Theorizing Through Paired Texts
My paired text curricula, picks up on this actively theorizing reader model of literary relevance by encouraging students to take up greater academic agency in their meaning-making, and facilitating the application of theoretical principles to “real world” interpretation. Again, this pedagogical move necessarily operates on two registers for my two grade levels:
- For 9th graders, the active application of interpretive skills to the real world was more structured and direct. As referenced above, the use of a news article to problematize ethical issues in Ender's Game proved to be a cognitively rich task that imbued the text with new "real world" relevance.
- For 11th graders, I found a more cognitively appropriate task in building theoretical schemata through reading explicitly theoretical texts, then applying these ideas in the interpretation of a variety of texts. For an more on my students' work with critical theory, see my complete unit plan here, with an analysis of this unit according to this framework here. For a focus on the transfer of these frameworks from literary to visual media, see my analysis of those lessons here.
The goals of my paired text curricula, then, lie at the intersection of theoretical schemata and Meijer’s model of the actively theorizing reader. Synthesizing these models of meaning-making provides a coherent model for accomplishing the three goals outlined in the section, “A Proposed Solution:” Adding depth to texts through alternate perspectives; Providing a shared experience in order to structure meaningful and accessible interpretation; And building student agency through relevant application of interpretive skills to a variety of texts. Thus, these models provide a theoretical basis for my paired text curricula, and a standard against which to measure its success.
Click below or a complete index of my paired text curricular materials, student work, and other artifacts from my practice, analyzed according to my presented framework.