4:07 it has the power to make the world a more reasonable place.

Five: explore other points of view.

you should consider, "What is shaping my approach to this situation?"

Facing a decision, ask yourself, "What concepts are at work?"

Two: gather your information.

One: formulate your question.

subjects all available options to scrutiny and skepticism.

and one particularly effective technique is critical thinking.

For example, which politician should I vote for?

such as fiction and even songs by your favorite popular artists

We also encourage you to find YouTube videos and other more visual ways of organizing any information you read

and continue on to see if the context of the rest of the article or chapter, or video, answers your questions.

A practical reading comprehension and annotation strategy that works well for many readers is to draw mind maps during or after reading.

The point is: not all reading is the same, and it is important to develop awareness of how to be flexible as a reader, recognizing the particular conventions of a ‘genre’ and discipline or subject, and adapting your reading strategies accordingly.

(I still have all of those books, some on shelves and others in boxes, and it is very rewarding to look back on who I was as a reader when I was an 18-year-old college student.)

your experiences, your memories, your knowledge from other literature, other courses, and other texts – are all very important to bring to your reading process.

to research topics you find important in your life or your view of society; to solve problems you see in a text or piece of literature that nobody else seems to notice.

Readers can create meaning in any number of ways as they read actively, from asking questions in the margins, to making connections with other texts and other authors. In other words, the reader is not a robot or a passive bystander in the rhetorical situation below, but an active meaning-maker in conversation with the author of the text.

Schema-building: What does “reading” mean to you? Who are you as a reader? How would you describe your reading process?

It is no surprise, then, that there are multiple ways of reading, and that reading and writing are connected.

One way to focus your active reading and annotation is to ask questions about what the writer is doing, in addition to what the writer is saying in various parts of the text.

Being able to recognize certain genres as a reader also involves recognizing the “moves” that writers typically make within those genres

When scanning, you want to look for particular ways that the author or publisher of a text made certain words or ideas stand out — whether they are bolded, underlined, or italicized; if there are Text Boxes that make the concept or idea stand apart from the rest of the text; and/or if there are images to add meaning to a certain concept, idea, or section of a text.

I use the heuristic of KWL+ to frame and structure an active pre-reading process that involves follow-up after reading as well – it encapsulates all stages of an active, critical reading process.

Habits of Mind for Success in Postsecondary Reading and Writing

Professors play a big part in your college experience and your academic journey. They are experts and researchers in their fields, but they are also your allies and supporters.

Before reading the narratives below, why do YOU think individual experience is important? How can we start to connect experiences in academic settings?

Every premise in this text up until now is based on the importance of one’s experience to who they are as a learner, reader, and writer.

I teach my students about the importance of having a flexible mindset in college is developing the courage to take risks, experiment, and truly grow as readers and writers.

“Literature is not my thing.”

What do you believe your learning style is? If you were to place yourself on the Zone of Appropriate Challenge and Growth, where has the majority of your education taken place as a learner?

where learning becomes overwhelming.

students end up in the center—“the Comfort Zone”—where they are not engaged, they are bored, and they become passively complacent about learning.

To counter this trend, particularly in Writing Studies but also across the educational spectrum, teachers are being forced to confront the reality of what Howard Gardner calls “multiple intelligences” in the classroom, expressed and practiced through what the New London Group of composition theorists calls “multiliteracies.” Building on Kohn’s assertion that students’ “purposes and interests” should inform the curriculum and classroom discussion, this textbook is also built on the premise that each reader has various skills, assets, and learning styles that may not have been rewarded or stimulated in various parts of your education. In addition to “linguistic intelligence,” Gardner also discussed “logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, and interpersonal intelligence,” among others. When we center our teaching and the learning process around students, we realize that we are all intelligent in all kinds of different ways, and that teaching through a multi- literacies approach honors the learning styles and strengths of everyone in the classroom.

and we are seeing more and more that the abilities that are valued by the dominant society often reward white privilege, households who spoke standard English, and other ways that testing not only undermines diversity in society, but also undermines the diversity of learning styles within various groups.

Everybody has the capacity to learn, and by internalizing a flexible “growth mindset” where learning happens through sustained, deliberate practice in collaboration with others, all readers and writers grow. This includes us, very much so, through the writing of this textbook!

To counter this trend where reading becomes a chore and learning becomes boring

the curriculum is framed around the students’ worlds, involves their real issues, desires, and needs, and the teacher can learn from the multiple literacies of the students’ worlds even as they teach them more traditional literacies in school.

In a short answer, because that’s how learning happens best. No matter what your instructor’s philosophy of teaching, if they are using this textbook you can probably assume they agree with us, Kohn and countless others who believe that learning happens constructively, or through a “constructivist approach,” that always has to involve students.

Kohn argues that questioning is how students learn best, and challenges the old school learning model, where “Students are expected to do whatever they’re told, to accommodate themselves to a curriculum that was created by adults who never met them” (3).

This is called constructivist learning, where the knowledge in the classroom is constructed from below (which requires that students are collaborating with teachers)—as opposed to knowledge or information delivered from the top (where teachers deliver a lecture).

There are dozens of theories about learning, and while we do borrow from Lev Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)”

In fact, one premise of this book is that all meaningful reading and writing is personally motivated in some way: motivated by your connections, motivated by your passions and interests as students.

The way we will frame the ensuing text about learning, reading, writing, research, and college life in general is through the metaphor and real experience of a journey. Like all trips, this book will have a beginning and an end, with a middle that will provide many insights and stories from our teaching that are hopefully memorable because they relate to your own experience. In fact, one premise of this book is that all meaningful reading and writing is personally motivated in some way: motivated by your connections, motivated by your passions and interests as students. And although your college journey will come to an end in four, five, or six years, we hope that the lessons, practices, and habits that you will learn and practice through this interactive textbook will transfer to many courses, and beyond to many life situations in your career and elsewhere.

ntroduce how this textbook and classroom activities will engage students in active learning as they read, to engage students with interactive experiences during the process of learning and reading.