~ators and vie~ versa, is that each has a somewhat different agenda for seekmg the authority, power, themes, symbols and literary tropes in the text. The agenda of one deals with gender, the other with class. And some feminist educators (Ellsworth 1989, Luke 1990) point out that male critical educators tr~ _to tell them how to read. Patriarchy is alive and well, they say, among critical educators.

I do not deny that various combinations such as a critical-fem inist or poststructural-feminist pedagogy can be constructed when I descr ibe how a fe~inist, _critical, and, in the next section, a poststructural educator might revise reciprocal teaching. I do argue that the major concerns of each of these ~eaders often push in different directions. A feminist , for example, sees value ~n redu~ing distance and detachment in reading and constructing m eanings interactively whereas many crit ical educators argue that distance and det~chment are necessary if one is to understand and criticize oppressive social structures that previously had been taken for granted as par t of the 'natural' order of things.

. ~ _cri_tical educator might revise reciprocal teach ing not by removing or diminishing the steps of clarifying, summarizing, questioning and predicting as a cultural feminist might but by adding interpretation and criticism to the

14 C. H . CHERRYHOLMES

list. A critical educator might attempt to de-reify the text by explaining that it is, among other things, a product of history and power. Texts are never neutral. They draw our attention to some and away from other things. Those who write and authorize texts do so for a purpose. A critical educator might also push in the direction of seeing texts as symbols of power and would encourage students to look for power in and behind a text. This requires students to question the text: who is speaking? Who listens? What is written? What is avoided? Which ideas are proposed as foundational? What is rewarded? What is penalized? Feminist and poststructural educators can also push questions such as these although toward different ends. Students would be encouraged to analyse and criticize the justifications and values in and supporting the texts they read. They might be led to use elaborated codes for interpretive and critical ends.

Critical educators desire that students become critical so that they can help emancipate themselves and others from oppressive social conditions. Reciprocal teaching, however, does not foster criticism. It fosters textual acquiescence. It appears to be pedagogy consistent with what Allan Bloom promoted in The Closing of the American Mind. Scholes (1989: 125) put itlike this:

The great books of past ages, in the eyes of Bennett, Hirsch, and Allan Bloom, are to be mythologized, turned into frozen monuments of Greatness in which our 'cultural heritage' is embodied. This is precisely what Bloom does to Plato, for instance, turning the dialectical search for truth into a fixed recipe for 'greatness of soul'. The irony of this is that Plato can only die in this process.

Read the text closely, learn what it says, do not question our cultural and political canon. Critical educators, however, can appropriate reciprocal teaching for a critical pedagogy. After students learn to summarize one story in a text they can be taught that texts can be read and interpreted toward the ends of detecting the operations and effects of ideology, power, inequality, oppression and injustice. S.tudents can become critics and interpreters and thereby acquire textual power. Where reciprocal teaching ends with Palincsar and Brown permits it to be read as textual disempowerment disguised as enhanced reading comprehension. Where reciprocal teaching stops and what follows it is not an innocent choice.

One deconstructive reading

Deconstruction is the name of a form of textual analysis that derives from a particular logical or non-logical, as you wish, property of language. An argument that parallels an important deconstructive insight was made elegantly and decisively in modern logic and analytic philosophy by W. V. Quine (1953) in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. 9 This is rarely cited by deconstructionists (Wood 1987 is an exception). Exercising a fair amount of rhetorical simplification for the sake of brevity, one of Quine' s key points was that the meaning of a work is always somewhat up in the air because we do not have a clear characterization of natural language analytic meanings (analytic­ity) or synonyms (synonymy). If we only know the synonym of a word by referring to its usage then the meaning ('the thing one intends to convey esp.

READING RESEARCH 15

by language', Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) of a word is at the mercy of how the word is used and word usages change. This captures the temporal problem of meaning that Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most widely known theorist of deconstruction, calls deferral of meaning. There was another aspect of Quine's argument. If we cannot give an analytic account of meaning then we cannot give a formal account of translation. In translation, the meaning preserving substitution of one word for another whether between natural languages or between a theoretical term such as 'reading comprehension' and an observation 'observed reading comprehension', we sometimes resort to an indefinitely large number of substitutions, 'A means B means C means D means ... N'. Consequently, we do not know whether whatever A means is fully captured by B or any subsequent translation. This is what Jacques Derrida calls dispersion of meaning. Together, deferral and dispersion constitute what Derrida calls dif.ferance. Texts are, it seems, out of the author'(s') control. Language does not appear to be up to what we might ask of it when it comes to stability, certainty, or immediacy of meaning.

Authors often make rhetorical claims for their texts, in the present case about increasing reading comprehension, yet because of the play of dif.ferance the text itself by its own logic may controvert and contradict its rhetorical claims. Dif.ferance and the deconstructive moves it makes possible have a logical status not unlike 2 + 2 = 4 although the point of dif.ferance is one of non-identity and non-presence instead of identity. By itself deconstruction is non-programmatic and it is not possible to oppose it as one might oppose Marxism or the Republican Party Platform or the Pro-life movement. It is not possible to oppose deconstruction as a new orthodoxy because there is no deconstructive project to be orthodox about. It is yet another way of reading: it is reading for sub-texts, for textual contradictions, for textual blockages, for that which was textually suppressed, for that which was textually excluded. The issue is not whether to reject or fail to reject deconstruction as one might a null hypothesis. The issues are what to do with deconstruction and how to live with it.

Raman Selden (1989: 87) writes, 'Deconstruction can begin when we locate the moment when a text transgresses the laws it appears to set up for itself. At this point texts go to pieces, so to speak'. This means that the structural distinctions which authors deploy subvert themselves. Before proceeding to Palincsar and Brown here is one short example of how 'texts subvert themselves'. In his widely used and highly respected Foundations of Behavioral Research (1973: viii) Fred Kerlinger writes that the book

. . . is a treatise on scientific research; it is limited to what is generally accepted as the scientific approach . It does not discuss historical research, legal research, library research, cultural research, philosophical inquiry, and so on. It emphasizes, in short, understanding scientific research problem solution.

In asserting a structural distinction between what is scientific from what is non-scientific he introduced a problem that he failed to recognize, address, or solve. Kerlinger's problem: research procedures, practices and results must be interpreted (judgements must be made about validity, generalizability and applicability, for example); yet the scientific status of interpretation remains unclear because interpretation involves, at one time or another:

16 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

historical, linguistic, library, literary, or philosophical research. To draw the point out, all research occurs in historical context. Theoret.ical cons~ructs, hypotheses to be tested and theories to be evaluated are ob~ects of history. Furthermore theories of empirical phenomena, by convent10nal standards, are required 'to be internally consistent and not contradictory. Decisio?s about consistency and contradictoriness are made by appealing to logic. Logic is a branch of philosophy. The scientific/non-scientific distinction deconstructs. Deconstructive readings are readings that attend to the rhetorical play of meanings that authors often try to conceal by imposing distinctions categories and taxonomies.

Palincsa~ and Brown's research article transgresses criteria they utilized in their own research. They claim in their title that reciprocal teaching is concerned with comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities but readers are never told what constitutes reading comprehension or incom~rehension. This is what they write:

In this paper, we concentrate on improving students' ability to learn from texts .. It ~s generally agreed that given reasonable facility with decoding, read mg comi:rehens10n 1s the product of three main factors: (1) considerate texts, (2) the compat1b1hty of the reader's knowledge and text content, and (3) the active strategies the reader empl.oys to enhance understanding and retention, and to circumvent comprehension failures. (p. 118)

The third point makes this statement circular, that is, readers c~mpr~hend when comprehension failures are avoided and when comprehen.sion failures are not avoided readers do not comprehend. Absent an independent characterization of comprehension (nor, it should be added, do they tell us what constitutes understanding), how can comprehension failures be identified? Their proxies (translations of the theoretical term reading comprehension into observations) for comprehension are reading skills that presume considerate, unambiguous and uncon;iplic~t~d texts.

Palincsar and Brown measure a student s ability to detect textual incongruities in a way that superficially resembles one deconstructive strategy but they employ it toward a different end.

For six of the stories [of eight], one line was anomalous with the title; the remaining two stories made sense. Four of the stories, three containing anomalous lines, were presented on the pretest and the remainder on the ~osttest .... Th: st.~dents _were. tol~ to read each line and say 'yes' if the line made sense m the story, or no 1f the !me d1dn t make sense. (p. 134)

The operative theory of text explicit in the measurement requires. con­gruence between story title and story lines, that is, titles should not mislead one about what to expect in the text. A correct response on this measure is one in which a reader identifies an incongruity between a story line and story title indicating, presumably, that the story line should be excised from the text. In their research a faulty text has anomalous lines. If the question that they asked of their students, 'read each line and say "yes"if the line made sense in terms of the title or "no" if the line didn't make sense', was put to a reader of ' . 'Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehens10n-Monitoring Activities', where the line of text was the title of the article itself, a comprehending reader, in terms of Palincsar and Brown's own research,

READING RESEARCH 17

would answer no. Is this inability to identify story line anomalies to be attributed to the text of Palincsar and Brown or to the reader? A seemingly related deconstructive point that comes to quite a different conclusion about the nature of text is that given the play of textual differance there is no way to assure that well-constructed texts will not be ambiguous, contradictory, or sprinkled with anomalies. It is ironic that this Palincsar and Brown outcome measure foreshadows how the text of their research article deconstructs: the rhetorical claims of their title are neither congruent with nor supported by the logic of their argument and the evidence they deploy on its behalf.

Despite their failure to characterize reading comprehension it was incumbent upon Palincsar and Brown to measure something called reading comprehension. Their measurements of reading comprehension are re­viewed in the following passage. This is their translation of the theoretical construct 'reading comprehension' into 'reading comprehension observed'.

[l]n this series of studies, we decided to train the four activities of self-directed summarizing (review), questioning, clarifying, and predicting, embedding them in the context of a dialogue between student and teacher that took place during the actual task of reading with the clear goal of deriving meaning from the text. Each 'separate' activity was used in response to a concrete problem of text comprehension. Summarizing was modeled as an activity of self-review; it was engaged in to state to the teacher or the group what had just happened in the text and as a self- test that the content had been understood. If an adequate synopsis could not be reached, this fact was regarded not as a failure to perform a particular decontextualized skill , but as an important source of information that comprehension was not proceeding as it should, and remedial action (such as rereading or clarifying) was needed. Similarly, questioning was not practiced as an isolated activity, but as a continuing goal of the whole enterprise-what main idea question would a teacher or test ask about that section of t he text? Clarifying occurred only if there were confusions either in the text (unclear referent, etc.) or in the student's interpretation of the text. And prediction was attempted if the students or teachers recognized any cues that served to herald forthcoming material. In short, all of the activities were undertaken in the context of actually reading with the goal of understanding and remembering the text content. (pp . 121 - 122)

Comprehension, on this account, occurs when students engage successfully in 'self-directed summarizing (review), questioning, clarifying, and predict­ing' that are directed toward 'the goal of understanding and remembering the text content'. Because no independent measure of understanding was utilized, comprehension reduces to 'remembering the text content' as measured by successful summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predict­ing. It is instructive to recall their words about questioning: 'questioning was not practiced as an isolated activity, but as continuing goal of the whole enterprise - what main idea question would a teacher or test ask about that section of the text?' It is quite likely that the main idea question a teacher or a test might ask about Palincsar and Brown's research article would be: what is reading comprehension ?

Recall Mailloux's third component of textual interpretation: acceptable to whom? Students interpret texts when they participate in reciprocal teaching. Who is the audience for their interpretation? Palincsar and Brown propose an audience that speaks as one: what might a teacher or test ask about the text? Of all possible audiences and their varied purposes, reciprocal teaching students are questioned in ways that are particularly instrumental in terms of accountability and assessment and students are well served, no

18 C. H . C HERRYHOLMES

question here, if they can produce successful readings in terms of testing. Achieving this goal should serve students well because most of them are likely to spend many additional hours, days and years i~ school w~ere t~ey will be tested by teachers. But is not reading comprehension a more mclusive concept that can also be defined in ways appropriate for other audiences and purposes, say for audiences of friends or family ~r. ~or turposes of entertainment, emotional attachment or support, or criticism.

Reciprocal teaching is described as a way for stud.ents who are low on reading comprehension to start on the path of becommg mature readers.

Mature readers can come to grips with a variety of inconsiderate texts, that is, those that creatively violate accepted structure or those that are just plainly poorly written. Mature readers also read to learn, that is, they read to obtain content knowledge that they do not yet possess .... Mature learners question and elaborate t.heir own ~n~wledge and the content of the text, testing their degree of understanding by thmkmg. of counter­examples and testing possible generalizations, by attempting to apply the1r new foun.d knowledge, and by a variety of debugging ploys that fore~ them to correct their misunderstandings . .. As there is ample evidence that such act1v1t1es prove partlc~l.a~ly troublesome for the young and academically weak, attempts to instruct these act1v1t1es seem particularly worthwhile. (pp. 119- 120)

The reason they focused on 'comprehension-fostering strategies is that they comprise a set of knowledge-extending activities that apply in a wide range of situations other than reading; these are the basic skills of argument' (p. 119). As described, however, reciprocal teaching does not teach readers to 'con:e t? grips with a variety of inconsiderate texts'. Fo~ pres~nt purp~ses o~ly will ~t be granted that their description of mature readmg skills constitute~ the basic skills of argument' but reciprocal teaching doe~ not tea~h these skill~. Under the rhetoric of teaching reading comprehension, reciprocal teachmg pro­motes the teaching of technical and procedural reading skills such as summarizing and predicting. . .

Comprehension, at the outset the dominant te:m m. the~r structural distinction of reading comprehension/technical readmg skills, is repeatedly invoked but only addressed in terms of reading skills or processes or operations, such as providing a synopsis or questioning. Sin:ultaneou.sly comprehension is distinct from, yet is meas~red by reading skill~. Readmg comprehension is marginalized textually dunng the course of their resear.ch article while the purported instrumental operations at the textual margm, reading skills, are moved to a position of dominance. The Palincsar and Brown argument inverts itself where comprehension, a more or less substantive issue, is replaced by technical operational activities that are, more or less, issues of process. Substance is treated and translated ~s i:>roc.ess. The argument and evidence produce a revised structural distmction, technical reading skills/reading comprehension, where the former becomes the dominant term in the hierarchy.

An educator who values deconstructive rhetorics might well revise reciprocal teaching differently from our feminist and critical readers. A deconstructionist might revise reciprocal teaching by teaching students to clarify, summarize, question, or predict texts instead of diminishing or removing these operations as a cultural feminist might or o~ adding t~ them as a critical educator might. Following this, the teacher might explam and

READING RESEARCH 19

demonstrate why th~ gist of a story is often illusory and comprehension incomplete and partial. In short, the textual comprehension that clarifi­cation, summarization, questioning and predicting provide would be quest­ioned and made problematic. Students would be taught to look beyond the gist of a .story ~or the play of differance. The play of meanings in friendly as well . as mconsiderate tex~s would be highlighted and multiple images of readmg encou:aged. It might be argued, for example, that a line of text that literally describes d~n~elions in the grass also can be read poetically and figuratively as descnbmg dandy lions in the grass. Adding deconstructive rhetorics to r~ciprocal teaching decisively shifts the emphasis from instruc­tion ~o.educatl~n wh~re s~udei:its now see the power of the text as shifting and requiring contmual Justification and rejustification, authorization and re­authorization. Students would learn to deconstruct as well as construct meai:iin?°~' they would .learn to look for textual contradictions, blockages, ambigmtles and rhetorical/logical divergence.

The logic of the ~rticle i~vokes a diminished view of text. If reading skills that students acquire durmg successful reciprocal teaching intervention transfer, say, to the remainder of the humanities and social studies then the textual complexity and opportunities for interpretation and criticism from a Shakespeare play to a presidential address will be missed. Palincsar and Browi:i rhetorically prom~se much more in the name of comprehension­fostermg and comprehension-monitoring activities than they deliver. Their title suggests that reciprocal teaching helps students gain power over a text when just the opposite seems to be the case. Reciprocal teaching fosters textual acquiescence. ·

Objections and counter-arguments

It is pos~ibl~, of c~urse, to object to alternative readings of research findings. One objection might be that the researchers never intended to address interpretations and criticisms of cultural feminists, critical educators deconstructionists (that is, if we had any idea about how to elude deconstruc~ ~ive criticism), community watchdogs, or any other interpretative commun­ity or cla~s of readers. One response to this objection, assuming the premise is correct, i~ to ask why a conventional, empiricist reading of research, if one su~~ reading can be agreed on, has claim to privilege over a cultural feminist, critical, deconstructive, or any other reading - interpretation - criticism. It has been argued that the Palincsar and Brown studies were as much if not ~ore, about teaching students to read in a patriarchal, public' non­mte~pretative, non-critical, and univocal way as about how to impr~ve the readmg compre~ension of 7th-grade students. Lacking a persuasive argu­men~ that the Palmcsar and Brown research article necessarily requires and is restn.cte~ to a particular, say, empiricist reading- interpretation- criticism, th.at is, . it can be read correctly if and only if ... (fill in your preferred ~tlpulation~), the·n· t.here is no justification for restricting one's reading­mterpre~ation-cnt.icism to one perspective. One objection to the legitimacy of mu~tiple readings by way of searching for a 'methodologically­theoretically correct' reading- interpretation-criticism parallels in broad

20 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

outline other demands for a 'correct' reading, say a 'politically correct' reading. A demand for a 'correct' reading requires, in turn, justification for what constitutes 'correctness'. What would constitute such an argument? What would it look like? One might appeal to researcher or authorial intention but our access to intentions could only, it seems, be by way of researchers or authors such as Palincsar and Brown telling us what they intended. In their telling they produce another text which, in turn, must be read. How is the text of their intentions to be read? Again, we face the prospect of multiple readings because a privileged way to read remains undefined and unjustified. If, on the other hand, no claim is made for a privileged methodological and theoretical reading of empirical research then this objection is no longer in play.

A second objection might attend to the substance of these readings. It would go like this. Each of the three readings highlighted an approach to 'reading' that structured reciprocal teaching activities that, in turn, deter­mined the outcome measures. Put differently, these readings simply provided different interpretations and criticisms of the construct validity of the dependent variable. Therefore, this objection continues, the research text of Palincsar and Brown contained only one story, it was about finding the gist of a text. A response is readily available. First, reading - interpreting ­criticizing the dependent variable and how it was measured made it possible succinctly to review alternative readings of Palincsar and Brown, but, second, it also strengthened the argument. Consider, for the sake of conjecture, that each reading had singled out three quite different aspects of the research. Imagine a hypothetical study of reciprocal teaching other than Palincsar and Brown where problems were found with: sample selection (say , only boys and not girls were included, a feminist might notice), data analysis (say, only objectified variables were collected and analysed and not ideological under­standings of the text, a critical educator might find), and construct validity (say, measures of reading comprehension did not point in the direction of the authors' description of a mature reader, a deconstructionist might add). If three such readings were produced a defender of the univocal nature of research findings could, perhaps, effectively respond to each criticism individually and give the appearance that multiple readings can, in principle, be reconciled. One point of these readings is to provide alternative interpretations and reactions that some cultural feminist, critical, or deconstructive audiences will find persuasive and that cannot easily be reconciled, if reconciled at all. Perhaps there are cultural feminist , critical, deconstructive, traditional community values, and ethnic pride readings, among others, that converge. But convergence cannot be guaranteed. Choices often must be made. Readers must choose. How to read?

It is freely granted that seriously flawed research designs abound and that we would all be better served if this were not the case but this is not the point. The point is that even if each reader were to pronounce the research design acceptable the dispersion and deferral of textual meanings and the interests and commitments of different readers will produce competing readings that different audiences find persuasive. I concede that different readers and audiences will sometimes make the same recommendations for different reasons or even for the same reasons. My argument, simply put, is that there

-

READING RESEARC H 21

is no reason that I can imagine to expect that different readers and audiences of the Palincsar and Brown studies will agree on the same moves; they may or may not. The foregoing readings preclude the possibility of revising reciprocal teaching at one stroke that would satisfy these cultural feminist, critical, or deconstructive readings. One fix will not satisfy these disparate criticisms because each reading suggests that different changes be made in reciprocal teaching. A cultural feminist educator might try to diminish detachment and distance by trying to diminish or eliminate altogether the role of clarifying, summarizing, questioning and predicting. A critical educator might try to increase detachment and distance in order to provide perspective for students in reading the texts of themselves and their society and would add interpretation and criticism to the four key processing steps of reciprocal teaching. A poststructural educator might begin with reciprocal teaching as it is and proceed to deconstruct it by explaining and demonstrat­ing that uni vocal texts are illusory will-o' -the-wisps; there are always sub­texts and counter-texts and contexts and other texts. There is little (any?) reason to believe that these studies can be redesigned so that all subsequent readings will agree and that research findings will finally 'get things right' . This issue or problem or weakness, it should be emphasized, is not peculiar to the Palincsar and Brown studies. All research texts, it seems, including the one you are reading, are likewise vulnerable.

A third objection might counter by asking where one is to begin when working with poor readers. It is reasonable to begin, this argument goes, with a teacher modelling a 'straightforward' reading of a friendly text while presenting an uncomplicated view of text. Furthermore, this objection continues, reading a research article out of the context of its research tradition and discourse is needlessly, exorbitantly, and, perhaps, unfairly demanding. This counter-argument is well taken. It can be made stronger; imagine that each of our three readers agree that reciprocal teaching is an appropriate place to begin with students who are poor readers, assuming that such different critics could agree on this is by no means a foregone conclusion. Additionally, let it be granted for purposes of argument that reciprocal teaching is a worthwhile first step in teaching reading. This only raises further questions and problems. Even granting (our three hypothetical ~eaders ag:ee) that reciprocal teaching is an appropriate first step it is patently mappropnat~ (given the foregoing readings) as a last step in teaching reading. Reciprocal teaching cannot be permitted to have the last word on conceptualizing text, textual comprehension and reading. If reciprocal teaching is allowed to have the first word, this counter-counter-argument goes, it contributes confusion not clarification to education aimed at P.romoting reading comprehension. How are the simplifications and confu­sions that reciprocal teaching teaches to be undone and corrected? How are we to proceed from 'summarizing (self-review), questioning, clarifying and and predicting' to reading comprehension and understanding? How is the t~aching of reading conceptualized within the discourse of the research hterat~r.e on readi~g? Is there a last word or words on teaching reading? What ts 1t? Who decides? How are these decisions made? What is (are) the last word. (words)? Who gets the last word on teaching reading? Where is the teaching of reading comprehension to be discontinued? Or is it to be

22 C. H . CHERRYHOLMES

discontinued? Do the last words of the research discourse convey cultural feminist critical or deconstructive interests? If not, why not? Are these words, ~hether ~hey aspire to be last words or not, canon conserving or dedicated to patriarchy, or dominant class interests, or 'traditional' family values or to something else?

A fourth argument might contend that it is not possible, in principle, to satisfy simultaneously such disparate demands even if that were one's goal. I agree. It is possible, in principle, that conflicting demands of different readers cannot be reconciled. And, there is little reason to expect that different readings will converge with any great frequency . This objection and the presupposition on which it is based undermines clai~~ ~f privil~ge and superiority that are often made for conventional emp1n~1st readin.gs .of educational research. Three readings of teaching, each seeking to clarify its meaning and consequences, have been provided. If for present P1;1rposes of argument we can assume they are 'correct' in that reciprocal teaching means and leads to these different outcomes, how are we to choose among them?

Pragmatism and reading research

In one sense Palincsar and Brown's research on reciprocal teaching as well as the feminist critical and deconstructive readings of it are all pragmatic exercises. They each attempt to clarify the meaning of reciprocal teaching, they each trace out 'in the imagination the conceivable practical consequences ... of the affirmation or denial of the concept' to use Peirce's words quoted above. In a limited sense we are all pragmatists but whenever attempts are made to privilege once and for all a particular 'scientific' reading or political vision or rhetorical strategy pragmatism is rejected. How to read research? How to choose among the proliferation of meanings that our readings produce? It is at this point that the connections between pragma­tism and democracy about which Dewey frequently wrote come to the foreground. This is one of the themes of this final section.

Because the scope of pragmatic thought has moved beyond the early conceptions of Peirce and James I take the liberty of quoting at lengt? from three contemporary pragmatists: Richard Rorty, Joseph Margolis and Nancy Fraser. Richard Rorty (1983) has been largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in pragmatism. This is his (1983 : 160, 165- 166) preferred characterization of pragmatism:

'Pragmatism' is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless, it names the chief glory of [the American] intellectual tradition . ... Pragmatism . . . is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones - no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers .... The only sense in which we are constrained to truth is that , as Peirce suggested , we can make no sense of the notion that the view which can survive all objections might be false . . . . There is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to

it than before.

Pragmatism is not a well-defined body of thought and a variety of differences in emphasis and specific disagreements set pragmatists apart from one

READI N G RESEARCH 23

another. Rorty has drawn criticism from many sides because of h is apparent reduction of inquiry only to conversation. An argument to the contrary can be found in the critical theory of J iirgen Habermas that is also heavily influenced by Peirce's pragmatism. Habermas emphasizes that inquiry cannot be separated from its material context. Or, put somewhat differently, conversations are actions that have not only material as well as ideal properties but are situated in material circumstances. The material con­ditions within which we speak to each other prohibit some conversations and lines of argument, metaphor, image and conjecture while promoting others. The material setting of our conversations often exerts powerful constraints on what is said and what remains unspoken. Rorty repeatedly m akes the point in other places that pragmatists do not separate text from context but he highlights neither the materiality of text or context. Rorty's assertion that the only constraints on inquiry are conversational is easily interpreted to mean that the uneven distribution of power and wealth do not shape or influence how we read and inquire. Whether this is Rorty's intention or not I side with Habermas and have argued elsewhere that power precedes p rofessional discourses and the attempts within them to produce truth (Cherryholmes 1988a and b). With this caveat, here is Rorty 's (1983: 166) eloquent conclusion.

Our identification with our community-our society , our political trad ition, our intellectual heritage - is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature's, shaped rather than found , one among m any which men have made. In the end, the pragm atists tell us, what m atters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark , not our hope of getting th ings right.

Joseph M argolis (1986: 201- 202) ascribes three character istics to pragmatism.

Let us const rue 'pragmatism' as a term of art. We shall take any ph ilosophy to be pragmatist to the extent that it distinctly favours three doctrines. It must, fi rst, oppose foundationalism . .. . Secondly, ... our cognitive powers and our theories of those powers must be sufficiently grounded in reality fo r our sustained adherence to them not , as such, to entail the extinction or near-extinction , or related jeopardy of the human species . .. . Thirdly, it must provide for the cognitive success of valid forms of inquiry in terms continuous with, and dependent upon, the conditions of social praxis- that is, the historically variable activities by which apparently viable societies intervene in nature and reproduce their kind.

Pragmatists deny foundationalism, that grounded meaning and t ruth can be determined once and for all. How could or would we know if ou r beliefs are true? We would know perhaps by observing the consequences of acting on them. But this pragmatic test could yield contrary results on the occasion of a future trial.

At the end of an essay on Richard Rorty, N ancy Fraser (1989: 106-107) gives us her recipe for 'a democratic-socialist-feminist pragmat ism'. Here are some key ingredients and steps.

Begin with the sort of zero-degree pragmatism that is compatible with a variety of substantive political views, with socialist feminism as well as bourgeois liberalism . This pragmatism is simply antiessentialism with respect to t raditional philosophical concepts like truth and reason, human nature and morality . . .. T hen add the kind of zero-degree holism that combines easily with radical democratic politics . . . Next, add a keen sense

24 C . H. C HERRYHOLMES

of the decisive importance of language in political life. Mix with the pragmatism and the holism until you get a distinction between making a political claim in a taken-for­granted vocabulary and switching to a different vocabulary .. . Now, add. a view of contemporary societies as neither hyperindividualized nor hypercommunahzed. Con­testation, in turn, should be broadly conceived to include struggle over cultural meanings and social identities, as well as over more narrowly traditional political stakes like electoral office and legislation .... This broad sense of contestation allows for a politics of culture that cuts across traditional divisions between public and private life.

Fraser's recipe produces an insightful and powerful mix of democratic­socialist-feminist ideas. One of the last steps and batch of ingredients in her recipe is to 'combine all these ingredients with a nonindividualist, nonelitist, nonmasculinist utopian vision'. 10

Pragmatists believe that they and others must choose and act without knowing whether they or anyone else have 'got things right'. But assume for purposes of argument that it is possible to get the 'facts' straight, say in the matter of reciprocal teaching. The pragmatic task to clarify what the 'facts' mean, Peirce's original concern, remains. Feminist and critical readers contribute to pragmatic readings because they are attempting to clarify what the 'facts' of reciprocal teaching mean when they foreground particular aesthetic and ethical issues. Deconstructive readings illuminate meanings when they highlight the textual play of rhetoric, logic and evidence. Conventional methodological readings also contribute by exploring and criticizing the rhetorical and evidentiary force of research. Those who read pragmatically choose among rhetorical strategies that are feminist or deconstructive or linguistically or statistically structural or historical or rational or otherwise. Each offers insight. Reading to clarify meanings with an eye to consequences, forsaking foundationalist and essentialist conce_its, offers some hope of peering beyond provincial and parochial categories, interests, boundaries and narratives.

Now assume that a pragmatist provides a reading of Palincsar and Brown in light of the interpretations offered above and that our pragmatist agrees to a stipulation of the 'facts' of the matter: reciprocal teaching is effective in raising the reading achievement scores of students who read poorly. It is a teaching practice that contributes to an educational community where previously poor readers score well on reading tests. Students can answer questions on the text. They can summarize, clarify, question and predict the text even as they acquiesce to, if not openly endorse, patriarchal and androcentric views of text. Furthermore, reciprocal teaching reduces substantive comprehension to process and thereby marginalizes reading comprehension itself. It is possible that researchers who self-consciously read and act as pragmatists could choose to promote the acquisition of reading skills as reading comprehension and implicitly endorse patriarchal and hegemonic interests. But moves in directions such as these are limited because pragmatism rejects foundational and essentialist views that pat­riarchal and hegemonic interests advocate. Whatever else researchers and readers do when they read pragmatically they ask wide-ranging questions about what research findings mean for their preferred communities and ways of living, they do not look to 'get things right' . When William James (1907 /1975: 37) contended that the 'true' refers to 'whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief' he was not arguing that it is possible simply to

READING RESEARC H 25

wish subjectively that something is good or true. His argument was that we will be better off in terms of our goals, values, ambitions and activities if we look to consequences as we clarify meanings.

_There is a ?roblem: how does one choose among consequences of reciprocal teaching that run counter to each other? One pragmatic response would begin by making explicit to students, sooner or later that this view of text is driven by t~sting and would introduce to them altern~tive conceptions of text and reading. Some texts and situations suggest closeness others critical distance. Not all forms of text can be taught and explored at the same ~im~ ?ut teaching reading by ~ay of checklists of cognitive operations may inhibit development of alternative approaches to reading because summariz­ing, clarifying, questioning and predicting may not be useful when it comes to rea~ing poetry or criticizing the text itself. In the case of poetry these operations may lead readers to reify metaphors and symbols in the case of criticism these operations, after they have been learned, ~ay be viewed themsel~es as beyo~d criticis~. Feminist and critical readers who adopt a pragmatic.stance might see rec~procal teaching as a first step to teaching more complex.views of text and reading. On the other hand, those who would avoid pra?~attsm and hold to dogmatic feminist or critical or other programmatic positions put themselves in the position of defending their position of privilege. A deconstructionist point for pragmatic readers to heed is to avoid excessive rhetorical claims for reciprocal teaching.

One could g~t the in:ipression that reading pragmatically is simply a matt~r of collecting a series of alternative readings and interpretations and meldin~ them together. This is false. Pragmatists look to consequences. They pick and choose among the meanings their readings suggest on the ba_s~s ?f their purposes. If, for example, some readers choose not to promote cnttcism_ ~mon~ students then they will avoid approaches to reading that afford critical distance. This point is relevant to those who ask how reading pragmatica_lly links_ to action. When readers look to the consequences and seek to clarify meanings they are writing texts, as it were, that, they hope, will not only persuade themselves and others but will work and be effective when acted ?n. The texts that readers produce can be thought of as stories or ~arrati~es abo~t the world a~ it is and the kind of world in which they want to hve; neither kind of story, it should be added, is clearly distinct from the other. These stories can also be thought of as hypotheses and theories about the ~orld and the community(ies) they desire. One tests these readings and st?~ies wher:i they are acted on. For example, the foregoing feminist and cr~tical readings.may prove t? be nothing but fantasies; reciprocal teaching might no.t contribute to patriarchy and class oppression at all, it may well work against them. But pragmatists continually read the text of their actions and outcomes and repeatedly attempt to clarify what they mean. In this c?ntext connections between pragmatism and democracy are obvious and direc.t. _Those wh? would ~revent a search for clarity of meaning, who would prohibit alternative readings, who would halt the investigation of the outcomes of action wish to be dictators. It is ours to choose between democ~a~y and the proliferation of readings that go with it or dictatorship that privileges one or a narrow range of readings.

26 C. H . CHERRYHOLMES

One aspect of the relationship between pragmatism and deconstructioi: is relevant here. Even if texts deconstruct in some fashion, each deconstruct10n is not necessarily of interest to a pragmatic reader. Some deconstructions are simply not related to our goals or purposes or are so marginal and tangential that they have little interest for a pragmatic reader. A deconstructive reading can be an exciting rhetorical tour de force yet have little to offer that is pragmatically interesting. Sometimes a deconstruction says more about the political and professional milieu of the research, as above perhaps, than about substantive claims of the text although neither pragmatists nor deconstruct­ionists acknowledge clear distinctions between the two. Deconstructive readings are useful, however, in reminding us of the dangers of orthodoxy and seductive appeal of hierarchy and authority.

The connection that Dewey and Rorty and other pragmatists make between pragmatism and democracy is intimately related to decisions readers make when they seek to clarify meanings. Pragmatists do not want dictators to force readings on them. When readers try to clarify meanings new texts are produced and the texts that attempt to clarify meanings themselves aspire to be rhetorically persuasive. The Oxford English Diction­ary reports that 'rhetoric' has meant 'The art of using language so as to persuade or influence others; the body of rules to be observed by a speaker or writer in order that he may express himself with eloquence'. Whether our clarifying texts are elegant or eloquent is one thing but it is unlikely that we will be satisfied with attempts to clarify meanings that are not persuasive. If some try to dictate and force a text on us they are trying to deny our purposes, desired ways of living and community. Orthodoxy in research and reading dictates some meanings as preferred and excludes others. As we learn to read in more and more disciplined and approved ways democracy is shunted aside, often in the name of expertise and efficiency. .

Rorty (1991: 43) writes the following in response to those who desire fixed foundations for our beliefs and actions

Suppose that for the last three hundred years we had been using an explicit algorithm for determining how just a society was, and how good a physical theory was. Would we have developed either parliamentary democracy or relativity physics? Suppose that we had the sort of 'weapons' against the fascists of which Dewey was said to deprive us -firm, unrevisable, moral principles which were not merely 'ours' but 'universal' and 'objective' . How could we avoid having these weapons turn in our hands and bash all the genial tolerance out of our own heads?

Reading pragmatically requires tolerance and democracy. Pragmatists are not extremists and do not countenance dictators. Pragmatists are democrats that modern professions and research practices often seek to regulate and subdue.

Pragmatists are concerned about the holistic consequences of their beliefs and actions when they seek to clarify meanings, when they inquire into what is true (small t) and false, good and evil, and beautiful and ugly. The text of Palincsar and Brown itself kept acquisition of cognitive skills distinct from questions about what is beautiful and ugly, it left unexamined the aesthetics of reciprocal teaching and perhaps many who read it will also direct their attention elsewhere. But some pragmatists will ask if reciprocal teaching is a beautiful or ugly way for students and teachers to relate to each other as well

READING RESEARC H 27

as as.k which co.nceptions ?f aesthetics are implicated by reciprocal teaching and its concept10n of readmg. Because pragmatists are neither foundationa­lists nor essentialists they are sceptical of categorical and structural distinc­tions between, say, matters of cognition, aesthetics and ethics. These comn:ients notwit~standi~g, so_me pragmatists could interpret reciprocal teachmg as useful m workmg with slow readers, others could interpret is as an approach to be avoided altogether.

Reading pragmatically requires an exploration and combination of different ethics a?d rhetorics as we envision and explore meanings and consequences. Different ethics are exhibited, for example in feminist critical, ethnic and Third World readings where one is conc:rned with th~ effects of reading and acting. Ethics of reading attend to social values and outcomes, to matters of justice and fairness, and to the normative consti­tution of our social life. Rhetorical strategies of reading investigate the exchange of pleasure and power between readers and texts (Scholes 1989: 90). Rhetorical investigations of the texts of research seek to locate what makes them persuasive or leads them to be questioned. Research findings, for example, attempt to be rhetorically persuasive when they descr ibe research design., sampling frame, measurement instruments, procedures of data analysts and conclusions. Research findings are rhetorically successful to the extent they convince people to act on them. O ther rhetorical strategies are more closely associated with, say, literary criticism such as new critical structural, or deconstructive readings although explorations of research findings that deviate from more or less stan dard methodological criticisms are rarely encountered.

One may be tempted to believe that ethical commitments and rhetorical strategies are structurally d istinct categories. This would be a mistake. Ethical commitments implicate rhetorical strategies and rhetorical strategies, ethical commitments. Reading cannot be ethically neutral. Interpretation requires choices and choices cannot be m ade without reference to values and preferences. Ethical commitments imply rhetorical move.s. A feminist ethic, for example, will identify some rhetorical ex­pressions, arguments, symbols, aspirations and desires as more effective than others. Feminist readers, perhaps, are likely to be interested in rhetorics that look for sub-texts and textual multivocality, ambiguity , connection and cont.r~diction and be less interested in rhetorics designed to discover stability, convergence, hierarchy and consensus. The reverse is also the case rhetor~cal strate~ies imply ethical positions. Readings that employ th~ rhetorical strategies of deconstruction, for example, implicate som e ethical stances and not others. Deconstructive rhetorics require ethics that are anti­essentiali~t, non-absolute, that are continually expecting, if not exper iencing, co:"1struct~on and ~econstruction of meanings. Deconstructive readings re1ect ethical ~omm1tments that claim to be foundational and totalizing; we should be remmded that totalizing ethics of both political left an d right have been used to justify enormous 20th-century holocausts and atrocities. Pragmatic rhetorics require ethics that are non-absolutist, inclusive, tolerant and ~~bject to revision. Pragmatism requires democracy and the social conditions that make it possible. Connections between pragmatism and democracy are both obvious and elusive, direct and diffuse.

28 C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

It is an indication of how far removed, divorced and alienated contempor­ary empiricism is from pragmatism that questions about 'getting things right' dominate contemporary research while questions of aesthetics and ethics and culture and language and community are shunned. Ethical questions are rarely posed by empiricists and then are usually limited to issues of treating research subjects (objects?) fairly. Aesthetic questions about whether empirical research promotes beautiful or ugly practices and outcomes seem so odd that they appear to be almost completely out of place in conducting or reading research. Only an occasional reference to the elegance of a theory or explanation is found in the research literature and these rare statements themselves are almost always about the theory and not the practices under investigation. Questions of efficiency must be reckoned with, to be sure. Pragmatists concede that benefit-cost and cost­effectiveness questions that policy analysts ask are important and should be pursued but efficiency is only one of many consequences. When it comes to reciprocal teaching pragmatic concerns range far beyond cognitive outcomes in looking towards, as James (1907 /1975: 29) wrote, 'last things, fruits, consequences,fact', towards, as Dewey (1931: 24) wrote, 'the possibilities of action', and towards, as Rorty (1983: 166) wrote, 'community as ours rather than nature's, shaped rather than found'.

Conclusion

In some ways we have been pragmatists all along - in our research, discourse practices and in our reading. We have been choosing community and a way of life in doing what we do. Our conceit has been to claim an epistemologically superior position - some call it positivism, some call it empiricism - in order to deny, evade and exclude the instabilities, uncertainties, terror and responsibilities that accompany pragmatism. The emperor or empress, as you wish, of educational action and knowledge is not clothed with privileged knowledge, with empirical certainties, with grounded meaning, or with truth, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. The positions that have been called positivism and empiricism were always problematic. Increas­ingly it will be difficult to deflect the claim or escape the knowledge that we have been choosing our future as we have described and explained our past. We were unwitting pragmatists in our choices but not pragmatic at all in our arrogant and presumptive search for certainty as we have tried to 'get things right'. We have been and are choosing community and a way of life and not simply generating knowledge with our research and reading. We are responsible for the stories we find within, upon and against the texts of research. That has always been the case but the luxury of self-delusion, if not intoxicating, has been a potent and often pleasant sedative. It was never possible to deny the obligations of reading but our past is full of heroic efforts to read poorly. An inability to accept the obligations of reading always resided within us and remains difficult to resist. Good readers, perhaps, are always on the verge of looking into darkness.

READING RESEARCH 29

Notes

1. This essay. was init~ally presented in the Critical Discourse and Educational Reform lec~ure series organized .by ~illiam Stanley at the University of Delaware; it was last delivered at Uppsala University, Sweden in a seminar taught by Tomas Englund I th k the members ~f.the study group to which I belong at Michigan State Universit~ · Di:~e Brunner, Patricia Burdell, Douglas Campbell Kathy Fear Davi·d L b El. ·s· D II s . ' ' a aree, 10t inger

ai:ine ~ teven.s, and .Jaime Gr~nberg and Thomas Popkewitz and his study group at th~ University ofW1sconsm at Madison for questions and comments. In addition thanks are due to Bruce Burk~, Deborah Britzman, David Cohen, Mark Conley, Evelyn Fink, Scott Gates, Jody Hall,_J 1m Henderson, Sandra Hollingsworth, Wanda May, Carmen Luke and Bruce Vansledre1ght for comments on various drafts. Finally the su esti n f R b Page were very helpful. ' gg 0 s o e a

2. This view of reading pragmatically combines Peirce's (1878 1905) · f · h 1 ·fi · . . , view o pragmatism as

t e c an cat10n of the.meaning of intellectual concepts with James' (1907 /1975) emphasis on trac'.ng the practical cons~quences .of an idea. It is quite different, it should be emphasized, from the pragmatism described by Knapp and Michaels (1985) to the effect that a text means what its author(s) intends.

3. Arguments sin;iilar to t?ese pragmatic themes have been recently put by Robert Scholes. He to.ok the title of his book Protocols of Reading (1989) from Jacques Derrida 'He (J?e~rid~] says we need them [protocols of reading] but he has never found any that s~tisfy him (p. ix). Scholes contends that today's most interesting interpreters and critics employ a vague and ~lus1.ve strate~y that he calls nih!listic hermeneutics. It is similar in many ways to my combinat10n of Pe1rcean and Jamesian pragmatism. Scholes (1985: 59) writes

Herm~nei:tics refers t~ the search for truth or grounded meaning in texts (or the method or principles go.verning that search) and nihilistic refers to the view that truth (or grounde.d meaning) cai: never. be attained .. . nihilistic hermeneutics is indeed the paradoxical nan;ie of an 1mposs1.ble practice. M y own view is that we need some such name - paradoxical or not - while we grope toward some new protocols of reading.

4. This ~ssar is vulnerable, perhaps, to some of the interpretations and criticisms it advances at v~ri.ous momei:ts. Som.e might charge.' for example, that it is phallologocentric from a feminist p~rs~ectlve, wittingly or unwittingly oppressive from a critical viewpoint or full of contrad1ct10ns and ambiguities from the vantage of deconstruction. I am not 'willing presently to concede the substance of these particular charges; I do concede that this argument does not escape the kinds of interpretative and critical issues it explores with respect to other texts.

5. On this I follow Quine's (1953: 46) concluding comment in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'.

Carnap, Lewis, and ot~ers take a pragmatic stand on the questions of choosing between language forms, sc1ent1fic fran:ieworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic an? the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse. a more thorough pragri:at1sm .. Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing. bar~age.of sensory st1mulat10n; and the considerations which guide him in wa~ping his sc1ei:t1fic heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are where rational, pragmatic. '

6. I thank Richard ~rawat for bringing this article to my attention. 7· Extended. quotat10ns follow in order to minimize misattributions that come with

paraphrasing and summarizing. 8· L~nda Alcoff's 09~8) discussion of issues that separate cultural feminism from

P ststructural .fe~in1sm,. for example, provides arguments about how feminist thought can produce distinctly different readings of the same text

9· ~~e argument is. t.h~t <fuine's failure and the failure of. anyone since Quine's 'Two gmas of. Empmc1sm to characterize satisfactorily natural language analyticity or

~yno~yri:y is roughly c?mparable to Jacques Derrida's argument against presence or ~~enti~y.in ~extual meaning. Derrida's idea of differance, then, is one name for the Jack of

alyt1c1ty in natural languages. The similarity between Quine and Derrida on this point

30

10.

C. H. CHERRYHOLMES

is called on only for instructional purposes. That each took radically different directi?ns in their work and perhaps would not approve of the direction taken by the other is not

T~r~~~e~f Fraser's democratic - socialist - feminist pragmatism one feminist readin~ of John Dewey requires comment because some feminists TI?i?ht be tempted to. reJe~t Dewey's pragmatism, possibly pragmatism altogether. In writing. about Henry Giroux s utilization of John Dewey, Carmen Luke (1990: 13) argued that.

W . h k J dgement of the deeply embedded masculinist standpoint in 1t out an ac now e h d · 1 d t t f the Dewey's democratic vision .. . [its] incorporation into t e ra 1ca pe agogy ex . o f 1980s is no more than a dangerous extension - a dangerous memory -: of con~ept10~s o male individualism, power, and public speech disguised in the rhetoric of universalized self- and social-empowerment.

But the pragmatic production and consumption of texts need not be phallologocentric or masculinized or androcentric. Because pragmatism argues that we look to the .conse-

. · ·bl to choose not to act in ways that we think perpetuate patriarchy. quences 1t 1s poss1 e . · t d k regarding Cornell West (1989: 96) writes that, 'the kind of choices pra~mahs s ? ma. e the content and style of their work depends greatly on their historical s1tuat10n, personal aims, and sociocultural location' . In this connection he quotes something John Dewey (1929b: 846) wrote over 60 years ago:

Women have as yet made little contribution to philosophy. ~ut .when woman who ~re not mere students of other persons' philosophy set out to write It, we cannot ~once1ve that it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the standpoint of the different masculine experience of things.

Women are contributing increasingly to philosophy, literary theory and ~ritici~m, and educational theory and practice among a large number.of other areas. Femin1s~:lter.s are following no command or imperative to embrace patriarchy, to s~y the least. r er~1s ~~ reason for pragmatism to produce a masculinized and vulgar inst~umenta 1t~ .. ocia efficiency, patriarchy and class privilege need not be allowed to dominate our v1s10ns of community.

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