Breakthroughs in College Reading: The Promises and Tensions of Disciplinary Reading Apprenticeships

This collection combines scholarship, reflection, and practitioner stories of classroom teaching. It begins by reporting the results of a survey of 86 college faculty and staff regarding breakthroughs in their teaching of reading and proposes three tentative threshold concepts and what the editors call a meta-concept undergirding those threshold concepts. Contributors from writing studies, English, first-year seminar, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics and other disciplines describe their strategies for engaging college students in reading in their disciplines, sharing what they have learned from their years of experience using the Reading Apprenticeship framework in the classroom. Chapters that elaborate on that framework and on the tensions of academic apprenticeship round out the collection. The collection is motivated by the question, How do we help college students become independent learners in their disciplines? In it, the editors and contributors argue that we do so by supporting students in learning from texts. In order to do so effectively, college faculty must recognize reading as a problem-solving process, encourage and support students in taking responsibility for the intellectual work in their classes, and create strong classroom communities that help students develop identities as scholars. When we truly engage in a reciprocal academic apprenticeship with our students--valuing what they bring to our disciplines as much as what our disciplines offer them--we transform our classrooms and the academy itself. The authors in this collection illustrate this difficult and rewarding work with stories of and reflections on the practices in their own contexts that begin to make this shift.