A healthy sense of skepticism when reading remains one of the most important lessons that my students take away from my English composition and literature classes. In a society that is increasingly bombarded with easily available information and misinformation just an internet search away, it is imperative to our intellectual, social, and cultural health that we learn to practice the skills of close reading and active inquiry when encountering texts of any kind. It is for this reason that I intend to create atmosphere in all of my classes that facilitates conscious awareness through skeptical reading.
After general introductions during the first class meeting for both my composition and literature courses, I begin the semester with a brief lecture outlining the practices of skeptical reading. The purpose of this lecture is to explain to students the difference between the often confused cynical and skeptical perspectives. Unlike the negative belief expressed by cynics, I teach my students that the power of a skeptical view that it questions everything. Furthermore, I explain that skeptical reading is practiced through respectful and open-minded discourse. Skeptical reading does not produce the unconstructive negativity and combativeness often associated with cynical belief. Rather skeptical reading starts by questioning one’s own position with just as much rigor as one questions oppositional or alternative positions. Instead of taking a defensive stance when encountering a text or interpretation of a text that challenges personal beliefs, my students are taught to play Peter Elbow’s famous “believing game” in order to more wholly comprehend other perspectives before forming and composing their own interpretation or argument.
While I do begin the first class with a lecture, I favor the Socratic method as a means for producing critical thought and engagement. In British literature classes, I do often begin with a daily sketch of the contexts surrounding a text and wrap-up class with a summary of the important points of discussion. However, there are times when I do purposefully leave students with more questions than answers. This is particularly appropriate and productive when we examine texts that leave us with more questions than answers, as occurs at the end of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats’s statement that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” fittingly remains an enigma. My students always recognize this during class discussion. By continuing to question meaning students discover that Keats’s poem resists clear meaning and aligns with his theory of Negative Capability, which is to embrace uncertainties and find comfort in the unknown.
Embracing uncertainty is not something that undergraduate students always feel comfortable attempting. However, a college education should teach students the value of stepping outside their comfort zone. One of the essays that I require composition students to write is an observational analysis in which I ask that students put themselves in an unfamiliar situation and analyze their experience. This assignment has produced a wide range of exciting and interesting essays, such as one in which a student wrote about her first experience volunteering for meals-on-wheels, one in which a baseball playing student joined his sister for a yoga class, and one in which a student who was raised Southern Baptist attended a Passover Seder with a friend.
By teaching students to step outside their comfort zone and employ methods of skeptical reading, I teach them the value of questioning the choices, beliefs, and opinions of others, but most importantly of themselves. To these ends my students are encouraged to ask of themselves, “why do I believe what I believe?”
leslie ann haines 