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Opening Texts: Using Writing to Teach Literature
Reviewed by Joan Noyes, Student, California State University, Northridge
Calling all English teachers: Opening Texts by Kathleen Dudden Andrasick is a book
that you will not want to miss reading! Full of practical suggestions for lesson planning,
this is a book which will give you confidence as a teacher and will show you how to
give your students confidence as learners in your literature classroom. At the time of the
publication of this book (1990), Ms. Andrasick had taught literature and composition to
teenagers and adults for fifteen years. She was Co-director of the Hawaii Writing Project and
was an instructor at the New Hampshire Writing Program. For eight years she had taught
literature, expository and creative writing, and Advanced Placement English at Iolani School,
Honolulu, where she was department head. Since Opening Texts was published, the author has
earned her Ph.D and is now a Professor in the Department of Secondary Education at California
State University, Northridge. Her name has since changed to Kathleen Dudden Rowlands. In
Opening Texts, Ms. Andrasick speaks from experience as well as a high regard for students, for
literature, and for the writing process. Her insights and discoveries are well worth making part
of your approach to teaching.
Andrasick’s book is for teachers who are frustrated by their students’ predictable and
boring writing about literature. The author’s experience has shown her that when students write
for an audience of one (the teacher), their writing hopes to prove what they believe the teacher
holds as the one true interpretation of the text. They are more interested in finishing their work
and moving on to the next project than in truly discovering what meaning the text holds for them
in their own personal life. They miss out on connecting with the text and fully enjoying its
possibilities for informing their actual lives. Opening Texts provides real and exciting methods
for helping students connect with texts, and open their minds to all that the literature can provide,
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through the process of writing as a method of generating new thinking. This new thinking is
what leads the student to connect to the text and make it their own rather than regurgitating what
they believe the teacher is looking for or expecting to read in their paper.
Ms. Andrasick’s rallying cry throughout the book is to “Look…. and look again” (p.57).
Her challenge to the world of education is to teach students how to observe, to notice, to pay
attention to what they see and read! There is always so much more than meets the eye at first
glance. It is this learning to look and notice which paves the way for critical thought and critical
inquiry. One of the most important ways that Andrasick offers for learning to “look and look
again” is to share written observations with classmates, either in pairs, in small groups, or with
the large group. Her knowledge of the importance of the social element in the learning process is
a huge factor contributing to the success of her teaching methods. Collaboration is what makes
connections take place in the classroom! This is because “students find such classes to be safer,
more reasonable, and more productive places because they have a central role in the direction of
their own learning” (p.19). Sharing observations are what make them real and useful in the
minds of students. Students learn so much from each other as they are offered a glimpse into the
thought processes of their peers. Students are much more interested in really thinking things
through to share with their peers than they are in writing for what they think the teacher wants to
hear.
Audience is really what it is all about. Who will be the reader of what we write?
“Writing becomes a way of making and conveying meanings in a real, social context. School
writing grows more nearly to approximate the demands of real-world writing because students
must consider a real audience” (p.89). The implications of Andrasick’s book go far beyond the
classroom. Wouldn’t it improve everyone’s writing if they established an emotional connection
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to their proposed reader and wrote specifically for that reader? Andrasick’s writing made a real
connection to this reviewer throughout the book. Speaking of her students, she writes, “We want
them to chuckle with us at the human condition and to weep where our tears have stained pages.
We want them to enjoy the same pleasures- emotional, critical, and aesthetic- that we do when
we read” (p.39).
The way Andrasick proposes helping students enjoy literature is through very specific
methods which have all been tested in her classrooms. She has found that students working in
isolation tend to write to what they think the teacher wants to hear. She offers three specific
kinds of writing to help students get all they can from the text before they share with others.
Now working together and sharing what they have come up with on their own, their personal
observations are expanded and enhanced. Their final writing will show their interest in their
reader and their personal connection to the text. This is what makes writing clear and enjoyable.
Andrasick stresses throughout Opening Texts that writing is communication with the purpose of
getting across one’s ideas to a real reader. The writer has a responsibility to the reader, and it is
the three specific kinds of writing: the dialogue journal, the process log, and the reading response
which enable the writer to organize and understand their thoughts, in order to be able to distance
him or herself from the text enough to be able to clearly communicate their thoughts to their
proposed reader.
With the dialogue journal, students first write, on the left side of the page, observations
and quotations from the text. This column could be called “what the book says” (p.45). On the
right side of the page, students write about these observations, and thus engage in conversation
with themselves as they interpret what they have read. This side of the page could be called
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“what I say” (p.45).This interpretation allows some distancing from the text, after having been
immersed in it while writing the left side of the page.
The second method of writing is called the process log. This can be written after reading
a text, and being given prompts from the teacher such as, “What did you understand or feel after
your reading?” / “What questions do you have?” / “What words/phrases were confusing, helped
your understanding, had particular importance, and why?” (p.60). Andrasick writes, “Generating
questions, a reader can return to the text for evidence that might suggest some answers” (p.63).
Process logs give students confidence, and confidence is what makes a good reader. If a student
has the freedom to express their confusion or even hostility toward a text, they are freed to
further explore deeper meanings and clear up confusion, often erasing their hostility. As the
students read and write about the text, they progress in their understanding and therefore their
appreciation of what they read.
The third method Andrasick offers is the reading response. This is where the student
starts writing about a text and doesn’t remove the pen from the page for at least 10 minutes. The
pen keeps moving and thoughts keep pouring out. Grammar and mechanics are not what is
important here. Rather, it is the moving pen which allows many original thoughts to spill out
upon the page, thoughts writers did not even know they had. Also, “they find that writing helps
them locate and retrieve information from long-term memory that might otherwise have been
inaccessible to their reading of a particular text. They learn to use the generative powers of
language” (p.92). “The reading response also gives students an opportunity to connect reading
with personal experience…. Emotional connections should not be undervalued or labeled
frivolous. A work that fails to move us also fails to compel our attention and will quickly fade
from view,” Andrasick writes (p.72).
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A reading response also enables a student “to explore the possibility that her initial
response might have been unfair or limiting” (p.75). Reading responses are great springboards
for conversation about literature, and “the conversation begins with a student’s text and with a
student’s concerns,” Andrasick observes (p.80).These important conversations can take place
between two people, in a small group, or in a larger one. “Temporarily frozen by the act of
writing, the literary experience becomes an available subject for discussion” (p.78).
It is these important critical conversations which enable students to understand and
appreciate literature enough to make texts their own, both fiction and poetry. So many students
say that they hate poetry. If only they could have had Kathleen Andrasick as their literature
teacher! Luckily she has written Opening Texts! Teachers reading this useful book will be able
to reduce by great numbers those students who say they hate literature in general or who hate
poetry in particular, by following Andrasick’s prescriptions for injecting new life into literature
classrooms. This refreshing book offers much hope to the world of secondary education! The
very specific and easy to follow ideas offered in the book are solidly grounded in knowledge of
human growth and development and in learning theory. They are based on years of experience
in real classrooms.
The ideas in Opening Texts also have fantastic implications for students with many
different kinds of learning styles. What the world of education once saw or in many cases still
sees as learning disabilities are often differences in learning styles. Andrasick’s literature
classrooms have for years been a place where students with many different learning styles can
learn in their own individual ways as students are offered varied experiences in reading, writing,
talking, and listening.
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Opening Texts: Using Writing to Teach Literature is so aptly titled. Kathleen
Andrasick’s methods truly allow students to understand, appreciate, and make texts their own for
life by using writing to make individual connections to literature.
Kathleen Dudden Andrasick. 1990. Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Heinemann
Educational Books. 208 pp. Docutech OPI 2006.