Reading Social Work.

Witkin, Stanley L.

Each year my department at the University of Vermont conducts a writing workshop for students. The workshop is one way we try to address our concerns about the quality of students' written work. We are far from unique. Anyone hanging around the halls of the academy will sooner or later hear tales about the woeful state of students' writing skills. These assessments are not commentaries on students' abilities, but, to varying degrees, an indictment of our educational system--a statement about what it means to be an educated person and the importance of writing to social work practice.

As social workers, our written artifacts inscribe clients' lives. Written texts--whether in the form of a case record or journal article--form an "official record" about clients and are used to render judgments and inform decisions about them. But for these texts to have an impact they must be read. Yet, despite all the attention given to writing almost no attention is paid to reading. We do not hold "reading workshops" or give students' reading anything like the meticulous attention they receive about their use of sentence construction, syntax, and style. When it comes to reading students are left in the dark. (OK, bad joke.)

What accounts for this difference in the way writing and reading are treated? I suspect it may have to do with the following:

* Writing is considered a skill, even a craft, that requires continuous practice and feedback. Reading, in contrast, is considered a kind of language proficiency that students already possess by the time we meet them.

* Writing is viewed as active, reading as passive. Writers produce something, readers consume.

* The characteristics of good writing, such as clarity and proper use of grammar, are generally known. Good reading is harder to pin down, or when it is, it gets defined narrowly as "comprehension."

* We can observe another's writing directly, but reading is "observed" only indirectly--by speaking or writing.

At the same time that I am writing this editorial, I also am reading papers that students have written for the "Human Behavior and the Social Environment" course that I am teaching this semester. My comments on their papers are of two types: those that address how they write, such as their use of grammar and word choice, and those that address what they write, their ideas. The former is viewed as an expression of writing skills, the latter as something like "understanding." In my opinion, this understanding may, in part, be a function of how students read.

Good Readers

The absence of attention to reading is connected to a view of written texts as containing specific meanings that reflect the intentions of authors. Reading is basically passive, as the text already contains the meanings that readers hope to absorb. Good readers, from this perspective--their interpretations correspond to authors' intentions or the facts as reported--are able to comprehend the "true" meanings of the text. Particular interpretations of texts are considered true and others false. True is used here in two ways: as reflecting an author's actual meaning or as reflecting reality. This view depends on notions of texts as having fixed meanings and of language as corresponding to "reality," positions that have been subject to considerable critique (see, for example, Denzin, 1997; Derrida, 1974).

An alternate view, informed by developments in literary theory and cultural studies, is that what is taken as the true meaning of a text depends on whose interpretation is privileged. For example, in universities, instructors' interpretations are privileged; in practice settings privileged interpretations are associated with various experts--for example, social workers, supervisors, judges, or psychiatrists. True meaning becomes synonymous with authoritative interpretations, and authoritative interpretations are based on conferred power within particular contexts. Uniformity, associated with efficiency and the reproduction of relations of authority, rather than multiplicity becomes rewarded. Thus, teaching social work students "correct" interpretations is a way to socialize them into the social work community while retaining the relationship between teacher and student. They learn to read in a manner that accepts certain literary conventions and beliefs--for example, the relationship between authority and ci tations or the privileging of experts' opinions about others over others opinions of themselves.

Locating meaning within texts also has been challenged by the view that meaning is generated by the interaction of reader and text. In contrast to meaning residing in texts, an alternative view, informed by developments in literary theory and cultural studies, considers meaning as residing in neither texts nor readers, but produced by an interaction of both. For example, a social worker writing a report to the court is influenced by the literary style, structure, and lexicon of court reports, the intended audience; cultural issues such as individualism and beliefs about children; social issues such as class and political climate; and personal interests, such as whether the social worker believes in "family preservation." Readers of this report interpret it through their cultural, social, and personal lenses. These readings may generate "different" reports--for example, the parent's reading of the report and the judge's reading may differ markedly. The text (report) having no fixed meaning may become the site of contested meaning. Nevertheless, the judge's reading, because of her or his position in the judicial system, is likely to be the most authoritative, even more so than that of the social worker--author. Of course, skillful negotiation of meaning on the part of other readers may lead to yet another reading of the report. (This example was inspired by Hall, 1994.)

A related view considers that all readings may be seen as connected to interpretive communities that suggest meanings and criteria of interpretation. This idea--developed by literary critic and theorist Stanley Fish (1980)-- posits that readers' interpretive decisions, shaped by the conventions and standards of their referent communities, generate textual meaning. The interpretive community of social work, informs us how to read a journal article differently from a novel. It furnishes definitions of certain words or phrases--for example, the social environment and self-determination. It informs readers which interpretations are sensible--for example, interpreting a child's aggression as a reflection of her home life--and which are not--for example, her possession by evil spirits.

Just as individual readers can be seen as part of a community, texts develop out of a network of relations with other texts both past and present. Hall (1994) described this "intertextuality" as the "recognition that all texts are constituted not merely by 'quotations' from other texts but by many historical, social, and institutional discourses, genres, and reading conventions. Such conventions are made available on the occasion of the reading through the interaction between the writer, reader, text and context" (p. 144). In other words, the meaning of texts are indeterminate and readings are not isolated individual acts but historical, cultural, and social expressions.

Science Reading

The pervasiveness and authority of scientific thinking has had a substantial influence on our reading and our teaching of reading. As I argued in my previous editorial (October 2000), science writing is not viewed as writing in the literary sense. Rather, it produces a realist text in which the observations of neutral researchers are inscribed. Critical reading in this context means assessing methodology and data analysis; literary considerations are irrelevant. We are taught to read research as researchers rather than as social workers. As researcher-readers we relinquish our social work identities--as activist, advocate, and iconoclast--and become passive absorbers of received truth. Such readings reauthorize the hegemony of science and ensure that the literary genre of which the text is part remains invisible.

Are we obligated to read in this manner? If science writing is a form of literature, then scientific texts can be subject to multiple readings. Even methodology can be viewed as a literary device that authorizes and reproduces itself. Agger (1989) for instance, read methodology as a narrative that denies its own narrative form, thereby positioning itself as privileged knowing beyond the boundaries of literary critique. He reminded us that "statistics, regression analyses, research design cannot solve problems in themselves. They appear only to still debate and diminish dissension in an age of science. They narrate the argument, nothing more" (p. 97).

Similarly, certain terms commonly used in research reports, which are viewed as having existential status, can be interpreted as literary devices. For example, Danziger (1997) writing about the history of psychology, showed how the term "variable" entered into psychological discourse. His analysis traced the shift of variable from a technical term used in statistics during the 1920s to a component of a "metalanguage that investigators used to describe, not just an element of technique, but the objects of their investigation" (p. 169). Thus, interpretation and meaning were transformed into "psychological variables," which were further categorized as "independent," "dependent," or intervening." One effect of describing human experience in this way was to reduce its subjectivity and complexity and create "objective entities that varied only in degree and had causal effects on other objective entities" (p. 172). Like methodology, this pseudo-objectification and surrounding scientific aura served to insulate term s like variable from ideological or other nonscientific forms of critique.

Other Ways of Reading

If we are not limited to reading in prescribed ways, how should we read? We might begin by expanding our reading to include analyses of communication structure such as narrative, literary tropes such as metaphor, and techniques of persuasion. For example, texts make use of various rhetorical strategies to convince their intended audiences of the veracity or strength of their arguments. Even those claiming a scientific or empirical approach use these strategies (see, for example, Witkin, 1998). Once we move away from language as a reflection of reality, form regains its place along side content. Even a "fact" may be considered a rhetorical achievement, an interpretation made incontrovertible through the persuasiveness of various forms of argument. As Soyland (1994) remarked, "the 'facts' do not simply 'speak for themselves'; they are presented in a particular form, in a given style, and using a specific number of 'descriptions' of the 'evidence' on which the arguments contained in the text are based" (p. 15). As agents of change and control, social workers tend to be sensitive to, and skilled in, strategies of persuasion. We can apply these sensitivities to reading, including the reading of research.

Social Work Reading

Beyond these literary and rhetorical readings, social workers can read from within the profession. What I mean here is reading informed by the profession's values, commitments, and aims. From my perspective, such readings would be oppositional in the sense of challenging the recognition that texts can be status quo in their adherence to literary formats, writing styles, reification of linguistic categories, and authorial authority. Social work readers would recognize that "every text situates a reader in a dominant discourse or ideology" (Denzin, 1997, p. 239) and therefore, "refuse to confine interpretation to a predetermined conceptual scheme" (p. 238). Understanding reading as an active engagement with texts, social work readers would practice critical interpretation that would seek to dislodge "the privileging of sexuality, class, gender, race, age, nationality, and ideology" (Denzin, 1997, p. 238).

Consistent with social work's contextual orientation, social work readers would locate ideas and individuals historically, culturally, and socially. They would understand that the language of texts creates rather than reflects the world and they would inquire about whose world was being created. Speaking for the other would be viewed with suspicion and listening for subjugated voices would be a priority.

Social work readings would interrogate texts in ways that sought to expose their assumptions, ideologies, values, and practice implications. Questions would not be bound by the belief in a fixed meaning, but would seek to reveal the alternative meanings of texts. Examples might include: What is the relationship of the text to current institutional arrangements? What values about human behavior or social life are stated or implied? How does meaning change if claims of truth or objectivity are analyzed rhetorically or culturally? What practices are likely to be encouraged, discouraged, or disrupted? Who is speaking for whom, by what authority, and in what language? What is taken for granted or assumed in the text? Who is the text's intended audience? the unwanted audience? How would they read this text? To what extent does the text encourage or close off dialogue?

Denzin (1997) asserted that "[e]very reading challenges or destabilizes a text, questioning its representations of reality" (p. 239). Alternative readings can "open up another version of the story being told" (p. 239). From this perspective, social work readings can become a form of action. Texts are reinterpreted to reveal their reauthorizing, status quo-preserving, or generative potential. Instead of passively accepting authorized versions of the text, we use its potential for multiple stories to further our vision of a just society. Such readings expand the possibilities for human action. (See Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999, for a social work text that encourages multiple readings.)

As Goldstein (2000) told us, "The human situation-narrowly or broadly conceived--is the focus of social work. How we might make sense of any human situation falls somewhere across a continuum of types of understanding that, at one extreme, might be called scientific, at the other, artistic" (p. 236). As social work readers we must traverse this whole range of understandings if we are to find ways to sensitively and meaningfully forge the human connections that inform our work.

References

Agger, B. (1989). Reading science: A literary, political, and sociological analysis. Dix Hills, NY: General Hall.

Chambon, A. S., Irving, A., & Epstein, L. (Eds.). (1999). Reading Foucault for social work New York: Columbia University Press.

Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Derrida, J. (1974). On grammatology. (Trans. Gayatri Spivak). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldstein, H. (2000). Poetry and practice [Editorial]. Families in Society, 81, 235-237.

Hall, C. (1997). Social work as narrative: Storytelling and persuasion in professional texts. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.

Soyland, A. J. (1994). Psychology as metaphor. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Witkin, S. L. (1998). The right to effective treatment and the effective treatment of rights: Rhetorical empiricism and the politics of research. Social Work, 43, 75-80.