Critical Reading in Higher Education

Academic Goals and Social Engagement

Karen Manarin, Miriam Carey, Melanie Rathburn, Glen Ryland

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253018984
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Higher Education

Faculty often worry that students can't or won't read critically, a foundational skill for success in academic and professional endeavors. "Critical reading" refers both to reading for academic purposes and reading for social engagement. This volume is based on collaborative, multidisciplinary research into how students read in first-year courses in subjects ranging from scientific literacy through composition. The authors discovered the good (students can read), the bad (students are not reading for social engagement), and the ugly (class assignments may be setting students up for failure) and they offer strategies that can better engage students and provide more meaningful reading experiences.

1Different Courses, Common Concern

ANY SCHOLARSHIP OF teaching and learning (SOTL) project must grapple with the issue of generalizability. On the one hand, the scholarship of teaching and learning is strengthened by its grounding in real classrooms, with the messy, ill-structured, fascinating, and rich glimpses of student learning they provide. However, these classrooms, situated in messy, ill-structured, fascinating, and unique institutions, cannot be easily compared within, let alone across, institutions. Practitioners of the scholarship of teaching and learning cannot assume findings are transferable across contexts. Liz Grauerholz and Eric Main, warning against the assumption that findings are generalizable, describe teaching methods as “social acts informed by cultural traditions that become most meaningful when described in terms of specific histories and larger social contexts.”¹ As Cheryl Albers notes, “It is sometimes difficult to reconcile this context-dependent characteristic of SOTL with the call to use SOTL to build an intellectual commons. . . . The quandary lies in how to use context-rich SOTL work to build a body of knowledge that influences practice.”² Albers talks in terms of transfer, “not achieved through generalizing the results of context-bound investigations,” but rather through collaboration and conversation.³ In this book we describe our collaboration, hoping to extend the conversation and influence practice beyond our own classrooms. We do not claim our findings are generalizable beyond our institution or even beyond these specific class sections. We believe, however, that aspects of our findings will resonate with other instructors and may provide insights they can use in their own unique contexts. To facilitate this transfer, we must provide more details about our particular context, the “‘rich description,’ which paints a detailed picture of the conditions of the study, allowing others to compare it to their own context.”⁴ This chapter provides some of those details by outlining our general education provision, the reading requirements for each of these general education courses, and the parameters of our collaborative inquiry.

We teach at Mount Royal University, a public undergraduate institution in Canada. The Canadian postsecondary system has much in common with the American system, including a high degree of individual autonomy for faculty.⁵ As in America, bachelor degrees are usually four-year full-time programs involving a major concentration of courses, some sort of breadth requirement, and a few electives. However, many students do not complete the program in four years. One trend over the last few decades has been more students working part-time to help pay for their studies. Although the Canadian government is a large funder of postsecondary education and increasingly wants a say in how its money is spent, Canadian students still pay a portion of the costs, so many of them have to work.⁶ Unlike America, where students seeking to enter postsecondary study take the SAT or ACT, students entering the Canadian system do not take any sort of standardized national examinations, so there is no way to compare students across provinces. For better or for worse, students are admitted on the basis of their senior high school grades. In our province, Alberta, these grades are a combination of an individual teacher mark and a provincial examination mark.

Mount Royal is the smaller of two universities in Calgary, Alberta, with more than 13,500 students. Almost 80 percent of Mount Royal students come from the Calgary area; while there are some student residences, most students do not live on campus. They come, take their classes, and leave. The average age of full-time students is twenty-two, and more than 60 percent of students are women. Mount Royal prides itself on smaller classes, though “smaller” is, of course, a relative term. While 99 percent of classes have fifty or fewer students, the average class size is more than twenty-seven students.⁷ The first-year general education courses we describe in this study are capped at thirty for Composition and thirty-five for the others; they are usually full.

In Canada universities tend to offer bachelor, and higher, degrees, while colleges tend to offer diplomas or transfer courses. Founded in 1910 as a college, Mount Royal is a relatively new university, as it has been offering four-year bachelor degrees since only 2008. As part of this transition Mount Royal adopted a new general education provision, moving from a purely distributive model of arts and science requirements to a hybrid model. Most universities in Canada have some sort of arts and science requirement; far fewer have a general education program, as general education has not received the same attention in Canada that it has in America. We do not have province-wide general education programs as happens in many states; we have not yet faced the same pressures for standardization, accreditation, and accountability. Many universities continue to rely on what Terrel L. Rhodes has called the “inoculation approach of the last century” with a collection of courses that is, in Ann S. Ferren’s terms, “an amalgam created through accretion” rather than an intentional structure.⁸ Mount Royal took advantage of its transition to a university to create a general education provision, examining and adapting different American models.

When this study occurred, Mount Royal’s general education requirement was 30 percent of the bachelor degree, like many American models.⁹ In General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty, Paul Hanstedt discusses a vision of general education as foundational—the courses taken in the first year that develop basic skills to support the major in years two, three, and four—and contrasts that with a vision of general education occurring over the four years. He argues for the importance of an integrative model providing iterative opportunities for students to practice and extend skills.¹⁰ Mount Royal implements what Hanstedt describes as a core-distributional model: foundational first-year courses followed by a number of distribution requirements; these distribution requirements are courses spread across the disciplines to provide the students with some educational breadth. However, while Hanstedt finishes off the model with a capstone course or courses, we don’t. So if the core-distributional model can be described as “a good start and a strong finish but a ‘muddle in the middle,’”¹¹ we are left in the muddle. Many, though not all, of our students take our foundation-level general education courses in their first year of study as we had hoped. Some wait until later in their degrees before taking these courses. Students may wait because they don’t like general education or particular parts of it, or someone recommended waiting, or they want an “easy” course near the end of their program, or they take fewer than five courses a term but still want to move with their cohort through their major requirements. The university does not have the resources nor, to be honest, the political will to make all students take foundational courses at the beginning of their studies, even though these foundational courses are designed to develop key skills and introduce students to different ways of thinking about the world.

Our distribution requirements are quite similar to many American institutions. Robert Shoenberg, describing twenty-two statewide general education systems, notes that all of them require at least one writing course, a mathematics course, and some courses distributed across arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.¹² When our study was conducted, Mount Royal students had to take twelve courses divided across four thematic clusters: Numeracy and Scientific Literacy; Values, Beliefs, and Identities; Community and Society; and Communication.¹³ These clusters are intended to be cross-disciplinary; however, faculty elsewhere may find it useful to think of them in terms of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics); arts and humanities; social sciences; and writing, speech, media studies, and languages.

Each cluster of general education includes three levels of courses. Students needed to take one course from each thematic cluster for the first two levels; at the third level they needed to take four courses from at least two areas. Mount Royal hopes that this structure provides students with breadth as well as the opportunity to go deeper into areas of interest outside of their major concentration. At the foundation level students take specifically designed GNED-prefixed courses (GNED meaning General Education); at the second and third levels most courses that fulfill a general education requirement have a disciplinary prefix and are also intended to serve students majoring in that area, a situation that leads to some confusion about the identity of general education. Mount Royal created a Department of General Education to administer the foundation-level courses and oversee the entire general education provision; however, it is difficult to predict how students will move through the general education requirements beyond the foundation level, where they have limited choice.

The courses we examine in this inquiry are part of that foundation level. Because students from across the institution must take foundation-level general education courses, these courses offer a glimpse into student learning that goes beyond any specific discipline. In what follows in this chapter we briefly describe the learning outcomes, the types of readings, and the range of activities for each of these courses. We try to present this material in terms of what we thought we were doing to foster critical reading when we started this inquiry. Subsequent chapters provide more detail about what was really going on.

Cluster 1: Numeracy and Scientific Literacy

These courses aim to develop an understanding of the nature and methods of subjects in the health sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics, as well as assuring that students have the opportunity to acquire essential mathematical skills needed in postsecondary studies.¹⁴

At the foundation level students practice basic math skills, begin to use statistics, recognize mathematics and statistics as ways of reasoning, develop a “foundational understanding” of the nature of mathematical inquiry and the scientific method, examine both the development and limitations of technology, become aware of the scope of scientific disciplines, and develop skills needed to retrieve and evaluate scientific information. Not bad for a thirteen-week course when many students come with negative attitudes and high levels of anxiety about science and mathematics. And those students are in the same courses as science majors, who may resent having to take a foundational course in numeracy and scientific literacy. At the time we gathered data there were two choices for students at the foundation level in Numeracy and Scientific Literacy: they could take Scientific and Mathematical Literacy for the Modern World or Controversies in Science. The main difference between the two courses is that the second is organized around case studies.

Melanie Rathburn, a biologist, gathered data on students in her Controversies in Science course. After an introduction to numeracy and the scientific process, students investigated three topics: the efficacy of complementary and alternative medicines, the safety of nuclear energy, and the effects of oil sands development. Students completed readings from a variety of sources ranging from media articles, to popular science writing, to scholarly literature. The complexity and length of the readings determined the number of readings for each case, but each student was assigned at least two readings for each case, along with additional readings at the start and end of the course. To assist students with the scientific articles, Rathburn demonstrated how to read these articles during a class at the beginning of the semester. Students were instructed to read the same article, and then the entire class period was devoted to interrogating the reading and examining the different characteristics of scholarly articles. Rathburn discussed various approaches to reading these types of articles, how to interpret graphs and figures, how to read through the discipline-specific vocabulary, how to recognize and understand the main conclusions of the research, and how to evaluate the articles. She contrasted scholarly articles with other types of articles in an attempt to help students recognize different reading strategies they would need to use in the course.

The students’ major research assignment involved three parts: an annotated bibliography of their two major sources, a series of questions that helped students to summarize and interrogate a particular experimental study, and a research paper that compared and contrasted how an experimental study was presented in the media. Having taught this course many times, Rathburn felt that students were usually quite competent in answering specific guiding questions about the readings. They could articulate sampling procedures, describe methodological biases, and understand the overall conclusions of their articles. She assumed that students could read when given some help in knowing what to look for through the guiding questions. This assignment was perceived to be so successful that all instructors teaching this multi-section course used the exact same assignment, with each student selecting his or her own topic of interest.

Cluster 2: Values, Beliefs, and Identities

These courses provide students with the opportunity to critically explore the values, beliefs, and ideas that shape and are shaped by human experience. The understandings and sense of meaning expressed by individuals, communities, and societies through their art, music, literature, philosophy, and critical thought will be explored. Students will also have the opportunity to explore the various media through which cultural expression takes place. They will consider the impact of technology upon both the media and the content of cultural expression.

At the foundation level students explore cultural traditions, study texts of historical and contemporary significance in Western and non-Western cultures, appreciate different perspectives, examine issues related to personal identity and social interaction, and practice methods of study in the humanities and social sciences, including research skills. Perhaps because of the nature of the disciplines involved, there is much less standardization among the different foundation-level offerings in Values, Beliefs, and Identities than in the Numeracy and Scientific Literacy courses. At the time we gathered data there were nominally three choices for students at the foundation level in Values, Beliefs, and Identity: Aesthetic Experience and Ideas, Texts and Ideas, and Cultural Perspectives on Science. However, the courses are shells; each instructor decides upon a particular theme and texts, which typically students do not know when they register for that particular section. Three characteristics are common to all versions: the course is text-based, texts are approached with an open mind, and there is a strong written component.

Glen Ryland, a historian, taught Texts and Ideas—Genocide. He selected this theme because of its ongoing importance in the world and the wealth of primary and secondary texts; he had taught iterations of this course before. The primary required texts were Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation by Eboo Patel and The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace by John Paul Lederach,¹⁵ but students also read excerpts from Plato, Machiavelli, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, David Weiss Halivni, and others. Students read on average thirty-five pages of emotionally and cognitively difficult text a week. Usually there was not enough time to explore the intricacies of the text in class. Twice during the term, students were assigned different readings and took part in “expert corners.” In this activity the class is divided into four groups of “experts,” who carefully read one of four texts and discuss it as a group before teaching the content to a group of three other students, who have not read the text. Most times, however, students had read the texts prior to class and then discussed the texts together in class. Students also had to research a post-Holocaust genocide for a poster project and complete an analytical essay about a primary source for their research papers. Ryland provided extensive support about writing in this course, including wo...