“In the official university,” write Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney, “reading is outsourced…The classroom is a reading-free zone.” I suspect we all 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
This workshop was offered in the Fall semester, 2023.
This workshop took place in-person. The workshop and materials were developed by Jeff Voss.
Materials
All materials on this page and in the linked google folder are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License.
This folder contains Outreach materials and a workshop agenda.
Materials Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jKhO95QhpE67p-8FFKqqe0idDm7jL69Z?usp=sharing
Workshop Agenda
Resocializing Reading
10:00 – 11:30am, Friday November 3, 2023
5-10m: Hello, howdy ~ icebreaker !
~30m: Read together the essay, “Ground Provisions” by Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney.
Citation: THOMPSON, Tonika Sealy and HARNEY, Stefano. Ground provisions. (2018). Atterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry. 120-125. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5901
~5m Freewriting: How did it *feel* to read this essay together? How is it different from your normal/usual experience of reading? (*reminder*: this is freewriting! let the words take you wherever they/you go!)
~10m (If group is larger than 5-6 people, split into pairs and talk about the essay together, if it’s a small group, simply start talking all together): Begin the discussion with your freewriting. Travel between the content and context: what ideas/questions in the essay made you lean in? Were there moments that threw you out of the text?
Remaining time, group discussion! Some possible areas of inquiry: Can you imagine implementing reading together in the classes you teach? What are some obstacles or pressures (whether internal or structural) that exist for us as instructors that might get in the way of asking students to read together in the classroom? What might shift if we give our students all the time they need – or at least as much time as possible – to do all the work (reading, writing, etc.) we ask them to do, in-class, together?
*Keep an eye out for a Visible Pedagogy post on this workshop coming soon on the TLC site!: https://vp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
This handout was created by Jeff Voss (GC TLC, CUNY) and is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
