Those who work with children and young people inevitably concern themselves with readers’ responses to literature. In fact, Louise Rosenblatt’s classic work on reader response literary criticism, Literature as Exploration first published in 1938 and now in its 5th edition, has served as a model for the teaching of literary texts for more than fifty years.
A group of readers together in a reading environment, often a classroom or a library, sometimes for extended periods of time may be thought of as an interpretive community. Although this is a community of readers, a particular reader’s initial engagement with a text is ordinarily a private event with meanings internally experienced in the consciousness of that reader and not necessarily shared. No one else can participate in that first act of meaning-making even if all are listening to a reading of the same story. If an adult intermediary is reading aloud, the quality (tone, emphasis, enthusiasm, etc.) of the reading may influence young people’s meaning-making. One fruitful area of research is to study responses to different readings of the same text.
Whether or not the text is read aloud, after the reading, the adult intermediary uses all personal knowledge about individual readers and brings all available literary, educational, sociological, and communications knowledge to bear in studying the meaning-making situation. The task of the adult intermediary is to help develop and maintain the interpretive community and to ensure that each participant finds both private and public space within that community. The intermediary will observe outward behaviors for clues to literary response, provide ample time for the experiencing of personal felt meanings, and encourage young people to enter into discussion with confidence in and respect for both their own initial meanings and those of others.
Once the process of meaning-making moves from the private to the public domain, the role of the adult intermediary is both to keep the discussion going and make certain there is time for reflection, to encourage young people to share their own meanings and to listen to the meanings of others; and, finally, to refer readers back both to the text and to their own lives in an effort to track their own processes of meaning-making. The entire procedure then is one of metacognition in which participants are assisted in gaining an awareness of their own thought processes as meanings grow and are shaped both personally and socially. There is ordinarily a movement toward some kind of shared meaning, but not all will ascribe to it. Even if it were unanimously shared, that meaning itself would be an event in time and would shift and change to some degree, even within the same interpretive community.
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