Reading Protext

Last weekend T and I were in Madison for a conference he was attending. And since we're middle-class educated teachers, you wouldn't have to think too long about why and how we ended up at the capital building. We'll spare you our politics assured that you know us well enough to understand our stance and Terry's effort to talk with his leadership class about the power of compromise and conversation.

Instead, I'll share some photos and a blog post I crafted for a class I'm enrolled in on reading readers:

Last weekend I was in Madison, Wisconsin at the capitol for the rally in protest of Governor Walker’s controversial budget repair bill. As I wandered around the capitol grounds and quite literally stumbled into former colleagues, voices lead the call, “Tell me what democracy looks like?” And a cacophony of voices chanted in response, “This is what democracy looks like.” In part the experience was about looks, about the visual message of thousands gathered together in one symbolic space as the snow sprinkled our shoulders and hats.

But I was surprised by the role that reading played in the experience. Amidst the call and response chanting, the clang of cow bells, truck horns, and banging on drums, thousands gathered to read one another’s signs. Unity came in proximity, but it seemed also importantly to come through reading. People read signs as they marched by or while they waited in line to get into the capitol building. They asked some to stop for a photo, not of the person but of the sign and its text. They pointed out signs to others as they read and laughed or read and nodded in agreement. 

Inside the capital building thousands of signs had been taped to the marble walls. Hundreds walked the halls reading signs as if reading placards accompanying art or artifacts in a museum. On the second floor thousands of comments posted on websites by Wisconsinites had been printed onto sheets of paper and taped with blue painters’ tape in long rows. These posted comments ran down the walls along the stairways that lead from floor to floor. And copies of the bill itself had likewise been taped to walls where people stopped to read the text and comment to one another as they pointed to particular lines. On the door to the Democratic Assembly Caucus people had left yellow post-it thank you notes.  This was a site of literacy like none other I had quite experienced.

The range of texts alone was stunning and a bit, quite frankly, overwhelming.  Some messages were multimodal like the Ragging Grannies who had rewritten the lyrics to church songs and sang them in front of the capital as protest songs. Posters included three-dimensional artifacts that supported written texts. Other posters referenced popular culture as in this image of one linked to a popular 2010 viral Bed Intruder You Tube video. But what struck me most vividly is how much of the text was about writing one’s own narrative or self and about encouraging others to read. Nurses, firefighters, teachers, clergy, municipal workers, teamsters, thespians, and many more proudly asserted their identities and personal narratives on signs, T-shirts, and through lyrics that called for notice.

I wondered, what life events prompt us to rely most heavily on reading each other and on responding to one another’s autobiographies through text in such visible ways?