_Reader, Come Home_: Nurturing the Reading Brain

Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf sucked me in with just the blurb on the jacket: "[This author] considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection  as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies."

Critical thinking?
Empathy?
Reflection?
and READING?
Sign me up.

I was primed to love this text from the start, and then I read the first letter (the book is written in the form of an epistolary with each letter beginning with "Dear Reader.") The author makes some huge promises in the opening letter, and I can't wait to see how she delivers on them. Here is an excerpt:

        All these letters will prepare you, my reader, to consider the many critical issues involved, beginning with yourself. In the last letter I ask you to think about who the true "good readers" are in our changing epoch and to reflect for yourself on the immeasurably important role they play in a democratic society--never more so than now. Within these pages the meanings of a good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once describes as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one's own.
        There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader. [The good] reader—like the good society—embodies each of Aristotle’s three lives, even as the third life, the life of contemplation, is daily threatened in our culture. From the perspectives of neuroscience, literature, and human development, I will argue that it is this form of reading that is our best chance at giving the next generation the foundation for the unique and autonomous life of the mind they will need in a world none of us can fully imagine.  The expansive, encompassing processes that underlie insight and reflection in the present reading brain represent our best complement and antidote to the cognitive and emotional changes that are the sequelae of the multiple, life-enhancing achievements of a digital age. 

…I will suggest that the future of the human species can best sustain and pass on the highest forms of our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom by nurturing and protecting the contemplative dimension of the reading brain. (12-13) 

This passage alone raises an incredible number of questions for me as an educator and a teacher of reading. What's my role in cultivating "good readers?" How does that play out in my everyday practices as a teacher? How do I encourage my students to go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover their own wisdom? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the school climate where I'm teaching support lives that propel and sustain our students' becoming "good readers?" 

We're particularly challenged, as educators, by this concept of creating a life of contemplation for our students. There are timelines and deadlines and curriculum maps that all seem to propel us forward, but they don't necessarily give us the time and space for a "contemplative life." Gotta get to this chapter by this point in time so that I can get them through this material and have them read this next thing... (wording intentionally vague). It's not solely the system that forces this kind of thinking--it's also certainly the autonomous choices I make in my classroom to move on. 

The word that seemed to stick with me the most here was "nurturing." While trying to highlight all the details of our current book, I wonder if my pace, my checks for understanding, my trying to dial into the minds of my students during the receptive skill of reading is really nurturing their brains. I hope so, but I wonder... 

I'm guessing I'll be back with more references to this text. In the meantime, I'm off to nurture the contemplative dimension of my reading brain through some off-screen time.