Cultivating Understandings Through Reader Response: Dawn’s Responses to The Things They Carried and When Heaven and Earth Changed Places

Each fall like teachers all over the country I face a brand new class of students. Each fall I wonder what we can learn and teach one another and how far along the continuum of a learning-teaching community we can move. I am a professor at a large Midwestern research university, but I try to make my classes as personal and practical as they can be in this environment by demonstrating “theory into practice” in literacy methods courses. I use reader response in my college methods course for two specific reasons. First, it allows my students the opportunity to learn about reader response from a participant’s point of view, and it offers them opportunities, in a nonthreatening environment, to practice responding to readers. Second, I use reader response to multicultural literature to help my students learn more about themselves as cultural beings and as future English language arts teachers in a multicultural society (Willis “Reading”).