TLC Workshop: Resocializing Reading

Friday November 3, 2023 , 10:00am – 11:30am
Graduate Center, Room 3317 

“In the official university,” write Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney, “reading is outsourced…The classroom is a reading-free zone”. Many of us have experienced this phenomenon all too often as both students and teachers. Reading is what we do outside the classroom; we’re expected to come to class already having read, already having done the work somewhere else, alone. 

But what might shift for us as students and teachers if we read together, in-class? In this workshop, we will begin by reading Sealy Thompson and Harney’s provocative essay (together, of course!) “Ground Provisions.” As we read together we’ll discuss how we might “resocialize” reading in our classrooms. 

In addition to proposing new reading strategies and practices instructors can bring into their classrooms, this workshop will address some of the challenges involved in teaching reading as a skill that’s all too often taken for granted. For instance, how might we balance the tension between the unpredictability, struggle, and joy of reading together with the imperative to grade and evaluate (ourselves and our students) individually? What sort of confidence or autonomy might students gain from reading when they are given the chance to practice it socially?

Attendees will leave this workshop with a sense of the epistemic and embodied potentials of reading together, and ideas for how to productively resocialize reading in their own classrooms.

Please register by visiting http://cuny.is/tlc-f23.