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Why is reading good? Reading competency supports healthier and more inclusive social communication, opening a reader’s panorama. We need a more critical citizenry to cultivate fairer societies. Therefore, people must be able to interpret the messages they receive correctly. Reading is an indispensable skill that we must encourage and develop in students, as well as depth in reading comprehension. This was the theme of the Observatory’s Webinar featuring Dr. David Santamaría Cid de León. This article summarizes his most relevant points. Also, I invite you to watch the entire webinar and share it with your colleagues.
According to Martha Nussbaum, reading helps us subsume the mind in a different reality through imagination. This means that when we read the narration, we can imagine and situate the thoughts, experiences, and motives that the “other” person in the narration had or has. Moreover, we can imagine or identify the developing story’s personal, social, and historical contexts and the author’s or protagonist’s characteristics.
Narrative imagination is critical, allowing us to understand “other” people. This concept is crucial for developing critical thinking for a better, more plural, and diverse citizenry. Comprehending the differences and “otherness” and the origin of the otherness is part of understanding and empathy, as Professor Santamaría explained.
“Literature helps us explore the emotional richness of the human being, imagination, and new ways to experience real caring.” – Irene Comins.
In this session, Professor Santamaría explained that the narrative imagination leads us to understand more complex problems through the literary genre or type of reading. A message can be conveyed differently depending on the literary genre. For example, we can convey a message directly with an essay, but if we want a lyrical aesthetic, we might employ poetry or engage the reader through fiction. The objective is to guide students in finding the underlying messages in literal reading. All these genres will place us in a reality that we do not experience, and we will come to understand that there are other realities. Only one does not prevail; all produce dialogue and interpretation, and each situation may have multiple resolutions.
Intertextual dialogue
Reading competency makes it possible to establish what Bakhtin (1986) calls intertextual dialogue, the interaction between different messages from authors with different perspectives that converge in the reader. Thus, readers can weigh arguments, ideas, conclusions, and positions to build their own. Diverse readings help us co-construct ideas with others in an active dialogue:
- Previous position: What we think individually.
- Intertextual dialogue: What we read and debate internally.
- Active dialogue: What we hear from other people and analyze.
- New position: The reconstruction is enriched by otherness.
“A constant critical attitude is how a person will fulfill their vocation of integrating, understanding the themes and tasks of their time.” – Paulo Freire.
Lëttëra: A Strategy for Developing Reading Competency
Lëttëra is a project developed by a group of teachers from Prepa Tec in 2020. It is a web-based technology strategy. It seeks to promote the development of reading competency based on the levels set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which are measured through the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment). According to the most recent PISA application, Mexico’s young people barely attain OECD’s basic level: comprehending sentences literally. Given that result, we can visualize teachers’ enormous challenges in classrooms.
Better reading competency in young people eventually produces a critical vision of public and social life through recognizing and understanding their needs and those of others; it allows them to develop skills to improve their professional perspectives.
Lëttëra helped students advance from level 1a to level 2. Using this platform over approximately four months helped them develop reading competency. Learn more about Lëttëra in the webinar‘s entire video and this post.
When teachers face students’ educational lag in reading comprehension, they must analyze the conditions that led to it. It is crucial to rework students’ development of reading comprehension from the level we receive them to understand what strategies we can adapt to improve it. Otherwise, students will feel frustrated and powerless and leave school; thus, not doing this work will cause dropout rates to rise.
We can employ different strategies to get students to read and enjoy it. For example, reading artificial intelligence text summaries is like reading the back cover of a book to see if it can hook us or reading a critical review by someone specialized in the subject to know if it can catch our attention. ChatGPT is not a rival; it can convey the message described in other sources of information and give us more details that enrich what we already know. It is like comparing a book with its movie or series: we can have more detail.
Why is it important for young people to develop critical thinking?
In this presentation, Professor Santamaría focused on what we call “critical thinking” from the point of view of creating solutions, starting from questioning. Critical thinking allows us to ask questions and know the questions to ask. It refers to the action of questioning, a crucial first step that has nothing to do with judging or disqualifying. It can occur through questioning even everyday actions, where we consider: What is the meaning of what I am doing? What is its usefulness? What do I want to achieve?
In a higher education environment, students’ critical thinking allows them to generate active solutions that apply to their chosen professions. They will confront daily professional situations (“problems”) that require a solution. Critical thinking helps them question what they will do and why, triggering in them a creative process that passes through multiple iterations, through which they will get closer and closer to a possible solution.
“Questioning is not a rejection; it is only the act of asking, which then passes through a process of reflection that can lead us to confirmation, reaffirmation, evaluation or discernment.” – David Santamaría Cid de León.
In addition to questioning, the process of connecting is essential. This refers to retrieving previous thoughts and finding their correlation with new information, understanding the connection, and seeing the conflict or harmony of the thoughts.
Professor Santamaría explained that in the context of current news, we can read and comprehend different realities contextually, contrast these with what we already know, and trigger the process of critical thinking, leading to questioning, reflecting, evaluating, and pondering. Subsequently, with all this information, we can arrive at new solutions or approaches to the truth. Evaluating and discerning must be continuous, as well as questioning and reconstructing.
We should routinely perform critical thinking about the content we find every day. We can ask ourselves: Who says it? Where did I read it? This encourages questioning daily. These two questions seem simple, but they effectively trigger questioning that leads us to be better informed through a virtuous circle. To make reading exciting, we can bring to class current news that relates to the classroom reading topics we will address and achieve a motivating dialogue.
Relive this webinar. If your native language is not Spanish, you can turn on translated YouTube subtitles for this article. To activate this option, select “Subtitles” on YouTube (Spanish subtitles will appear), then choose Settings ->Subtitles -> Translate automatically and the language you prefer.
About the Speaker
David Santamaría Cid de León (david.santamaria@tec.mx) holds a Ph.D. in Educational Innovation from Tecnologico de Monterrey, a master’s degree in education in Teaching from La Salle University, and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Tecnologico de Monterrey. His research and participation focus on dialogic education, the development of citizenship, and measuring the impact of various educational innovations.
He is an Impact Measurement Researcher at the Institute for the Future of Education and a professor in the master’s degree program in Educational Technology and Education at the School of Humanities and Education of Tecnologico de Monterrey.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
