• Students think the textbook is boring.
• They come to class unprepared. They haven’t done the reading and/or they don’t have anything meaningful to add to discussion.
• Then they complain about their grades.

It’s easy to complain about the state of young people today and how they seem to think that what you assume are basic requirements of university level study are unreasonable demands on their time.

• Didn’t they know the reading is supposed to be hard in university?
• Shouldn’t English majors expect to read poetry? And whole novels?
• Why is seminar discussion so often like pulling teeth?

What if there is a deeper issue?

What if the “boring” textbook is a sign of a deeper problem. One your students can’t (or won’t) articulate.

What if they actually spent a few hours preparing for class and it just doesn’t look like it to you?

What if they worked really hard on that essay and are genuinely surprised at the low grade?

Are you assuming they have skills you need to teach them?

Just because your students can read a newspaper, a novel, or an instruction manual does not mean they can read the material you need them to read.

Reading a novel for an English Literature class is very different from reading a novel for your own enjoyment.

Reading theory or even research papers is unlike most of the reading people do outside of academia.

Have you explained to them what “doing the reading means”?

Do they know what kinds of notes they need to participate fully in the seminar discussion?

Do they understand that you are not primarily looking for facts in that essay but argument, supported by evidence? Or interpretation, set in the context of other interpretations?

An example

Back when I was still teaching, I discovered that final year undergraduates in one of my classes couldn’t identify the main argument of a journal article. When I asked them to tell me what the reading was about, they told me an “and then” story about the content of various sections.

I had to explain what a journal article was doing. That it was a contribution to a debate. That the author is making an argument and supporting it with evidence. (I then started explicitly doing this in the Intro to Sociology class as a means to head off the problem in future.)

I told them they should put down their highlighters* and read the whole article through once first and try to summarize it in one or two sentences. Then they should read it a second time, more carefully, focusing on the evidence and other details presented.

Just the idea that it might be necessary to read the assigned article more than once is a surprise to most students. Many of them think that if they don’t get it on the first reading, it is too hard.

Disciplinary literacies

As I was figuring out how to address these issues, particularly in the Intro to Sociology course that I also taught (and which seemed to be a good place for this kind of skills teaching), I discovered the phrase “academic literacies”.

You may think that your students should have been taught these skills before they get to you. Perhaps in high school. Perhaps in earlier years of the program. However, what you mean by “argument” , “evidence” and other key terms is strongly influenced by your discipline**.

You cannot assume that your students know how to read and engage with material in your discipline, particularly in North America, where students will take classes in a lot of different disciplines as part of their degree.

They may be doing well in their major (or single-honours subject) and be genuinely baffled in your class.

Another example

I’m a good sociologist. But I’m a bit lost when reading literary criticism. It’s not because I’m stupid. Or lazy. It’s because I have never learned how to read that stuff. I have no idea what literary critics consider important questions. Nor how they go about constructing arguments. Or even if they call them arguments.

I am also intimidated by poetry. Recently, I’ve been less intimidated mostly because a friend gave me some tips — read aloud, listen to it being read — and because I read that Terry Eagleton book on how to read poems. (Ironic, I know.)

If I were assigned poetry without any guidance on how to read it, I’d be frustrated and probably confused by what I was supposed to say in class. Either I wouldn’t say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, or I’d say something and you’d probably think I was lazy, stupid, or unprepared.

Skills vs content

Reading the material in our disciplines comes naturally to us. We’ve been doing it for so long that we’ve forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. We may never have been formally taught how to do it, but we figured it out somehow.

What we want to teach is the content. The content seems exciting. Skills seem boring. (Hmm. Funny that we might use that term.) And maybe even beneath us. Shouldn’t they know how to read by now?

But reading is not a generic skill.

And the students need the skills to be able to grapple with the content. They need the disciplinary literacy in order to get excited about the content. To have meaningful things to say about it in the seminar. To write good essays.

While it makes sense to start explicitly teaching these skills in first-year classes, it is likely that students will take their entire undergraduate degree to become proficient. They will need to be explicitly taught even in final year courses.

They think they know how to read, too

By teaching students the skills they need to really prepare for class and do well, you risk being accused of being patronizing.

Demonstrating how to read a poem aloud in class means risking looking like a fool.

Both are risks worth taking.

And it sure beats the hell out of being depressed about the poor quality of students these days.

*I blame the highlighter pen for the decline in note-taking abilities and the rise in (accidental) plagiarism

**”academic discipline” is not fundamentally different from “military discipline” or “disciplining a child”. You are training students in a particular way of seeing the world and understanding texts, data, etc.