Summer 2011 14 A Powerful Pairing : The Literature Circle and the Wiki

tute “a form of independent reading” (Daniels, 2002, p. 38). Creating literature circles around young adult texts, in particular, incorporates the best aspects of independent reading into the classroom by allowing students to choose what they want to read and then discuss it in peer-organized, peer-managed groups that encourage them to develop critical interpretations independently, under the guidance (not control) of the teacher. Asking students to create a wiki based on their chosen book and their group process gives them a dynamic forum for crafting responses to what they have read. Combining the two methods has proven to be an ideal way to synthesize the “learning and innovation skills” of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity with 21st century technology skills.2 Merging the low-tech literature circle with the higher-tech wiki can foster interest in autonomous reading, develop tools for collaborative meaning making, and encourage students to become better critical thinkers, which may lead to better performance on standardized tests. Both the literature circle and the wiki emphasize collaborative meaning making through an ongoing process and, as such, complement each other in very powerful ways. I have combined literature circles and wikis in a college-level young adult literature course for preservice teachers and found that the two to work extremely well together, especially for the “sharing out” that is essential at the end of each cycle of the literature circle process. Given the many digital literacy tools available to English language arts teachers, the wiki is perhaps more flexible and adaptable Study after study has shown that one of the best predictors of reading achievement is how much independent reading a young person does.1 And yet, as secondary English language arts teachers feel more and more pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, independent reading is likely one of the first things to be dropped from the curriculum. Combined with pressures to teach digital literacy, media literacy, and 21st century skills, English language arts teachers may well feel overwhelmed by the challenge of meeting, much less synthesizing, all these demands. In the process, as Gallagher argues in Readicide (2009), student motivation and curiosity—the very qualities most teachers want to nurture, and the ones that most often lead to student success—are extinguished (p. 10). The outlook need not look so grim, however. Fortunately, the English language arts discipline can adapt quite readily to many of these “new” requirements, since many are simply reconfigurations of skills we have been teaching all along: critical thinking, critical writing, interpretation, and creative response. And independent reading can be seamlessly integrated into approaches that meet many of these diverse requirements. But the perennial question for teachers is how to nurture students’ independent reading habits, especially at the secondary level, when pleasure reading tends to drop off significantly (National Endowment for the Arts, 2007, pp. 7–8). The pedagogy of literature circles can provide the missing link between school reading and pleasure reading, since lit circles consti-