Dear All
Kate's original mail has stimulated some really interesting thinking and
responses ... I have a few things I'd like to share... albeit in a
rather rushed and fragmentary message - but that is partly my point ...
I'm writing this in a hurry, having read some of the responses to Kate
very quickly (familiar story, eh?) Like most of you, I am dealing with
the usual 'million things' that our lives in contemporary academia
engender every day. In particular, the burgeoning 'in-box' of things to
read and do - some more or less urgent - the largely - nay almost
exclusively - electronic texts we are organised by.
I suspect that 'reading' has changed a lot for all of us over the past
twenty years. I certainly read 'less' if I construct reading in a
traditional sense - the way I used to understand it pre-internet.
Some reading activities, differentiated by functions and contexts - e.g.
in university study, in-depth, critical reading - may have (or seemed to
have) declined, in part because of the sheer proliferation of
'information' we receive in mostly electronic and paper forms. But then
reading for gist and relevance (a shorthand for a long discussion to be
had some other time!) - for me at least - has increased massively... and
reading in multiple contexts - hypertextually / intertextually has
become a more 'normal' way of reading and perhaps is not well accounted
for in our conceptions of reading ... being critical in times of
supercomplexity (Barnett) is challenging!
Higher education, as we all know, has changed very significantly. When
I worry about students 'not reading' I remind myself of the fact that
university entrants are not the academically focussed sixth formers of
former times. I think we need to beware of a tendency to blame or
pathologise students for the 'ills' of our times. The massive pressure
of 'information' is in reality the pressure of our social structure and
how it operates.
Students in HE are now about 50% of school leavers ... they read and are
still critical - albeit under new strains and pressures. We can help
them by encouraging questioning, and by facilitating an environment for
concentration on an issue or set of issues/problems/questions by using
texts.
For in depth, critical reading we all need time. Time is one of the
things we and our students feel is most under threat in our supercomplex
lives. To encourage critical approaches, as several responses have
already reiterated, we need to model questioning, and potential
answering. Back in the 1980s a school based movement called Language in
the National Curriculum produced some really excellent materials. I
still use a checklist from LINC and reproduce it here - in hopes I am
not breaching copyright! I hope it may be helpful in stimulating
approaches to critical reading.
I'd be interested in hearing if others use/modify it. It does not
mention electronic texts, though remains valid for them - but it might
benefit from some updating ...
Very best to you all
John
John Hilsdon
Co-ordinator, Learning Development
University of Plymouth
Drake Circus
Plymouth
PL4 8AA
01752 232276
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http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/learn
-----Original Message-----
From: learning development in higher education network
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of C Neville
Sent: 28 February 2007 10:18
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Motivating students to read
When I came back into education as a mature student in the
1970s, I remember feeling thoroughly intimidated,
frustrated and angry at the academic texts I was expected
to read in the social sciences and arts.
It seemed to me then - and still does - that too much
academic writing was dry and lifeless, obtuse and
unfathomable, exclusive, rather than inclusive.
However, I persevered with it, resentfully.
Later I discovered Hudson's 1978 book 'The Jargon of the
Professions', which argued that the less secure a
profession feels about itself, the more excluding jargon it
spouts; Hudson singled out education, business & social
sciences at that time as the main culprits!
From my work in learner support I know that many students
still feel thoroughly intimidated by the set reading, and
some disengage from it, or serve it back undigested and
unintelligible in assignments - a link with another
discussion on plagiarism is here, perhaps.
I spend time with students now in workshops encouraging
them not to be intimidated by extracts like the one,
immediately below, taken from an academic text book:
"Garfinkel argues that the relationship between the act of
representation and represented object is dialectical not
unidirectional.
The character of the representation changes in the attempt
to explain the perceived nature of underlying reality while
the object 'changes', in turn, to accommodate the language
employed to represent it. Representation, in other words,
is a dynamic, interactive process in which the 'actor', and
the form of representation, that is language, 'constructs'
some at least of the reality under investigation"
In the workshop students try and work out what the author is
saying. Eventually, and together, they crack the codes and
work out that this particular writer is trying to say that
it can be difficult to explain the nature of <LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION
MARK>reality<RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK>,as
it depends who is talking about it, how they perceive it,
and the words they use to explain its meaning.
They will then usually comment as to why the author did not
simply say that in the first place.
Motivating students to read? Let's mount a LDHEN campaign
to encourage more clarity, less pretension, and better
communication, in academic writing.
Colin Neville
Bradford
---------------------------------
C Neville
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