The Center for Teaching and Learning offers Faculty Learning Communities each Academic Year. Participating in an FLC requires a commitment to meet together several times (about every 2-3 weeks) over the course of a semester. In most cases, FLCs work over a two-semester period. In addition to the meetings, participants will read, collaborate, and make progress on individual projects between meetings. Each participant will actively contribute as responders, facilitators, peer reviewers and experts in selected areas of teaching and learning. Faculty should consider their other professional commitments before applying.
AY 2024-2025
Incorporating College-Level Reading Instruction: 2024-2025
We all assign reading in our courses, and sometimes that reading is difficult for our students. Sometimes that difficulty is rooted in never having encountered something like a peer-reviewed scholarly article before. Or, perhaps students have come across them, but have only skimmed the abstract or selected a few quotes or data points. Either way, this difficulty can be mitigated by embedding more reading instruction into our courses, both through the ways we introduce and teach students how to read a certain genre (especially longer-form, dense academic texts) and how to engage in active reading.
The importance of reading instruction in the college classroom has become popular in Writing Studies scholarship recently, particularly in relation to changes in students’ reading habits. Students are spending less time reading “traditional” long-form texts and are instead immersed in short-form digital texts, making it difficult for higher-ed instructors to assign longer, more dense texts. Students are either not doing the reading or picking and choosing short selections from the text to include in their writing to prove to instructors that they have read a piece (while, in actuality, they may have spent minimal time doing so). The edited collection Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, for example, includes work from prominent scholars on topics from “Building Mental Maps: Implications from Research on Reading in the STEM Disciplines” (Nowacek and James) to “Device. Display. Read: The Design of Reading and Writing and the Difference Display Makes” (Yancey, et al).
These issues have led to the increasing need for reading instruction in higher-ed classrooms, as students need more help understanding and navigating dense texts like academic books or scholarly articles. Additionally, students who struggle with reading comprehension may be more likely to use AI to summarize and analyze dense course texts for them, making the discussion of the ethical use of AI reading assistance tools more important than ever.
If you have questions, please contact Dr. Meghan Hancock at hancockm@marshall.edu.
Works Cited
Nowacek, Rebecca and Heather G. James. “Building Mental Maps: Implications from Research on Reading in the STEM Disciplines.” Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, eds. Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau, NCTE, 2017, pp. 291-312.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake, et al. “Device. Display. Read: The Design of Reading and Writing and the Difference Display Makes.” Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, eds. Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg and Sheridan Blau, NCTE, 2017, pp. 33-56.
Learning and Practice Community for Graduate Advising
The Graduate Studies office is starting a Learning and Practice Community for Graduate Advising this fall. You are warmly invited to participate if your schedule allows. This group is open to all faculty and staff who wish to learn more about advising at the graduate level and develop their own skills and practices. A document with additional information and initial goals is available: Advising Community.docx.
The first organizational meeting was Wednesday, September 4 at 9:00am.
Based on the discussion from the first meeting, these are the themes for the meetings this semester:
- October 2: Graduate admissions and academic advising
- October 16: Advising software and financial aid
- October 30: Program marketing and recruitment, Graduate assistants, and Theses
- November 13: Handing challenging situations
We will be inviting representatives from campus offices to speak about their topics, and we will have time for discussion and sharing our own experiences. We will have additional meetings in the Spring, with time to include more topics.
A Team for this Community may be accessed here: Graduate Advising | General | Microsoft Teams.
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Carl Mummert (mummertc@marshall.edu).