f you become adept at analytical scanning, you can "read" an entire book in twenty or thirty minutes.

you

While thoughtful, effective highlighting can make studying more efficient, inaccurate highlighting can get you into trouble. If you highlight in a linear fashion while you read, you might not recog-nize important passages the first time through. If you miss them and study only the highlighted portions later, this practice can ac-tually lower your performance on exams.

The practice therefore leads you toward memorization and repetition, not to-ward interpretation, inquiry, or criticism.

Because you are doing something with and to the text, highlight-ing keeps you more alert and allows you to read longer without becoming distracted and fatigued.

If you want to avoid disrupting your engagement with the flow of the writing, pause to take notes at intervals, such as the ends of chapters or whenever you take a break from reading. Then you can also quickly skim portions you have read to recall structures, themes, or events.

but recalling that you enjoyed a movie or wept at the end won't give you much to say in an assigned paper or a class discussion.

you probably won't have much to say about it a few days later.

What should you do if the assigned reading is a good novel,

one times four times two equals eigh

why most of us can't remember the numbers on our credit cards. But we can recall longer sequences of numbers if we cluster them into logical units or create some other mnemonic.

me kind of mnemonic or aid to your memory. In other words, you need to break up the stream and repackage it somehow.

a vague recollection that the subject was interesting or uninteresting, that you disagreed with the author but not why, or that it made you sleepy.

(something like hitting the SAVE button on your computer),

tenacious

unless you take some active measures to retain information.

Therefore, when teachers assign readings, they do not expect you to read everything from beginning to end.

looking for the main idea

constructed objects.

coherent record to remind you of what you un-derstood while you were reading.

predatory readin

But this is only one way of reading-for pleasure-and for reasons I'll explain, you will rarely use it in your academic work.

reading is not a single kind of activity.

what I will need to know

Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove

first contact.

theethnobotany

isolation

Mexican era

before mission times

previously recognized Tribe

It has been our experience that this is most likely achieved when students focus more on mastery of content than on the final grade.

However, we urge our students to challenge this anxiety because it thwarts the process of authentic learning.

“I have been going through a lot of personal issues this semester.”

we are grading student demon-stration of understanding of content, not the perceived degree of effort expended to achieve it.

we encourage students to give some kind of verbal response when asked questions in class, even if it is to say that one does not know, is not sure, or only has a partial answer.

Students sometimes say later that they did not respond because the answer was “so obvious” that it did not require a response.

We are placed into academic tracks as early as 1st grade and these tracks have very real consequences for the kinds of careers we will have access to later in life

By this she means that in using the tools of the system we are more likely to uphold that system than to challenge it.

Grading in a course whose primary goal is to challenge social stratification is not without irony.

What are the things you can and can’t see based on the social positions you hold or don’t hold?

Ultimately, one or two courses in our college or university schooling are not enough to brainwash us or deny us the ability to think freely.

The instructor in our scenario is most likely a White male, as is the vast majority of higher education faculty

et this system is hard to see because we have always been “swimming” within it;

we cannot make sense of the world without the meaning-making system that our culture provides.

Would the logger, tribal member, environmentalist and scientist all agree on this matter of ownership?

As you can see, these are not neutral questions—they are always political, and they frame how knowledge is created, advanced, and circulated. Because of this, knowledge is never value-neutral.

Which subjects are funded and which are not

power of dominant knowledge depends in large part on its presentation as neutral and universal

all knowledge is taught from a particular perspective

what might be ethically re-quired of me?

What do my reactions reveal about what I perceive is at risk were I to ac-cept this information?

I don’t care if you’re purple”

Second, people do not come in these colors and so claims about green, purple and polka-dotted people render race ridiculous and trivializes the realities of racism.

As such, these barriers can be identified and acted against.

Yet, the relentless repetition of these ideas in the mainstream makes them seem true, and allows us to form strongly held opinions without being particularly educated on the issues.

“People should be judged by what they do, not the color of their skin” “I accept people for who they are” “I see people as individuals”“It’s focusing on difference that divides us”“My parents taught me that all people are equal”“I always treat everyone the same”“I’ve been discriminated against so I don’t have any privilege”“Our generation is more open-minded”“I have friends from all races and we are all fine with each other”“I don’t think race and gender make any difference—as long as you work hard” “It’s White males who are the minority now”“Women are just as sexist as men”

most of us have very strong feelings and opinions about the topics examined in social justice courses

recognize structural inequalities in ways that prepare us to change them.

For example, political and economic pressures on schools to focus on standardized testing have resulted in moves away from intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and engagement with ambiguity and toward creating conforming and compliant students who can memorize the “one right answer” to pass the test.

challenge mainstream understandings and thus bring to the surface patterns and tensions

for our K–12 schooling (especially in Canada and the United States) has conditioned us to seek clear and unambiguous answers

The deeply held beliefs that inform our emotional responses make studying and teaching from a critical stance very difficult.

immobilizing guilt, feeling overly hopeless

protect a worldview that is more familiar and comforting.

contrary to what you have always been taught, categories of difference (such as gender, race, and class) rather than merit alone, do matter and contribute significantly to people’s experiences and life opportunities.

inequality not only exists, but is deeply structured into society in ways that secure its reproduction.

you may not be as open-minded as you may have thought

knowledge is socially con-structed

not due to your own individual shortcomings but are in large part the product of socially organized structural barriers.

we are under a spotligh

hey are not necessarily problematic.

For many of us, this is the first time we have expe-rienced a sustained examination of inequality—especially where we are in domi-nant groups.

Use Your Reactions as Entry Points for Gaining Deeper Self-Knowledge

For example, if my best friend lives with a disability, I may assume that I am outside of ableism because I am open to this friendship when others are not.

How can using a critical framework expand my understanding of these phenomena?

atypical occurrence.

Yes, people from oppressed groups occasionally rise to the top in dominant society.

exceptions also illustrate the rule.

offers a new way

We are more interested in the various frameworks each practitioner uses, the schol-arly community that informs the ideas that practitioner draws on, and what each framework offers us in terms of understanding how the body works and how hu-mans conceptualize illness and healing.

To illustrate this concept of frameworks, imagine that you have pain in your leg and go to your doctor. Your doctor would likely examine your leg, feel the bones and muscles, and perhaps take X-rays to identify the source of the pain. If, however, you went to an alternative (from a Western perspective) medical practi-tioner, such as a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), she might have a completely different way of examining your body and identifying the source of the pain. She may begin by looking at your tongue and examining other parts of your body. A chiropractor might not examine your leg at all, but instead begin work on your spine.

One of the more important ac-ademic skills we can develop is the ability to apply a new sense-making framework to something we currently make sense of using another framework.

Anecdotal evidence is evidence drawn from hearsay or only personal experience, and thus anecdotal evidence is superficial, limited to interpretation, and not gener-alizable.

“Should schools ban soda machines?”

Reflect on your reasons for pursuing higher education.

We do want students to offer opinions in order to reflect on and examine them; opening one’s opinions to examination is not the same as simply expressing them.

scholars such as Peggy McIntosh, Michel Foucault, and Beverly Tatum are regularly disagreed with well before com-prehension of their work is mastered.

give a personal opinion about it (e.g., “I loved it when the author said that men dominate because it reminded me of an experi-ence I had . . . .”), or use it to reject the reading out of hand

expressing our opin-ions simply rehearses what we already think and doesn’t require us to expand, question, or go beneath our ideas.

However, in academia, opinion is theweakest formof intellectual engagement.

confusing opinion (which everyone has) with informed knowledge (which few have without ongoing practice and study).

implying that our opinions are equal to the opinions of professional dancers, singers, choreographers, and producers.

increase your comfort discussing them with others

One place where grappling often falls short is in small-group work. For most instructors, the goal of small-group work is much more than students simply “sharing their ideas or opinions on X.” Rather, it’s an opportunity for students to spend time critically thinking through difficult ideas with the support of others in order to deepen understanding and share insights.

Practice posing questions. Because most students have been socialized to care more about getting the answers right and less about comprehension, we may fear that asking questions will reveal that we don’t know the an-swers. Thus, we may make bold statements that lack intellectual humility.

in-structors appreciate questions that demonstrate engagement and curiosity, rather than apathy and silence that make it difficult to assess student needs.

taking notes of key points as you read.

Just as the astronomy professor’s teachings are more than his personal opinions, social justice professors’ teachings are more than their personal opinions. Both instructors are presenting concepts that have undergone peer review.

Peer review is the process by which theories and the research they are based on are examined by other scholars in the field who question, refine, deepen, challenge, and complicate the ar-guments, expanding the collective knowledge base of the field.

it must stand up to scrutiny by others who are specialists in the field.

And unfortunately, students who “disagree with” social justice content are often taken seriously by classmates —even seen as a kind of hero for speaking up to the professor.

still recognize our own lack of knowledge as the primary cause of the poor performance.

We are more likely to focus on gaining a basic understanding and not on whether we agree or disagree.

knowing that we might not fully understand the concepts and theories presented.

Yet critical social justice education demands a different kind of engagement than most of us have been prepared for in our previous schooling.

rewards conformity and single, correct answers over intellectual curi-osity and risk-taking.

students who have trouble understanding what they read seldom: re-read, read more slowly, use a dictionary to look up new words, or ask their professors to ex-plain difficult passages

In our experience,

Our hypothetical student is representative of many students we encounter: He has not done the readings or has trouble understanding what he’s read; he has limited knowledge but is resistant to increasing it; he clings to the same worldview he came into the course with; and he is overly confident about his position.

Recognize how your own social positionality (such as your race, class, gen-der, sexuality, ability-status) informs your perspectives

Strive for intellectual humility.

Yet basing our knowledge on such sources as personal opinions, self-concepts, anecdotal evidence, hearsay, intuition, family teachings, popular platitudes, limited relationships, personal experiences, exceptions, and main-stream media is insufficient for understanding and responding constructively to social injustice.

In sum, the combination of underdeveloped academic skills, difficult theo-retical concepts, and highly charged political content that is absent of complex analysis in mainstream culture, all of which is embedded within an institution-al context that is structured to reproduce inequality, can make these courses challenging.

mainstream culture

binary ways of conceptualizing these issues (good/bad, racist/not-racist) are part of what prevents us from seeing them.

hus an effective critical social justice course will unsettle mainstream perspectives and institutional discourses, chal-lenge our views about ourselves, what we think we know about society, how it works, and our place in it.

Society is structured in ways that make us all complicit in systems of inequality; there is no neutral ground.

if we ourselves are not poor.

Yet mainstream culture tends to present poverty as if there is a collective and shared experience of “the poor.”

Yet messages that circulate in mainstream society do not prepare most of us to conceptualize or develop the language to discuss our intersecting identities in any depth.

but may not have the scholarly language to discuss it in an academic context.

we will almost certainly have a superficial understanding because that is the primary message made available to us through mainstream society. Where we are members of minoritized groups (e.g., if we are women, Peoples of Color, transgender, People with disabilities), we may have a deeper personal un-derstanding of social inequality and how it works, but may not have the scholarly language to discuss it in an academic context.