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Active and Critical Reading

Reading Thematic Group

This poster begins to map the field of active and critical reading as demonstrated in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) projects in the Visible Knowledge Project. It connects, as well, to exhibition posters that synthesize work and methods that cut across projects. We also link to posters of individual SOTL projects ub the VKP Gallery.


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Student Engagement with Reading

An illustration of what we've learned about active and critical reading.

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This diagram illustrates how readers approach texts with ways of reading based on prior contexts, familiar disciplines, and a variety of "comfort" levels.

Readers then work through various intermediate processes to discover multiple ways of reading.

Informed by these models, readers become increasingly aware of their own practices and try out new ways of questioning not only texts, but their readings of texts in a variety of contexts.

Thus readers make critical connections to prior works and to other contexts. They begin to transfer their active methods of readings to new situations, starting the cycle again, internalizing the process.


 
Questions
Findings
Models

Strategies:

How can we introduce students to disciplinary and cross-disciplinary practices of reading?










How do we engage students with advanced and difficult texts?

 

"By using Word's Comment feature, students are able to create individualized, written "think-alouds," facilitating both the production and collection of student artifacts as well as providing a record of their reading process. These artifacts can then be studied to see what they reveal about the reading process and about students' reading development over the course of the semester. " --Sharona Levy.


What we've learned about Classroom Practices for Teaching Active/Critical Reading


-- It is possible to change the reading habits students bring to the classroom.




-- Progress comes from a process of rehearsal and strategic instruction.




-- We can break down instruction into developmental and incremental steps.

 

How VKP researchers model recursivity:


Rina Benmayor (Professor of Oral History; Latina/o Cultural Studies; Hispanic Literatures) assigns students to critique prior classes' digital stories.
Sherry Linkon (American Studies Professor) encourages students to make nuanced readings that shift their first impressions.


VKP Researchers use annotation techniques

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Sharona Levy (professor of Education) has students annotate text.




Randy Bass (Professor of English and American Studies) discusses his Inquiry into Student Reading Practices in which he assigns verbal think aloud activities.

bass think aloud project

 
Questions
Findings
Models

Self-Awareness:

How do we lead students to slow down their reading practices and develop self-awareness of their own processes for understanding texts?

 

How do we engage students in complex reading practices developmentally and incrementally?

 

 

What we've learned about student awareness and focus on the reading process



--  It is possible for us to identify reading practices.

 -- In order to improve students' reading, we have to engage them in the reading process.



-- Students' learning will be enhanced by their awareness of themselves as readers.


In the poster by Joe Ugoretz he discusses how students make personal connections to literary themes and life issues.

Arthur Lau's LaGuardia Community College students use BlackBoard postings, and create their own personal essays to help them understand the autobiographies and biographies of others. Their personal essays at the end of the term show significant adjustment, using many more features of the professional writers and awareness of common struggle as they depict their pasts.


 
Questions
Findings
Models

Texts and Contexts:

How can we make visible the multiple contexts that enable and limit reading of texts?

 

How can we teach reading through multiple literacies?

 
 

 
 

What we've learned about Developing Expert Ways of Reading


-- It is only possible for us to help our students make progress, not for us to move them from novice to expert readers.

-- Expert ways of reading provide a useful model for students' reading.

-- Texts are in dialogue with historical and cultural contexts.

How to relate these ideas to your classroom

Literacies Across Genres

One key way to expose students to the variety of contexts which inform reading of texts is to engage them in learning about reading texts from a variety of genres. Students in these courses learn to read and connect images, sound, and "traditional" texts.

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At USC, in English professor Alice Gambrell's class, "Writing Machines: Gender and the Mechanics of Story-Telling," students examine texts as physical objects that are the products of many histories, and of many hands and minds.

Cumberland Falls Ky Dept of Parks.jpgGeorgetown University English Professor Patricia E. O'Connor asks her Appalachian literature students to amplify their readings of novels by creating webpages that connect authors' depictions of the region with historical, cultural, economic, and literary texts.

ellawatson by gordon parks in jaffe.jpg City University of New York History professor David Jaffe's course asks students to read photographs with an eye to learning to think visually as historians.


Open Questions: Plans & Possibilities

  • What are the qualitative differences and similarities among reading strategies?
  • How do institutional contexts affect our students' learning of reading?

Related Posters
Contexts for Critical Reading by Lois Leveen, Sharona Levy,  Patricia E. O'Connor, and Martha Pallante

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