Your peers are often your best teachers, and through peer review

“reading like a writer”

we use mind maps for reading that your professor assigns you, for research and sources that you find, and for organizing your own original ideas in early stages of the writing process.

BrevityCompletenessObjectivity

strategies we introduced in Chapter 1.

it provides a summary of the source, in your own words, andIt starts your Works Cited pageOften, it can be a good way to start collecting quotes or evidence from your annotations of a source.

Using Notecards or Sticky notes to Organize your Research

choose to focus on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of underrepresented figures, topics, and viewpoints.

Wikipedia articles are written, edited, and maintained by volunteers, known as Wikipedia editors or Wikipedians, and like all sources, the quality of Wikipedia articles depends on the knowledge and skill of those creating them.

Everyone’s Google is Different

r popular sources

google, and we’re also probably used to considering whether we believe a source or not, how legit it is, and whether it is, to use the parlance of our times, “fake news.”

only reality you know is digital

Faculty Spotlights:

any question that elicits a single-word answer is . . . boring

So just remember, your question is always a draft, and you’ll have a better time if you practice being a flexible reader and writer during the “Inquiry” process.

gave these students a written voice for their struggles,

Here, reading is more about satisfying your personal curiosities about life’s conundrums, whether that’s answering questions about privilege or racism in your life, or questions about the future of the planet. Meaningful research involves using the reading and writing strategies we’ve outlined earlier to investigate your own topics that can help you address issues that you and others like you experience, or even think about everyday.

Openness: Continue to practice being open: open to new ways of asking questions, open to new ways of finding information and knowledge from sources, open to relating to new perspectives that you will find in those sources.

Curiosity, Engagement:

The more relevant the issue and/or the population is to you, the researcher, the more meaningful the reading, research, and writing process will be

and starts with your curiosity: asking your own questions, questions about real-life issues that matter to you, that hit close to home, that are related to your experience

Annotating a YouTube video

We also encourage you to find YouTube videos and other more visual ways of organizing any information you read

“parallel text sets”

r by annotating your way through difficult sections, with various new ways of annotating and asking questions to solve problems.

Chunking and close reading are inter-related reading strategies that allow readers to “zero-in” on one or two passages that are especially difficult to understand.

Mind Maps

The point is: not all reading is the same, and it is important to develop awareness of how to be flexible as a reader, recognizing the particular conventions of a ‘genre’ and discipline or subject, and adapting your reading strategies accordingly.

I have always used personalized symbols in the margins of texts, like a star for ideas I like, a “Q” for Quotes I may use in my essays or papers, a “!” for an alarming or surprising idea. I often use ? for difficult or confusing concepts that I want to return to later,

I would not sell back my textbooks, largely because I had spent so much time annotating in the margins that I felt a certain amount of ownership over those books and course readers by the term’s end.

Readers can create meaning in any number of ways as they read actively, from asking questions in the margins, to making connections with other texts and other authors. In other words, the reader is not a robot or a passive bystander in the rhetorical situation below, but an active meaning-maker in conversation with the author of the text.

Schema-building: What does “reading” mean to you? Who are you as a reader? How would you describe your reading process?

An important part of growing as a reader and writer is understanding who you are as a learner, but also learning from the models provided to you by readers and writers who came before you. The best way to increase your vocabulary, formality, or other skills, habits, and choices that professional writers make, for example, is by reading, and specifically reading in the discipline in which you wish to write.

One way to focus your active reading and annotation is to ask questions about what the writer is doing, in addition to what the writer is saying in various parts of the text.

After reading Writing in Academic Communities, describe a situation when you found yourself in a new “Discourse Community.” How did it feel? Did you feel that you had to conform, or that you could be yourself? What cues, conventions, or standards of that Discourse Community made you feel that way?

advanced writers make choices and moves within the expectations of the genre, that genres are also continually changing

reading like a writer involves picking up on the language choices, audience, purpose and main message of the writer, as well as the way in which the writer presents those moves within a particular structure, style, and set of conventions.

whether they are bolded, underlined, or italicized; if there are Text Boxes that make the concept or idea stand apart from the rest of the text; and/or if there are images to add meaning to a certain concept, idea, or section of a text.

Skimming is an important pre-reading step because it gives you a sense of the text before you start going in-depth, where you practice various ways of annotating, reading like a writer, mind mapping, and close reading (all described in detail below).

KWL + Reading Process

In my courses, I use the heuristic of KWL+ to frame and structure an active pre-reading process that involves follow-up after reading as well – it encapsulates all stages of an

Flexibility—the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands. Flexibility is fostered when writers are encouraged to

Responsibility—the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.

Engagement—a sense of investment and involvement in learning. Engagement is fostered when writers are encouraged to Make connections between [your] own ideas and those of othersFind meanings new to [you] or build on existing meanings as a result of new connectionsAct upon the new knowledge that [you] have discovered

Openness—the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world. Openness is fostered when writers are encouraged to

Seek relevant authoritative information and recognize the meaning and value of that information

We’ve got our ideas; what are your learning goals as a student??? What are some strategies you will use to accomplish them?

Developing healthy working relationships with your professors is good training for future professional relationships you will build. Your professors want to know you, and your actions allow them to do so.

The best way to make a positive impression is to show interest in or curiosity for what your professor is interested in. So ask questions when you need clarification

Queenie could have asked for an extension on any of the assignments and have reasonable excuses for doing so, but she chose not to. To focus and reduce distractions, she made the campus library her study area,

contract by preparing for your class, completing your assignments and submitting them by the due dates

Being present means more than just attending class; it means participating in and contributing to class.

Your experiences matter, because who you are as a learner matters. Your identity is shaped by your experiences, which is why in our courses when we begin talking about your academic identity

open perspective, and viewing your own diverse ways of learning with a more strategic point of view, reading can be for everybody. It just takes a growth mindset, where finding your learning style, negotiating an appropriate level of challenge, and having an open, flexible mindset all come together to help you grow as a reader and writer.

we try our best to change the way our students think about reading and writing in college. Mostly, we expand their view of the possibilities of college reading and writing.

Growth happens when learners work through the appropriate level of challenge; challenge should be determined both by your teacher and the way they set up their classroom; and by you and the way you set up your flexible, growth mindset.

assess what students don’t know yet, because they haven’t asked them, and they either go through material too fast or without proper support, students can end up in the “Panic Zone,” where learning becomes overwhelming

When teachers recite a pre-scripted curriculum that doesn’t assess the students’ prior knowledge and appropriate level of challenge, students end up in the center—“the Comfort Zone”—where they are not engaged, they are bored, and they become passively complacent about learning.

For some of you, we also recommend writing notes by hand. While we value the online format of this text to make the knowledge, strategies, and activities accessible and dynamic, we also realize that reading on screen is not natural or easy for everybody. Even if you don’t want to print out the pages and annotate directly in the margins using a pen or pencil (which is how your authors learned to read in college), an intermediate step may be to take notes in a notebook on the side, write summaries of new information, or draw Mind Maps to organize your own reading and thinking process. (See Reading Strategies in the next section.)

When we center our teaching and the learning process around students, we realize that we are all intelligent in all kinds of different ways, and that teaching through a multi- literacies approach honors the learning styles and strengths of everyone in the classroom.

Alfie Kohn, not surprisingly, is a big opponent of standardized testing practices, and actually all testing in general. The reason is simple: because a single test cannot test everybody’s abilities, and we are seeing more and more that the abilities that are valued by the dominant society often reward white privilege, households who spoke standard English, and other ways that testing not only undermines diversity in society, but also undermines the diversity of learning styles within various groups. Testing effectively encapsulates what is “wrong” with traditional schooling in our view.

Our constructivist teaching and learning philosophy is influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, who is known as the father of “student-centered” teaching and learning. Freire was an activist and teacher of adult reading in Brazil during a time when workers’ rights were being massively exploited, largely because they were uneducated. Without being able to read, these impoverished workers could not negotiate contracts or learn about how to defend their rights. Freire called this “reading the world,” which is the premise of this text and many of the projects involving student choice in our curricula across SFSU and beyond. In Freire’s critical pedagogy, or radically progressive way of teaching, the curriculum is framed around the students’ worlds, involves their real issues, desires, and needs, and the teacher can learn from the multiple literacies of the students’ worlds even as they teach them more traditional literacies in school. Freire made learning to read a very political and liberatory act in ways that many will never understand today, as most of us are lucky enough to be taught basic comprehension in elementary school and don’t give much thought to the act of reading after that, except as a chore for school that it usually becomes around junior high. To counter this trend where reading becomes a chore and learning becomes boring, we take constructivist teaching and learning further, where we borrow from Alfie Kohn who frames learning around “deep questions” generated by students. By doing so, Kohn believes that students will be motivated to learn based on genuine curiosity, problem solving, and a curriculum that revolves around their lives. Kohn frames it best by saying, “By contrast, the best sort of education—which is not only more respectful of children but far more effective—takes its cue from the interests of those who are being educated. The center of gravity is the kids; their purposes and interests are our point of departure” (3).

Why does your experience and opinion matter? In a short answer, because that’s how learning happens best. No matter what your instructor’s philosophy of teaching, if they are using this textbook you can probably assume they agree with us, Kohn and countless others who believe that learning happens constructively, or through a “constructivist approach,” that always has to involve students.

Alfie Kohn is just one of these progressive educators and theorists who frames our beliefs about critical, active learning through the importance of questioning. Kohn argues that questioning is how students learn best, and challenges the old school learning model, where “Students are expected to do whatever they’re told, to accommodate themselves to a curriculum that was created by adults who never met them” (3). Sound familiar? We hope not, but unfortunately, it is all too familiar to most high school students and something we wish to address in our courses.

Hence, this is the foundation of learning that will frame all of our activities in this textbook, where learning is not just about reading information and memorizing it, but where what you get out of this text largely depends on the energy you put back into it through our Discussion Forums, annotation prompts and further conversations ‘in the margins’ using hypothes.is. We are excited about the Open Educational Resource (OER) online format of this text because it allows open spaces for collaboration of ideas, using hypothes.is, to help you “learn by doing” even when reading at home. This approach is the foundation of active learning and what makes learning engaging, fun, and ultimately the most rewarding for both you, the students, and us, the teachers.

There are dozens of theories about learning, and while we do borrow from Lev Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)” when he describes how educators have to be responsive to young learners’ best “zones” for learning, we have narrowed our discussion to theories of adult learning that have been proven to work best actively and collaboratively. This is called constructivist learning, where the knowledge in the classroom is constructed from below (which requires that students are collaborating with teachers)—as opposed to knowledge or information delivered from the top (where teachers deliver a lecture).

We would like to start this journey by first preparing you with the mindsets that will empower you to grow and learn through various college situations that you will encounter. To properly develop these mindsets, it’s important to start with a fundamental question: What is learning, and how do we learn best?

The way we will frame the ensuing text about learning, reading, writing, research, and college life in general is through the metaphor and real experience of a journey. Like all trips, this book will have a beginning and an end, with a middle that will provide many insights and stories from our teaching that are hopefully memorable because they relate to your own experience. In fact, one premise of this book is that all meaningful reading and writing is personally motivated in some way: motivated by your connections, motivated by your passions and interests as students. And although your college journey will come to an end in four, five, or six years, we hope that the lessons, practices, and habits that you will learn and practice through this interactive textbook will transfer to many courses, and beyond to many life situations in your career and elsewhere.

Engagement in Active Learning: Introduce how this textbook and classroom activities will engage students in active learning as they read, to engage students with interactive experiences during the process of learning and reading.

Openness, Flexibility: Prepare your mindset to be flexible and open to new reading and writing situations in college; reinforce the growth mindset model and prepare students with strategies to control their reading and writing growth

Responsibility, Metacognition: To reflect on your own learning styles and build strategies for reading and writing based on your individual learning process.