ORONO – For Jeff Wilhelm, reading literature is an energetic exercise.

Readers, especially middle school and high school students, shouldn’t be taught to be passive, absorptive sponges, according to the associate professor of education at the University of Maine.

Rather, in learning to read, they should be taught to question, to engage the author, and to take part in a conversation about what they are reading and how it relates to them and their adolescent lives.

That’s the message at the heart of a new book by Wilhelm and Julie Dube, principal of Medway Middle School, and Tanya Baker, a mentor teacher in the University of Maine’s Professional Development Network, called “Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12,” (Boynton Cook).

The tone of much of the text is political and social activism bordering on crusade.

In the book’s introduction, they write, “We teach literacy to enhance more democratic thinking.

“We contend that the best way to teach students these new and necessary [reading] strategies is by carefully guiding them through actual readings in a context where they have a personal and social need to understand and then act on their growing understanding.”

As the authors adapted other thinkers’ ideas on teaching literacy, “we found that … our work became profoundly moral and community centered.”

In an interview with the Bangor Daily News, Wilhelm said the book is a critique of American education, especially reading education.

Reading education in the United States is teacher- and information-centered, he said, where students “regurgitate” what they read.

“We teach reading in a way that encourages people to be passive,” Wilhelm said. “The book is an attempt to say that we’ve left the kids out of the equation. Teachers should be lending their expertise to students so the students can go out and do their own thing.”

In the book, the authors state, “Readers need a personally relevant and socially significant purpose. … Readers need assistance … as they read new kinds of texts. And … they need to see the connection between their reading, their personal lives, and the world they inhabit. They need for what they read to serve a higher purpose, to inform some kind of decision making and social action.”

The crucible for all this is literature that young readers can relate to or that has relevance in their lives.

The nub of the problem is that children tend to lose motivation and achievement right around fourth grade, he said.

This is just when reading gets tougher, a time when students are no longer reading to learn to read but are reading to learn about other things, such as science and history, or to understand the themes of a piece of fiction or poetry.

“I don’t love literature because I get off on alliteration,” Wilhelm said. “I love it because it touches on the most important issues.”

Literature, such as Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” he said, “attends to things that really matter.”

And students will take to “Romeo and Juliet,” despite the difficulty of the language, if a teacher can show them it is about relations, he said. “Kids understand relationships and they can bring [that knowledge] to the table.”

In the book, Wilhelm, Baker and Dube write, “Students do not want to be taught for who they might be and what they might need to know several years down the road. They want to be taught for who they are and what they need right now. When students see the connection of what is studied to their own lives, they bring their life energy to the classroom project.”

And once at the table, teachers need to involve the students in a conversation about the important matters a book hits on, he said. Too often, discussions about literature are little more than student “recitation.”

Despite the fervor of reform that infuses the book, Wilhelm said, “I’m not trying to revolutionize education. I’m trying to insert these ideas into the conversation about education, because they are not there now. Education change takes a long time – you have to dig in for the long haul.”