Reading in Today's Higher Education Environment
PrintBy Gerson Moreno-Riano, October 21, 2008 in Uncategorized
The entire issue of online education and delivery formats raises the important question of the type of reading that goes on in our universities. What are the general characteristics of good reading habits? What type of reading have ICTs and online education fostered?
Obviously, there are various types of materials, courses, and information that perhaps demand different types of reading styles and practices. And here, I would like to gauge from our LASC CDT participants what different styles and practices may exist. One that seems to me to be an important part is that of close and reflective reading. Good reading demands the time and patience for the reader to enter into the conversation/argument of any material. A close reading and sympathetic interpretation of any text requires time, patience, and reflection.
I am wondering if this is possible in online delivery systems that require efficient presentation of material, scheduling flexibility, and that are predisposed to reading efficiently and not necessarily patiently. In other words, it seems to me that reading in today's digital environment leads students (and perhaps many of us faculty) to skim material rather than read closely. The information overload is so great that we resort to skimming material rather than reading carefully and deliberately. This may also have affected our attention spans- we want fast delivery and fast understanding whereas a liberal arts education or education in general are built on the assumption of careful, slow, patient, and deliberate reading, thought, and work.
Has the digital world made our students and perhaps ourselves more illiterate and less able to really read? Your thoughts? Are we all victims of information overload? How can we combat this among our students, our curricula, and ourselves?
Can we correct a generation of neglect in terms of our students’ capacity to seriously read (as most of them don’t reach our classrooms until they’re almost 20)? I’m not sure that we can correct it, but I do think that we have an obligation to try and encourage them to read closely and reflectively. I don’t have any experience teaching online classes, but I suspect the problem of getting students to read effectively are the same.
One of my strategies is (quite frankly) coercion. I give students “discussion questions” on readings we will go over in class about a week in advance. Then, on “discussion days,” they have to take a short ten-minute “writing-exercise” before we start talking. It simply consists of 2 of the discussion questions randomly selected by me. They have to answer both questions in three or four sentences. This compels the students to read (or at least look at) the material before coming to class if they wish to pass the exercise.
In addition to this, I also often choose a number of popular monographs for students to read in my classes (particularly in upper-level classes filled with majors). While I do incorporate primary documents into my courses to teach students principles of historical perspective and analysis, I also use engaging monographs (and some novels) largely because they are a “good read”. Generally speaking, few of the students I teach go to graduate school. Therefore, I don’t see the need for them to be up-to-speed on the latest historiographical arguments in the field. Thus I select books primarily because they are well-written and engaging. And they need to provide students with a good narrative thread. Narrative writing is, sadly, something that many historians have forgotten how to do (and some scholars are even disdainful of narrative histories written by others). But my broader aim is to encourage a love of reading in students.
What are the results? Definitely mixed. Many students find the popular narratives just as “boring” as the primary documents. And, like many in the millennial generation, they are too impatient to truly read carefully and reflectively. Rather they simply want the answer to “what do I need to know”. However, some students really do read the course books closely and thoughtfully.