Sam: It's satisfying because it's the kind of teaching when you're really responding. So it's very tiring at the time, but it's more satisfying because you can see people engaged. I think I learnt a lot about teaching, and a lot about reading from it, and seeing people move on, feeling more confident, reading different types of texts, how they were talking to each other, just the way they were talking about the characters at the end compared to the beginning.
Irene: Sort of developing their reading identities?
Sam: Yes definitely. The hard thing would be if you had really shaky attendance. That would be a bit of a challenge.
Irene: Yes, because then you'd have all the difficulties of trying to catch up and people missing.
Sam: Although, in our group, not everyone had actually read the same bit every week. But because they were talking about it, then they were all on the same page, they all knew where they were when they started reading on.
Irene: It probably also helped them realise that you don't have to read every word. To be able to read a book, actually you can skip bits and still get through it. How have you followed up this research? Have you done any more in the area?
Sam: I did a bit with the NRDC¹ this past winter, and for the Quick Reads² series. How reading for pleasure could work for emerging adult readers, and I decided to get in touch with existing reading circles who were using Quick Reads amongst other things and talk to them. I found two in the Greater London area, and I sat in on a session and talked to a few learners. And it was amazing, the same kind of things were coming up, and definitely what was coming up was that cycle - that kind of positive cycle of people feeling that in doing this it was altering their reading identity, or they got more confident and therefore they were doing more reading in their lives.
Irene: You've obviously followed up your first circle with other circles, and if other RaPAL members wanted to run reading circles with literacy learners, any advice that you might be able to give them?
Sam: Well if someone has a literacy class, they could think about the possibility of doing it even in the last half hour if you've got a long enough class, because the advantage of that is that it's not an extra commitment, but you can still make it feel like a quite different way of learning. I think once a week works well. So I suppose my advice would be to think through timings and what works for people.
Also in the beginning to try and set up an ethos or model a system where people feel like they can get themselves into a pattern or they're feeling supported, so they're not feeling abandoned.
So your involvement setting up a reading circle is to maybe give some ideas for getting into the swing of what you might talk about or ask about. And thinking about texts, not everyone has to really love the book, as long as everyone has something to say about it, and then all the discussion seems to be related back and forth to people's own lives. So even if someone really hates it, as long as they have something to say about it, it still works. And that discussion of lives is also a kind
1. National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy 2. Quick Reads are published books that are part of a campaign to introduce more adults to reading.
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