Dear All
This is such an important discussion. I was orginally going to make the point that deciding how to encourage students to do the reading for the seminars depends on why they aren't doing it in the first place, but you've all made it for me. That some students don't prepare because academic texts are dense and off-putting is a common issue, I think. I've, therefore, gone down the route suggested by Sandra of suggesting that colleagues do the reading with the students in class so they can face difficulties with reading head on and demonstrate what they, as academics, do with texts.
However, I'd love to hear more on the actual processes of dealing with difficult texts alluded to by Colin below and Rob, as the issues of 'perservering' and 'struggling' are still pretty abstract for me. How exactly do you 'persevere' or 'struggle'? How do you relate ideas from texts to your lives if you haven't a clue what these ideas are in the first place? What if, no matter how many times you read something, you just can't get it? Reflecting on the way I 'struggled' with difficult authors like Butler, Adorno and Jameson, I have to say that the only way I could face reading them (to start with at least) was by reading them with friends, and especially friends who were politically engaged. Once I made some sense of the ideas, I was then more motivated to read them alone. I couldn't have even started the struggle without the help of other people, though.
I'm not sure I agree that academic writers, who are often writing for other academics/to further intellectual debate, can always make exceptionally dense ideas more accessible in terms of language (although I do agree that, sometimes they could, and I do get really frustrated with academic verbiage!). For example, terms like 'subject' and 'object' are off-putting when you aren't involved in the debates, but they are shorthand and speak to people who have understood their meanings. To have to explain them each time you write would never get you off the starting block. I realise that this is a can of worms, though, so I'll not go on.
Lisa
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From: learning development in higher education network on behalf of C Neville
Sent: Wed 28/02/2007 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
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C Neville
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