These notes are for the ACRL2019 Thursday 4:00pm-5:00pm session:
Reading Critically, Thinking Critically

Presenters:

  • Anne-Marie Deitering
  • Stefanie Otis
  • Anne Jumonville Graf
  • Ashleigh Coren
  • Hannah Gascho Rempel

Critical Reading in Higher Education Academic Goals and Social Engagement book is highly recommended as something that they consulted before the panel

Anne-Marie: #

  • “critical reading” commonly used for two things
    1. reading to be able to successfully engage in academic discourse, often from critical thinking discourse
    2. reading to be able to recognize, unpack, counter the structures that operate within what they’re reading, this is in tension with critical thinking discourse and instead comes from justice and social change discourses, more from critical pedagogy
  • the tensions between social change discourse & critical thinking discourse came up in the panelists’ talks before today, so it’s useful to point to them now
  • some of the main structures in academia are grounded in structures of oppresion like white supremacy, heteronormativity, etc

Stefanie: #

  • critical reading is deep, intentional, active reading that looks at differences in research
    discern not just what text is saying but what it’s doing & how it’s doing that
    genre & disciplinary conventions
  • read so that the reader can do something with the text; join conversation, interrogate, etc
    responsive, somewhere between either regurgitate or react

Ashleigh: #

  • in special collections, it serves:
    • ability to identify perspective
    • purpose
    • silences & contradictions, power
  • examine primary source, different components like tech, language, etc.

Ashleigh: #

  • most common assumptions from students is around having to adapt critical reading strategies to different types / genres / formats of sources
  • reader needs to connect their extant knowledge to the new sources

Anne: #

  • librarian assumptions: reading & teaching readings “belongs” to other disciplines in the academy
  • library instruction is dominated by short instruction, which makes it difficult to be a teaching of reading in the time provided
  • reading doesn’t always fit into our common definitions of information literacy; new framework seems to prioritize “information” as “data”-ish production / consumption; “Read” is not a word in the framework
  • assumption is that reading is individual and private, not reading collectively in a class, for instance

What reading goals do you have for your learners? #

Ashleigh:

  • archival research is slow; can’t really skim…
  • affirm knowledge they already have, to celebrate that

Anne:

  • came often from experience as a first-year experience classroom instructor, then in library
  • easy to conflate & confuse “critical” with “negative”
  • have to understand what text is trying to do before beginning to criticize that
  • learn what individual students might bring out in a reading

Anne-Marie:

  • reading breaks beyond the walls of the text, readers address those connections by pulling connections out & bringing things in

Now talk a little more about concrete things #

Stefanie:

  • for upper-level social science class, worked with students on an assigned reading that they’d already read beforehand & written a response paper to
  • would look at specific aspects of the text to highlight need for careful & multiple reading
  • strategies for understanding a very difficult text
  • how they could use text to develop research question
  • looked at related but different articles, like from The Atlantic; ask what is the author doing, what can you do in your work?

Ashleigh:

  • special collections is a little different
  • worked with a professor on a class about Black rhetorics, African American communities
  • annotate things to identify things from Black rhetorics, they have AFL-CIO collection, so she pulled labor speeches for students to analyze
  • she selected & then they chose to narrow in
  • realized that speeches from different dates actualy would speak to each other, go beyond single text to looking at interconnections

Anne:

  • quick evaluation of a source during one-shots
  • feedback from English faculty was that students kept selecting good but not great sources
  • she gives students a citation, asks them to find it in full text with no instructions
  • their job is to find it, then think about what it is, and whether it is appropriate for the assignment at hand
  • vote on 1 to 5 whether it’s irrelevant to great
  • talk about it afterward
  • the searching aspect is downplayed and instead emphasizes evaluative strategies
  • encourages class discussion, and can help promote professors to join in the evaluation & share their own strategies / criteria with their students
  • sometimes she’ll have a second voting round to see if the discussion gets them to change their ideas
  • emphasizes that this is a preliminary judgement, no way to say without deeper engagement with the reading

What partnerships might be created or have you created to talk about critical reading? #

Anne-Marie:

  • first-year comp partnership
  • activities students now do by reading an artifact (whih may or may not be a text) then synthesize material
  • now Anne-Marie & Hannah teach not the undergrads themselves, but the graduate teaching assistants who teach these comp sessions
  • one-on-one feedback sessions once a semester
  • the GTAs are often overwhelmed as new instructors, very anxious — so A-M & H see it as an opportunity for grads to experience the curriculum as learners before they’re instructors
  • then A-M & H have them reflect on their strategies, experiences, affects, assumptions to interrogate them
  • this helps shift grad student feedback to focusing on process rather than anxiety over answers to things they’re not disciplinary experts in

Stefanie:

  • instead of doing a traditional research paper, one group does readers’ guide
  • instead of using patch writing to cobble together the minimum number of required sources, students instead write about “slow reading” and the difficulties of synthesizing sources (I might have missed some of the details here)
  • made what’s often the first step into the last step
  • it’s a path but not a recipe, not a simple answer to what critical reading is & should be

How can we create programs that focus on critical reading? #

Ashleigh:

  • one of our goals is to teach students about authorship, authority, authenticity
  • she’s working on developing department-level learning outcomes to standardize these things

Anne:

  • accessibility services staff visit has prodded her to realize that her strategies were mostly very visually-oriented; good practice is to tell students beforehand so that if they need more time, they can better prepare
  • hadn’t thought much about the accessibility aspect of her instruction, so now she’s planning to figure out how to do those things in a more inclusive way

Anne:

  • the way that we have constructed / shorthanded how we talk about source evaluation, beyond the checklist model
  • easy to collapse into the checklist model
  • one alternative is the journalistic, fact-checking model
  • we can also think critically as an additional alternative to simple checklist model or journalistic model

Stefanie:

  • checklist approach, the focus on evaluating rather than understanding are both huge barriers
  • exclusive language & terminology is also a barrier, i.e. when talking with faculty who talk about these things in their own disciplinary terms
  • describing research as a linear process is a barrier, so maybe acknowledging that the process is iterative / messier can help

Questions & Answers #

Q: how does Anne choose citations / readings she gives students?

A: works best when giving 2-3, at least 1 of which she thinks is a good fit, often found through the library databases
A: she’ll choose for instance The Explicator, which is a peer-reviewed source but doesn’t do much theoretical criticism and therefore isn’t highly regarded by instructors as a source; she helps highlight the differences for her students

Q: how do you work with readers who have a wide variety of reading levels in the classes?

A: in the global studies program there’s a lot of students whose first language isn’t English, and she found that the places where you’re struggling in the text are good places to explore further, good places to ask questions of yourself, your classmates, your instructors…
A: start with what they do know, build from there and reinforce their comfort, then model to move from things like graphs into more dense language and how even native English readers experience discomfort & use strategies like reading nonlinearly

Q: in instruction sessions, how do you bring in adjacent / connected works

A: Ashleigh says she’s lucky that she gets to pull stuff, so she’s very intentional about the formats / subjects / events / etc are connected. She also talks to professors before to see what they want students to get out of the session

A: Anne-Marie says that they work through the questioning thing. Often start at simple, closed questions (“is this true?”) to complex, open questions.

Q: Faculty buy-in; what stragies have you used to get faculty buy-in? or from colleagues in library?

A: Anne-Marie says that they’ll do assessment & research their institution’s own students to show faculty what students need
A: Stefanie says that coming at it from problem-solving perspective helps get buy-in, perhaps also get advocates among faculty
A: Ashleigh says that she works mostly with graduate student instructors, who seem more open to trying new things; they can become advocates for you

Q: Marianne Wolf’s work on deep reading, do you have any attention-keeping strategies?

A: Anne says that a small thing is the social nature of reading, having students actively engage in a text with each other helps keep them engaged and maybe is a stepping stone to them doing that again later on their own
A: Ashleigh says she’s very intentional about finding things that would affect her students at that particular time & place

Q: new center for teaching & learning at her place: assessment often about student success; how shape narratives around retention or impact when you’re doing more of a train-the-trainer model

A: Anne-Marie doesn’t much yet; they’re assessing work with the grad students, currently coding interviews to see if grad students are transferring what A-M & H teach them into other contexts. Largely qualitative, still a narrative talking about this stuff

original etherpad