Reading Wide Awake: Politics, Pedagogies, and Possibilities

“Reading Wide Awake should be required reading for all educators working to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the greatest opportunity for promoting a real thinking curriculum that I have seen in my 30 years as an educator. I was not only tremendously impressed with this book; I was inspired by it.”
—From the Foreword by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Boise State University; Director of the Boise State Writing Project, author of “You Gotta Be The Book”: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents, Second Edition

In his new book, popular author Patrick Shannon examines reading as agency—why reading critically is essential to civic engagement and a healthy democracy. We follow the author on a journey of self discovery as he practices “wide-awake reading” with a variety of everyday texts, from radio programs to legal documents to more traditional books and magazines. Shannon demonstrates how we can and must engage in close reading of the world around us and how teachers, in turn, can help their students make meaning from the information in their lives that often appears to move at warp speed. Reading Wide Awake integrates personal stories, political commentary, and guidance for educators into an engaging, fun-to-read book that will resonate with a diverse audience of teachers.

Book Features:

• How to read social objects and events as texts, such as a Little League game, Google Earth, and PieLab.
• New connections between reading comprehension and the role of reading in society.
• “Imagining Pedagogy” and “Reading Theory” summary sections in each chapter.

Patrick Shannon is a professor of education at Penn State University. He has written 16 books and was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2002.