Abstract
The ability to comprehend, discuss, and use disciplinary texts is central to graduate education. Although techniques for teaching writing have been well-discussed, and even incorporated into graduate curricula, the same is not true for techniques of scholarly reading, a crucial skill that is largely untaught and which students must learn independently or through shared culture. We argue that more explicit training in reading has potential benefits for graduate student education. Drawing on thirty-six in-depth interviews with students in the social sciences, we focus on the routines of managing academic reading, necessary for accessing information for research. Graduate students develop techniques and schedules that permit them to read rapidly or carefully, to read for different academic purposes, and to make information retrievable through notating. We suggest how graduate programs might incorporate reading education into the curriculum.
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Notes
Reports of how leading scholars read are sometimes spread informally. Pitirim Sorokin was known as a scholar who read widely, if superficially. In contrast, his colleague Talcott Parsons had the reputation as a selective, but deep, reader. How scholars move from reading to notating is less known, but Robert Merton, for instance, had an elaborate system of note-taking and indexing (Hunt 1961: 61; Lawrence Nichols, 2016, personal communication).
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Howard Becker, Joel Best, Charles Camic, Shannon Fitzsimons, Gianna Mosser, and Christopher Wellin for their insightful feedback and suggestions, as well as Kemi Adeyemi, Amanda Allan, and Gemma Brennan for help in transcribing interviews. This project was supported by the Alumnae of Northwestern University Grants Program and the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence Innovation in Teaching Grant.
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Wohl, H., Fine, G.A. Reading Rites: Teaching Textwork in Graduate Education. Am Soc 48, 215–232 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9322-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9322-0