Becoming well read
Wednesday 31 March 2021
Seventy delegates from over forty-two different institutions across the UK and further afield gathered to enjoy Keele’s annual Academic Reading Symposium. The event, held online for the first time, draws together practitioners from diverse contexts and institutions to support an investigation of shared experiences and expertise, and to forge communities of practice that explore the development of academic reading.
Workshops and presentations
Becoming well-read in online learning communities: Using Talis Elevate to support collaborative critical reading practices
Learning Innovation Showcase: Hardware and software to support reading productivity and start conversations about reading
Reading and the institutional practice of mystery: Reading List Anyone?
Becoming well-read or reading well?: Academic Reading Circles as an innovative and inclusive practice
Forming a professional doctoral reading and writing identity
Not seeing the wood for the trees: encouraging active reading
Programme
09:30 - 09:45 Registration / Joining
09:45 - 10:00 Welcome and Becoming Well Read Update, Angela Rhead
10:00 - 11:00 Parallel Sessions - delegates will be asked to choose from the following sessions:
Parallel A |
Parallel B |
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Becoming well-read in online learning communities: Using Talis Elevate to support collaborative critical reading practices Aimee Merrydew |
Learning Innovation Showcase: Hardware and software to support reading productivity and start conversations about reading Dominik Lukes |
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11:15 - 12:15 Parallel Sessions - delegates will be asked to choose from the following sessions:
Parallel C |
Parallel D |
|
Reading and the institutional practice of mystery: Reading List Anyone? Tracy Slawson |
Becoming well-read or reading well?: Academic Reading Circles as an innovative and inclusive practice Milena Marinkova & Alison Leslie |
12:15 - 13:00 Lunch
13:00 - 14:00 Parallel Sessions - delegates will be asked to choose from the following sessions:
Parallel E |
Parallel F |
|
Forming a professional doctoral reading and writing identity Amanda French |
Not seeing the wood for the trees: encouraging active reading Laura Barclay |
14:00 - 14:15 Break
14:15 - 14:30 Keynote
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The need to inspire academic reading within the university community: Reflections on encouraging staff to read academic books/journals in public spaces Professor Karen Fitzgibbon Phd, PFHEA, Head of Student Experience in the Faculty of Business and Society, Prifysgol De Cymru | University of South Wales |
14:30 - 15:00 Reading (T)Walks
15:00 - 15:30 Walking Reflections, Karen Fitzgibbon
15:30 - 16:00 Closing Remarks, Angela Rhead
Undergraduate academic reading continues to resonate as an almost universally ‘sticky’ (Schon, 1987) threshold concept for higher level learning, with many students struggling to select, read and then use literature in their own research and writing. Saltmarsh and Saltmarsh’s (2008), ‘Has anyone read the reading?’ responds locally to flawed undergraduate reading practices, but also reflects a wider concern in HE about the academic ‘skills’ students enter university with (Hermida, 2009). A significant aspect of academic reading for students across all levels is often the challenge of discerning the levels of credibility or influence of particular sources (Moore, 2013). The requirement for independent reading, with increasing expectations of ‘criticality’, presents further challenges regarding the process of selection and the purpose of academic reading, compounded by the apparent discord between perspectives of students and staff on reading lists (Brewerton, 2014). This is particularly significant where a disciplinary view of criticality emerges from a student’s individual engagement with reading and their positioning in terms of its discourse, which locates reading as a social practice (Lea & Street, 2006).
Additionally, academic reading as a social practice can be considered a ‘conceptual threshold’ (Wisker and Robinson, 2009) that, unlike discipline-specific threshold concepts, describes epistemological cross-disciplinary knowledge that supports interdisciplinary discussion. Becoming Well Read hopes to draw together practitioners from diverse contexts and institutions to support an investigation of shared experiences and expertise, and to forge communities of practice that will continue to explore the development of academic reading beyond the event.
Locally, recent innovative strategies to encourage the development of critical academic reading include scrolling and textmapping within an extended timeframe to enable deeper learning (Marton & Säljö, 1976; Middlebrook, 1994; Singer & Alexander, 2017) in the form of Academic Reading Retreats. These retreats are small, one-day interdisciplinary workshops that bring undergraduates, postgraduates and academics together to explore the processes of reading for enquiry, in which we attempt to precede (or circumvent) narrative reading and encourage “dialogic engagement with the text “(Abbott, 2013, p.198) to uncover the easily recognisable, but difficult to explain, intuitive practices of confident academic readers (Moore, 2013). We are eager to situate our emerging findings with other educational practitioners and to contribute to a debate about this significant, and persistently troubling, aspect of learning.
Abbott, R. (2013) ‘Crossing thresholds in academic reading’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 50 (2), 191-20.
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Brewerton, G. (2014) Implications of Student and Lecturer Qualitative Views on Reading Lists: A Case Study at Loughborough University, UK. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 20, 78–90.
Hallett, F. (2013). Study support and the development of academic literacy in higher education: A phenomenographic analysis. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(5), 518-530.
Hermida, J. (2009) The Importance of Teaching Academic Reading Skills in First-Year University Courses. The International Journal of Research and Review, 3, 20-30.
Hill, L. & Meo, A.I. (2015). A Bourdieusian approach to academic reading: reflections on a South African teaching experience. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(8), 1–12.
Hockings, C. (2010) Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education: a synthesis of research. HEA, April 2010.
Lea, M. & Street, B. (2006). The "Academic Literacies" Model: Theory and Applications. Theory Into Practice, 45(4), 368-377.
Macmillan, M. (2014). Student connections with academic texts: a phenomenographic study of reading. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(8), 943-954.
Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). ON QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING: I—OUTCOME AND PROCESS *. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(1), 4-11.
McAlpine, L. (2012). Shining a light on doctoral reading: Implications for doctoral identities and pedagogies. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 49(4), 351-361.
Saltmarsh, D. & Saltmarsh, S. (2008). Has anyone read the reading? Using assessment to promote academic literacies and learning cultures. Teaching in Higher Education, 13(6), 621–632.
Singer, L., & Alexander, P. (2017). Reading on Paper and Digitally: What the Past Decades of Empirical Research Reveal. Review of Educational Research, 87(6), 1007-1041.
Wingate, U. (2006). Doing away with ‘study skills’. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(4), 457-469.