Preface

What is critical reading, and how do you teach it in the college classroom? Exploring answers to these questions, as they vary across discipline and individual practice, is the purpose of Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, Volume 2: Social and Natural Sciences, as it was for its predecessor, Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, Volume 1: Humanities. For both volumes, we asked our contributors - accomplished professors who recognize teaching as an essential part of their role as scholars - to discuss critical reading and what it looks like in their discipline. We asked them to describe the goals of critical reading in their field, the questions it typically pursues, and the skills it requires. We asked them to demonstrate how it's done. More important, given our primary pedagogical aim, we asked these experienced educators to share with our readers the methods and materials they use to cultivate their students' critical reading skills. The following chapters thus present an array of classroom practices that our sixteen contributors use to critically engage students with a variety of texts, both written and visual, scholarly and popular, in the social and natural sciences.

We are grateful that they were up to this double challenge of not only defining and demonstrating critical reading in their disciplines, but also explaining how they teach it to their students. Teaching critical reading in higher education often involves confronting a pedagogical paradox: that being an expert on a topic can make teaching that topic more, rather than less, difficult. When we learn things well, when we master them, we internalize that knowledge, beginning with the fundamentals. This knowledge becomes ingrained and habitual, even unconscious. When speaking with other professionals in our field, we likely employ a conceptual shorthand without knowing it, packed with jargon we take for granted, with chains of thought we wouldn't think to spell out. To the uninitiated, it sounds like another language. Teaching what we know well thus requires an effort to explicate what's implicit, to unpack complex and multi-staged processes that to us may seem unitary and automatic.

This is what our contributors have attempted to do for their students through the activities and learning experiences described in their essays. Instead of one definitive theory or taxonomy of critical reading pedagogy, they offer a wide range of practices from which college instructors may draw, adapt, and extrapolate, whatever their discipline. Because our contributors work in a variety of institutional and programmatic contexts - at community colleges as well as research universities, in general education curricula as well as capstone research courses - this collection offers a broad perspective on critical reading pedagogy in American higher education.

Despite the differences in pedagogical approaches and practices, however, a number of common themes emerge.

Frameworks. All the essays offer frameworks for teaching and practicing critical reading based on the disciplinary questions prioritized by their authors, who recognize the work of critical reading as an iterative, ongoing process. Consequently, they have designed - and describe here - series of exercises that they implement across the semester. For them, critical reading is not a single skill to be dealt with once or twice, but, rather, a layered set of skills, each of which requires attention in the classroom and multiple opportunities for student practice. The framework that Michael Busch and Garri Rivkin offer for use in the political science classroom encapsulates many of those presented throughout the book. Busch and Rivkin identify three levels of critical reading and present sample exercises targeting each: text, context, and subjective response. Fittingly enough, these three levels correspond to three other major themes of the collection: argument, contexts and connections, and making it personal.

Argument. Unsurprisingly, a number of essays emphasize the ability to identify a text's argument. Noelle Liston in anthropology, for example, emphasizes the need for students to abstract conceptual arguments from what she calls their "content." Conceptualizing a particular argument can make it applicable and relevant to other contexts. An argument about the way the imagery of sperm and egg in medical textbooks perpetuates gender stereotypes, for instance, can suggest a broader argument about how scientific discourse can be shaped by - and perpetuate - social prejudices. Other contributors, such as Anna Shostya and Joseph Morreale in economics, ask students to identify the central questions addressed by texts and to consider the relevance of those questions to everyday life. And to help students extract such core information from scientific research papers, Andrea McKenzie and Eric Brenner (writing and biology) and Pascal Wallisch (psychology/neural science) offer strategies and sample exercises that clarify the different elements of academic science writing.

Contexts and Connections. In addition to a focus on the text itself, we find an even greater emphasis throughout the collection on understanding through contexts and connections between and across texts. Many contributors demonstrate how text and context are inextricably intertwined. Robert Lyon (business) and Jesse Goldstein (sociology), among others, guide students in situating difficult texts in particular areas of scholarly discourse, or within different "schools of thought." This benefits student writing as well as reading. When students understand their own research as contributing to an ongoing conversation among scholars, their work becomes more meaningful, and what's expected of them - in writing a paper, preparing a presentation, or developing another kind of project - is clarified. Goldstein, furthermore, requires his students to define their own areas of discourse, arguing that the literature review is never simply a survey of existing literature, but is instead an act of creative curation - a skill students need to develop as critical readers in the information age.

While Goldstein asks much of his students in terms of finding their own texts to connect with one another, other contributors scaffold this process. Michael Rodriguez (political science), as well as Shostya and Morreale, assigns strategic groupings of texts that invite and challenge students to make conceptual connections among them. Lindsay Anderberg, in guiding students through her institution's engineering archive, assigns bundles of materials (passports, catalogues, photos, patents) that only begin to make sense when looked at together, in multiple contexts.

Anderberg's work, along with that of Christopher Leslie (expository writing/science and technology studies), demonstrates the opportunity critical reading in the sciences provides for students to consider the material contexts of scientific discovery and innovation. Often undergraduates labor under the illusion that science and scientific writing are to be understood divorced from any context, be it historical, social, or institutional. To correct such misconceptions, examining artifacts and documents from the history of science, as well as reading critical studies of scientific developments, helps students understand how scientific work is actually accomplished. Students gain a fuller sense of their own potential to do science, and develop an informed perspective from which to critically analyze and assess its results, including its social impact.

The critical reading activities described by McKenzie and Brenner also disrupt a common misconception of scientific practice: that science is about finding answers, just as student lab work is all too often focused on recreating specific, pre-determined results. Instead, they want their students to read with an eye for the questions scientists ask and explore, as any result coming from the experimental process has the potential to inform. Reading scientific literature, including experimental reports, shows students how scientists pursue questions of relevance to their field, often by finding gaps in the existing research. It also gives students the opportunity to read critically and skeptically - in other words, like scientists - by evaluating whether interpretations of evidence actually fit the evidence they purport to describe, and considering what other questions, unrecognized by the experimenters themselves, an experiment might raise.

Making It Personal. Several of our contributors discuss how they engage students in critical reading by establishing the personal relevance of a text. Can a reading be situated within the immediate context of students' lives? What kinds of opportunities can students be given to practice connecting what they're reading to their everyday experience? To what extent do the concepts and theories they're reading about impact or illuminate their careers, their social interactions, or the natural world around them? Many of the essays here consider such questions of personal context. Deborah Gambs makes a case for using fiction in sociology courses, particularly narratives that describe situations and settings familiar to students, in order to engage them with sociological questions. (Corona, her primary example, is a novel centered on a character from a New York City neighborhood many of her students recognize.) Shostya and Morreale describe how they precede reading assignments in economics courses with questions that connect...