Reader (i.e., Student) Response Theory

As many of you know, my dissertation work (and my research agenda in general) involves the application of literary theory to teaching and learning. Most of my writing involves teaching and learning in the online environment, but virtually everything I write about is equally applicable to the traditional classroom as well.

Today I want to talk a little about Wolfgang Iser and Reader Response Theory. For Iser, the meaning of a text is determined solely by the individual reader’s interaction with it. It is important to point out, then, that meaning cannot be located purely in the “author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology,” but rather in the interaction between the two, during the “reading process itself” (Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, p. 31).

I firmly believe that this concept, while obviously oversimplified here, can lend a tremendous amount of depth and insight into our understanding of issues regarding teaching and learning. Indeed, it is this kind of interaction, between the author’s writing and the reader’s reading, between the instructors teaching and the student’s learning, that needs to be explored more fully, especially in the online learning literature, but also in other areas of education research.

For Iser, a text is simply a collection of marks on a page that only comes alive in the experience of a reader, so when we begin to think of teaching in the same way that Iser thinks of a text, we come to realize that teaching is like the proverbial tree in the woods: it is only “heard” if there is someone there to hear it.