Public reading: Framing the text: understanding emotional barriers to academic reading
Kimblery and Thursby
This paper for more represents an contact with the literature on affect, sociology and reading. It looks at readers thoughts by talking to readers as first-year undergraduates, and presenting them with an academic text to interact with. I am going to summarize what I find interesting here.
Firstly is the relationship between the ability to read and equity is interesting. I tend to prefer “universal” solutions but that a universal solution might resolve a systemic problem is interesting. It is interesting that there is a literature on this topic.
The idea that there is a social and “identity” process that goes on while reading is interesting and that people have a “reader identity”. Also the fact that reading is a lonley and hidden activity. I personally find reading and writing is often a bit like “being with myself and my text whlie writing”. I find it sad that the educational system can result in reading feeling less worthwhile - in a way this is abstractly true, there is a process going on with the educatoin system that in theory makes you more powerful at the end of it.
Students find it difficult interacting with the structure of text - this is intersting. I’m not sure whether academic texts should be made more easy to read. The structure can serve a number of purposes - connecting to existing ideas, abstraction can provide a link between concepts, compression can be useful to people to people. At the same time… I don’t think it’s correct to view academic text as “intrinsically good” and tools to understand it might be useful, it often servers a purpose for experts but not for readers. In a sense when the essay then takes about the resilience to deal with complicated texts, I feel there might be some acaemic hypocricy there - the texts are not necessarily hard for experts who *may* have built up there expertise away from reading.
Overall, it’s interesting