LACOL Engaged and Active Reading Workshop at Vassar College

In November 2014, LACOL sponsored a two-day conference at Vassar College titled “Engaged and Active Reading.”  LACOL faculty and staff gathered to consider how reading may be changing in a digital age, and the implications for teaching and learning in the liberal arts.

Workshop presenter hari kumar, Instructional Designer at Amherst College
Workshop presenter hari kumar, Instructional Designer at Amherst College

Session topics included:

  • A keynote talk entitled The Attentive Reader (and Other Mythical Beasts) from Alan Jacob, Baylor University Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
  • Reading on our campuses, where are our students?
  • Pedagogies for Engaged and Active Reading
  • Technologies for Engaged and Active Reading
  • Brainstorming on cross-campus collaborative reading, annotation, and curricular development projects, course modules, or models .

Workshop discussion explored various ways to promote a robust “culture of engaged reading” for the liberal arts through practice and course assignments. While online life can contribute to distraction, there are also interesting new pedagogies for engaging with text with digital tools.  Several of the workshop participants are also active in LACOL’s Active Reading Working Group  which continues to explore these questions more deeply through collaboration.

Read More:

Susan Zlotnick, Professor of English and Dean of Freshmen, for article on reading and educational technology in the Vassar Quarterly, February 2015
Susan Zlotnick, Professor of English
©Vassar College
/ Karl Rabe
Ron Patkus, Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History
Ron Patkus, Assoc. Dir. of the Libraries for Special Collections ©Vassar College/ John Abbott