wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

Recognising the power of pleasure:

What engaged adolescent readers get
from their free-choice reading, and how
teachers can leverage this for all
Jeffrey D. Wilhelm
Boise State University

Abstract
This three-year qualitative study explored the reading of 14 middle graders who self-identified
as passionate readers, and of 15 secondary school students who were highly engaged readers
of genres typically marginalised in school: romance, dystopia, fantasy, vampire and horror.
The purpose of the study was to help teachers think about free choice reading, including of
marginalised genres, and to help teachers think about pedagogic responses. One salient finding
reported here was that free reading of all kinds, including that of marginalised genres, brought
readers five distinct kinds of pleasure (each pleasure in turn bringing many ancillary benefits): the
immersive pleasure of play, intellectual pleasure, social pleasure, the pleasure of functional work,
and the pleasure of inner work. Pleasure, however, and the benefits that accrue from it, is largely
neglected as a research topic. With the exception of intellectual pleasure, the identified pleasures
were not directly fostered in the schools where the study took place although they easily could
be. Implications include the centrality of pleasure to fostering competent and lifelong reading,
as well as ways that teachers can value free-choice reading and promote the pleasures of reading
in their classrooms.

Introduction
Over the years Ive had numerous conversations with
parents, administrators, and other teachers about the
value of the books that students most want to read
and that they read with the greatest joy and engagement. I confess, that although Ive always believed in
choice and have made free-reading a part of my literacy
teaching in schools throughout my career, Ive worried
about some of the reading choices that my students
as well as my own daughters have made. But I also
have to confess my amazement at the absolute joy and
zeal displayed by many of these readers, who would
spend hours upon hours reading outside school even as
they often rejected the reading they were asked to do
inside school. I wondered what students were getting
from this out-of-school reading. So, with my colleague
Michael Smith, I decided to ask. Reading Unbound:

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Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why

We Should Let Them (Wilhelm & Smith, 2014) is a
report of what we learned through a three-year study
of engaged adolescent readers of texts that are often
marginalised in school and even the wider culture.
Our research focused on the experience of these young
readers with all freely chosen reading, and then of their
reading of genres like romance, vampire stories, horror,
dystopian fiction, and fantasy not typically privileged
in schools. We wanted to understand why these readers
pursued the reading agendas that they do, why they
choose the specific genres they love, and what they get
out of their reading of such texts. In short, one of our
most salient findings and the one Ill explore here
was that of the power of pleasure to not only motivate
and sustain engagement in reading, but also to bring
other emotional, psychological and cognitive benefits.

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

We found that all freely-chosen reading, including

that of marginalised genres, brought their readers, in
all cases, five distinct kinds of pleasure: the immersive
pleasure of play, intellectual pleasure, social pleasure,
the pleasure of functional work, and the pleasure of
inner work.
The only one of these pleasures directly fostered to
any degree in the schools where the study took place
(and those where I have taught over the years) was
that of intellectual pleasure. Yet play pleasure was prerequisite to this intellectual engagement and pleasure
and to all the other pleasures too. Additionally, all five
pleasures played into the reading engagement of our
29 informants, which led to ancillary benefits gained
from each. Pleasure, I would argue from the data, is
not only essential to reading engagement and expertise,
but is not foregrounded in schools in ways that would
leverage and develop student reading, and the growth
of students as readers and as human beings.

Research review of constructs related

to pleasure
The power and potential of pleasure suffers from a
degree of neglect in schools, teaching practices and in
the research base. Of course, its important that schools
help prepare students to be career and college ready,
which is the articulated purpose of the new standards
in the United States. But such a narrow focus does
not attend to the motivation and continuing impulse
to read. Next generation standards across the world
represent profound cognitive achievements that cannot
be realised without engagement and practice over time.
This will not occur without the motivational power of
pleasure.
Why are the pleasures of reading so neglected?
Perhaps its because researchers and educators tend
to focus instead on the power of reading. Reading is
certainly necessary to navigate modern life, to function
as an informed democratic citizen, and to work in a
knowledge economy. Using the Internet, multimodal
and multimedia as it is, requires significant kinds of
reading of various kinds of visual, traditional and
hybridised texts working together. Being informed,
especially about nuanced and complex issues, requires
deep reading. Literacy is essential not only for accessing
information and staying up to date; it is also essential to
doing work in the world. But, as we found, pleasure
neglected as it is is pre-requisite and necessary to
harnessing all this power.
Reading research tends to bypass pleasure but does
examine two related constructs: attitude toward
reading and reading motivation. Two recent articles
usefully characterise work in these areas. Examining the

reading attitudes of middle-school students, McKenna

and his colleagues (McKenna, Conradi, Lawrence,
Jang, & Meyer, 2012) draw on Fishbein and Ajzen
(1975) to explain that attitude is acquired, not innate.
The emphasis in the research is not on the nature of the
readers experiences with texts, but rather the extent
to which those experiences contribute to a learned
predisposition to respond in a consistently favourable
or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object
(Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975, p. 6), in this case, reading.
McKenna et al. (2012) note that their construct is very
much the same as what might be called reading interest.
But they note further that interest is usually rendered
as a plural form and carries the meaning of interest
in particular topics and genres. In those terms, our
reading interests develop in part because of the pleasure
that we have taken in reading, but McKenna and his
colleagues do not investigate the nature of that pleasure
in their work.
As Schiefele, Schaffner, Mller, and Wigfield (2012)
explain, researchers examining reading motivation
come closer to pleasure, especially those who seek
to understand the dimensions of reading motivation.
Much of that work is analyses of survey responses,
though some of those surveys used items that were
generated from an analysis of interviews or extended
written responses. Schiefele and his colleagues found
that these quantitative analyses in large measure jibe
with those of the few qualitative examinations of
reading motivation. Schiefele et al. conclude that the
following should be regarded as genuine dimensions
of reading motivation: curiosity, involvement, competition, recognition, grades, compliance, and work avoidance (2012, p.458). But they recognise that qualitative
studies have suggested that the experience of reading
involves several distinguishable facets (e.g., absorption, enjoyment, relaxation) that may warrant further
analysis (2012, p.457). These facets in need of further
analysis would seem to be closer to what we think of
when we talk about the experience of the pleasures one
may take from reading, and which were emphasised,
both explicitly and implicitly, by our informants.
In a report published by the National Literacy Trust
in the United Kingdom, Clark and Rumbold (2006)
take a different tack both from McKenna et al.s (2012)
research and from the research reviewed by Schiefele
and his colleagues (2012). In their view, reading for
pleasure refers to reading that we to do of our own free
will anticipating the satisfaction that we will get from
the act of reading. It also refers to reading that having
begun at someone elses request we continue because
we are interested in it (2006, p.5).
However, their justification for their focus on

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wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

pleasure is, like all of the studies in our literature review

(see Wilhelm & Smith, 2014 for a complete review),
instrumental. That is, reading pleasure is important
because of its impact on literacy attainment and other
outcomes (2014, p.5) rather than because of the experience it provides. More specifically, they argue that
research has established that reading for pleasure is
positively associated with reading achievement, writing
ability, comprehension, vocabulary development, positive attitudes about reading, self-confidence in reading,
and pleasure reading in later life.
Just as we were concluding our study (September,
2013), a sophisticated new study from the United
Kingdom appeared that makes an even more dramatic
claim. Social Inequalities in Cognitive Scores at Age
16: The Role of Reading (Sullivan & Brown, 2013)
draws on data collected in the 1970 British Cohort
Study which is following the lives of more than 17,000
people born in England, Scotland, and Wales in a single
week of 1970. That longitudinal study collected followup data from the studys participants at ages 5, 10, 16,
26, 30, 34, 38, and 42. Sullivan and Brown investigated whether inequalities due to social background
are similar across the three domains of vocabulary,
spelling, and mathematics, or whether they differ and
to what extent these inequalities are accounted for by
family material and cultural resources (2013, p. 2).
After doing a series of regression analyses, Sullivan and
Brown (2013, p.37) conclude the following:
Our findings [suggest] that childrens leisure reading
is important for educational attainment and social
mobility and suggest that the mechanism for this is
increased cognitive development. Once we controlled
for the childs test scores at age five and ten, the influence of the childs own reading remained highly significant, suggesting that the positive link between leisure
reading and cognitive outcomes is not purely due to
more able children being more likely to read a lot, but
that reading is actually linked to increased cognitive
progress over time. From a policy perspective, this
strongly supports the need to support and encourage
childrens reading in their leisure time

The increased cognitive processes is what accounts

for the surprising finding that leisure reading was also
correlated with increased math performance. A recent
study by Krashen, Lee, and McQuillen (2012) also
demonstrates that providing more access to books can
mitigate the effect of poverty on reading achievement
(p.30). However, access alone is not enough. Children
have to take advantage of that access, something, I
would argue, that depends on their deriving pleasure
from so doing. In their analysis of PISA results Kirsch
and his colleagues (2002, p.3) report a similar result:

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Levels of interest in and attitudes toward reading, the

amount of time students spend on reading in their

free time and the diversity of materials they read

are closely associated with performance in reading
literacy. Furthermore, while the degree of engagement in reading varies considerably from country to
county, 15-year-olds whose parents have the lowest
occupational status but who are highly engaged in
reading obtain higher average reading scores in PISA
than students whose parents have high or medium
occupational status but who report to be poorly
engaged in reading. This suggests that finding ways
to engage students in reading may be one of the most
effective ways to leverage social change.
So, what are the takeaways? Pleasure is neglected in
school and in research. But studies that examine the
impact of pleasure reading make a compelling case for
its importance. However, if educators are to pursue
a policy of supporting and encouraging the pleasure
reading of young people, we have to have a deeper
understanding of its nature and varieties than the
instrumental studies provide. This is the niche in the
research conversation that our research addresses.
One theorist who focuses on the nature of pleasurable reading experiences is Roland Barthes. Barthes
(1975, p.4)makes a distinction between pleasure and
bliss, though he is wary of absolute classifications.
The text of pleasure, he says, contents, fills, grants
euphoria: the text that comes from a culture and does
not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice
of reading (1975, p.14). The text of bliss, on the other
hand, imposes a state of loss, unsettles the readers
historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the
consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings
to a crisis his relation with language (1975, p. 14).
According to Barthes, conventional or familiar texts
yield a pleasure that is safe and comfortable, a kind
of pleasure he doesnt privilege, while experimental
or unfamiliar counter-narratives produce a bliss that
is challenging and unsettling. Bliss is produced by the
kinds of reading experiences recommended by Kafka
in a letter to Oskar Pollack, that bite and sting us and
that smash the frozen seas within (cited in Chambers,
1985, p.17).
Barthes ideas are complex, abstract and metaphoric.
But he plays with three ideas that are powerful for
teachers. First, he argues that textual pleasure isnt
singular. To understand pleasure one needs to delineate
its forms, something, as youll soon see, we attempt to
do in the coding of our data. Second, textual pleasure
is something thats experienced by individual readers:
Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

not a nave residue; it does not depend on a logic of

understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something
both revolutionary and asocial. And it cannot be taken
over by any collectivity, any mentality, any idiolect
(Barthes, 1985, p. 23). We agree, which is why we
interviewed individual readers about their individual
reading lives.
Third, textual pleasure is not distinct from the other
pleasures of our lives. As Barthes explains, There
is supposed to be a mystique of the Text. On the
contrary, the whole effort consists in materialising the
pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of
pleasure like the others (Barthes, 1975, p. 58). And
later: The important thing is to equalise the field of
pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical
life and contemplative life (Barthes, 1975, p.59). This
recognition is why we turned to philosophers in addition to literary theorists and reading researchers to help
us understand our data.

The problem of popular texts

In her article Reading is not eating, Radway (1986)
argues that popular culture texts such as romances
are comforting to their readers (Barthes pleasure or
plaisir). This comfort, she contends, is not regarded as
something of value. Instead the charge so often leveled
at mass-produced literature is that it is not simply bad,
nor even worthless, but that it is capable of degrading,
indeed, of corrupting those who enjoy it (1986, p.7).
This charge, in turn, is based on the further assumption that similar and simple texts fail to engage readers
in creative, productive response to thoughts and ideas
that challenge or call their own into question (1986,
p.7). The reading experience of such books is characterised by its passivity, by its complacency, and by its
ability to promote the status quo (1986, p.7).
Radways own research in Reading the Romance
(1984) demonstrates that such charges may be
unfounded. She found that some romance reading at
least manages to help women address and even minimally transform the conditions of their daily existence
(1984, p. 8). In other words, readers are not passive,
but active and often transformative in the ways they
transact with texts and use them (moving towards
Barthes bliss). Society has, she argues, failed to
detect the essential complexity that can characterise the
interaction between people and mass produced culture
(1984, p. 9) including, we would argue, popular
books for adolescents.
We think that research into the reading and pleasures
of popular texts might be lacking precisely because of
the prejudices Radway describes. In keeping with the
spirit of her research, we thought: Why not ask young

people directly what they get from their reading of

popular adolescent texts? Why not ask them how they
experience and use these texts? And so we did.

Methods

Informants
There were 14 informants in the initial phase of the study
reported on here. All were 8th graders in a medium-sized
city in the Western United States of America. They were
evenly split between male and female, and represented
various levels of socioeconomic status and different
cultural groups. They also represented different levels
of success in school, and different family backgrounds
in terms of ethnicity and educational attainment. All
self-nominated to participate in the study on the basis
that they were highly engaged readers (see Appendix
A). The second phase of the study involved 15 selfnominated readers who were passionate about reading
texts that they felt were marginalised by their parents
and by schools. These informants were mostly female
(12) but they did represent different levels of socioeconomic status, cultural groups and gender identity. They
also represented different levels of success in school,
and different family backgrounds in terms of ethnicity
and educational attainment.

Interviews
In both phases of the study, all informants engaged in a
series of semi-structured interviews. The first interview
(Appendix B) was about their general reading lives and
histories. The second interview (Appendix C) explored
a specific interest in a particular genre identified as their
favourite. The third interview (Appendix D) was reflections about several think-aloud protocols of favourite
excerpts from favourite books of their chosen genre. A
fourth interview (Appendix E) was structured around
connections from their reading lives to other interests, e.g. collecting or making playing cards regarding
characters, writing fanfics, blogging, going to movies,
collecting artefacts related to their reading interests,
etc.

Coding
We coded the content units from all interviews using
open, axial and selective coding using the qualitative
software program atlas.ti. (see Appendix F for more
on the process of data analysis and coding). Based on
our review of relevant research and theory and the
open coding, we developed three of what atlas.ti calls
coding families: nature of pleasure; the conditions that
give rise to this; and related constructs, such as attitude toward reading, reading interests, motivation to
read, etc. When we coded for the nature of pleasure, we

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wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

coded for four dimensions of pleasure (type, intensity,

duration, timing).
We used Deweys (1913) four kinds of educative
interest in our axial and selective coding of the types of
pleasure (play, work, intellectual, and social) and then
went back and reread the data to identify a new type
(inner work) and subthemes in each type. Sometimes
the type of pleasure was clear and singular as when
Karen says, Well you can definitely feel like youre the
character so you are kind of living through it and what
would it be like to live like that.
This content unit unambiguously describes the
pleasure of play, focusing as it does on the immediate pleasure of entering a story world. However, the
five types of pleasure sometimes overlapped as in the
following comment from Robert:
I do want it to be entertaining (play pleasure) at the
same time cuz Im reading Siddhartha, by Herman
Hesse, and the thing that I like about that book is he
does provide you the beautiful imagery but it doesnt
go so deeply that youre just can you get to the point
now?(intellectual pleasure) He provides [the point] in a
way that wraps around the story also, so that you want
to keep reading.

Immersive play pleasure

The first and pre-requisite kind of pleasure our informants experienced was the immersive pleasure of play.
This is the pleasure you get from living through a story
and getting totally lost in a book. John Dewey (1913)
described this kind of pleasure as that which puts itself
forth with no thought of anything beyond. As Rebecca
maintained, The characters become like your friends.
And theyre so much in your lives that theyre like your
best friends. Nearly 800 of our content unit codes
related to this kind of deep playful pleasure of living
through a story.
This pleasure was typically experienced as total
enjoyment, like Barthes (1975) plaisir, but not always.
In some cases, this pleasure was a kind of not so enjoyable engagement a sense of being totally engaged by
something that was challenging and disruptive, but
nonetheless so engaging, that as Robert put it: You
are scared almost or disturbed but its like being in an
earthquake and you are glued there, you have to stay
and deal with it and you are totally in the flow! (This
is akin to Barthes bliss.) One of our most significant
findings is that the immersive pleasure of play was not
only incidental to engaged reading, it was absolutely
necessary to it, and pre-requisite to experiencing all
other pleasures and benefits of reading. So kids need to
read books that immediately and sustainably provide
this kind of immersive pleasure.

34

Intellectual pleasure
As Dewey (1913) points out, there is a great pleasure in
figuring things out. Dewey (1913) labels the pleasure of
figuring things out as intellectual pleasure, noting that,
When any one becomes interested in a problem as a
problem, and in inquiry and learning for the sake of
solving the problem, interest is distinctively intellectual
(pp.8384). Our student readers regularly experienced
this kind of pleasure (over 250 content units related
to intellectual pleasure) and they sought out texts that
would provide this.
Alex talks about what most thrills him as a reader:
Its that process of taking the information you have
and coming up with possible solutions. Like, its like
being a detective almost. Its taking the evidence and
the information and everything thats happened, taking
all that and putting it together. Processing through it
and seeing what ends connect, and then finding, once
all those ends connect, what that last piece is.

This pleasure was often expressed in terms of figuring

out would happen next in a story or even beyond
the end of a story, of figuring out character development, psychology and motivation, in asking What if?
and figuring out what would be different if setting or
character changed in certain ways, and especially in
thinking about themes and how the author worked to
express these. Callie provided the following:
When I read books, pretty much the plot comes
naturally to me and I dont spend a lot of time pondering
a plot. [Instead] I kind of ponder myself in the plot.
And so, when I read books I do go more philosophical
than just feeling the plot and flowing with that and
the imagery I am looking for the direct and indirect
messages from the author and how the author wrote
that text so you could figure it out, especially the hidden
messages. Those are so fun and powerful to figure out.

Michelle makes a similar comment about the authors,

like J.K. Rowling, who she most enjoys: So, I like to see
how they made the story happen.
Intellectual pleasure parallels in many ways
traditional activities in school: learning how to discern
character, and to extract and justify themes, as just two
examples. But the readers who talked most animatedly
about intellectual pleasure, also talked about how
school interfered with it.
Heres Callie again:
[In out-of-school reading] you dont have the preconceived notion of school. You have this looks like an
interesting book, lets see what its about. And that just
broadens the horizon because without the preconceived
notion of what you should be learning, then you dont
have the set limits and set expectations for yourself or
for the book.

Helen raised a similar concern:

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

When you pick up a book in school, you know that

theres supposed to be something youre getting out of
this, and thats all you really think about, what does
the teacher want me to understand from reading this.
And then, when you read it by yourself, you dont really
know what you need to know about it, and its a little
more spontaneous when it happens.

The pleasure of work

Social pleasure
There were two ways in which our data expressed social
pleasures: the pleasure of using reading to connect to
others and the pleasure of using reading to name and
identify yourself. We coded over 300 content units
relating to these two dimensions of social pleasure.
Dewey (1913) writes about social pleasure: A moments
consideration of childrens play shows how largely they
are sympathetic and dramatic reproductions of social
activities (p. 86). Our data demonstrated that the
playful entering of a story world provides similar reproductions. Dewey also notes that social interest is a
strong special interest, and also one which intertwines
with those already named (1913, p. 84). The social
interest of connecting with characters intertwines
with the pleasure of play and of intellect and work;
however, the social pleasure of connecting with other
readers seems to us to be something different because it
happens outside the world of the text.
Mia has this to say about how books are part of
social relationships:
She [a friend] started reading them [manga] to us,
reading them around us and letting us read them.
Teaching us how to read them. Now we go out and buy
manga ourselves and read them together and talk about
them and that led us to meeting new people who like
manga or wanted to read it.

Likewise Callie comments:

A lot of my friends, they started recommending these
books. So I think the first real dark fiction book I read
that I started realising it was dark fiction and that I was
into was Choke. All my friends were telling me I had
to read this I go to this writing group every Monday
and they were telling me this. Youve got to read it! And
so I did because I wanted to talk to them about it and be
part of the group doing that kind of reading.

The pleasure of naming and identifying yourself was

likewise salient in the data. Heres Bennies comments:
I like to think of myself as a Harry Potter reader. As
someone who has imagination and is a good friend.
Who admires characters and people like Hermione for
her friendship and Harry for his courage. Who reads
Books that help you with the challenges you are facing.

Psychologist Erik Erikson (1963) explains this

impulse to identify oneself by arguing that the central
psychosocial conflict of adolescence is identity versus

role confusion. That is, adolescents have to make a

place for themselves in the social worlds they inhabit.
Doing so, he claims, depends on a confidence in ones
sameness and continuity thats matched by a sameness
and continuity in ones meaning for others. Identity
work, according to Erikson, has a social dimension.

A fourth pleasure is what Dewey (1913) calls the

pleasure of work. Work pleasure is the pleasure one
takes from using a text as a tool to accomplish something. The ends that our readers were seeking to accomplish were not those instrumental ends discussed by
policy makers. For the most part, our readers werent
thinking about college and career. They had much
more immediate and personally compelling goals that
involved writing, talking, understanding others and
their perspectives, and using reading to think and act
in new ways.
Several of our informants, like Michelle, read to
inform and shape their writing:
Well, I like reading books that I can write about. Like
Im very interested in writing government conspiracy
stories, so I like to pull things from other books and I
can kind of think okay, well this worked really well in
this story so how can I do something like that in a book
I am writing.

Callie focused on the work her reading did to inform

her in debates and conversations:
But beyond that, with the knowledge I gained from
these books, when I get into conversations and/or
arguments with people, I have a perspective that they
wouldnt usually see, so when we get into these conversations and/or arguments I can bring out that and
make them consciously think about how we are the
future. We dont really have to tolerate failed political
regimes and corporate America destroying our future
and limiting our possibilities. Dark fiction opened up
endless possibilities but theyre set in a realistic point.

Terry, like many other readers, read to understand

other people and perspectives:
I like to understand people better than what I could do
in real life. Like I cant, as I said, stick a tube up your
brain and know what youre thinking. When people
write books, you can know what they were thinking
at the time, what they recount they were thinking.

The work to which students put their reading were

of two fundamentally different sorts. On the one hand,
they experienced the pleasure of work to accomplish
practical ends. We coded nearly 300 content units
as relating to this functional kind of work pleasure.
On the other, our readers experienced the pleasure of
work to address deeply personal issues in what might
be called inner work. We had over 200 content units

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wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

that directly indicated that a kind of inner work was

being pursued.

The pleasure of inner work

Perhaps our most striking finding during the study was
that the participants in our study drew pleasure, in all
cases, from using their reading to help them become
the kind of people they wanted to become, a kind of
pleasure we termed inner work. According to the
psychologist Robert Johnson (1986, p.3), inner work
is the effort by which we gain an awareness of the
deeper layers of consciousness within us and move to
an integration of the total self to actualising the full
possibilities of our human potential.
Helen gave a typical response:
Well, I learn about myself through books when I
imagine myself in the different situations you can
help yourself change in that way, and when you really
admire a character in a book whos really brave and
stuff, you kind of can idolise them and become more
like them. So its not really learning about yourself, its
learning about what you could be.

Another example: a couple of girls in the study wore

WWHD bracelets: What would Hermione (from the
Harry Potter series) do? They did this to remind themselves to be good friends during tense situations. As
Bennie explained: And then we would use Hermione
to think with, and to figure out what to do to be a
good friend. This was clearly using their experience
as readers of the Harry Potter series to do a profound
kind of inner work and an imaginative rehearsal for
negotiating difficult situations.
Our takeaways: when given choice, kids tend to read
what they need. Our informants gravitated towards
books that challenged them to be better or more whole
people, that assisted them to outgrow themselves, that
helped them consider new perspectives and see new
possibilities in themselves and the world.
Our informants read for pleasure, but of kinds that
go well beyond our conventional thinking about motivation, interest and even pleasure itself. Our informants drew a hard line between school reading and real
reading (to quote Callie). School reading was reading
you had to do. It was closed ended and involved
guessing what the teacher already knows. It rarely
involved pleasure. Real reading was reading that helped
you on your lifes journey, that was open-ended, and
that immersed you in all five of the pleasures described
here.
But this disconnect can easily be bridged. Exhibit
A below offers a few examples of how teachers can
easily promote each of these pleasures in the context
of typical classroom instructional units and activities.

36

We do research because we want it to matter in actual

classrooms. The project of pursuing and leveraging the
five pleasures is one of many implications this research
has led us to pursue in our own teaching. We hope that
it will also motivate you to the same end.

Exhibit A: How teachers can foster the

pleasures of reading
Fostering the pleasure of play
Dramatic techniques like revolving role play, in-role
writing, good angel/bad angel, hot seating, and alter
ego encourage and reward all students for entering
story worlds in the way these committed readers do.
What do you do or could you do to promote the
prerequisite pleasure of play for reading/writing in
your classroom?
(For ideas about how to use drama and action strategies
in ways that promote immersive play pleasure while
reading, see Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1996; Wilhelm
2012a)

Fostering intellectual pleasure

Read a book for the first time along with your
students figure it out along with them model your
fits and starts and problems through think alouds
and discussion
Pair an assigned reading with self-selected reading
from a list, or a free reading choice that pertains to
the topic. (e.g. 1984 with The Hunger Games)
Frame units as inquiry with essential questions, as a
problem to be solved
Student-generated questions for discussion and
sharing, using techniques like QtA and QAR.
Discussion structures like Socratic Seminar that
make it clear there is no teacherly agenda to fulfil as
far as topics or insights to achieve (this is consistent
with the Core which focuses on strategies over
content)
(For ideas about how to generate intellectual pleasure
and substantive learning through inquiry, see Smith &
Wilhelm, 2006; Smith, Appleman & Wilhelm, 2014;
with inquiry, questioning and discussion strategies:
Wilhelm, 2007; for inquiry into how texts work for
meaning and effect through the use of literary elements:
Smith & Wilhelm, 2010, through the use of think
alouds, Wilhelm, 2012b)

Fostering social pleasure

Be a fellow reader with students
Read one of their favourite books.
Foster peer discussion of reading and response in
pairs, triads, small groups, literature circles, book
clubs, etc.

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

Do group projects with reading that are then shared:

videos, PSAs, dramas, visual displays, talk shows,
etc.
Have a free reading program; promote books
through booktalks, online reviews, etc.
(For ideas, see Smith & Wilhelm, 2006)

Fostering work pleasure

Frame texts and units as inquiry: as a problem to be
solved by using essential questions
Work towards culminating projects service and
social action
Drama work: Hotseating, mantle of the expert
What do you do/could you do to promote the
pleasure of work?
(For ideas on how to use inquiry and design environments to promote the power and pleasure of work, see
Wilhelm, Boas & Wilhelm, 2009, for how to use service
learning and social action that comes from reading,
Wilhelm, Douglas & Fry, 2014)

Fostering inner work pleasure

Imaginative rehearsals for living: inquiry geared
towards current and future action, inquiry for
service, drama as characters in dilemmas or agents
(good angel) trying to help a character in distress
or dilemma, as authors making choices, writing
for the future/ to a future self, corresponding with
characters and authors, cultivating a spirit of transfer
What do you do/could you do to promote inner
work?
(For ideas, see Wilhelm & Smith, 2014; Wilhelm,
Douglas & Fry, 2014; Mayes, 2010)

Conclusion
Our research has convinced us that teachers need
to grant more respect to student choices. We were
surprised by the story worlds our informants delighted
in inhabiting. We were surprised by how they used
books of which we had been dismissive to help them
along their lives journeys. We came away from our
work resolved to try to understand why kids choose to
read what they choose to read. Our study showed us
that if you ask kids about their reading, you will often
be surprised by their answers, and often pleasantly or
even profoundly so.
We understand that people who worry about the
books that kids read are worried about the content of
the books and how that might negatively affect kids
(i.e., that reading Harry Potter would encourage a
fascination with witchcraft, that reading Twilight and
other vampire books would encourage risky behaviour, or that reading The Hunger Games might make

kids question authority or give them a negative attitude about the state of the world). What we found was
that reading was not eating (as Janis Radway puts it,
1986). In other words, kids dont consume books like
junk food they transact with them and make them
their own. In still other words, readers are not operated on by the books, but they operate on the books.
Readers actively make meanings they dont passively
receive them and the meanings they make are relevant
to their current lived experience and life challenges.
The poem or meaning of the reading, is a result, as
Louise Rosenblatt (1978) so elegantly puts it, of the
compenetration of the reader and the text. The transaction between these two is what results in the poem
of meaning. It is not textual features or complexity that
determine meaning but the interpretive content and
complexity that result from this transaction.
So what? This means that questions that focus solely
on the content of a text are likely to be superficial and
perhaps misguided. If we want to know how readers
are affected by a reading, we should instead ask what
meaning they are making of it, and what satisfactions
and pleasures they are experiencing. This is the true
content of a reading and what we must pay attention to.
In the case of our informants, the meaning they made
was salutary indeed, and promoted their future reading
and more wide-awake living.
We also recognise that teachers worry that kids
choices wont prepare them for the next generation
of standards and assessments. This study makes us
think that this emphasis is misplaced. Even with what
might be called formulaic books, series books or
what seem to be simpler texts like graphic novels or
manga, the readers in this study were using all of the
complex reading strategies of experts, just the strategies required by next generation standards. If a book
encourages, assists or even requires children to do what
experts do, we would argue that this constitutes what
we call interpretive complexity. An added consideration is that if a text is too difficult or too distant
from a students interests or experiences then the text
may fit current definitions of textual complexity and
actually undermine the students capacity to use expert
strategies. Consider for yourself what satisfying and
enriching experiences have you had with texts, movies,
or artwork that others might not judge as worthy?
Our study convinces us that we need to trust kids
choices and remember that its important to learn from
kids how to best nurture and teach them. This means
that we should ask students directly why they love
the books they do love so much, and engage them in
conversation about the books and games that they love.
Our data compel us that we need to make pleasure

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37

wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

much more central to our practice. We can foster

immersive pleasure through drama and action strategies, and we can foster the pleasure of inner work by
contextualising reading in inquiry contexts that lead
to culminating projects and service to self, peers, class,
community and environment (Wilhelm & Novak,
2011; Wilhelm, Douglas & Fry, 2014). Our research
review convinces us that pleasure reading is an underutilised tool for addressing issues of social equality and
opportunity and should not be neglected by teachers,
educational institutions or policies. And finally, our
work convinces us that we need to reflect on and model
their own pleasure in reading. We need to think and
share with each other our own successes with getting
our students to fall in love with books. Because, after
all, it is only through love that all things are possible
including developing lifelong readers who take joy and
great transformative benefit from their reading.

References
Barthes, R. (1975). The pleasure of the text (R. Miller,
Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang.
Chambers, A. (1985). Booktalk. London: The Bodley Head.
Clark, C. & Rumbold, K. (2006). Reading for pleasure:
A research review. London: National Literacy Trust.
Retrieved from www.literacytrust.org.uk/research/
Reading%20for%20pleasure.pdf
Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin and Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press.
Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd edition). New
York: Norton.
Fishbein, M. & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention,
and behavior: An introduction to theory and research.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Gee, J.P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis:
Theory and method. London: Routledge.
Johnson, R. (1986). Inner work. New York: Harper and Row.
Kirsch, I., de Jong, J., LaFontaine, D., McQueen, J., Mendelovits, J. & Monseur, C. (2002). Reading for change: Performance and engagement across countries: Results from
PISA 2000. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development. Retrived May 29, 2015
from http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/programmeforinternationalstudentassessmentpisa/33690904.pdf
Krashen, S., Lee, S. & McQuillan, J. (2012). Is the Library
Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], 8(1), 2638. Available at http://jolle.coe.uga.
edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Is-the-Library-Important.pdf

Mayes, C. (2010). The archetypal heros journey in teaching

and learning. Madison, WI: Atwood Publishing.
McKenna, M.C., Conradi, K., Lawrence, C., Jang, B.G. &
Meyer, J.P. (2012). Reading attitudes of middle school
students: Results of a U.S. survey. Reading Research Quarterly, 47, 283306.
Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press.
Radway, J. (1986). Reading is not eating: Mass-produced
literature and the theoretical, methodological, and political
consequences of a metaphor. Book Research Quarterly, 2,
729.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Schiefele, U., Schaffner, E., Mller, J. & Wigfield, A. (2012).
Dimensions of reading motivation and their relation to
reading behavior and competence. Reading Research
Quarterly, 47, 427463.
Smith, M.W. & Wilhelm, J. (2006). Going with the flow.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smith, M.W. & Wilhelm, J. (2010). Fresh takes on teaching
literary elements: How to teach what really matters about
character, setting, point of view, and theme. New York:
Scholastic.
Smith, W.W., Appleman, D. & Wilhelm, J. ( 2014 ).
Uncommon core: Where the authors of the standards go
wrong about instruction and how you can get it right.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. (2013). Social inequalities in
cognitive scores at age 16: The role of reading. London:
Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
Wilhelm, J. (2012a). Action strategies for deepening comprehension. (2nd ed.). New York: Scholastic.
Wilhelm, J. (2012b). Improving comprehension with think
aloud strategies: Modeling what good readers do. (2nd
ed.). New York: Scholastic.
Wilhelm, J., Boas, E. & Wilhelm, P.J. (2009). Inquiry minds
learn to read and write: 50 problem-based literacy and
learning strategies. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Wilhelm, J., Douglas, W. & Fry, S. (2014). The activist
learner: Inquiry, literacy and service to make learning
matter. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wilhelm, J. & Edmiston, B. (1998). Imagining to learn:
Inquiry, ethics and integration through drama. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Wilhelm, J. & Novak, B. (2011). Teaching literacy for love
and wisdom: Being the book and being the change. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Wilhelm, J. & Smith, M.W. (2014). Reading unbound: Why
kids need to read what they want and why we should let
them. New York: Scholastic.

Jeffrey Wilhelm is Distinguished Professor of English Education at Boise State University and regularly
teaches middle and high school students. He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and
the Boise State Writing Project, and author of 32 texts about literacy teaching and learning, and editor of
four series of books for adolescents including the new Issues 21 (Scholastic Canada). He is the recipient of
the NCTE Promising Research Award for You Gotta BE the Book and the Russell Award for Distinguished
Research for Reading Dont Fix No Chevys.

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

Appendix A
Survey:
Please indicate if you love to read (or watch or play)
any of the following kinds of texts. If so, list some of
your favourite texts (actual titles of games, videos,
books, etc):
_____ Electronic texts
_____ Movies/videos:
_____ Video games:
_____ Favourite Internet sites:
_____ Television shows/series:
_____ Visual texts
_____ Graphic novels:
_____ Manga:
_____ Comic books:
_____ Cartoons:
_____ Magazines:
_____ Collectibles (e.g. Yugioh, Dragonball Z cards)
_____ Literary Genres
_____ Series books (e.g. Series of Unfortunate
_____ Events, Harry Potter):
_____ Romances:
_____ Science Fiction:
_____ Horror:
_____ Fantasy:
_____ Historical Fiction:

Appendix B
Initial Structured Interview (flexible prompts to follow)/
General Attitudes towards reading.

Inventory Questions:
(purposes)
1. What do you see as the purposes of reading?
in life? in school? Why the differences or
similarities?
2. What materials best serve these purposes?
3. What different ways are there of reading, and how
do these ways serve various purposes?
4. If you could choose anything to read, what would
you choose?
5. Tell me about your most and least favourite
assignments in school, e.g. favourite writing
assignments, reading assignments, project? How
do these assignments connect or fail to connect to
your existing interests and expertise?
(self-monitoring)
6. How can you tell if you have done a good job of
reading something? What would you do if you felt
you had not done a good job?
7. If you were to study a specific topic of interest

to you, what would it be? In what ways would

reading help you to study this topic? What other
things would you do to help you learn?
(reading history)
8. Have there been times in your life when you read
a lot? Why? A little? Why?
When you found reading very satisfying? Why?
Unsatisfying? Why?
9. What were your most intense and enjoyable
reading experiences/texts as a child? pre-teen?
teen?
10. Have you ever read a series of books, or lots of
books of the same type? How does that inform
how you read or what you choose to read today?
11. Why do you read today? When and in what
situations and with what texts do you remember
first reading for these purposes?

Appendix C
Second Semi-structured interview/ Genre-Specific
questions
1. Tell me what your favourite genre is and a little
bit about why you like it so much.
2. When did you first become familiar with/
interested in this genre?
3. What drew you to the genre in the first place?
4. How does reading your favourite genre compare
to other kinds of reading you like to do? Compare
your favourite genre to a second favourite, not so
favourite, a less favourite genre?
5. How does reading your favourite genre compare
to other kinds of reading you dont like to do?
6. How does reading your favourite genre compare
to the kinds of reading you are asked to do in
school?
7. How have teachers used your favourite genre in
their teaching? What was your response?
8. How could/might teachers use your favourite
genre in their teaching? How would you respond
to a teacher/lesson that did so?
9. How would this kind of use improve their
teaching, your learning, or your experience of
school?
10. How might reading your favourite genre or using
it in school contribute to the learning you are
supposed to do in school?
11. What are your favourite examples of texts/titles of
the genre?
12. What makes these examples so special? So
enjoyable? So engaging?
13. What do you do or think about before reading a
text in this genre?

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wilhelm Recognising the power of pleasure

14. What do you know or do that helps you to read

this kind of text?
15. How do you choose a text of this type?
16. How do you find out about texts of this type that
you might want to experience?
17. How do you share (appropriate) your reading
or what you learn from your reading of this text?
18. How do you use or apply your reading or what
you learn from your reading to your thinking,
your life, or other tasks you do inside or outside
of school?
19. What other people do you know who like this
genre?
20. What ways are there of sharing your enjoyment or
learning from this genre?
21. What artifacts/movies/toys/etc. do people collect
associated with this genre?
22. How do you buy, borrow, access, keep, organise
these texts?
23. How does this genre express, challenge, or shape
your identity/sense of self?
24. Do you repeat your reading/playing/viewing of
individual texts? Which ones? What do you get
from the repeated reading?
25. How is your reading/experience similar or
different from that of other people you know who
enjoy this genre?
26. To what degree do you feel supported (or not) in
your choice to engage with this genre (by your
family, teachers, school, the culture at large,
subcultures, groups, friends, et al.)?
27. Are there particular authors (designers, et al.)
who you particularly like? Why? How do you
think about or relate to these authors? How is the
author like or unlike you?
28. Are there particular characters who you
particularly relate to? Why? How do you relate to
these characters? How are these characters like or
unlike you? How does the similarity or difference
from you matter to your engagement with this
character?
29. What are topics that interest you and that you
would be more willing to pursue in your reading
or studying at school?

40

Appendix D
Third interview: Exploring the think-aloud
protocols
This will be an informal, semi-structured interview.
The researchers will ask stimulated recall questions,
following up on particular moves or comments made
in the think-aloud regarding what the reader noticed,
attended to, visualised, connected to, interpreted, etc.
Prompts might include
Tell me more about
Explain what you were thinking when
How would this move help you when
What made you notice
What helped you connect to
How did you learn to
How did you know that
How was this like
What did X remind you of
How could X help you with
What prior experiences/etc. did you use to see/connect/
judge
What is something else a reader could do when
How was reading this scene similar/different from
reading other scenes in this book/other scenes in other
books you like

Appendix E
Final semi-structured interview: Artifacts and
Follow up
This interview will follow up on the first three interviews. Informants will be asked to bring in artifacts,
observations of their own about their reading, questions they have for the researcher, etc. These will be
discussed during the interview. Interview questions
from the initial interview may be revisited or followed
up on.
1. Tell me about the artifacts you brought in.
2. Why did you compose/create/collect these
artifacts?
3. How do you read/use/share these artifacts?
4. How do or might other people you know use
these artifacts?
5. How might these artifacts or something similar be
used in school or to abet work you do in school?
6. What are some things you have noticed about
your reading since our last interview?
7. What are some observations or questions you
have for us about this study, reading in general,
genres, your reading, etc.?

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Recognising the power of pleasure wilhelm

Appendix F
Coding and data analysis
All interview data were analysed according to procedures
of constant comparative analytic (CCA) procedures
(Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We also employed tools of
discourse analysis (Cazden, I2001; Gee, 1999) within the
framework of constant comparative analysis. Constant
comparative analysis involved coding across three stages:
open, axial, and selective coding. In the open coding
stage, categories and subcategories were noted and
labelled (as codes, at that point), and some initial connections among categories were noted. Generative questions
were posed of the data as a means of testing tentative
hypotheses and generating areas for further data collection. Connections were made to extant theories. We
eventually found Deweys classifications of interests to
be very useful in understanding and explaining the data.
As implied in the naming of this method, open coding is
a constant procedure; that is, open coding begins with
the first collection of data and proceeds throughout the
data collection process (as opposed to some methods in
which data are analysed only after all data are collected).
The benefit of the constant nature of CCA is that the
coding process allows researchers to collect data to test
(both to confirm and disconfirm) the codes being generated and to generate analyses that reflect change over
time, thus complementing the quantitative analyses of
change over time.
In the axial stage of coding, we coded intensively and
concertedly around single categories (the pleasures, in
this case) generated during open coding. We labelled
the properties of categories deemed central to the data.
We hypothesised about and specified various conditions

and consequences associated with the category. Finally,

each category was compared to other categories yielded
through the open coding stage. We considered overlaps,
points of convergence and divergence, and outright
contradictions. The stage of axial coding allowed an
assessment of whether the identified categories are
related to other categories, should perhaps be collapsed
into other categories, or further separated into subcategories, and whether, indeed, the categories have any
relevance to the central research questions. This axial
coding process also forces the researchers to reexamine
data at a later point, thus safeguarding against premature typification of data patterns.
In the selective coding stage, we revisited the data
as organised into central categories (via the process of
axial coding) and systematically checked for confirmation or negation of hypotheses, as well as for generalisability of patterns across the sample (referring only
to the sample directly examined via qualitative data
collection procedures). It is during the stage of selective
coding that we employed methods of discourse analysis
as outlined by Gee (1999), in which the researchers will
analyse verbatim interview or observation transcripts
to assess how language use reflects and instantiates
certain motivations, expectations, values, practices,
extensions and uses of literacy in particular domains
and contexts.
Throughout the CCA process, we prepared theoretical memos and integrative theoretical memos to link
data to relevant extant theory and empirical research,
to test, generate, and document initial hypotheses for
later analysis, and to communicate generated theories.

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