Cover: Critical Reading Across the Curriculum by Anton Borst and Robert DiYanni

Critical Reading Across the Curriculum

Volume 2: Social and Natural Sciences

Edited by Anton Borst and Robert DiYanni








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Notes on Contributors

Lindsay Anderberg is the Interdisciplinary Science & Technology Librarian and Poly Archivist at New York University. She works in Bern Dibner Library at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where she manages the Poly Archives and integrates information literacy into the engineering curriculum through teaching with primary sources.

Eric Brenner is an associate professor in the biology department of Pace University, teaching courses in botany, genetics, and molecular cell biology. He has been on the faculty of New York University and The New York Botanical Garden. He conducts research on plant signaling in order to understand whole plant dynamics (movement). He also conducts research on plant evolution and strategies to inhibit invasive plants. Dr. Brenner enjoys creating novel teaching labs where students measure gene expression in plants, conduct genetic experiments in nematodes, and quantify movement in plants from time‐lapse movies using cellphone‐based software (see http://planttracer.com).

Anton Borst is an instructional consultant at Teaching and Learning with Technology at New York University. A specialist in writing across the curriculum and digital pedagogy, he previously worked in faculty development at Hunter College and Macaulay Honors College. He received his PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught literature and writing at Hunter College, Baruch College, and Pace University. With Robert DiYanni, he is co‐author of The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide (Princeton University Press) and co‐editor of Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, Volume 1: Humanities (Wiley Blackwell).

Michael Busch is associate director of the Office of Student Success at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York, where he also teaches in the departments of political science, international studies, and sociology.

Robert DiYanni is a professor of humanities at New York University and an instructional consultant in the NYU Center for the Advancement of Teaching. He has written extensively on the teaching of literature and writing, interdisciplinary humanities, and critical and creative thinking. Among his books are Connections, Literature, Modern American Poets, Arts and Culture, The Pearson Guide to Critical and Creative Thinking, and most recently, with Anton Borst, The Craft of College Teaching.

Gregory T. Donovan is an assistant professor of communication and media studies as well as affiliate faculty in the New Media and Digital Design Program and the Urban Law Center at Fordham University. He is also the co‐editor of Issue 5 of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: Media and Methods for Opening Education and an inaugural coordinator of Fordham’s Digital Scholarship Consortium. Donovan received his PhD in environmental psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Deborah Gambs, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her current research in visual sociology/sociology of art examines modern and contemporary sculpture by women artists, using psychoanalytic theory and feminist philosophy to understand conceptions of femininity and the relationship between inside and outside the body. She is co‐editor of Women on the Role of Public Higher Education: Personal Reflections from CUNY's Graduate Center (Palgrave 2015).

Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is an environmental sociologist and political economist. His recent book, Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism (MIT Press 2018), examines the limits of environmental politics predicated upon entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

Kiersten Greene is an associate professor of literacy education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at SUNY New Paltz. Her scholarship is rooted in making sense of the twenty‐first‐century classroom experience, and she recently received a 2017 ISTE Making IT Happen Award from the New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education. In her spare time, you’ll find her making stop‐action movies, knitting, and running after her four‐year‐old son. Find out more at kierstengreene.net.

Christopher Leslie is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China. A two‐time winner of a Fulbright fellowship, he has also taught at Hunter College, John Jay College, New York University, and Universität Potsdam. Dr. Leslie graduated from the City University of New York Graduate Center with a PhD in English. His research interests include the interactions among science, technology, and literature.

Noelle Molé Liston is a cultural anthropologist and senior lecturer in New York University’s Expository Writing Program. Her widely reviewed book, Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well‐being and the Workplace (Indiana University Press, 2011), received the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award in 2013. Her new book, The Disinformation Society: Post‐truth and Politics, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.

Robert Lyon has taught communication and critical thinking courses at New York University Stern School of Business since 2007. Prior to joining NYU Stern, Professor Lyon owned a marketing communications agency in Chicago and did communications consulting for corporate and institutional clients in New York City and Chicago. At NYU he focuses on teaching business students how to advance their analytical skills and communicate their ideas more effectively. Professor Lyon received his BA from Macalester College and his MFA from the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Andrea McKenzie is an associate professor with the writing department at York University, Toronto, Canada. Prior to that, she was director of writing in the disciplines at New York University, where she collaborated with professors in science and a diverse range of other subjects on improving writing through curriculum design and classroom outreach. She has published and presented in the fields of visual rhetoric, technical communications, First World War studies, and writing in the disciplines.

Joseph C. Morreale received his MA and PhD in economics from the University of Buffalo‐SUNY and MS HEd in administration and finance from the University of Albany‐SUNY. He is a full professor of economics at Pace University‐NYC, where he teaches various level courses, including a capstone research course for seniors. His major fields of study are public economic policy analysis, China’s economic studies, and higher education. He is the author and co‐author of many publications in his fields.

Garri Rivkin is director of academic support services in the Office of Student Success at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York, and founder of City Tutors, a leading provider of academic tutoring services in the City University of New York system.

Michael S. Rodriguez is associate professor of political science at Stockton University, where he teaches public policy and serves as the campus liaison for the institution’s Washington Internship Program. He is author of “Race and the Quest for US Citizenship: Birthright Restrictionism and American Constitutionalism,” a chapter in the book Race in America: How a Pseudoscientific Concept Shaped Human Interaction (ABC‐CLIO).

Anna Shostya received her PhD in economics from New School University and MA in economics from City University of New York. She is an assistant professor of economics at Pace University‐NYC, where she teaches introductory and intermediate level economic courses. For ten years she also was a visiting lecturer at University of Shanghai for Science and Technology in China. Her major fields of study are transition economies, financial markets, and higher education pedagogy.

Pascal Wallisch serves as clinical assistant professor at New York University. He received his PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago. His main research interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and data science. He co‐founded the Neural Data Science summer course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and has written several books on the analysis of data for neuroscience purposes. He is passionate about effective teaching and has been recognized for his efforts by teaching prizes at both the University of Chicago and New York University.

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 the readings to common student experience (e.g. “What is a bank?”). In biology and other natural sciences, McKenzie and Brenner provide exercises that help their students identify the human relevance of seemingly abstract experimental work in scientific research papers (as it applies to particular medical treatments, for example).

Other contributors describe powerful avenues to personal relevance through service learning and social justice. For Rodriguez, making global awareness a goal of critical reading provides students with a necessary twenty‐first‐century competency, while also pursuing the higher aim of fostering global citizenship. Kiersten Greene, who teaches literacy education, asks her students to critically evaluate teaching materials through a social justice lens. And Gregory Donovan (communication and media studies) has his students work with community stakeholders to design and facilitate technology‐focused community development programs, as they critically “read” other, municipally‐directed, smart urban design initiatives.

Positionality. One theme that emerged among the social scientists was positionality: an awareness of the effect of our position – in terms of history or society or geography – on our interpretation of a text, and an appreciation for the difference in point of view between ourselves and the authors we read that such positioning may entail. For Liston and Rodriguez, for example, critical reading thus involves positioning oneself, as much as possible, in the subjective experience of the author or intended audience of a text, be that text a critical analysis, a political argument, a Balinese cockfight, or, in Liston’s own example, a stiletto boot. Both Liston and Rodriguez offer exercises to activate students’ empathic imaginations, not to enforce blind agreement with particular texts, but in order to engage students in deep understanding before they launch into judgment.

Donovan and Greene emphasize a different aspect of positionality: its limits. What does our background, our culture, our technological hubris, allow us to miss or take for granted? The service‐learning component of Donovan’s course on smart urban design requires students to develop relationships with community members to learn their needs before unilaterally implementing service projects. Greene, as a teacher of teachers, has her students critically read their own teaching practices, including the books typically incorporated into literacy curricula, which often quietly smuggle racial bias into the classroom. For both Greene and Donovan, the task of critical reading and thinking extends beyond the texts being read to investigating the positions of authority assumed by instructor, observer, and community developer.

Relevance. As may be apparent from the forgoing, one overarching theme to emerge from this exploration of teaching critical reading is relevance: critical engagement depends on students recognizing why a text matters (assuming it does), and how it connects to the work of other scholars, to the world, and to their personal lives. But teaching critical reading does not mean doing that work for students, and it does not mean expecting them to be able to do it on their own simply by telling them to do so. It requires mediating the space between dependent and independent learner, through strategically scaffolded exercises and instruction, so that students ultimately are able not only to distinguish valid arguments from false ones, scholarly work from opinion, but also to hold even well‐established perspectives and theories up to critical scrutiny. That is the goal of the contributors in this volume, who share in these pages the tools they have developed to foster critical reading in the college and university classroom. We hope you find the practices they share as adaptable, instructive, and inspiring for your teaching as we have for ours.

Anton Borst
Robert DiYanni

Acknowledgments

Many people were involved in the making of this book. We would like to thank, first and foremost, each of our contributors for their willingness to share their classroom expertise, and for all the hard work they devoted to crafting the fine essays collected here. We believe they have performed a valuable service for the college‐teaching community by participating in a much‐needed conversation on teaching critical reading across the curriculum.

We are deeply grateful as well to Todd Green, Shyamala Venkateswaran, and Ajith Kumar at Wiley for their skill, professionalism, and care in managing the production process. Others at Wiley who provided generous support were Janani Govindankutty, Haze Humbert, and Niranjana Vallavan. Many thanks also to copy‐editor Christine Ranft.

We remain grateful to our sponsoring editor Jayne Fargnoli, who provided essential guidance and encouragement at the outset of the project.