Table Of ContentREADING ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Jennifer Meta Robinson, Whitney M. Schlegel,
and Mary Taylor Huber, editors
READING ACROSS
THE DISCIPLINES
Edited by
KAREN MANARIN
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CONTENTS
Foreword / Pat Hutchings vii
Reading across the Disciplines: An Introduction /
Karen Manarin (Mount Royal University) 1
I. Ways of Reading
1. Exploring Readerly Diversity / Margaret
Mackey (University of Alberta) 25
2. Understandings of Reading: Insights from Faculty
Development with Reading Apprenticeship /
Nelson Graff, Rebecca Kersnar, Dan Shapiro, and
Ryne Leuzinger (California State University,
Monterey Bay) 44
3. “Mind the Gap”: Investigating Faculty Reading
Practices / Heather C. Easterling and
John Eliason (Gonzaga University) 64
4. Understanding How Students across the Disciplines
Read Images / Dana Statton Thompson
(Murray State University) 81
5. Student Reading of Documentary and Fiction Film /
Elizabeth Marquis (McMaster University) 102
II. Reading in Specific Contexts
6. Reading-to-Write: Rehearsing the Doctoral
Literature Review / Rosemary Green
(Shenandoah University) 123
7. Embedding Scaffolded Reading Practices into the First-Year
University Science Curriculum / Neela Griffiths and
Yvonne C. Davila (University of Technology Sydney) 143
8. Reading and Relationships in Organic Chemistry /
Brett McCollum (Mount Royal University) and
Layne Morsch (University of Illinois Springfield) 166
9. Teaching Analytical Reading in Psychology at
Alverno College / Joyce Tang Boyland, Kris Vasquez,
Jordan R. Donovan, and Rachel M. Henry
(Alverno College) 184
10. Strategies to Promote Reading Compliance and Student Learning
in an Introductory Child Development Course / Trent W. Maurer
and Catelyn Shipp (Georgia Southern University) 205
11. Read Literature, Read the World: Teaching and Learning the
Interpretive Strategies of Literary Studies for Transfer /
Angela J. Zito and Jakob T. Zehms
(University of Wisconsin–Madison) 219
12. Capturing Confusion: Multidisciplinary Reading as
Productive Disruption / Aimee Knupsky and
M. Soledad Caballero (Allegheny College) 239
Index 259
vi Contents
FOREWORD
Pat Hutchings
A number of years ago, I was lucky enough to meet Karen Manarin and
three of her wonderful colleagues from Mount Royal University—Miriam
Carey, Melanie Rathburn, and Glen Ryland. As part of a campus program
on the scholarship of teaching and learning, they were in the midst of an
extensive study of how students read in different disciplines. In particular,
they were interested in what they called “critical reading” and its role in
advancing “academic goals and social engagement” as part of the institu-
tion’s general education program. I was very taken with their project and
apparently told them so with sufficient enthusiasm that I was invited to
write the foreword for their 2015 volume, Critical Reading in Higher Educa-
tion: Academic Goals and Social Engagement, which I was delighted to do.
A couple of years later, Karen was in touch to say that she was consid-
ering a more wide-ranging volume, one that explored the issues around
reading from a wider set of angles and in more diverse ways and contexts.
That volume, Reading across the Disciplines, is of course the one you have
in your hands. And once again I find myself writing (with pleasure) the
foreword to a wonderful addition to the teaching commons.
The scholarship of teaching and learning, which has contributed so
much to that commons, will never run out of issues and topics that call for
our attention and careful inquiry. But reading is surely among the most
important and the most challenging. It is important because virtually all
higher learning depends on the ability to make meaning from texts—be
they scientific articles, memoirs, visual images (including film), or the mo-
lecular models used in chemistry, all of which figure in this collection. It
is challenging because reading is a process that is, for most of us, novices
and experts alike, virtually invisible most of the time. As teachers, we ask
our students to “read” the assigned essay or scientific article (or whatever).
And students tell us they have done so. But what does that mean? What do
they do? What do they think they’re supposed to do?
vii
A personal confession comes to mind here. As a first-year college
student, one who had excelled academically at every previous stage of
education, I dutifully read the textbook required in the Introduction to
Philosophy course I was so excited to take. Indeed, I read it several times,
highlighter in hand . . . and then proceeded to emerge from the midterm
with a lousy C. I soon realized that I had not, in fact, really been reading. I
was turning the pages, decoding words. But I was certainly not doing the
kind of meaning-making, engaged, critical reading this volume explores.
(Happily, I was able to mend my ways thereafter.)
It turns out, as the authors of chapter 7 argue, that we are not born
knowing how to be effective critical or engaged readers. Reading, as Sam
Wineburg (2001) says about the practice of history as a discipline, is an
“unnatural act.” Accordingly, it can be hard for those of us who in one way
or another make our living (and enjoy our leisure) as readers to remember
how hard it is, how complicated a process, and to let students in on what
it takes and how it happens. When I needed help with that philosophy
text, I was on my own; indeed, I doubt that it would ever have occurred
to my professors to talk about how to read in their respective disciplines.
Reading was then and, as this volume makes clear, is now still seriously
underinstructed. Accordingly, the two main gifts of Reading across the Dis-
ciplines are, first, to capture what reading entails in all its complexity and
variety—the different purposes, processes, and disciplinary frames that
readers bring to the practice; and, second, to set out a rich mix of strategies
that have been found promising in various contexts—attention to reading
within disciplinary contexts, metacognitive strategies, think-alouds, cog-
nitive and reading apprenticeship, decoding the disciplines, defamiliariza-
tion, reflective writing about reading, and others.
These interventions are not, it should be said, offered as answers. On
the contrary, they are possibilities that faculty are moved to explore be-
cause of problems that arise in their own classrooms—and sometimes in
their own experience as readers—problems that call out for inquiry and
innovation. This brings us to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
As I was writing this foreword, I came across a new essay on the schol-
arship of teaching and learning by Randy Bass. Many readers of this vol-
ume will know Bass’s much-cited article from 1999, “The Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem?” In that now-classic piece, he
argues that teaching “problems” can be framed as issues for inquiry and ex-
ploration rather than indications of failure. Treating teaching problems in
the same way we treat research problems—as welcome sites for inquiry—
is the signature move made by the scholarship of teaching and learning.
viii Foreword
Bass’s new essay, written on the twentieth anniversary of the earlier one,
is fetchingly entitled “What’s the Problem Now?” And that problem is not
only new but “wicked”: the transformation of higher education “to meet
the needs of society, equity, and the future” and, accordingly, seeing “the
problem of learning . . . as complexly embedded in social and cultural con-
texts” (2020, 5). Toward this end, he invokes a concept from the National
Science Foundation (2019), “convergence research,” which has two charac-
teristics: it is driven by a specific and compelling problem, and it requires
deep integration across disciplines.
This strikes me as an apt description of this volume. While never losing
sight of the individual student—the reader in front of us in the classroom—
Reading across the Disciplines shines a light on a big and surely “wicked”
problem, it brings together perspectives and findings from a wide range of
disciplines and contexts, and its methods are diverse and complementary.
And while focused on the realities of the classroom—and what individual
teachers may want to try in their own settings—it invites and invokes
thinking not only about, say, helping students read that piece of literature
(or philosophy text) more critically but, as chapter 11 puts it, fostering abil-
ities to “read the world” in ways that make a difference not only for the
individual but for society and our collective future. It’s hard to imagine
a grander challenge than that—or a smarter road map for meeting that
challenge than this collection provides. And who knows, maybe there’s yet
another volume to come.
References
Bass, Randall. 1999. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem?” Inventio 1 (1):
1–10.
———. 2020. “What’s the Problem Now?” To Improve the Academy 39 (1): 3–30. http://dx.doi.org
/10.3998/tia.17063888.0039.102.
Manarin, Karen, Miriam Carey, Melanie Rathburn, and Glen Ryland. 2015. Critical Reading in Higher
Education: Academic Goals and Social Engagement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
National Science Foundation. 2019. “Convergence Research at NSF.” https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia
/convergence/.
Wineburg, Sam. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the
Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Foreword ix
