If students need contextual pool knowledge for their writing tasks but that pool is shallow, the challenges are endless. But after some conversations and research, a plan emerges to make it part of students’ writing routines.
With the school year in full swing, the impending AP Lang exam is already imposing its unrelenting pressure on the gas pedal of our daily pace. I still find my students’ contextual pools of knowledge to be somewhat shallow, and I still see places every time we look at a text or a writing prompt where I might help them to deepen and widen those pools if I could only find the means to open the floodgates.
There are, of course, no floodgates for student learning. But thanks to my conversation with Dr Gina Cervetti, a professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture in the School of Ed, I do think I’ve found some other mechanisms to help deepen my students’ knowledge and approach to hard texts. She was able to point me to some studies about the nature of contextual knowledge and how it shapes things like reading comprehension and a learner’s ability to form new knowledge. Most notably, she pointed me to the extensive work of Susan Goldman and a fascinating meta-study by Courtney Hattan and her team.
Goldman’s work gets at the idea that every discipline has its own ways of structuring texts and its own epistemological approach. Students aren’t likely to know this unless those structures and norms are taught explicitly–this, in fact, matches up with some of the work we do in AP Lang with what Goldman calls the “metadata” of a text (its publication date, the background of the author, and other rhetorical information not necessarily provided within the text itself). This got me thinking more about some spaces in AP Lang where I could dovetail some new strategies for my students into the work of the class and hopefully simultaneously achieve my goal of increasing their contextual knowledge and ability to engage with complex texts while also preparing them for one of the major parts of the exam itself: the synthesis essay.
Synthesizing the synthesis essay (I’m a pun guy–you’ve been warned) requires students to read 6–7 texts that share nothing in common but their broad topic and utilize the evidence they contain to structure their own original argument about that topic. It sounds easy for an adult reader, but Goldman would see it differently: If one text is a political cartoon and another is a set of data structured as a bar graph, and one is a government document, and yet another is an op-ed…then a reader with little sense of the norms of any of those fields is unlikely to be successful at even interpreting the documents, let alone synthesizing a defensible position of their own from them!
And Goldman illuminates a second problem too. Students with no experience with the epistemology of various fields usually end up constructing arguments that draw on exactly the wrong sorts of evidence to defend them. They default to anecdotal evidence or personal experience or what they’d call “vibes” in lieu of the standards of the field.
So this all has me thinking that some of the observations Hattan made in her metastudy of how “prior knowledge” was engaged in various school settings might help me shape my intervention plan. She notes that prior misconceptions are also activated and can lead to deeper misunderstandings (one imagines this is how “chemtrails” remain a thing) which means students who believe they “get” a topic but actually misunderstand it are likely to deepen their inaccurate worldviews. Hattan’s study would suggest that some solutions to all of this would be various reading activities like turn-and-talk or jigsawing the collection of synthesis sources and asking each group to focus on one while being mindful of its discipline and then joining a whole-class discussion where the sources interact through discourse.
More interesting to me though is her notion of “augmented activation” which involves alerting readers before they read that they may encounter ideas and evidence in the text that will run counter to some of their existing beliefs. This worked better for undergraduate students than HS students in the studies she examined, but I have reason to think that AP Lang students may function intellectually as readers and writers in a way similar to a college freshman.
So there’s still a lot to process and figure out! But I think there are also some accessible ways offered in these studies to help me move my kids forward with their contextual pool knowledge without sacrificing the necessary attention to course content. I actually feel more confident now that I can use the course content as the delivery system for whatever interventions I eventually settle on. Whatever else I implement, I have already added the idea of a “contextual pool” to their own vocabulary, as well as the reasons why it’s important, so I think Goldman and Hattan would both approve of where I’m at so far.