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Fall 2014 (November 19, 2014)

On the LACOL Consortium and the Issue of Distracted or Engaged Reading

November 17, 2014
By Fred Hagstrom, LTC Director

In late November several of us will attend a conference at Vassar on distracted or engaged reading.  Of the various LACOL campuses, Vassar has been leading on this issue.  The Vassar faculty are concerned that the reading habits of incoming students have declined.  They have introduced a number of events and practices in an attempt to impress on new students the importance of serious and careful reading, both for class as well as outside of assigned material.  They want to increase a sense of value for the book and for the benefits of careful and deep reading.  They feel that this is important in order to foster the kind of engagement with texts that they want to see in their students, and that the idea of careful reading should not be taken for granted.

I am going to participate in a panel that is on the level and quality of reading that we think we see in new students.  In order to do this, I have been gathering opinions from various parts of the community.  For this newsletter, I thought it might be interesting to share some of what I have found.  I think these findings are valid, but I have to add that they are based on small samples and might change if we were able to do a broader assessment.

When students spoke at a panel for new faculty they spoke about the importance of having well chosen readings.  Even if they are quite interested in the subject of the class, too many readings can dilute the experience because they don’t keep up with the pace of reading.  However, when readings seem to them to be concise and targeted, they have a lasting effect.  Students admit to being distracted when reading and have devised various methods to retain their focus.  Some mention that breaking longer readings into smaller sections is helpful, as is marking notes on their texts.  They also have some preference for paper reading as opposed to screen reading.  They mention that screens are just a click away from other distractions, and they prefer the ease of note taking on paper.  Perhaps most concerning is an admission some students make that reading is lower on their priorities compared to other expectations for class.  Tests, quizzes, lab reports and papers all call for the student to prepare more carefully, while skimming a reading, or even not doing the reading for class time can be a hidden compromise for the busy student.  A student who has issues with procrastination will put off reading until other work is complete.

Faculty impressions about reading are quite diverse.  New colleagues who have taught at other schools note that our students do the readings with a degree of care and thoughtfulness that far exceeds what they have seen elsewhere.  They see our students as fully capable of absorbing dense and difficult reading, and well motivated to participate in class discussions.  Some colleagues who have been here for years say that they have not noticed any decline in students’ abilities to take in large amounts of reading or to deal with difficult information in texts.  Others report having scaled back their assigned reading to something close to half of what they used to expect. We have seen an increase in students for whom English is not their first language.  And there are greater issues with students who have diagnosed difficulties with attention. In summary, there is some sense of change and concern of a decline, but not to a degree that has raised college-wide concern to this point. 

I wonder if the Harry Potter habit (for lack of a better way of phrasing it) creates a drive to enjoy the world of books, or if it establishes a consumer-driven model of light entertainment that makes it difficult to engage more demanding texts.  Certainly there are issues of distraction broadly in our society that go beyond the issue of reading.  It doesn’t make sense to blame everything on digital media, even though that can be an alluring distraction.  It is possible to use digital resources to read in ways that take advantage of information that adds depth to any text.  I see distraction in areas other than reading.  I see students struggle with the task of quiet contemplation that drawing requires. I see students rushing about and forgetting important appointments or obligations. During a break in a long class, students can’t wait to take out their phones, making break times much less conversational than they used to be.  Considering distraction broadly, it would make sense that this has an effect on the quality of reading we will see in our classes.  I also hope that students establish a joy of serious reading that takes them to texts outside of assignments.  I would like to see us consider what sort of habits of reading our students bring to Carleton, and to ask if we are comfortable with what we see, or if we need to do something to increase the importance of reading that we see in our students.  

To prepare for the conference I am reading The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs.  In a section on the importance of attention he quotes this poem by W.H. Auden. 

You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.