In this paper, Goldschmidt outlines a reading pedagogy for FYW, the focus of which is on the production of marginalia. To this end, she offers the reader two appendices as checklists in order to facilitate this exercise themselves.
She grounds this exercise in Michael Carter's pluralistic notion of expertise. Carter distinguishes between local and global knowledge. Local knowledge is domain specific, whereas global knowledge can be transferred across domains. The distinction is important because it enables Goldschmidt to push back against Downs and Wardle, for whom all knowledge is local. Goldschmidt uses an analogy to make this distinction stick:
Athletes talk about the awkwardness of initially doing certain movements and motions, but then point out that their practices always involved doing the isolated act over and over again, sometimes on special equipment and with feedback from the coach. Eventually, the correct performance of this general skill becomes automatized and then usable (transferable) in more complex actions unique to that sport. However, while dribbling a basketball may not be transferable to football or softball, the balance and hand-eye coordination skills necessary for both are. Core aptitudes such as balance are parallel to rhetorical reading skills. (Goldschmidt, 2010, n. pg).In passing, I might note the obvious allusion to David Russell's ball-handling metaphor. But the main point is that Goldschmidt turns to Carter to authorize her practice of meta-reading. To do so, however, requires that she first distinguish between reading and writing. While writing and reading share a lot in common, they're not the same thing. And reading is partly different from writing insofar as the latter is more tightly tied to what Carter calls local knowledge. Inversely, while each discipline has its own situated reading practice--like, I think I remember Carillo saying how, in math, sometimes it takes a professor his/her entire career to get through an entire article--certain reading practices transcend the disciples. Aside from drawing on Carter, she also makes this point with an example drawn from her own faculty workshops. Apparently, she had professors read a paper on Elizabethan drama, and, when they tell her it's difficult to parse, she asks them to think about what it must be like for FYW students. To be clear, when experts read literature on which they are experts, there is a certain situated practice they rely on. However, when those same experts are positioned again as novices (see Dryer 2008), they fall back on general reading strategies. As ought to also be clear by now, neither type of knowledge is more important than the other. But, since it doesn't make sense for teachers of FYW to teach content areas of which they are unfamiliar, Goldschmidt contends that it's our job to teach meta-reading strategies. What's more, her own annotation exercises are examples of such strategies.
Importantly, Goldschmidt observes a similarity between Carter and Haas and Flower. In Haas and Flower, the ten students they recruit for their study are all from different fields, and no one is from the field that the passage comes from (psychology). And what they find is that the expert students who have accumulated general strategies are able to not only ascertain the claims faster, they are also able to ascertain the nebulous claim two, which isn't explicitly stated in the text. In sum, what Haas and Flower call rhetorical reading is an example of what Goldschmidt calls meta-reading, and the former's findings--aside from corroborating Carter's claim that "'general strategies ... enable the writer to achieve some success in writing in a domain without extensive experience in that domain' (282)" (qtd in Goldschmidt, 2010, n. pg)--are sufficient to affirm the value of a practice of meta-reading. (Note also how Carter is talking about writing, not reading, in that latter quote. I'm not sure if you correctly navigated the differential nature of reading and writing in this article.)
I might also note a similarity between Goldschmidt's paper and Nancy Benson's, both of which rely on strategies of coding students' reading responses in order to promote meta-cognition.
I was also struck by the following question: why don't we do studies of experts reading texts on which they aren't experts?
Lastly, this article again hinted at issues of scaffolding. In Downs, it seems like difficulty itself is doing the scaffolding, which puts the pressure on which article you choose to read. That is, Downs teaches students skimming (Berkenkotter and Huckin) and content analysis (Huckin), but he seems much more concerned with disabusing students of ideas by treating students like pseudo-experts in themselves. You don't see anything like that in Goldschmidt. She doesn't apprentice students. The dyad is manifestly teacher-students, rather than apprentice-master.
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