Deep Reading : Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom

2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection category

Arguing that college-level reading must be theorized as foundationally linked to any understanding of college-level writing, editors Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau continue the conversation begun in What Is “College-Level" Writing? (2006) and What Is “College-Level" Writing? Volume 2: Assignments, Readings, and Student Writing Samples (2010).

Measurements of reading abilities show a decline nationwide among most cohorts of students, so the need for writing teachers to thoughtfully address the subject of reading, especially in grades 6–14, has become increasingly urgent. Curriculum and state standards often reflect an impoverished and reductive understanding of reading that views readers as passive recipients of information, fueling the widespread use of standardized tests to measure proficiency in English literacy, and ignoring decades of reading scholarship that positions readers in more complex relationships with the texts they read.

Contributors to this collection—high school teachers, college students who discuss the challenges they faced as readers and writers, and composition scholars—offer an antidote to this situation. These authors:

• Define the challenges to integrating reading into the writing classroom
• Develop a theory of reading as a specific type of inquiry and meaning-making activity
• And offer practical approaches to teaching deep reading in writing courses that can be put immediately to use in the classroom

Sheridan Blau is Professor of Practice and Program Coordinator in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also Professor of English and Education (emeritus) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he taught for nearly 40 years before his retirement in 2009. At UCSB he served for over 30 years as the director of the South Coast Writing Project and the Literature Institute for Teachers. He was also Director of the campus Composition Program from 1984-90. From January 2008 through the spring of 2009 he was a Visiting Professor of English Education at Teachers College. In the summer of 2012 he served as a Visiting Professor of English at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. 

Beyond the university, Professor Blau served as a member of the Assessment Development Panel in English for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and as Senior Advisor to the California Test Development Committee for statewide assessments in reading and writing. He is also a former President of the National Council of Teachers of English and has chaired two international conferences on the teaching of language and literacy. In 2012 he was named “Rhetorician of the Year” by the Young Rhetoricians Conference in recognition of his career-long contributions to the teaching of writing and to the development of teachers of writing through his publications and professional leadership. 

His publications include 5 authored or co-edited books and 55 articles covering the fields of seventeenth century British Literature, the teaching and learning of composition and literature, professional development for teachers, and the ethics and politics of literacy. His widely influential book, The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers (Heinemann, 2003), was named by the Conference on English Education as the winner of the 2004 Richard Meade Award for outstanding research in English education. 

Howard Tinberg, a professor of English (retired) at Bristol Community College, Massachusetts and former editor of the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College, is the author of Border Talk:  Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College and Writing with Consequence:  What Writing Does in the Disciplines. 

He is co-author of The Community College Writer:  Exceeding Expectations, and Teaching, Learning and the Holocaust:  An Integrative Approach.  He is co-editor of Deep Reading:  Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, What is “College-Level” Writing? and of What is “College-Level” Writing? Vol 2.  He has published articles in a variety of academic journals, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Change.  His article “Reconsidering Transfer Knowledge at the Community College:  Challenges and Opportunities” received the Mark Reynolds Best Article of the Year in Teaching English in the Two-Year College for 2015. In 2004, he was recognized as US Community Colleges Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and the American Council on Education (ACE).   

From 2005 to 2006, he was a scholar in residence for the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). In 2015, he was selected as a Museum Teaching Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is a former Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the premier national organization for college teachers of writing and rhetoric. In 2019, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, a book that he co-edited (with Patrick Sullivan and Sheridan Blau), was awarded the 2019 Outstanding Book Award in the Edited Collection category by the Conference on College Composition and Communication.