Dive Brief:
- Annotation — regardless of whether it’s done in a print or digital format — integrates reading and writing in a way that strengthens the impacts of both, seeding greater comprehension and ongoing inquiry into the text in question, said Remi Kalir, associate director of faculty development and applied research at Duke University’s Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education office.
- Decades of research show the positive benefits of annotation for reading comprehension, the ability to analyze ideas, and the skill to communicate those ideas in writing, said Kalir, who authored “Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice.”
- “It’s an act. It lives on in the world, not only on the page,” said Kalir, who began his career as a teacher at Middle School 22 in Bronx, N.Y., and now leads a centralized unit at Duke to support teaching and learning across the university.
Dive Insight:
Annotation does not stand alone as a casual solution that provides better learning — it’s a complement to other instructional practices such as active reading and other ways of developing comprehension to help readers make sense of what they’ve learned, and then write about it, said Kalir, who maintains “a foot in the K-12 world” doing teacher professional development.
“But it’s a very powerful strategy,” he said. “We find this to be true whether annotators are writing by hand, in a book, or in some type of worksheet or graphic organizer. They can also create digital annotations,” which is more effective in middle and high school.
Annotating articles, scientific literature, books or poetry greatly aids comprehension, said Kalir, who co-facilitated a four-part series on annotation in the summer of 2021 produced by the National Council of Teachers of English.
“At the end of the day, we’re talking about how readers make sense of texts,” he said. “A very powerful way is to express rough-draft thinking while you are reading. To write notes in the margins. To ask a question of the author, express a disagreement, to make a connection to another area, to define a term, to understand a form of scientific inquiry.”
When Kalir and Antero Garcia, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, co-authored the first volume of “Annotation” in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Press Essential Knowledge series, readers responded to two themes.
“One is about learning and the relationship between annotation and learning, from professionals to very young children,” he said. “The other thing is, it’s an act of power, a way of speaking back to an author or idea. It’s a way of expressing an opinion. It’s a way of contesting an ideology, or an unjust circumstance. It can happen in all manner of annotation — social settings, civic settings and certainly in our political world.”
In “Re/Marks on Power,” published last spring, Kalir presented four deeply researched case studies that took a historical lens to socially and publicly rooted texts. “We can trace inscriptions across time and across texts and see how power is contested and see how annotations have changed social reality and political reality,” he said.
For example, he considers the case of 19th century abolitionist Harriet Tubman. “People said she was, quote-unquote, ‘illiterate.’ But she was an annotator,” he added, noting that the book shows her writing and the legacy of her annotations.
Kalir added that he doesn’t discourage his 6-year-old son from writing in books and stresses that young learners — and young writers — need to understand that their thinking can be visualized on the text they are reading, helping them to better understand or question that text.
“Certainly, by middle school, more formal annotation practices or conventions are appropriate to introduce,” he said. “By high school, [teachers] should encourage learners to annotate and then translate those annotations into their own writing. … It’s a bridging activity between supporting a student as a reader and supporting a student as a writer.”
