Reflecting on the Read-Around

In my Teaching Writing class, we had two read-around presentations this morning. The read-around is a variation on the choral reading recommendations that Katie Wood Ray makes in Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom. In my assignment, students bring to class the texts they'd choose to read aloud in a classroom, and then, in groups, they use these texts to create a new text, collaborating in the writing of their new creation and then performing their text for the rest of the class. Typically, students take bits of different books and put them together, adding some text as necessary, to create a new story. Sometimes they use one of the texts as an anchor and incorporate elements of other texts into the story based on that single text.
I am always impressed with my students' creativity with this assignment. They combine the texts they've brought in interesting and usually humorous ways. They get quite involved in writing their text, and they often comment to me, while they're crafting it, on how good their group's text is and how much we are going to enjoy hearing it.
They are usually quite good performers, too, and the rest of the class enjoys hearing each group's story.
I have several goals for this assignment. One is to illustrate in a concrete way the bridge between reading and writing: when we write our first stories, we are more or less consciously making use of the elements of story we have learned from hearing stories and, eventually, reading stories ourselves. We often echo the style of the writers we've heard read to us. This assignment explicitly calls for such echoing. Another goal is to involve students in a collaborative writing project. Despite the clear need that students have for collaborative skills, many college students go through class after class without having an opportunity to work together to craft a text. I believe that teachers-in-training need to experience the kinds of activities that I recommend they implement in their own classrooms, so this experience prepares them, in a small way, to use collaborative writing assignments themselves. My third goal is to illustrate the performative dimension of literacy. Too often, reading aloud is something that teachers do well; children's reading aloud, in contrast, is not practiced beforehand and may be painful in its exposure of inadequacies. When students have worked together on making a new text and have planned how they will present it, they've had enough practice to perform it well. This performative element, the sharing of one's own take on a reading experience and one's own writing, requires real involvement with the text.
And really, the tendency of authors to write stories in response to stories has been rewarded in recent years with publication of books such as March by Geraldine Brooks, a novel that takes Louisa May Alcott's Mr. March of Little Women and gives him a past, and Finn by Jon Clinch, a novel that creates a past for Huckleberry Finn's Pap. The phenomenon has less formal expression in the world of fan fiction and in some gaming communities, where users make up narratives for their characters and even suggest modifications of the games. These are all illustrations of interactive, communal literacy, extensions of Frank Smith's "literacy club"--activities that exhibit and stimulate excitement about literacy.