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I will never tire of my kid's astonishment and glee when he encounters something he read about in a book elsewhere: in another book, in conversation, in the world.
Been reading some early childhood literacy stuff and talking to teacher friends & they talk about how this experience changes kids' relationship to reading itself -- makes them into *readers* who then learn other things from reading and get exponentially more educated over time.
People in that field have been sounding the alarm about the demise of content education in K-5. Turns out that focusing formally on literacy doesn't work -- kids need to learn elsewhere about the things they then encounter in text.
It's clear to me that many of the university students I teach don't have this relationship to reading - they don't expect texts to connect to other texts, to the world, etc. Dealing with the fallout from K-12 curriculum has changed my English lit pedagogy over time, I think.
Been musing about it in the wake of @johannawinant's great thread on teaching close attention to texts. I think I used to do this kind of pedagogy way more ten years ago but lately I'm focusing more on making things in texts seem real & connected for students, if that makes sense
Also musing about it in preparation for our "What is Aesthetic Education" MLA roundtable with @ENOgden - (can guarantee that all my evidence will be drawn from reading to my kid and talking to my sister-in-law on the phone because I haven't read a book this year.)
