Critical Reading in Higher Education

Glen Ryland, Melanie Rathburn, Miriam Carey, Karen Manarin

Description

Faculty often worry that students can't or won't read critically, a foundational skill for success in academic and professional endeavors. "Critical reading" refers both to reading for academic purposes and reading for social engagement. This volume is based on collaborative, multidisciplinary research into how students read in first-year courses in subjects ranging from scientific literacy through composition. The authors discovered the good (students can read), the bad (students are not reading for social engagement), and the ugly (class assignments may be setting students up for failure) and they offer strategies that can better engage students and provide more meaningful reading experiences.

Foreword by Pat Hutchings
Preface
Introduction
1. Different Courses, Common Concern
2. Can Students Read? Comprehension, Analysis, Interpretation, and Evaluation
3. Critical Reading for Academic Purposes
4. Critical Reading for Social Engagement
5. So Now What?
Appendix One: Rubrics and Worksheets
Appendix Two: Taxonomy of Absence
Appendix Three: Coda on Collaboration

Sujets

• Subjects
• Teaching
• EDUCATION
• Higher
• Level
• Subject
• School
• Higher education
• Research

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9780253018984
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

CRITICAL READING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Editors Jennifer Meta Robinson Whitney M. Schlegel Mary Taylor Huber Pat Hutchings
CRITICAL READING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Academic Goals and Social Engagement
Karen Manarin, Miriam Carey, Melanie Rathburn, and Glen Ryland
Foreword by Pat Hutchings
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Karen Manarin, Miriam Carey, Melanie Rathburn, and Glen Ryland
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-253-01883-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01892-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-01898-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Contents
Foreword by Pat Hutchings
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Different Courses, Common Concern
2 Can Students Read?
3 Critical Reading for Academic Purposes
4 Critical Reading for Social Engagement
5 So Now What?
Introduction to the Appendixes
Appendix 1: Rubrics and Worksheets
Appendix 2: Taxonomy of Absence Regarding Social Engagement
Appendix 3: Coda on Collaboration
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
T HIS BOOK OFFERS a pair of welcome gifts. The first, as promised by its title, is a sustained examination of the character of that mostly invisible, often taken for granted but essential capacity that the authors call critical reading. As teachers who care about that capacity from quite different disciplinary perspectives, Karen Manarin (English), Miriam Carey (political science), Melanie Rathburn (biology), and Glen Ryland (history) have much to tell us about how higher education can improve our students reading skills in ways that advance not only academic success but also the ability to engage with the social world in consequential ways. Their findings reflect the authors in-depth exploration of these issues in their own classrooms at Mount Royal University as well as their journey through the wider research literature about reading and how we learn to do it well. What they bring us is, as they say, good news, not-so-good news, and bad news, and a wonderfully detailed account of their own practices as teachers striving to foster effective reading in their students; reflections on how those practices have been changed by this study; and a plea, finally, for a radically more intentional, collaborative approach to the development of critical reading as a cornerstone of effective undergraduate liberal education.
The second gift, which follows from this collaborative vision, is a powerful model for undertaking the scholarship of teaching and learning. The work reported in this book began as part of a Mount Royal University campus program in which faculty were invited to work together on what Richard Gale (who directed the program in its early days) has described as collaborative investigation and collective scholarship (2008). The idea, as I understand it, was to create a space for individual faculty to explore questions they were individually passionate about but to do so in ways that led to shared insights and findings that are thus more likely to deliver on the scholarship of teaching and learning s promise to create new knowledge that others can build on. This vision, this possibility, has recently been championed by others as especially promising. In a session at the 2014 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning ( SOTL ), for instance, Peter Felton, Arshad Ahmad, and Joelle Fanghanel argued for what they call translational research in SOTL , work that is iterative and collaborative in ways that can make a difference beyond the individual classroom. In this they were building on conceptions of the scholarship of teaching and learning put forward by Lee Shulman (2013) and, as noted earlier, by Richard Gale, among others. Indeed my co-authors, Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone, and I write about the value of harnessing the practices of the scholarship of teaching and learning to larger, shared institutional goals (and it s hard to imagine a more important one than developing critical readers) in our 2011 volume, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact . The Mount Royal authors deliver on this transformational vision as they move back and forth from the particulars of their own classrooms-visiting and revisiting and making sense of the extensive evidence they have gathered from their students-to uncovering the implications for higher education more broadly.
It is perhaps useful to back up a few steps here. Critical Reading in Higher Education: Academic Goals and Social Engagement represents several years of study and writing by Manarin and her co-authors, each teaching a foundational (first-year) course in the institution s then newly designed general education program. Manarin, coming from the field of English, focuses her work on a course called Critical Writing and Reading. Carey, with her background in political science, focuses on Communities and Societies. Rathburn, the biologist, gathers data in her course Controversies in Science. And the historian in the group, Ryland, explores students practices as readers in Texts and Ideas-Genocide. Looking across these diverse course contexts, and drawing on work by scholars from a wide range of traditions, they identify common elements that comprise critical reading, including comprehension, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. But, unsurprisingly, one circumstance that becomes clear early on in their work-one of the features that must have made their collaboration particularly irresistible, though perhaps challenging as well-is that reading does not look the same in their four fields. Thus, part of what these scholars are doing is exploring the impact of different disciplinary contexts on the learning and teaching of critical reading, which, as has been recognized in the case of critical thinking, does not really exist in the abstract. One must think or read about something.
In fact, the importance of context turns out to be a key theme throughout the volume, and not only around issues of disciplinary identity. Expert readers are different from novices in that they recognize that a newspaper article must be read differently from a poem; a scholarly scientific article from a personal essay. Some things must be read slowly; others can be gone through more glancingly. Some invite, even require, emotional engagement; some ask that the reader maintain a sense of distance. But readers are not born making these distinctions, and as teachers we must interrogate our own reading practices in order to make them visible and available to students. That s a huge step forward, and one we learn a lot about from Manarin, Carey, Rathburn, and Ryland, whose work can be seen in the tradition of what a group of faculty at Indiana University Bloomington has called decoding the disciplines.
But here s the thing. While Manarin and her colleagues propose, illustrate, and analyze the evidence from a wide range of strategies designed to help students engage in critical reading in different contexts, they cast a cold eye on easy answers. They note, for example (this in a set of bullets at the end of chapter 2 ), that students can be coached to display particular traits in writing about their reading. That is, reading behaviors can be improved with the right scaffolding and explicit prompts. But they come back in the next bullet to say, Prompted levels of engagement did not remain when the prompts were removed. Even more, they tell us after analyzing hundreds of student reading logs and other artifacts, and tracing the development of critical reading over time in each of their courses, they found no developmental pattern in reading over the semester despite our assumptions that we were helping students read critically. There was simply no evidence that students had improved in any of the categories of reading proficiency they explored. And, as they tell us in chapter 4 , it is especially hard to get students to engage socially-to read not only the words but also (as they say, invoking Paulo Freire) the world. Teaching students to read in sophisticated ways, to make meaning, is hard going, and this is a courageous book in facing up to just how challenging that task is.
It is this recognition that brings the authors, and us as readers, to the most powerful injunctions in the book, which are not about the need to use this or that particular strategy for teaching reading (although readers who are interested in strategies will find lots of them), but about a rethinking of what it will take to advance students proficiency with the highly complex set of practices called critical reading. Their answer is that this work invites-nay, requires-joining forces as teachers and as scholars. Critical reading is not something that can be mastered in a single course; it requires an intentional, collaborative approach in which faculty work together based on shared understanding