Comparing Lecturer and Student Accounts of Reading in the Humanities

Abstract

This article reports the outcomes of an exploratory small-scale study to compare lecturer and student conceptions of critical reading at a research-intensive UK institution. Analysis of lecturer and student interviews in four humanities subjects suggests differences in the way lecturers and students conceptualize and articulate the practices of critical reading. Lecturers conceptualize reading as creative and intertextual, a defamilarization of personal experiences of the world and the development of relational ways of understanding through close reading. Conversely, students are found to conceptualize reading as evaluating different perspectives, domesticating new experiences into existing personal value schema and apprehending the text as object. The discussion considers the pedagogical implications of these differences for developing reading practices in the humanities classroom. The article also reflects on the relationship between the capacity to participate in the discourses of criticality and the capacity to enact critical encounters with texts as readers.

Inquiry-based reading – Towards a conception of reading as a research method

“…This suggests that researchers do not consider reading to be a methodological practice significantly influencing the knowledge they produce. Thus, although reading is recognized as a core academic skill (Brookman and Horn, 2016; Culler, 2010; Love, 2010; Maclellan, 1997; Weed, 2012; Weller, 2010), it is by implication constructed as a supplement to genuine research methods. To our knowledge, research undertaken specifically to identify how reading informs and influences knowledge production processes, as well as to develop a conception of reading as a method of inquiry in its own right, is lacking.…”

“…Within the field of higher education, studies on student approaches to reading assert that these are often instrumental and framed as information-seeking practices aimed at comprehension (Douglas et al., 2016; Stokes and Martin, 2008; Tomasek, 2009; Weller, 2010: 89). Furthermore, reading practices are associated with a generic study skills agenda (Weller, 2010: 89) that is said to be ineffective, misleading and counterproductive to learning (Wingate, 2006).…”

“…Within the field of higher education, studies on student approaches to reading assert that these are often instrumental and framed as information-seeking practices aimed at comprehension (Douglas et al., 2016; Stokes and Martin, 2008; Tomasek, 2009; Weller, 2010: 89). Furthermore, reading practices are associated with a generic study skills agenda (Weller, 2010: 89) that is said to be ineffective, misleading and counterproductive to learning (Wingate, 2006). More studies (Maclellan, 1997; Stokes and Martin, 2008; Weller, 2010) support that students’ reading often does not take them beyond ‘adoption’ of perspectives and concepts in the text or the ability to recall and reproduce conceptual meanings or explications.…”

Renaissance Humanism and the Future of the Humanities

“…And if this is the case, we might conclude that students enter the humanities not to “engage in learning about the human” (Mora), but to engage in learning about learning – as active participants in a communal process that many of them will continue as educators themselves. We can better serve these many students who are drawn to careers in education by foregrounding, and involving them more self‐consciously in understanding, the methods and practices we wish them to learn, rather than, as we currently do, modeling those practices and expecting them to become transparent (Weller).…”

A thematic Analysis Comparing Critical Thinking in Engineering and Humanities Undergraduates

“…However, counter to this principle, one study found lecturers in humanities conceptualized critical reading very differently from their students. 41 Therefore, this leads to an area for further study within both disciplines.…”