Recognising the power of pleasure: what engaged adolescent readers get from their free-choice reading, and how teachers can leverage this for all.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D.

Introduction

Over the years I've had numerous conversations with parents, administrators, and other teachers about the value of the books that students most want to read and that they read with the greatest joy and engagement. I confess, that although I've always believed in choice and have made free-reading a part of my literacy teaching in schools throughout my career, I've worried about some of the reading choices that my students as well as my own daughters--have made. But I also have to confess my amazement at the absolute joy and zeal displayed by many of these readers, who would spend hours upon hours reading outside school even as they often rejected the reading they were asked to do inside school. I wondered what students were getting from this out-of-school reading. So, with my colleague Michael Smith, I decided to ask. Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want--and Why We Should Let Them (Wilhelm & Smith, 2014) is a report of what we learned through a three-year study of engaged adolescent readers of texts that are often marginalised in school and even the wider culture.

Our research focused on the experience of these young readers with all freely chosen reading, and then of their reading of genres like romance, vampire stories, horror, dystopian fiction, and fantasy not typically privileged in schools. We wanted to understand why these readers pursued the reading agendas that they do, why they choose the specific genres they love, and what they get out of their reading of such texts. In short, one of our most salient findings--and the one I'll explore here--was that of the power of pleasure to not only motivate and sustain engagement in reading, but also to bring other emotional, psychological and cognitive benefits. We found that all freely-chosen reading, including that of marginalised genres, brought their readers, in all cases, five distinct kinds of pleasure: the immersive pleasure of play, intellectual pleasure, social pleasure, the pleasure of functional work, and the pleasure of inner work.

The only one of these pleasures directly fostered to any degree in the schools where the study took place (and those where I have taught over the years) was that of intellectual pleasure. Yet play pleasure was prerequisite to this intellectual engagement and pleasure and to all the other pleasures too. Additionally, all five pleasures played into the reading engagement of our 29 informants, which led to ancillary benefits gained from each. Pleasure, I would argue from the data, is not only essential to reading engagement and expertise, but is not foregrounded in schools in ways that would leverage and develop student reading, and the growth of students as readers and as human beings.

Research review of constructs related to pleasure

The power and potential of pleasure suffers from a degree of neglect in schools, teaching practices and in the research base. Of course, it's important that schools help prepare students to be career and college ready, which is the articulated purpose of the new standards in the United States. But such a narrow focus does not attend to the motivation and continuing impulse to read. Next generation standards across the world represent profound cognitive achievements that cannot be realised without engagement and practice over time. This will not occur without the motivational power of pleasure.

Why are the pleasures of reading so neglected? Perhaps it's because researchers and educators tend to focus instead on the power of reading. Reading is certainly necessary to navigate modern life, to function as an informed democratic citizen, and to work in a knowledge economy. Using the Internet, multimodal and multimedia as it is, requires significant kinds of reading of various kinds of visual, traditional and hybridised texts working together. Being informed, especially about nuanced and complex issues, requires deep reading. Literacy is essential not only for accessing information and staying up to date; it is also essential to doing work in the world. But, as we found, pleasure--neglected as it is--is pre-requisite and necessary to harnessing all this power.

Reading research tends to bypass pleasure but does examine two related constructs: attitude toward reading and reading motivation. Two recent articles usefully characterise work in these areas. Examining the reading attitudes of middle-school students, McKenna and his colleagues (McKenna, Conradi, Lawrence, Jang, & Meyer, 2012) draw on Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) to explain that 'attitude is acquired, not innate.' The emphasis in the research is not on the nature of the readers' experiences with texts, but rather the extent to which those experiences contribute to a 'learned predisposition to respond in a consistently favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object' (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 6), in this case, reading. McKenna et al. (2012) note that their construct is very much the same as what might be called reading interest. But they note further that interest is usually rendered as a plural form and carries the meaning of interest in particular topics and genres. In those terms, our reading interests develop in part because of the pleasure that we have taken in reading, but McKenna and his colleagues do not investigate the nature of that pleasure in their work.

As Schiefele, Schaffner, Moller, and Wigfield (2012) explain, researchers examining reading motivation come closer to pleasure, especially those who seek to understand the dimensions of reading motivation. Much of that work is analyses of survey responses, though some of those surveys used items that were generated from an analysis of interviews or extended written responses. Schiefele and his colleagues found that these quantitative analyses in large measure jibe with those of the few qualitative examinations of reading motivation. Schiefele et al. conclude that 'the following should be regarded as genuine dimensions of reading motivation: curiosity, involvement, competition, recognition, grades, compliance, and work avoidance' (2012, p. 458). But they recognise that qualitative studies 'have suggested that the experience of reading involves several distinguishable facets (e.g., absorption, enjoyment, relaxation) that may warrant further analysis' (2012, p. 457). These facets in need of further analysis would seem to be closer to what we think of when we talk about the experience of the pleasures one may take from reading, and which were emphasised, both explicitly and implicitly, by our informants.

In a report published by the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom, Clark and Rumbold (2006) take a different tack both from McKenna et al.'s (2012) research and from the research reviewed by Schiefele and his colleagues (2012). In their view, reading for pleasure 'refers to reading that we to do of our own free will anticipating the satisfaction that we will get from the act of reading. It also refers to reading that having begun at someone else's request we continue because we are interested in it' (2006, p. 5).

However, their justification for their focus on pleasure is, like all of the studies in our literature review (see Wilhelm & Smith, 2014 for a complete review), instrumental. That is, reading pleasure is important because of 'its impact on literacy attainment and other outcomes' (2014, p. 5) rather than because of the experience it provides. More specifically, they argue that research has established that reading for pleasure is positively associated with reading achievement, writing ability, comprehension, vocabulary development, positive attitudes about reading, self-confidence in reading, and pleasure reading in later life.

Just as we were concluding our study (September, 2013), a sophisticated new study from the United Kingdom appeared that makes an even more dramatic claim. Social Inequalities in Cognitive Scores at Age 16: The Role of Reading (Sullivan & Brown, 2013) draws on data collected in the 1970 British Cohort Study which is following the lives of more than 17,000 people born in England, Scotland, and Wales in a single week of 1970. That longitudinal study collected follow-up data from the study's participants at ages 5, 10, 16, 26, 30, 34, 38, and 42. Sullivan and Brown investigated 'whether inequalities due to social background are similar across the three domains of vocabulary, spelling, and mathematics, or whether they differ and to what extent these inequalities are accounted for by family material and cultural resources' (2013, p. 2). After doing a series of regression analyses, Sullivan and Brown (2013, p. 37) conclude the following:

   Our findings ... [suggest] that children's leisure reading
   is important for educational attainment and social
   mobility ... and suggest that the mechanism for this is
   increased cognitive development. Once we controlled
   for the child's test scores at age five and ten, the influence
   of the child's own reading remained highly significant,
   suggesting that the positive link between leisure
   reading and cognitive outcomes is not purely due to
   more able children being more likely to read a lot, but
   that reading is actually linked to increased cognitive
   progress over time. From a policy perspective, this
   strongly supports the need to support and encourage
   children's reading in their leisure time ...

The increased cognitive processes is what accounts for the surprising finding that leisure reading was also correlated with increased math performance. A recent study by Krashen, Lee, and McQuillen (2012) also demonstrates that 'providing more access to books can mitigate the effect of poverty on reading achievement' (p. 30). However, access alone is not enough. Children have to take advantage of that access, something, I would argue, that depends on their deriving pleasure from so doing. In their analysis of PISA results Kirsch and his colleagues (2002, p. 3) report a similar result:

   Levels of interest in and attitudes toward reading, the
   amount of time students spend on reading in their
   free time and the diversity of materials they read
   are closely associated with performance in reading
   literacy. Furthermore, while the degree of engagement
   in reading varies considerably from country to
   county, 15-year-olds whose parents have the lowest
   occupational status but who are highly engaged in
   reading obtain higher average reading scores in PISA
   than students whose parents have high or medium
   occupational status but who report to be poorly
   engaged in reading. This suggests that finding ways
   to engage students in reading may be one of the most
   effective ways to leverage social change.

So, what are the takeaways? Pleasure is neglected in school and in research. But studies that examine the impact of pleasure reading make a compelling case for its importance. However, if educators are to pursue a policy of supporting and encouraging the pleasure reading of young people, we have to have a deeper understanding of its nature and varieties than the instrumental studies provide. This is the niche in the research conversation that our research addresses.

One theorist who focuses on the nature of pleasurable reading experiences is Roland Barthes. Barthes (1975, p. 4) makes a distinction between pleasure and bliss, though he is wary of 'absolute' classifications. The text of pleasure, he says, 'contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from a culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading' (1975, p. 14). The text of bliss, on the other hand, 'imposes a state of loss., unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language' (1975, p. 14). According to Barthes, conventional or familiar texts yield a pleasure that is safe and comfortable, a kind of pleasure he doesn't privilege, while experimental or unfamiliar counter-narratives produce a bliss that is challenging and unsettling. Bliss is produced by the kinds of reading experiences recommended by Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollack, 'that bite and sting us' and that 'smash the frozen seas within' (cited in Chambers, 1985, p. 17).

Barthes' ideas are complex, abstract and metaphoric. But he plays with three ideas that are powerful for teachers. First, he argues that textual pleasure isn't singular. To understand pleasure one needs to delineate its forms, something, as you'll soon see, we attempt to do in the coding of our data. Second, textual pleasure is something that's experienced by individual readers: 'Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naive residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial. And it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any idiolect' (Barthes, 1985, p. 23). We agree, which is why we interviewed individual readers about their individual reading lives.

Third, textual pleasure is not distinct from the other pleasures of our lives. As Barthes explains, 'There is supposed to be a mystique of the Text.--On the contrary, the whole effort consists in materialising the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others' (Barthes, 1975, p. 58). And later: 'The important thing is to equalise the field of pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical life and contemplative life' (Barthes, 1975, p. 59). This recognition is why we turned to philosophers in addition to literary theorists and reading researchers to help us understand our data.

The problem of popular texts

In her article 'Reading is not eating', Radway (1986) argues that popular culture texts such as romances are comforting to their readers (Barthes' pleasure or 'plaisir'). This comfort, she contends, is not regarded as something of value. Instead the charge so often leveled at mass-produced literature is that it is not simply bad, nor even worthless, but that it is 'capable of degrading, indeed, of corrupting those who enjoy it' (1986, p. 7). This charge, in turn, 'is based on the further assumption that similar and simple texts fail to engage readers in creative, productive response to thoughts and ideas that challenge or call their own into question' (1986, p. 7). The reading experience of such books is characterised 'by its passivity, by its complacency, and by its ability to promote the status quo' (1986, p. 7).

Radway's own research in Reading the Romance (1984) demonstrates that such charges may be unfounded. She found that 'some romance reading at least manages to help women address and even minimally transform the conditions of their daily existence' (1984, p. 8). In other words, readers are not passive, but active and often transformative in the ways they transact with texts and use them (moving towards Barthes' 'bliss'). Society has, she argues, 'failed to detect the essential complexity that can characterise the interaction between people and mass produced culture' (1984, p. 9)--including, we would argue, popular books for adolescents.

We think that research into the reading and pleasures of popular texts might be lacking precisely because of the prejudices Radway describes. In keeping with the spirit of her research, we thought: Why not ask young people directly what they get from their reading of popular adolescent texts? Why not ask them how they experience and use these texts? And so we did.

Methods

Informants

There were 14 informants in the initial phase of the study reported on here. All were 8th graders in a medium-sized city in the Western United States of America. They were evenly split between male and female, and represented various levels of socioeconomic status and different cultural groups. They also represented different levels of success in school, and different family backgrounds in terms of ethnicity and educational attainment. All self-nominated to participate in the study on the basis that they were highly engaged readers (see Appendix A). The second phase of the study involved 15 self-nominated readers who were passionate about reading texts that they felt were marginalised by their parents and by schools. These informants were mostly female (12) but they did represent different levels of socioeconomic status, cultural groups and gender identity. They also represented different levels of success in school, and different family backgrounds in terms of ethnicity and educational attainment.

Interviews

In both phases of the study, all informants engaged in a series of semi-structured interviews. The first interview (Appendix B) was about their general reading lives and histories. The second interview (Appendix C) explored a specific interest in a particular genre identified as their favourite. The third interview (Appendix D) was reflections about several think-aloud protocols of favourite excerpts from favourite books of their chosen genre. A fourth interview (Appendix E) was structured around connections from their reading lives to other interests, e.g. collecting or making playing cards regarding characters, writing fanfics, blogging, going to movies, collecting artefacts related to their reading interests, etc.

Coding

We coded the content units from all interviews using open, axial and selective coding using the qualitative software program atlas.ti. (see Appendix F for more on the process of data analysis and coding). Based on our review of relevant research and theory and the open coding, we developed three of what atlas.ti calls coding families: nature of pleasure; the conditions that give rise to this; and related constructs, such as attitude toward reading, reading interests, motivation to read, etc. When we coded for the nature of pleasure, we coded for four dimensions of pleasure (type, intensity, duration, timing).

We used Dewey's (1913) four kinds of educative interest in our axial and selective coding of the types of pleasure (play, work, intellectual, and social) and then went back and reread the data to identify a new type (inner work) and subthemes in each type. Sometimes the type of pleasure was clear and singular as when Karen says, 'Well you can definitely feel like you're the character so you are kind of living through it and what would it be like to live like that.'

This content unit unambiguously describes the pleasure of play, focusing as it does on the immediate pleasure of entering a story world. However, the five types of pleasure sometimes overlapped as in the following comment from Robert:

   I do want it to be entertaining (play pleasure) at the
   same time cuz I'm reading Siddhartha, by Herman
   Hesse, and the thing that I like about that book is he
   does provide you the beautiful imagery but it doesn't
   go so deeply that you're just can you get to the point
   now?(intellectual pleasure) He provides [the point] in a
   way that wraps around the story also, so that you want
   to keep reading.

Immersive play pleasure

The first and pre-requisite kind of pleasure our informants experienced was the immersive pleasure of play. This is the pleasure you get from living through a story and getting totally lost in a book. John Dewey (1913) described this kind of pleasure as that 'which puts itself forth with no thought of anything beyond.' As Rebecca maintained, 'The characters become like your friends. And they're so much in your lives that they're like your best friends.' Nearly 800 of our content unit codes related to this kind of deep playful pleasure of living through a story.

This pleasure was typically experienced as total enjoyment, like Barthes' (1975) plaisir, but not always. In some cases, this pleasure was a kind of not so enjoyable engagement--a sense of being totally engaged by something that was challenging and disruptive, but nonetheless so engaging, that as Robert put it: 'You are scared almost or disturbed but it's like being in an earthquake and you are glued there, you have to stay and deal with it and you are totally in the flow!' (This is akin to Barthes' bliss.) One of our most significant findings is that the immersive pleasure of play was not only incidental to engaged reading, it was absolutely necessary to it, and pre-requisite to experiencing all other pleasures and benefits of reading. So kids need to read books that immediately and sustainably provide this kind of immersive pleasure.

Intellectual pleasure

As Dewey (1913) points out, there is a great pleasure in figuring things out. Dewey (1913) labels the pleasure of figuring things out as intellectual pleasure, noting that, 'When any one becomes interested in a problem as a problem, and in inquiry and learning for the sake of solving the problem, interest is distinctively intellectual' (pp. 83-84). Our student readers regularly experienced this kind of pleasure (over 250 content units related to intellectual pleasure) and they sought out texts that would provide this.

Alex talks about what most thrills him as a reader:

   It's that process of taking the information you have
   and coming up with possible solutions. Like, it's like
   being a detective almost. It's taking the evidence and
   the information and everything that's happened, taking
   all that and putting it together. Processing through it
   and seeing what ends connect, and then finding, once
   all those ends connect, what that last piece is.

This pleasure was often expressed in terms of figuring out would happen next in a story--or even beyond the end of a story, of figuring out character development, psychology and motivation, in asking 'What if?' and figuring out what would be different if setting or character changed in certain ways, and especially in thinking about themes and how the author worked to express these. Callie provided the following:

   When I read books, pretty much the plot comes
   naturally to me and I don't spend a lot of time pondering
   a plot. [Instead] I kind of ponder myself in the plot.
   And so, when I read books I do go more philosophical
   than just feeling the plot and flowing with that and
   the imagery ... I am looking for the direct and indirect
   messages from the author ... and how the author wrote
   that text so you could figure it out, especially the hidden
   messages. Those are so fun and powerful to figure out.

Michelle makes a similar comment about the authors, like J.K. Rowling, who she most enjoys: 'So, I like to see how they made the story happen.'

Intellectual pleasure parallels in many ways traditional activities in school: learning how to discern character, and to extract and justify themes, as just two examples. But the readers who talked most animatedly about intellectual pleasure, also talked about how school interfered with it.

Here's Callie again:

   [In out-of-school reading] you don't have the preconceived
   notion of school. You have 'this looks like an
   interesting book, let's see what it's about.' And that just
   broadens the horizon because without the preconceived
   notion of what you should be learning, then you don't
   have the set limits and set expectations for yourself or
   for the book.

Helen raised a similar concern:

   When you pick up a book in school, you know that
   there's supposed to be something you're getting out of
   this, and that's all you really think about, what does
   the teacher want me to understand from reading this.
   And then, when you read it by yourself, you don't really
   know what you need to know about it, and it's a little
   more spontaneous when it happens.

Social pleasure

There were two ways in which our data expressed social pleasures: the pleasure of using reading to connect to others and the pleasure of using reading to name and identify yourself. We coded over 300 content units relating to these two dimensions of social pleasure. Dewey (1913) writes about social pleasure: 'A moment's consideration of children's play shows how largely they are sympathetic and dramatic reproductions of social activities' (p. 86). Our data demonstrated that the playful entering of a story world provides similar reproductions. Dewey also notes that 'social interest ... is a strong special interest, and also one which intertwines with those already named' (1913, p. 84). The social interest of connecting with characters intertwines with the pleasure of play--and of intellect and work; however, the social pleasure of connecting with other readers seems to us to be something different because it happens outside the world of the text.

Mia has this to say about how books are part of social relationships:

   She [a friend] started reading them [manga] to us,
   reading them around us and letting us read them.
   Teaching us how to read them. Now we go out and buy
   manga ourselves and read them together and talk about
   them and that led us to meeting new people who like
   manga or wanted to read it.

Likewise Callie comments:

   A lot of my friends, they started recommending these
   books. So I think the first real dark fiction book I read
   that I started realising it was dark fiction and that I was
   into was Choke. All my friends were telling me I had
   to read this ... I go to this writing group every Monday
   and they were telling me this. You've got to read it! And
   so I did because I wanted to talk to them about it and be
   part of the group doing that kind of reading.

The pleasure of naming and identifying yourself was likewise salient in the data. Here's Bennie's comments:

   I like to think of myself as a Harry Potter reader. As
   someone who has imagination and is a good friend.
   Who admires characters and people like Hermione for
   her friendship and Harry for his courage. Who reads ...
   Books that help you with the challenges you are facing.

Psychologist Erik Erikson (1963) explains this impulse to identify oneself by arguing that the central psychosocial conflict of adolescence is identity versus role confusion. That is, adolescents have to make a place for themselves in the social worlds they inhabit. Doing so, he claims, depends on a confidence in one's sameness and continuity that's matched by a sameness and continuity in one's meaning for others. Identity work, according to Erikson, has a social dimension.

The pleasure of work

A fourth pleasure is what Dewey (1913) calls the pleasure of work. Work pleasure is the pleasure one takes from using a text as a tool to accomplish something. The ends that our readers were seeking to accomplish were not those instrumental ends discussed by policy makers. For the most part, our readers weren't thinking about college and career. They had much more immediate and personally compelling goals that involved writing, talking, understanding others and their perspectives, and using reading to think and act in new ways.

Several of our informants, like Michelle, read to inform and shape their writing:

   Well, I like reading books that I can write about. Like
   I'm very interested in writing government conspiracy
   stories, so I like to pull things from other books and I
   can kind of think okay, well this worked really well in
   this story so how can I do something like that in a book
   I am writing.

Callie focused on the work her reading did to inform her in debates and conversations:

   But beyond that, with the knowledge I gained from
   these books, when I get into conversations and/or
   arguments with people, I have a perspective that they
   wouldn't usually see, so when we get into these conversations
   and/or arguments I can bring out that and
   make them consciously think about how we are the
   future. We don't really have to tolerate failed political
   regimes and corporate America destroying our future
   and limiting our possibilities. Dark fiction opened up
   endless possibilities but they're set in a realistic point.

Terry, like many other readers, read to understand other people and perspectives:

   I like to understand people better than what I could do
   in real life. Like I can't, as I said, stick a tube up your
   brain and know what you're thinking. When people
   write books..., you can know what they were thinking
   at the time, what they recount they were thinking.

The work to which students put their reading were of two fundamentally different sorts. On the one hand, they experienced the pleasure of work to accomplish practical ends. We coded nearly 300 content units as relating to this functional kind of work pleasure. On the other, our readers experienced the pleasure of work to address deeply personal issues in what might be called 'inner work'. We had over 200 content units that directly indicated that a kind of 'inner work' was being pursued.

The pleasure of inner work

Perhaps our most striking finding during the study was that the participants in our study drew pleasure, in all cases, from using their reading to help them become the kind of people they wanted to become, a kind of pleasure we termed 'inner work'. According to the psychologist Robert Johnson (1986, p. 3), 'inner work is the effort by which we gain an awareness of the deeper layers of consciousness within us and move to an integration of the total self--to actualising the full possibilities of our human potential.'

Helen gave a typical response:

   Well, I learn about myself through books when I
   imagine myself in the different situations ... you can
   help yourself change in that way, and when you really
   admire a character in a book who's really brave and
   stuff, you kind of can idolise them and become more
   like them. So it's not really learning about yourself, it's
   learning about what you could be.

Another example: a couple of girls in the study wore WWHD bracelets: What would Hermione (from the Harry Potter series) do? They did this to remind themselves to be good friends during tense situations. As Bennie explained: 'And then we would use Hermione to think with, and to figure out what to do to be a good friend.' This was clearly using their experience as readers of the Harry Potter series to do a profound kind of inner work and an imaginative rehearsal for negotiating difficult situations.

Our takeaways: when given choice, kids tend to read what they need. Our informants gravitated towards books that challenged them to be better or more whole people, that assisted them to outgrow themselves, that helped them consider new perspectives and see new possibilities in themselves and the world.

Our informants read for pleasure, but of kinds that go well beyond our conventional thinking about motivation, interest and even pleasure itself. Our informants drew a hard line between school reading and 'real reading' (to quote Callie). School reading was reading you had to do. It was closed ended and involved 'guessing what the teacher already knows.' It rarely involved pleasure. Real reading was reading that helped you on your life's journey, that was open-ended, and that immersed you in all five of the pleasures described here.

But this disconnect can easily be bridged. Exhibit A below offers a few examples of how teachers can easily promote each of these pleasures in the context of typical classroom instructional units and activities. We do research because we want it to matter in actual classrooms. The project of pursuing and leveraging the five pleasures is one of many implications this research has led us to pursue in our own teaching. We hope that it will also motivate you to the same end.

Exhibit A: How teachers can foster the pleasures of reading

Fostering the pleasure of play

* Dramatic techniques like revolving role play, in-role writing, good angel/bad angel, hot seating, and alter ego encourage and reward all students for entering story worlds in the way these committed readers do.

* What do you do or could you do to promote the prerequisite pleasure of play for reading/writing in your classroom?

(For ideas about how to use drama and action strategies in ways that promote immersive play pleasure while reading, see Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1996; Wilhelm 2012a)

Fostering intellectual pleasure

* Read a book for the first time along with your students--figure it out along with them--model your fits and starts and problems through think alouds and discussion

* Pair an assigned reading with self-selected reading from a list, or a free reading choice that pertains to the topic. (e.g. 1984 with The Hunger Games)

* Frame units as inquiry with essential questions, as a problem to be solved

* Student-generated questions for discussion and sharing, using techniques like QtA and QAR. Discussion structures like Socratic Seminar that make it clear there is no teacherly agenda to fulfil as far as topics or insights to achieve (this is consistent with the Core which focuses on strategies over content)

(For ideas about how to generate intellectual pleasure and substantive learning through inquiry, see Smith & Wilhelm, 2006; Smith, Appleman & Wilhelm, 2014; with inquiry, questioning and discussion strategies: Wilhelm, 2007; for inquiry into how texts work for meaning and effect through the use of literary elements: Smith & Wilhelm, 2010, through the use of think alouds, Wilhelm, 2012b)

Fostering social pleasure

* Be a fellow reader with students

* Read one of their favourite books.

* Foster peer discussion of reading and response in pairs, triads, small groups, literature circles, book clubs, etc.

* Do group projects with reading that are then shared: videos, PSAs, dramas, visual displays, talk shows, etc.

* Have a free reading program; promote books through booktalks, online reviews, etc.

(For ideas, see Smith & Wilhelm, 2006)

Fostering work pleasure

* Frame texts and units as inquiry: as a problem to be solved by using essential questions

* Work towards culminating projects--service and social action

* Drama work: Hotseating, mantle of the expert

* What do you do/could you do to promote the pleasure of work?

(For ideas on how to use inquiry and design environments to promote the power and pleasure of work, see Wilhelm, Boas & Wilhelm, 2009, for how to use service learning and social action that comes from reading, Wilhelm, Douglas & Fry, 2014)

Fostering inner work pleasure

* Imaginative rehearsals for living: inquiry geared towards current and future action, inquiry for service, drama as characters in dilemmas or agents (good angel) trying to help a character in distress or dilemma, as authors making choices, writing for the future/ to a future self, corresponding with characters and authors, cultivating a spirit of transfer

* What do you do/could you do to promote inner work?

(For ideas, see Wilhelm & Smith, 2014; Wilhelm, Douglas & Fry, 2014; Mayes, 2010)

Conclusion

Our research has convinced us that teachers need to grant more respect to student choices. We were surprised by the story worlds our informants delighted in inhabiting. We were surprised by how they used books of which we had been dismissive to help them along their lives' journeys. We came away from our work resolved to try to understand why kids choose to read what they choose to read. Our study showed us that if you ask kids about their reading, you will often be surprised by their answers, and often pleasantly or even profoundly so.

We understand that people who worry about the books that kids read are worried about the content of the books and how that might negatively affect kids (i.e., that reading Harry Potter would encourage a fascination with witchcraft, that reading Twilight and other vampire books would encourage risky behaviour, or that reading The Hunger Games might make kids question authority or give them a negative attitude about the state of the world). What we found was that 'reading was not eating' (as Janis Radway puts it, 1986). In other words, kids don't consume books like junk food--they transact with them and make them their own. In still other words, readers are not operated on by the books, but they operate on the books. Readers actively make meanings--they don't passively receive them--and the meanings they make are relevant to their current lived experience and life challenges. The 'poem'--or meaning of the reading, is a result, as Louise Rosenblatt (1978) so elegantly puts it, of the 'compenetration' of the reader and the text. The transaction between these two is what results in the 'poem' of meaning. It is not textual features or complexity that determine meaning but the interpretive content and complexity that result from this transaction.

So what? This means that questions that focus solely on the content of a text are likely to be superficial and perhaps misguided. If we want to know how readers are affected by a reading, we should instead ask what meaning they are making of it, and what satisfactions and pleasures they are experiencing. This is the true content of a reading and what we must pay attention to. In the case of our informants, the meaning they made was salutary indeed, and promoted their future reading and more wide-awake living.

We also recognise that teachers worry that kids' choices won't prepare them for the next generation of standards and assessments. This study makes us think that this emphasis is misplaced. Even with what might be called formulaic books, series books or what seem to be simpler texts like graphic novels or manga, the readers in this study were using all of the complex reading strategies of experts, just the strategies required by next generation standards. If a book encourages, assists or even requires children to do what experts do, we would argue that this constitutes what we call 'interpretive complexity.' An added consideration is that if a text is too 'difficult' or too 'distant' from a student's interests or experiences then the text may fit current definitions of textual complexity and actually undermine the student's capacity to use expert strategies. Consider for yourself what satisfying and enriching experiences have you had with texts, movies, or artwork that others might not judge as worthy?

Our study convinces us that we need to trust kids' choices and remember that it's important to learn from kids how to best nurture and teach them. This means that we should ask students directly why they love the books they do love so much, and engage them in conversation about the books and games that they love.

Our data compel us that we need to make pleasure much more central to our practice. We can foster immersive pleasure through drama and action strategies, and we can foster the pleasure of inner work by contextualising reading in inquiry contexts that lead to culminating projects and service to self, peers, class, community and environment (Wilhelm & Novak, 2011; Wilhelm, Douglas & Fry, 2014). Our research review convinces us that pleasure reading is an underutilised tool for addressing issues of social equality and opportunity and should not be neglected by teachers, educational institutions or policies. And finally, our work convinces us that we need to reflect on and model their own pleasure in reading. We need to think and share with each other our own successes with getting our students to fall in love with books. Because, after all, it is only through love that all things are possible including developing lifelong readers who take joy and great transformative benefit from their reading.

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

Boise State University

References

Barthes, R. (1975). The pleasure of the text (R. Miller, Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang.

Chambers, A. (1985). Booktalk. London: The Bodley Head.

Clark, C. & Rumbold, K. (2006). Reading for pleasure: A research review. London: National Literacy Trust. Retrieved from www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/ Reading%20for%20pleasure.pdf

Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin and Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd edition). New York: Norton.

Fishbein, M. & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Gee, J.P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. London: Routledge.

Johnson, R. (1986). Inner work. New York: Harper and Row.

Kirsch, I., de Jong, J., LaFontaine, D., McQueen, J., Mendelovits, J. & Monseur, C. (2002). Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries: Results from PISA 2000. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Retrived May 29, 2015 from http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/programmeforinternationalstudentassessmentpisaZ33690904.pdf

Krashen, S., Lee, S. & McQuillan, J. (2012). Is the Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 8 (1), 26-38. Available at http://jolle.coe.uga. edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Is-the-Library-Important.pdf

Mayes, C. (2010). The archetypal hero's journey in teaching and learning. Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing.

McKenna, M.C., Conradi, K., Lawrence, C., Jang, B.G. & Meyer, J.P. (2012). Reading attitudes of middle school students: Results of a U.S. survey. Reading Research Quarterly, 47, 283-306.

Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Radway, J. (1986). Reading is not eating: Mass-produced literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political consequences of a metaphor. Book Research Quarterly, 2, 7-29.

Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Schiefele, U., Schaffner, E., Moller, J. & Wigfield, A. (2012). Dimensions of reading motivation and their relation to reading behavior and competence. Reading Research Quarterly, 47, 427-463.

Smith, M.W. & Wilhelm, J. (2006). Going with the flow. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Smith, M.W. & Wilhelm, J. (2010). Fresh takes on teaching literary elements: How to teach what really matters about character, setting, point of view, and theme. New York: Scholastic.

Smith, W.W., Appleman, D. & Wilhelm, J. (2014). Uncommon core: Where the authors of the standards go wrong about instruction--and how you can get it right. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. (2013). Social inequalities in cognitive scores at age 16: The role of reading. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies.

Wilhelm, J. (2012a). Action strategies for deepening comprehension. (2nd ed.). New York: Scholastic.

Wilhelm, J. (2012b). Improving comprehension with think aloud strategies: Modeling what good readers do. (2nd ed.). New York: Scholastic.

Wilhelm, J., Boas, E. & Wilhelm, P.J. (2009). Inquiry minds learn to read and write: 50 problem-based literacy and learning strategies. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Wilhelm, J., Douglas, W. & Fry, S. (2014). The activist learner: Inquiry, literacy and service to make learning matter. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wilhelm, J. & Edmiston, B. (1998). Imagining to learn: Inquiry, ethics and integration through drama. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Wilhelm, J. & Novak, B. (2011). Teaching literacy for love and wisdom: Being the book and being the change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wilhelm, J. & Smith, M.W. (2014). Reading unbound: Why kids need to read what they want and why we should let them. New York: Scholastic.

Appendix A

Survey:

Please indicate if you love to 'read' (or watch or play) any of the following kinds of texts. If so, list some of your favourite 'texts' (actual titles of games, videos, books, etc):

--Electronic texts

--Movies/videos:

--Video games:

--Favourite Internet sites:

--Television shows/series:

--Visual texts

--Graphic novels:

--Manga:

--Comic books:

--Cartoons:

--Magazines:

--Collectibles (e.g. Yugioh, Dragonball Z cards)

--Literary Genres

--Series books (e.g. Series of Unfortunate

--Events, Harry Potter):

--Romances:

--Science Fiction:

--Horror:

--Fantasy:

--Historical Fiction:

Appendix B

Initial Structured Interview (flexible prompts to follow)/ General Attitudes towards reading.

Inventory Questions:

(purposes)

1. What do you see as the purposes of reading? in life? in school? Why the differences or similarities?

2. What materials best serve these purposes?

3. What different ways are there of reading, and how do these ways serve various purposes?

4. If you could choose anything to read, what would you choose?

5. Tell me about your most and least favourite assignments in school, e.g. favourite writing assignments, reading assignments, project? How do these assignments connect or fail to connect to your existing interests and expertise? (self-monitoring)

6. How can you tell if you have done a good job of reading something? What would you do if you felt you had not done a good job?

7. If you were to study a specific topic of interest to you, what would it be? In what ways would reading help you to study this topic? What other things would you do to help you learn? (reading history)

8. Have there been times in your life when you read a lot? Why? A little? Why?

When you found reading very satisfying? Why? Unsatisfying? Why?

9. What were your most intense and enjoyable reading experiences/texts as a child? pre-teen? teen?

10. Have you ever read a series of books, or lots of books of the same type? How does that inform how you read or what you choose to read today?

11. Why do you read today? When and in what situations and with what texts do you remember first reading for these purposes?

Appendix C

Second Semi-structured interview/ Genre-Specific questions

1. Tell me what your favourite genre is and a little bit about why you like it so much.

2. When did you first become familiar with/ interested in this genre?

3. What drew you to the genre in the first place?

4. How does reading your favourite genre compare to other kinds of reading you like to do? Compare your favourite genre to a second favourite, not so favourite, a less favourite genre?

5. How does reading your favourite genre compare to other kinds of reading you don't like to do?

6. How does reading your favourite genre compare to the kinds of reading you are asked to do in school?

7. How have teachers used your favourite genre in their teaching? What was your response?

8. How could/might teachers use your favourite genre in their teaching? How would you respond to a teacher/lesson that did so?

9. How would this kind of use improve their teaching, your learning, or your experience of school?

10. How might reading your favourite genre or using it in school contribute to the learning you are supposed to do in school?

11. What are your favourite examples of texts/titles of the genre?

12. What makes these examples so special? So enjoyable? So engaging?

13. What do you do or think about before reading a text in this genre?

14. What do you know or do that helps you to read this kind of text?

15. How do you choose a text of this type?

16. How do you find out about texts of this type that you might want to experience?

17. How do you share ('appropriate') your 'reading' or what you learn from your reading of this text?

18. How do you 'use' or apply your reading or what you learn from your reading to your thinking, your life, or other tasks you do inside or outside of school?

19. What other people do you know who like this genre?

20. What ways are there of sharing your enjoyment or learning from this genre?

21. What artifacts/movies/toys/etc. do people collect associated with this genre?

22. How do you buy, borrow, access, keep, organise these texts?

23. How does this genre express, challenge, or shape your identity/sense of self?

24. Do you repeat your reading/playing/viewing of individual texts? Which ones? What do you get from the repeated reading?

25. How is your reading/experience similar or different from that of other people you know who enjoy this genre?

26. To what degree do you feel supported (or not) in your choice to engage with this genre (by your family, teachers, school, the culture at large, subcultures, groups, friends, et al.)?

27. Are there particular authors (designers, et al.) who you particularly like? Why? How do you think about or relate to these authors? How is the author like or unlike you?

28. Are there particular characters who you particularly relate to? Why? How do you relate to these characters? How are these characters like or unlike you? How does the similarity or difference from you matter to your engagement with this character?

29. What are topics that interest you and that you would be more willing to pursue in your reading or studying at school?

Appendix D

Third interview: Exploring the think-aloud protocols

This will be an informal, semi-structured interview. The researchers will ask 'stimulated recall' questions, following up on particular 'moves' or comments made in the think-aloud regarding what the reader noticed, attended to, visualised, connected to, interpreted, etc.

Prompts might include ...

Tell me more about ...

Explain what you were thinking when ...

How would this 'move' help you when ...

What made you notice ...

What helped you connect to ...

How did you learn to ...

How did you know that ...

How was this like ...

What did X remind you of ...

How could X help you with ...

What prior experiences/etc. did you use to see/connect/ judge ...

What is something else a reader could do when ...

How was reading this scene similar/different from reading other scenes in this book/other scenes in other books you like ...

Appendix E

Final semi-structured interview: Artifacts and Follow up

This interview will follow up on the first three interviews. Informants will be asked to bring in artifacts, observations of their own about their reading, questions they have for the researcher, etc. These will be discussed during the interview. Interview questions from the initial interview may be revisited or followed up on.

1. Tell me about the artifacts you brought in.

2. Why did you compose/create/collect these artifacts?

3. How do you read/use/share these artifacts?

4. How do or might other people you know use these artifacts?

5. How might these artifacts or something similar be used in school or to abet work you do in school?

6. What are some things you have noticed about your reading since our last interview?

7. What are some observations or questions you have for us about this study, reading in general, genres, your reading, etc.?

Appendix F

Coding and data analysis

All interview data were analysed according to procedures of constant comparative analytic (CCA) procedures (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We also employed tools of discourse analysis (Cazden, I2001; Gee, 1999) within the framework of constant comparative analysis. Constant comparative analysis involved coding across three stages: open, axial, and selective coding. In the open coding stage, categories and subcategories were noted and labelled (as codes, at that point), and some initial connections among categories were noted. Generative questions were posed of the data as a means of testing tentative hypotheses and generating areas for further data collection. Connections were made to extant theories. We eventually found Dewey's classifications of interests to be very useful in understanding and explaining the data. As implied in the naming of this method, open coding is a constant procedure; that is, open coding begins with the first collection of data and proceeds throughout the data collection process (as opposed to some methods in which data are analysed only after all data are collected). The benefit of the 'constant' nature of CCA is that the coding process allows researchers to collect data to test (both to confirm and disconfirm) the codes being generated and to generate analyses that reflect change over time, thus complementing the quantitative analyses of change over time.

In the axial stage of coding, we coded intensively and concertedly around single categories (the pleasures, in this case) generated during open coding. We labelled the properties of categories deemed central to the data. We hypothesised about and specified various conditions and consequences associated with the category. Finally, each category was compared to other categories yielded through the open coding stage. We considered overlaps, points of convergence and divergence, and outright contradictions. The stage of axial coding allowed an assessment of whether the identified categories are related to other categories, should perhaps be collapsed into other categories, or further separated into subcategories, and whether, indeed, the categories have any relevance to the central research questions. This axial coding process also forces the researchers to reexamine data at a later point, thus safeguarding against premature typification of data patterns.

In the selective coding stage, we revisited the data as organised into central categories (via the process of axial coding) and systematically checked for confirmation or negation of hypotheses, as well as for generalisability of patterns across the sample (referring only to the sample directly examined via qualitative data collection procedures). It is during the stage of selective coding that we employed methods of discourse analysis as outlined by Gee (1999), in which the researchers will analyse verbatim interview or observation transcripts to assess how language use reflects and instantiates certain motivations, expectations, values, practices, extensions and uses of literacy in particular domains and contexts.

Throughout the CCA process, we prepared theoretical memos and integrative theoretical memos to link data to relevant extant theory and empirical research, to test, generate, and document initial hypotheses for later analysis, and to communicate generated theories.

Jeffrey Wilhelm is Distinguished Professor of English Education at Boise State University and regularly teaches middle and high school students. He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project, and author of 32 texts about literacy teaching and learning, and editor of four series of books for adolescents including the new Issues 21 (Scholastic Canada). He is the recipient of the NCTE Promising Research Award for 'You Gotta BE the Book' and the Russell Award for Distinguished Research for 'Reading Don't Fix No Chevys'.