I’m (not) an academic … get me out of here!
Paul Stevens
What?
I’m (not) an academic … get me out of here! is a reading workshop in development at Solent University Southampton. It is run primarily with second-year media production undergraduates (mostly 19- to 20-year-olds).
The workshop promotes high-quality academic reading through active learning. The problem is that students are not reading — research tells us 27 per cent of expectations is a high estimate — and they are afraid to engage with some of the reading university-level study requires. So, this workshop offers an active learning approach to getting students reading high-quality academic sources, understanding their structure, and helping them with comprehension, interpretation, paraphrasing, synthesis, but above all boosting their confidence.
Why?
In academia, we see academic reading as purposeful and critical for our students, but we also understand it is challenging (Gorzycki et al., 2019). One obstacle is that students can believe they are better at it than they really are (Gorzycki et al. 2019). This ‘Dunning-Kruger-esque’ situation (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) can lead to an inflated sense of ability in some, combined with a fear of how challenging it will be in others.
So, the initial objective was to develop a classroom-based activity promoting and scaffolding high-quality academic reading through active learning (Ryan, 2006). The workshop addresses a specific problem we identified, i.e. students were not reading at the level they needed to in order to write at the level we required of them.
This workshop facilitates students reading high-quality academic sources, understanding their structure, helping them with comprehension, interpretation, paraphrasing, and synthesis. But above all, it boosts their confidence, as they realise over time that they can understand texts they previously thought they could not.
The key to achieving this is collaborative interrogation of what they are reading. What it purposely does not ask students to do is decipher a whole document on their own: they work on a section of the whole text, while classmates work on other parts.
The students end the workshop by pooling what they have discovered, so that each individual student ultimately arrives at an understanding of the whole text, without having read it all.
We now have both anecdotal and grade-based evidence that improving the quality of the texts students engage with also improves the quality of their subsequent academic writing, as they seek out higher-quality sources than perhaps they would have done, and apply what they read to their practical work, and synthesise it into formative and summative reflections on that work.
An example text that I have used for my second-year undergraduates can be found in the references, below.
The module’s summative assessments were to:
(a) create an audio-based experience via an app (a bit like a soundwalk); and
(b), write a critical reflection about the process,