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The Blair Reader
Third Edition
by Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell
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After more than twenty years of teaching composition, we have come to believe that students are most enriched and engaged if they view the reading and writing they do as a way of participating in ongoing public discussions about subjects that matter to them. This focus enables students to discover their own ideas and to see how these ideas fit into a larger discourse community, where ideas gain meaning and value. We created The Blair Reader to encourage students to make their own contribution to the public discussion and to help them realize that ideas take shape only in response to other ideas.
Another reason we decided to create The Blair Reader was that we could not find a reader that truly addressed our needs as teachers. We--like you--expect (and believe we are entitled to) compelling reading selections that engage both instructors and students in a spirited exchange. We also expect selections that reflect (and are enriched, not limited, by) the diversity of ideas that characterizes our schools and our society. We expect writers to speak in distinctive voices, to treat issues that concern us deeply, and to use language that challenges and provokes us. In addition, we expect questions that accompany readings to encourage readers to participate in the process of creating meaning--in other words, questions that ask "What does this mean to you?" not simply "What does this mean?" In short, we expect a book that stimulates discussion and that prompts students to discover new ideas and to see familiar ideas from new perspectives. These expectations guided us as we developed The Blair Reader and as we worked to enhance its usefulness in this new edition.
The Reading Selections and Their Arrangement
We began work on The Blair Reader determined that it would include readings that composition instructors really enjoyed teaching. To accomplish this goal, we surveyed hundreds of instructors and asked them what essays they thought were the most readable and teachable. To their selections we added our own favorites. After we assembled our table of contents, teachers from all over the country tested the readings and apparatus. The result of this effort is a reader that contains the most readable and teachable selections we could find.
To create the third edition, we followed a similar process, relying on our own experience as users of the first two editions in the classroom as well as on the thoughtful comments of the many other teachers who generously shared their reactions to the first two editions with us. The result is a text that includes 108 essays and 8 poems. The readings are arranged in ten tightly focused units: Family and Memory, Issues in Education, The Politics of Language, The Media's Message, Women and Men, The American Dream, The Way We Live Now, Medical Practice and Responsibility, Earth in the Balance, and Making Choices. These thematic groupings are diverse enough to allow many options yet focused enough for meaningful discussion and writing.
New to this edition are three features designed to increase the flexibility and usefulness of the book. The Two Perspectives on . . . feature presents two complementary readings that introduce students to the chapter's theme and motivate them to use their critical thinking skills. These paired readings, accompanied by a set of "Responding to Reading" questions, now appear at the beginning of every chapter. Each chapter ends with a Focus question that is followed by a group of essays that take a variety of different positions on a single debatable issue. For example, Chapter 2, "Issues in Education," asks "What is good teaching?" and Chapter 10, "Making Choices," asks "Are all ideas created equal?" The essays in these sections not only encourage students to add their voices to an ongoing debate but also illustrate that complex issues often elicit more than two points of view. Also new to this edition is a Widening the Focus feature that identifies essays in other chapters of the book that offer insight into the issues raised by the "Focus" question.
As we worked on the third edition, we added readings that would tighten the emphasis of each chapter as well as increase students' interest and involvement. Among the selections new to this edition are Neil Postman's "Virtual Students, Digital Classrooms," Bobby Fong's "Commonplaces about Teaching: Second Thoughts," Jorge Amselle's "iIngles, Si!" Madeline Levine's "Media and the Adolescent," Stephanie Gutmann's "Sex and the Soldier," Susan K. Cahn's "You've Come a Long Way, Maybe." Bharati Mukherjee's "American Dreamer," Webb Hubbell's "Life in Prison," Stephen L. Carter's "Rush to Lethal Judgment," Linda Pastan's "Ethics," and Lawrence Krauss's "Equal Time for Nonsense."
These and other new readings were selected to introduce students to the ongoing ethical debates surrounding issues like divorce and the nontraditional family, communication in the information age, inequalities in education, the problems of the disabled and the homeless, stereotyping in the media, euthanasia and assisted suicide, sexism, affirmative action, the environment, animal rights, and freedom of speech. The result of our revision is a table of contents that combines time--tested favorites with provocative new pieces, thereby illustrating to students that ideas can continue to be "relevant" long after a selection was written.
Finally, the selections in The Blair Reader, third edition, continue to represent a wide variety of rhetorical patterns and types of discourse as well as a variety of themes, issues, and positions. In addition to essays, The Blair Reader contains speeches, meditations, newspaper and magazine articles, and poems. The level of diction ranges from the relaxed formality of E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" to the biting satire of Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll." Every effort has been made, too, to include a diverse selection of voices, because we believe that students can best discover their own voices by becoming acquainted with the voices of others.
Resources for Students
We designed the apparatus in The Blair Reader to involve students and to encourage them to respond critically to what they read. Their reactions can then become the basis for more focused thinking and writing. In order to facilitate this process, we have included the following special features:
Introduction: Becoming a Critical Reader explains and illustrates the process of reading and reacting critically to texts and formulating varied and original responses.
Student Voices, a collection of brief, informal responses (from students' writing journals) to the unit's theme, opens each chapter.
A brief chapter introduction, Preparing to Read and Write, places each chapter's broad theme in a narrower social or political context, helping students connect with the chapter's specific ideas and issues. A series of questions at the end of these chapter introductions helps students to focus their intellectual and emotional reactions to individual selections in the context of the chapter's larger issues.
Headnotes that accompany each selection provide useful biographical information and often offer insight into the writer's motivation or purpose.
Responding to Reading questions that follow each selection focus on thematic and rhetorical considerations. By asking students to do more than read essays simply for facts or information, these questions help them realize that reading is an interactive and intellectually stimulating process and that they have something valuable to contribute.
Writing suggestions at the end of each chapter ask students to respond in writing to the ideas they have encountered. These questions encourage students to explore relationships among readings and to connect readings to their own lives.
A Rhetorical Table of Contents, located in the front of the book on pages viiiÐxii, groups the text's readings in categories that reflect the way they arrange material: narrative, description, process, comparison and contrast, and so on.
Topical Clusters, narrowly focused thematic units, (pp. xiii-xx), offer students and teachers additional options for pairing and grouping readings.
Resources for Instructors
Because we wanted The Blair Reader to be a rich and comprehensive resource for instructors, we developed an Instructor's Resource Manual to accompany the text. This manual, designed to serve as a useful and accessible classroom companion, incorporates teaching techniques drawn from our years in the classroom as well as reactions of our own students to the selections.
The Instructor's Resource Manual, updated for this edition by Connie Rothwell of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, includes the following features:
Setting Up the Unit begins each chapter by focusing on a rhetorical or pedagogical strategy that instructors can use in their discussion of the chapter.
Confronting the Issues offers a range of activities--most of them collaborative--designed to explore some of the issues suggested by the chapter's readings.
For Openers, the first prompt for each selection, is designed to initiate class discussion.
Teaching Strategies for each selection provide suggestions for eliciting students' response to the reading, stimulating their discussions, and providing further information on the writer or the writing selection.
Collaborative Activities present group activities through which students can develop insight and understanding by exchanging ideas with others.
Writer's Options offer possibilities for exploring (in a journal entry or a longer piece of writing) personal responses, stylistic techniques, or thematic issues suggested by the selection.
Multimedia Resources point to "texts" outside the scope of the anthology--movies, songs, cartoons, Internet resources, and the like--that address either the selection itself or the issues it raises.
Suggested Answers for "Responding to Reading" questions provide possible responses to the questions that follow the selection.
Additional "Responding to Reading" questions are supplementary questions for those instructors who want more editorial apparatus than the book includes.
Teaching Perspectives prompts facilitate using the two or three readings in the chapter that have been grouped together because they provide complementary perspectives on an issue.
We encourage you to use the Instructor's Manual to complement your own proven strategies. We also encourage you to let us know your reactions to the Manual and your suggestions for making it better. We are especially interested in hearing about classroom strategies that you use successfully and reading selections that have consistently appealed to your students. In future editions of the Instructor's Resource Manual, we would like to include these suggestions along with the names of the individuals who submitted them. Just write us in care of Prentice Hall, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458.
Acknowledgments
The Blair Reader is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the two of us, between us and our students, between us and Prentice Hall, and between us and you--our colleagues who told us what you wanted in a reader. At Prentice Hall, we want to thank our editor, Leah Jewell, and her assistant, Patricia Castiglione. We appreciate the organizational skills of Production Editor Randy Pettit, and we thank him for his patience and professionalism as he guided the book through production. We also thank our exceptional copyeditor, Margaret Ritchie, and Connie Rothwell for her creative contributions to the Instructor's Resource Manual.
As always, Mark Gallaher's editorial instincts were exactly right;
as always, his contributions are much appreciated. (And, as always, he deserves his own paragraph.)
In preparing The Blair Reader, third edition, we benefited at every stage from the assistance and suggestions of colleagues from across the country: Kerry A. Reilly, University of New Hampshire; Jeanann Rader, Camden Community College; Mary E. Hallet, University of New Hampshire; Jeslyn Medoff, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Sue Mehlich, Pitt Community College; Anne Righton Malone, University of New Hampshire; Ted McFerrin, Collin County Community College; Bryan Polk, The Pennsylvania State University, Abington; Timothy P. Twohill, Lee College; Carolyn Allen, University of Washington; Sarah Markgraf, Bergen Community College; Beverly G. Galvan, Clark College; Charles Ross, Purdue University; Susan Kelly, Saddleback College; Suzanne I. Staszak-Silva, Hofstra University; William Keough, Fitchburg State College; Victoria Lague, Miami-Dade Community College; Andrew Tomko, Bergen Community College.
On the home front, we once again "round up the usual suspects" to thank--Mark, Adam, and Rebecca Kirszner and Demi, David, and Sarah Mandell. And, of course, we thank each other: it really has been a "beautiful friendship."
-- Laurie G. Kirszner
-- Stephen R. Mandell
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