Bizzaro, Responding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory
Bizzaro explains in this book how he uses New Criticism, reader-response criticism, deconstruction, and feminist criticism to respond to students’ poems. By applying literary criticism techniques to his students’ poems, Bizzaro decentralizes authority in his class and models critical reading strategies. He also helps his students understand how readers (and writers) make meaning. Students can clearly see themselves and classmates revising in response to readers’ critiques, foregrounding the dialogic nature of text production. Bizzaro reports that “by perceiving their teachers’ readings of their poems as participations in the meaning-making process, students will approach the task of revision differently from the way they do” when the teacher is merely an evaluator (69). Bizzaro makes what he calls “participatory comments” which “mirror for the author what the reader construes to be the author’s intentions when reconstructing the text’s meaning. . . the reader should try to ask questions that reflect the reader’s effort to receive the text as the author intended it” (77). Bizzaro points out that “the goal is not to apply or adapt theory, but to read a student poem in a particular way” (104).
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