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.
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:
- Nov 2014 presentation The Attentive Reader (and Other Mythical Beasts) from Keynote Speaker Alan Jacob, Baylor University Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
- Distracted Reading in the Digital Age by Elizabeth Randolph in Vassar College Alumnae/i Quarterly, Winter 2015