Kevin E. DePew
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
As instructors across the disciplines know, most incoming college students struggle to read academic texts. While there is an array of reasons that students might not be reading their assigned texts—from limited time to neurodivergent challenges to failure to see the assigned reading’s relevance—this series of activities is designed to familiarize students with the genres of academic articles and the process of reading rhetorically, or learning the text’s place within its conversation (e.g., author, institution, time of publication, the debates in the field, influencing ideologies). This series of activities can become a focused assignment that culminates in each student more extensively examining the scholarly discourse of their respective field of study (see final activity). Since this series of activities is designed to be completed over 10 class sessions, the entire series of activities might take three to eight weeks. While this can be a large portion of the semester/quarter, the series of activities is designed to deliberately slow down the process of teaching students how to read academic texts to help them develop confidence about achieved outcomes before moving on. If this series of activities does not meet a writing program’s or institution’s local student learning outcomes for writing, instructors are encouraged to supplement this reading instruction with writing instruction about students’ major disciplines or career goals. Using Christina Haas’ longitudinal case study of Eliza’s four-year literacy journey in “Learning to Read Biology: One Students Rhetorical Development in College” (1994) instructors can 1) use the content to highlight a single student’s experiences becoming enculturated through academic and disciplinary prose, and 2) use their students’ process of working to understand the text to illustrate Haas’ argument about the importance of learning to read rhetorically. Putting these goals together, I describe this series of activities as “a peek behind the wizard’s curtain” because it seeks to demystify the production of scholarship and how to access the knowledge within.