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A thinking routine that can help you identify 'transformation' as a concept, where it may be present in a text you're reading etc. :))

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Transformation is possible through the PLOT of a story

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Transformation is possible through the PLOT of a story

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What guiding questions can you think of that might lead students to unpack your concept when reading a text?

What stands out to you? How is this text transformed by your eyes?

How has this text been transformed through different cultural viewpoints? (e.g. The Satanic Verses)

How has this text been changed through time?

If you were the represent a character/the text itself in an object, what object would that be? Go with your gut feeling! Now- why that object?

Has this book changed your opinion of a preconceived culture/idea/view of yours? Was that previous view from your own personal inputs (e.g. family's opinion)?

How has the protagonist matured throughout the text? What caused this change - psychological, physical, etc?

What do you think the author's main aim was in writing this text? Was it to address a bigger issue? (e.g. Animal Farm by George Orwell)

How has your understanding of a particular character/event in the text been transformed? Has this transformed your perspective on issues outside the text?

What allusions, references or other concepts have been transformed in the text? How do these connections relate to the original text? Do they alter or transform something about the original text?

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What is the interplay between author, text and concept (how do they affect each other)?

The three concepts of author, text, and transformation, are constantly affecting one another. The text is affected by the author, seeing as the author has control over the text. The author is able to transform the text through influences of their own life, other literary texts, and their perspective. The text can, in turn, affect the author, maybe through prompting the author to reflect on and transform their ideas, opinions, and actions. Whilst in the process of transformation, the author may be able to identify deeper meaning or connections in other literary works.

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I'm often asked if the questions I publish here are "real." That is, do teachers, really ask me these things? The questions definitely are real. Though they come to me in a variety of ways.

Not long ago a colleague contacted me for my advice on a question she'd been asked. She was surprised to see that one show up on my blog. Other times, I might be giving a talk and a question comes from the audience. I remember it later and answer it again for you.

This week's "question" is less a query than a confluence of two recent experiences.

First event: The Washington Post told the story of Sara Holbrook, an author, whose poetry is included in Texas's state reading test. Ms. Holbrook was chagrined to find that she couldn't answer all the questions about her own poems. Part of the problem was that one question was about the implications of the poem's structure, but in printing the poem the publisher screwed up the formatting. One shouldn't need the original author to fix that kind of mistake.

The more interesting concern was with another question that asked about the meaning of a particular simile Ms. Holbrook had used. She thought there were multiple answers that could be acceptable and chided the test makers.

I came across all this from a tweet from my good buddy, Kylene Beers (please don't judge her for that). She posted it and various educators weighed in about the futility of testing. Despite my recent rant about how we misuse testing, I picked a fight, pointing out that in various interpretive communities, once a text is "published" the author has no more say in what it means than anyone else. Kylene's followers evidently were not amused.

Second event: I was working on a curriculum project, and I had to compose some stories to use in the lessons. My wife, Cyndie, was helping me and at some point we got in an argument over the meaning of one of the stories. She believed that it carried one theme and I thought another.

After we had banged at each other for a while, she started laughing. "What's so funny?" I asked.

Her response: "I'm arguing with the author about what his story is suppose to mean." Once she stopped laughing, she suggested that I write about this on my blog.

The issue is this: who owns meaning and what does it matter who owns it if we are trying to teach kids to read and interpret texts?

Many years ago, I studied kids' conceptions of authors and their role in reading comprehension and text interpretation. In doing that work, I read a great deal of literary criticism, and was surprised to find not everyone was as excited as me about having readers think about authors. In fact, many literary critics thought it was a singularly foolish idea.

The New Critics, the Post-Structuralists, the Communities of Meaning groups all rejected the author's primacy. While some authorities (e.g., Louise Rosenblatt) seemed not so much aimed at banishing the author as treating him/her as a minor irrelevancy, others, like Michel Foucault, went so far as declaring the author to be dead (a position Foucault recanted later).

My point isn't that since many experts reject the importance of author in interpretation that we should too. I'm only pointing out that it is contested ground.

In contrast to the anti-author group are those who champion the idea that readers must construct author persona from a text, or those, like E.D. Hirsch who have made the argument that readers are ethically responsible for trying to honor the author's meaning - rather than simply constructing any meaning they might choose.

There are at least a couple of ways of considering these arguments about meaning within reading instruction. One simple thing to do would be to pooh-pooh it all as trivial; we are talking about the interpretation of literature right. Does it really matter, in the whole mix of things, whether we think about authors or not?

I can't do that because we aren't just (that is an ironic italicization) talking about literature. The world may not be disrupted much whether I grasp the true meaning that Robert Frost crafted into "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," but there are text interpretations that do matter materially. I remember Stanley Fish providing a seminar to Supreme Court Justices concerning the futility of trying to grasp the "original intent" of the Founders. Do laws mean what the words say or what the authors might have meant when they wrote those words?

You might not care whether I think Frost's poem is about death or Santa Claus, but you might care a lot about Justice Robert's take on what the U. S. Constitution has to say about reproductive rights or gun control. Those issues turn on where the meaning resides - in the text, in the reader, or in the original author.

I tend to fall on the conservative side of such arguments ... that is, I tend to believe that authors try to communicate with readers, and that our job as readers is to try to figure out what the author meant to communicate. Like Hirsch, I see it as a matter of ethics. To turn someone's words to your own purposes is very similar to using other people for your own purposes.

Not only do I think thoughtful reading considers what an author was trying to convey, I believe that much of our ability to argue back with a text is bound up in our perception that the words represent another person; another fallible person with a point of view that may be wrong.

I'm one of those readers who luxuriate in an author's voice (when I read E. B. White, I slow to "hear" his flat, unemotional accent - a bit of New York, a bit of Maine).

However, those things do not render me ignorant of the ultimate impossibility of ever grasping another person's meaning with full certainty. Language is too imperfect for that.

Doesn't that argue for simply asking an author what she meant? Perhaps, but as Fish has pointed out, authors err; they change their minds; they forget; they have a subconscious; they have ulterior motives for nurturing or dispelling ambiguity. Maybe Ms. Holbrook doesn't like tests and was willing to twist her original meaning to make a political point. Or, perhaps she had second thoughts about getting paid by a test company. Ultimately, you just can't trust authors.

I buy the ethical argument that we should try to honor an author's words - considering not just multiple interpretations, but which one the author may have intended; it appeals to my sense of decency. But, I also accept the idea that multiple interpretations will usually be possible, and that once a work is shared, the author surrenders his or her authority over the "meaning" of the text. Now it belongs to all of us, including the people who make up test questions.

Okay, that's part one. Next time I'll provide some practical ideas about how teachers may best enable this dual approach to interpretation: how to teach kids to be sensitive to authors and true to what those authors probably tried to mean; and, also, how to ignore an author, appropriately, when trying to develop one's own interpretation.

I not only can talk out of both sides of my mouth, I can teach that way.

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Who Has Authority Over Meaning: Authors or Readers? | Reading Rockets

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I'm often asked if the questions I publish here are "real." That is, do teachers, really ask me these things? The questions definitely are real. Though they come to me in a variety of ways. Not long ago a colleague contacted me for my advice on a question she'd been asked.

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What would this concept look like in literature? How would it manifest?

It would depend on the book. It appears every time someone new reads or revisits a book, as their eyes transform the text. Think about how your friend reads a book, tells you it's good and you should read it. You do, and your favourite part is the commentary you see through the techniques used about humanity. Your friend is surprised but pleased- they liked character relationships and the character progression the most. Nobody reads the same text in exactly the same way.

Texts themselves can be transformed also- through time, change in culture, etc. A motto's direct correlation with real-time problems can change as solutions arise.

So far these are external sources transforming a text, but the texts themselves can transform each other through their connections to one another. The transformation of elements between texts and/or real-life may manifest itself in some literary techniques such as allusion (whether historical, literary or religious), direct reference or an echo.

Books can be transformed literally through translation.

Additionally, texts can change the real world through their impact on readers, whether through emotional or intellectual connection.

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Examples of TRANSFORMATION within literature

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Examples of TRANSFORMATION within literature

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Can you think of previous examples of literature you have studied and discuss how the concept may have been present in these?

Anika
Within a span of two months, I had read two different books that were at my disposal: the first was I am Malala, that my mother bought for me randomly; and the other being The Kite Runner, that I had filched from my sister's collection. Malala's birthplace of Pakistan and the setting of the latter book of Afghanistan is quite different culturally. Geographically, the countries share borders. Both of their languages use Arabic scripture. Both countries are Islamic, hence the shared main theme between the books - the Taliban, which tried to take military control of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. A notable difference is that I am Malala is non-fiction. However, Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner, claims that the protagonist's childhood mirrored his own in Afghanistan. I am Malala explains the rise of power and impact of the Taliban in great detail, whereas the terrorist group's presence is not as pronounced in the fiction book of The Kite Runner. The books are constantly revisited by violence and met with reoccurring fear.

It can be said that in The Kite Runner the same experience of Malala's was transformed to iterate a different aesthetic and even to address some different concepts through the same main themes.

How has this transformed me?
On the opposite side of Pakistan is Bangladesh, my country, that recently gained independence from Pakistan. The cultural similarities struck me unaware. I had thought: I understand this cultural stigma, the food, the jokes, and the mindsets! Parallels between my life and Malala's and even Khaled's was dramatic despite my westernization. I was not separate from this political disaster, not merely a viewer. I could discuss this with relatives of mine in Iran that had directly experienced these acts of violence, rather than just read from a newspaper article. Alongside this, the books urged me to reflect on some of the western views of Islamic countries - 'oppressive, disgusting, sexist, outdated,' etc. Westerners at times can be viewed as lost - that they have no sense of oneness and family, that they are people who live in a spiritual vacuum. Understanding that each and every society has its pros and cons can, I believe, change the world in terms of harmony. I believe that the books also refuelled my love for nature and my religion.

Tori
A book I will forever remember reading is 'LoveStar' by Andri Snær Magnason. I studied it myself, the second and third times I read it. The book is set in the future, and to me has always read as a commentary on human nature. 'What makes something human?' 'What is humanity?' Were questions I had never considered before reading it. In that way, the text completely transformed my view of life and literature. I read every book after that asking myself, 'what is this saying about humanity? the human condition?'. For that, I can never thank the author enough. The book itself though was never popular in Iceland. It was deemed 'bizarre and uncouth'. When I first heard about the popular opinion of it was one of the first times I truly had had to deeply consider other peoples perspectives. It seemed absurd how a text I'd come to treasure so much and saw such brilliance in was condemned by wider society until I started thinking about other people's perspective. They might have noticed different things to me, would have had histories of their own to compare to. Overall, reading and analysing LoveStar I believe was one of the most transformative experiences I've had in regards to literature and myself. I've also recently discovered that the book has been translated into English- I'm excited to read it in my other language to see how the text has yet again been transformed, this time through the act of translation.

Lily
Through the transformation of my own perspective and of the protagonist of The Life of Pi that I studied last year. At the start of the text, I believed Pi to be pretentious and annoying however as I continued to read the text the character started to transform. I found myself more tolerant of and having more empathy towards him. The transformation of Pi, or my perspective of Pi, was present and I was not aware of it until reflection on previous texts that I have studied.

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How would your group define the concept?

Transforming a text or one of its aspects is changing something about it, an evolution. Transforming texts can also be to do with their personal meaning to a reader. A text is being transformed every time a new person reads them, as that persons unique life will bring them to witness something new or to make new connections.

You can transform a text simply by looking at it with a different eye- if you search for a new theme, search for a particular literary technique used, or even re-read the text, you'll gain another understanding, transforming a previous view.

Transformation can also refer to the transformation of a plot or character in a book, or even a literal transformation from one language to another through translations of international literature. Understanding that this form of transformation can affect the direct meaning of literature in terms of culture, literary devices, etc.

The transformation of elements between texts is used as a way for authors to appropriate parts of another text to suit a different aesthetic or purpose. This transformation adds depth to the text and allows more connections to be made.

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They should address the following questions when developing this profile for the rest of the class to use:

-How would your group define the concept? Think much more broadly than a dictionary definition! (BLUE)

-What would this concept look like in literature? How would it manifest? (YELLOW)

-What is the interplay between author, text and concept (how do they affect each other)? (PURPLE)

-Can you think of previous examples of literature you have studied and discuss how the concept may have been present in these? Perhaps aim for 3-5 examples. (RED)

-What guiding questions can you think of that might lead students to unpack your concept when reading a text? (GREEN)

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Transformation
The study of the connections among texts constitutes the focus of one of three areas of exploration, namely intertextuality: connecting texts. The complex ways in which texts refer to one another [allusion, etc.], appropriate elements from each other and transform them to suit a different aesthetic or communicative purpose, are evidence of the importance of transformation in the process of creating a text. Additionally, the act of reading is potentially transformative in itself, both for the text and the reader. Different readers may transform a text with their personal interpretation. The text can also have an impact on the reader which potentially might lead to action and to the transformation of reality.