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I have just returned from the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) annual conference, and a term from keynote speaker Dr. Stephen Chew of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama stuck with me: the curse of expertise (or the curse of knowledge). In short, the curse afflicts those who have attained expertise and forget what it was like to be a beginner, someone who does not have a conceptual framework or vocabulary for a particular discipline. Experts who are cursed in this way struggle to communicate effectively with novice learners.
In another NADE session, Sonya Armstrong and Normal Stahl discussed the “fall of the field” of college reading. Among the factors influencing the decline of the field, Armstrong and Stahl noted the rise of composition-centric integrated reading and writing classes, often taught by instructors with little or no background in reading theory and pedagogy (and as I have seen in many community colleges, a dearth of resources and funding for professional development). Without that training, composition instructors—and content instructors across multiple disciplines—can easily succumb to the curse of expertise when it comes to reading.
You may have heard the language of the curse in hallways and faculty meetings: Why can’t they read? Reading is a skill they should have learned in high school. Once you’ve learned to decode, you can read anything. I am not assigning much reading; my students can’t comprehend the text. I know they can’t because they fail the multiple choice comprehension checks I give them. If they can’t read this, they aren’t college material. When I was in school…
But as “expert readers,” perhaps we have forgotten the journey that brought us where we are – a journey of misreading and revision, of developing conceptual schemata and lexical sophistication, of growing awareness of genres and disciplinary conventions, of connections and the pleasure of shifts in our thinking. There was probably a moment when we first began to argue with texts or smile upon meeting a familiar idiom or rhetorical strategy in use. But before that familiarity, there was surely some confusion or frustration.
I would like to make three recommendations for IRW instructors:
It’s so easy for students to see recursion, revision, and repetition as signs of failure. But we know they are not—they are the hallmarks of what we (as experts) do.
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