Reading Aloud as an Act of Compassion and Resistance

Article

An open book, a shared experience.

If I were asked to describe reading aloud in six words, this might be it. We select a text that will capture and sustain our kids’ attention over hours, days, even weeks, twenty minutes at a time. The teacher leaves off on a cliffhanger as the class clamors for more. One student - you know who this is - asking to read ahead until next time.

Nothing I did as a teacher created more community in my classroom than reading aloud. It wasn’t only a literacy experience; it brought us together, similar to a family dinner. Instead of saying grace and passing the dishes, we co-created understanding with talk and time to think around a common text.

Our communities are now apart. We cannot come to the table daily and listen to the read aloud in person. There’s no audible gasp when a twist is revealed, save our own.

And yet through our digital connections we might create at least a shadow of the original experience. Maybe in real time with a video conferencing tool or asynchronously using Vocaroo. The distance between text and self has been traversed, albeit many winding pathways to twenty or so separate rooms. It’s not the same, yes, but so much better than what it could have been.

Taking the time to devote to read aloud is an act of both compassion and resistance.

Compassion, because we expect nothing of our students except to enjoy the story and develop understanding. We take on the work of decoding, offering our thinking when appropriate. Reading aloud also lifts a responsibility for parents who are trying to juggle jobs and home within this fog of anxiety constantly surrounding us. As well, for our students who are not necessarily “safer at home”, giving them twenty minutes of escape is an invaluable gift.

Resistance, because to devote time to reading aloud a story to our students seems easy, almost luxurious, as if we are not really teaching. There was so much expected of us in the physical classroom. To reduce instruction to its bare essentials frees ourselves up to attend to our kids and to the story. There’s no script for the pandemic; why stick to one in our instruction? Even if we do have to stay the course, our selection of the text for read aloud can surface topics that are omitted from the mandated curriculum.

Caring for our students too often involve acts of resistance. An open book and a shared experience might seem benign. Yet the outcomes of community created around ideas and inquiry are anything but.

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