Gallagher, K. (2009). Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Stenhouse Publishers.
Reviewed by Kade Copenhaver
Who am I and what do I want to understand better as a teacher?
As an undergraduate student and preservice secondary English educator, I have infinite questions about my future. What are my students going to look like? What problems are they going to be facing? How can I use ELA to broaden their minds and support them on both a human and an academic level? Going into this read, I sought to gain valuable insight on how I can make reading relevant and worthwhile to my future students, especially in a time where already reluctant readers are having books stripped from their grasp due to book bannings. I wanted to find ways that I can frame or approach reading in my classroom that will allow me to have a positive impact on my student’s relationship with reading and writing, looking specifically for methods in which students are allowed the freedom and the flexibility to discover the beauty of reading for themselves, whatever that may look like for each student.
Who are the authors and from what beliefs about teaching and learning do they come?
Kelly Gallagher, a high school English teacher who has taught for over 20 years, believes that we as educators should be promoting students to become lifelong readers, digging deeper into the canonical texts of the traditional high school curriculum with a more constructivist stance about making meaning out of what we are reading. He is primarily concerned with the methods that educators use to teach, not what books they choose to use. He feels that all books can have merit, and that the classic texts that are often used in our classrooms (The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, etc.) need not be memorized by the students, but applied to their modern lives to make them relevant.
What questions or problems in teaching and learning does this book work to answer, uncover, surface, trouble?
In this book, Gallagher seeks to uncover why and how schools have inadvertently facilitated the demise of many young readers. He claims that through overbearing teaching strategies, teaching for the test, overteaching of books, and not allowing students to achieve “reading flow”, educators have effectively fueled student’s distaste for reading. The title of his book, Readicide, refers to the death of kids loving to read, and is the central issue that he seeks to address with his work. Seemingly killing the very thing that they are trying to instill, he has found that the teaching strategies and methods that are mainstream in classrooms across the nation are suffocating students, and not allowing them room to appreciate reading and writing for what they are: art. Uncovering ways that we can make reading less test-oriented and less daunting to approach for students, Gallagher aims to first define the problems he sees in plain terms, give evidence as to why they are issues, and provide very clear frameworks or modifications that we as educators can easily apply to our lessons.
What is their answer and how do they answer it (e.g., theory, strategies, examples, resources)?
Gallagher provides bountiful solutions to the questions and problems that he highlights with this book, focusing particularly on ways that educators can promote lifelong readers and mitigate “readicide”. One problem that he illustrates was that his students could not identify the vice president of the United States, yet they could identify literary elements of Lord of the Flies. This troubled him, and indicated to him that his students aren’t reading a wide breadth of texts, so his solution was to scaffold other smaller, more supplemental texts (such as news articles or current events) into the larger whole class texts in order to root them in their reality. Another problem that Gallagher highlights is that students are failing to give in to reading because teachers are “overteaching” books, having their students break down every single detail with sticky notes and annotations, leaving no time for the students to actually absorb the book as a whole. He claims that this choppy and over analytical method of teaching prohibits what he calls the “reading flow”, which is the state of engagement that a student has in a book once they are invested and have been reading just for the sake of reading for an extended period of time. He says that allowing students to read books with a “reading flow” will allow them to more easily glean the value of the book more than when they are inundated with meticulous line-by-line analysis. He is very centered around making reading relevant, accessible, engaging, and above all else: educational. He aims to strike the balance between reading for the sake of reading while also not losing sight of the standards and formal literary elements of ELA.
What are one or two quotes, passages, strategies that are especially worth sharing with teachers and why?
There is one particular passage that I feel really summarized both the issue and the solution that Gallagher is posing with his book, providing potential readers with a good indication of if they would like to read the entire book. It reads as follows:
“All students should be engaged in books they might normally avoid. This doesn’t mean it has to be an awful, reader-killing experience. If taught in the sweet spot, Hamlet should be a work that motivates students to take additional English classes, not convince them to avoid English courses at all costs. Hamlet isn’t the problem; the problem dies in how the work is taught (or how the work is not taught). Doing English is not the issue; how students do English is the issue. The question isn’t whether classics should be taught; the question is how do we get students reading classics to reach the sweet spot?” (Gallagher 92)
With this example, Gallagher illustrates the worth and the merit that these canonical texts still hold in today’s world, but he indicates that teachers are failing to make that correlation engaging or compelling for their students. He recalibrates the issues to be centered on the teaching approach rather than on the students, on society, or on the texts themselves, challenging educators to find innovative ways to make their content relevant and impactful for their kids.