Three years into the current Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype cycle, catalyzed by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI continues to profoundly disrupt higher education. A recent survey of more than 300 university leaders affirms many of the concerns expressed in public discourse: the majority of students use generative AI while the majority of faculty do not; cheating has increased while AI detection tools remain unreliable; almost all institutions feel behind progress in some way. While we certainly share these concerns, we do remain relatively optimistic about one aspect of higher education: learning to write.
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can now produce polished, technically competent texts in seconds, challenging our traditional understanding of writing as a uniquely human process of creation, reflection, and learning. For many educators, this disruption raises questions about the role of writing in their disciplines. In our new book, How to Use Writing for Teaching and Learning, we argue that this disruption presents an opportunity rather than a threat. Notice from our book’s title that our focus is not necessarily on “how to teach writing.” For us, writing is not an end goal, which means our students do not necessarily learn to write for the sake of writing. Rather, we define writing as a method of inquiry that allows access to various discourse communities (e.g., an academic discipline), social worlds (e.g., the knowledge economy), and forms of knowledge (e.g., literature).
The true value of writing lies in the thinking it generates (pun intended)—prioritizing new information, triangulating it with other sources of information to uncover new insights, and analogizing the information to make sense of it from different perspectives. We call this process of prioritization, triangulation, and analogizing “concentric thinking,” as it involves making multiple layered connections, similar to how our brains develop schemas. We not only assign writing in order to teach our content, but students also use writing to explore connections between assigned texts, lived experiences, and other course content.
By reframing writing as a cognitive process rather than merely an outcome, AI’s existence compels us to integrate writing more intentionally into our courses, regardless of the discipline. Sure, AI might produce an A-quality essay in seconds, but we humans remain a curious species; writing, along with its equivalent reading, is the primary way we satisfy our information-seeking drive. AI not only presents a good excuse to use writing for teaching and learning, but it also demands it. After all, to use generative AI effectively, one must be able to clearly prompt the tool as well as critically read the output.
The other cause for hope is that we describe a pedagogical issue, something we can influence by the ways we design and teach courses. We have the agency and the ability to foster quality learning, especially in our current era. Below, we explore the three cognitive moves of concentric thinking—prioritization, translation, and analogy—and show how low stakes, informal writing assignments can leverage these moves to enhance teaching and learning in the AI era.
Concentric Thinking
At the core of our model are three interrelated cognitive moves that writing facilitates: prioritization, translation, and analogy. These moves align with the ways experts organize and apply knowledge in their fields.
Prioritize Information: Before students can write effectively, they must learn to identify and rank key ideas from their readings, lectures, or discussions. For instance, in a history course, an informal writing prompt might ask students to select the most significant event in a unit on the Civil Rights Movement and justify their choice. This exercise encourages students to engage critically with the material, distinguishing central ideas from supporting details.
Translate Understanding: Translation involves reframing complex concepts into accessible language. This step not only reinforces comprehension but also prepares students to communicate ideas effectively to diverse audiences. In a biology course, students might write a brief explanation of DNA replication as if they were explaining it to a high school student. By simplifying the concept, they deepen their own understanding.
Analogize Insights: Drawing connections between course material and real-world problems fosters higher-order thinking. For example, in a sociology course, students could write about how current debates on economic inequality mirror historical patterns of social stratification. Analogical thinking helps students see the broader relevance of their studies and prepares them to apply knowledge in new contexts.
These moves are recursive, building on one another as students progress from informal reflections to more formal assignments. By designing prompts that scaffold these moves, teachers can help students develop the habits of mind necessary for disciplinary expertise.
Low-Stakes Informal Writing in the Classoom
Informal writing assignments, also known as “writing-to-learn,” are versatile tools that can be adapted to any discipline. Here are a few examples of how concentric thinking can be fostered through writing tasks that focus more on learning than evaluation:
Pre-Class Reflections: Before class, students might write a short response prioritizing the most compelling argument from the assigned reading. These reflections can be used to structure class discussions, ensuring that students engage with the material in meaningful ways.
In-Class Exercises: During class, students could work in pairs to translate a challenging concept into simple terms, then share their explanations with the group. This collaborative exercise reinforces understanding while fostering communication skills.
Post-Class Applications: After a lecture, students might be tasked with writing a brief analogy connecting the day’s topic to a real-world issue. For example, in an environmental science course, students could relate concepts of ecosystem balance to urban planning challenges.
Such assignments require minimal grading and can be formatively assessed for students’ learning journeys. The focus remains on developing students’ critical thinking and cognitive flexibility rather than correctness or adherence to conventions.
Writing as a Lifelong Pathway Towards Expertise
In an era where AI-generated text can mimic expertise without truly embodying it, writing as concentric thinking offers an irreplaceable cognitive pathway for developing genuine mastery. Expertise, as cognitive science shows, is not about merely accumulating knowledge; it involves organizing and integrating information into deeply connected schemas that can be applied across contexts. Writing fosters this process by requiring students to prioritize significant ideas, translate complex concepts into accessible language, and analogize insights to new or interdisciplinary challenges.
The informal writing we assign act as low-stakes opportunities for students to engage in deliberate practice. These prompts scaffold the connections between prior knowledge and new content, providing essential practice in disciplinary thinking. Through iterative feedback—designed not only to identify gaps but to guide deeper reflection—students gradually shift from surface-level memorization to a nuanced understanding of course material. Formative feedback serves as a bridge, helping students navigate challenges and transform their understanding of difficult concepts.
Furthermore, the interplay between formative and summative assessments underscores the relevance of writing to developing expertise. When students revisit their informal writing during the organizational phase of a major assignment, they engage in an essential process of synthesizing their learning. By integrating informal writing with final assignments, teachers provide a cohesive learning arc that fosters not just task completion but a deep understanding of disciplinary methods and epistemologies.
AI may offer polished outputs, but it cannot replicate the intellectual journey students undertake as they engage with course content, assigned readings, and other learning experiences with writing as the vehicle. The metacognitive insights gained through concentric thinking—prioritizing, translating, and analogizing—equip students with a level of expertise that transcends what any AI can generate. These skills are not only critical for academic success but also for navigating the complex, information-saturated world beyond the classroom.
As educators, we hold the tools to design writing processes that cultivate authentic learning and expertise. By reframing writing as a dynamic scaffold for inquiry rather than a static product, we prepare our students to think critically, synthesize knowledge, and apply their learning in meaningful ways. In this, we not only preserve the value of writing in higher education but also ensure that our students emerge as confident, capably generative (pun once again intended) of new knowledge.
Suzanne Hudd is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology who also served as Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Quinnipiac University.
Robert A. Smart is a former Dean of Arts & Sciences at QU, Professor Emeritus of English, and resident of the great state of Maine.
Andrew W. Delohery is the associate vice president of retention and academic success at Quinnipiac University, where he has also teaches courses in First Year Writing and the First-Year Seminar.
JT Torres is the Director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington & Lee University.
College presidents showed tepid support for tenure with a little more than a third agreeing that the pros outweigh the cons, according to Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents, conducted with Hanover Research and released in full today.
That was just one of many findings across the annual survey, now in its 15th year.
Presidents were optimistic in some areas, with most expressing confidence that their institutions will be financially stable over the next five to 10 years and positivity about the job itself. But campus leaders also expressed concerns about politicians trying to shape institutional strategies, which they see as an increasing risk, plus a seeming lack of improvement on undergraduate mental health, even as campuses make more investments in related services.
Inside Higher Ed earlier this month released a portion of the survey findings that unpacked how presidents viewed the second Trump administration. The bulk of the survey’s political findings were covered in that initial release, with college presidents largely worried President Donald Trump will negatively affect higher education in this new term.
This year’s survey included responses from 298 respondents across two- and four-year institutions, including public, private nonprofit and a small number of private for-profit colleges.
More on the Survey
Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Presidents was conducted with Hanover Research starting in December and running through Jan. 3. The survey included 298 presidents of two- and four-year institutions, public and private, for a margin of error of 5 percent. Download a copy of the free report here.
On Wednesday, March 26, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a webcast with campus leaders who will share their takes on the findings. Register for that discussion here.
Faculty Tenure
Tenure is often championed by professors and presidents alike for the protections it provides when it comes to issues of academic freedom. But just over a third of college presidents surveyed here—37 percent—indicated that the pros of tenure outweigh the cons.
By institution type, presidents at public doctoral universities were most likely to support tenure, with 82 percent agreeing that the pros outweigh the cons.
The overall finding came as a surprise to some observers, especially as politicians in some states are increasingly taking aim at tenure.
Anne Harris, president of Grinnell College in Iowa, said she was surprised that presidential support was so low, adding that tenure plays an important role at liberal arts colleges, such as the one she leads.
“For the small liberal arts college model, tenure is the continuity of mentorship, of advising, of those long-term relationships that we rely on … to see students through, to high graduation rates, to all those things,” she said. “From my perspective, the pros are very, very salient for what tenure does, not just for academic freedom and for the pursuit of research, but also for what it does for the continuity of advising and mentoring for students.”
Michael Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University (and no relation to the Grinnell College president), noted tenure can “be a thorn in the side of presidents and provosts” but that it can also serve as a buffer to political attacks on academic freedom.
“It’s disappointing to me that presidents don’t have a better opinion of tenure, particularly in this current moment. I understand the challenges that tenure causes, and how it might limit the institution financially, or in decision-making—well-known areas where tenure can slow things down. But at this moment it’s just disappointing to me that there wasn’t more belief in tenure,” Harris said.
Yet he believes that even the presidents who don’t like tenure will continue to protect it.
“Presidents understand—even if tenure is a pain for them to deal with—the damage it would do to them in recruiting faculty [to lose tenure]. So there’s a self-interested argument on keeping tenure, even if they personally would like for the whole industry to get rid of it.”
Campus Speech
After pro-Palestinian student protests broke out on campuses nationwide over the bloodshed in the war between Israel and Hamas, many institutions changed their campus speech policies. Almost half of presidents surveyed—45 percent—noted that their institution updated its speech policies within the last 18 months, with public institution leaders most likely to say so.
Additionally, almost a third of survey respondents (29 percent) indicated that their campus has an institutional neutrality policy, according to which college leaders should not comment on social or political matters that do not directly threaten the core mission. Such policies saw an uptick amid the fallout of the recent protests, which many congressional Republicans cast as antisemitic.
Few respondents whose institution does not already have an institutional neutrality policy said it’s likely to adopt one.
Despite recent student protests, presidents overwhelmingly blamed politicians for escalating tensions over campus speech concerns, versus other groups: Some 70 percent said politicians were primarily at fault, while just 18 percent blamed students.
Presidents speaking on a panel about the survey findings at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in Washington on Feb. 12 suggested campus speech concerns are overblown.
“One incident goes viral, it gets all sorts of publicity,” Jon Alger, president of American University, said, while arguing that “99 percent of campus conversations” typically go well.
Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York, also speaking at ACE, said that social media often inflates speech issues with incomplete narratives for the sake of virality. He added that outside actors also weaponize such tensions to further their own political agendas.
In a separate December survey of two- and four-year students by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab, nearly all respondents supported institutional efforts to promote civil dialogue, and 40 percent were at least somewhat concerned about the climate for civil dialogue and student free expression at their institution.
Economic Confidence
Presidents surveyed expressed strong financial confidence, despite difficult headwinds for the industry in recent years, which have seemingly been exacerbated by Trump’s recent executive actions threatening funding, prompting hiring freezes and more.
Among respondents, 87 percent signaled that they expect their institution to be financially stable over the next five years, and 83 percent said the same over a 10-year timeline. But nearly half of presidents, 49 percent, believe their institution has too many academic programs and needs to close some. Some 19 percent responded that they had serious merger or acquisition talks recently, about the same as last year’s survey.
This year, most of the presidents weighing mergers cited a desire to ensure their institution’s financial stability and sustainability, rather than risk of closure.
Nine percent of all presidents said it’s somewhat or very likely that their institution will merge into or be acquired by another college within the next five years, with presidents of private nonprofit baccalaureate institutions especially likely to say so (21 percent).
Presidents also saw risks beyond the business side. More than half—60 percent—believe politicians’ efforts to influence strategy are an increasing risk to their institution.
However, some presidents at public institutions see that tension as inherent to the sector.
“I think we’re a little bit naïve if we expect to be totally independent from the voices of our elected officials in helping to set the direction they think is important for the public investment that is being made in our institutions,” said Brad Mortensen, president of Weber State University in Utah.
Presidents of public and private nonprofit institutions expressed similar levels of concern on this point.
Being a President
Most presidents like the job, even if they question how their time is spent. The overwhelming majority of respondents—89 percent—agreed, at least somewhat, that they enjoy being a college president.
Additionally, 88 percent of respondents said that their own governing boards were supportive.
However, more than half—56 percent—question whether the presidency can be capably handled by one person. Presidents also indicated they would prefer to focus on strategic planning, fundraising and community engagement but often find other pressing demands, such as dealing with personnel issues and managing institutional finances, eating into their time.
A quarter of respondents said that the hardest part of the job was navigating financial constraints. Other areas of difficulty that emerged in the survey include too many responsibilities with too little time to do the job, enrollment challenges and external political pressures.
Asked how long they expected to be in their job, a plurality (47 percent) answered five years.
Harris, the SMU professor, is skeptical that most presidents will last that long. He said the finding that nearly half of presidents expected to be in their jobs over the next five years prompted him to “laugh out loud,” and he noted that data from ACE’s latest American College President Survey showed the tenure for college leaders has fallen to just over five years.
“Either a whole bunch of first-year presidents filled out the survey and they’re going to stay another five years, or somebody is missing the boat on how long they’re actually going to serve,” he said. For reference, the plurality of survey respondents, 33 percent, have served as president of their current institution for five to 10 years. The rest were roughly split between less than three years, three to approaching five years and 10 or more years served.
Last year saw numerous high-profile presidents abruptly resign, including from the nation’s wealthiest institutions—some of whom had only been in the job for a matter of months.
Student Mental Health
College presidents also expressed confidence about their institution’s approach to student mental health.
The overwhelming majority reported that their institution has done a good or excellent job of promoting student health and wellness across multiple areas. On mental health, in particular, 81 percent said this. And 69 percent said that their institution has been effective in addressing the student mental health crisis, though only 37 percent felt the same was true of the sector as a whole.
Despite the confidence in their institution’s efforts, only 44 percent of presidents somewhat or strongly agreed that undergraduate mental health is improving on their campus. Just 23 percent said the same of undergraduate mental health across higher education.
Harris, the Grinnell College president, suggested that finding may not be cause for alarm but rather for deliberation. She noted that “more students accessing mental health resources, to me, is not necessarily a sign of a mental health crisis, it’s a sign of mental health self-advocacy.” Still, she said that colleges still need to develop a better understanding of student mental health issues.
Other Findings
Artificial intelligence is another category that prompted mixed feelings.
About half of respondents—51 percent—believe their institution is responding adeptly and appropriately to the rise of AI, but only 29 percent said the same was true across the sector.
About the same share over all (52 percent) said their institution had established a campuswide AI task force or strategy.
Survey respondents noted that the most common uses for AI for their institutions included virtual chat assistants and chat bots, research and data analysis, predictive analytics to identify student performance and trends, learning management systems, and use in admissions processes.
A third of presidents (32 percent) said their institution has set specific climate-related or environmental sustainability goals. Institutions in the Northeast and West appeared to lead here and on other sustainability-related questions, by region.
The survey period ended Jan. 3, ahead of Trump taking office for a second term and ahead of his administration issuing a Dear Colleague letter attempting to dramatically widen the scope of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
At the time of the survey, nearly all presidents (88 percent) said their institution had been able to maintain or increase previous levels of student diversity since that Supreme Court decision. Looking only at presidents whose institutions previously practiced affirmative action (n=22), closer to half said they’d been able to maintain or increase previous levels of diversity.
Separately, 10 percent of all presidents said their institution had curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts beyond admissions since the decision, with presidents in the South and Midwest likeliest to say this, by region.
Groups such as ACE have cautioned against anticipatory compliance to the Education Department’s Dear Colleague letter, which does not have the force and effect of law. Other legal experts note that the letter is not subject to the current preliminary injunction against parts of two White House executive orders that also seek to limit diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
I had the pleasure recently to participate in a lifelong learning session with a group of mostly current or retired educators at my nearby Lincoln Land Community College. The topic was AI in education. It became clear to me that many in our field are challenged to keep up with the rapidly emerging developments in AI.
The audience was eager to learn, however, many were unaware of the current models and capabilities of AI available to them. I had mentioned in the previous edition of “Online: Trending Now” that we are now in the third of a five-step development of AI as envisioned by the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman:
Level 1: Chat bots, AI with conversational language
Level 2: Reasoners, human-level problem solving
Level 3: Agents, systems that can take actions
Level 4: Innovators, AI that can aid in invention
Level 5: Organizations, AI that can do the work of an organization
Most Popular
Level 1, chat bots, are the question (prompt) and answer version that many users still think of as generative AI. Famously, on Nov. 30, 2022, OpenAI released GPT-3.5 featuring ChatGPT, an interactive, conversational AI trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and fine-tuned safety measures, derived from the GPT-3.5 model. That became the inflection point for this technology that has rapidly spread around the world:
“ChatGPT stands out as the undisputed leader of this boom, capturing over 82.5% of the total traffic, with over two billion global visits and 500 million users each month. The pace of adoption is particularly noteworthy. ChatGPT set a record as the fastest-growing consumer software in history, reaching 100 million users just 64 days after the release of the updated ChatGPT3.5 in May 2023. It’s not alone in this surge; Baidu’s AI chatbot, ‘Ernie Bot,’ surpassed 200 million users within just eight months of its launch.”
Yet, this technology has, importantly, developed beyond earlier versions to stage 2, which Sam Altman called “reasoners,” such as the more recently released OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o3-mini. Every version of GPT engages in some form of text-based pattern recognition that can look like reasoning. The newer versions exhibit markedly stronger logical consistency, better multistep problem-solving and better handling of extended context. This is why Altman calls the latest iterations “reasoner” models: They integrate more advanced techniques, larger context windows and improved training methods to produce answers that seem more logically sound. Ultimately, these “reasoner” capabilities reflect the evolution of large language models toward more complex forms of textual analysis and response.
The newer model OpenAI o3-mini is available to all users (paid and unpaid). I encourage you test out this reasoner model. You are welcome to use the GPT I trained for higher education emphasis, Ray’s eduAI Advisor, or the general ChatGPT site. In either case, try running a deep, questioning prompt that requires interpretation and significant research in its response. You will be able to briefly view the thought process that o3 is taking flash onto the top of your screen. The model shares this thought process with you as it assesses your question and context, then gathers data and ultimately responds to your question. What is unique about this level of AI is that you can see how the application is thinking about your inquiry. This will give you hints as to how you might craft follow-up prompts to add insights and perspectives to your inquiry.
On Feb. 2, 2025, OpenAI announced a highly advanced application built upon 03-mini named “Deep Research,” saying:
“Today we are launching our next agent capable of doing work for you independently—deep research. Give it a prompt and ChatGPT will find, analyze & synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report in tens of minutes vs what would take a human many hours … Powered by a version of OpenAI o3 optimized for web browsing and python analysis, deep research uses reasoning to intelligently and extensively browse text, images, and PDFs across the internet. Deep Research is built for people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy & engineering and need thorough & reliable research.”
While Deep Research is not available to the general public at this time, online demonstrations show that this very powerful tool conducts both reasoning and far-reaching analysis. In her podcast of Feb. 9, AI expert Julia McCoy reports that the release of Deep Research puts us on the cusp of artificial general intelligence (summarized by Gemini 2.0 Flash):
“The podcast talks about OpenAI’s new deep learning models, 03 mini and Deep Research. 03 mini is a groundbreaking reasoning Powerhouse that fundamentally changes how AI approaches problems. Unlike previous models, 03 mini actually thinks before it speaks, methodically working through complex tasks with unprecedented precision. Deep Research is an autonomous research assistant that can spend up to 30 minutes deeply analyzing information, something previously unheard of in AI systems. What makes Deep Research truly special is its ability to dynamically adapt its research path, combining multiple sources and presenting its findings in fully cited comprehensive reports in seconds. The podcast discusses how Deep Research can be used to provide medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations. It can also be used for other knowledge work, such as market research and product development. The podcast concludes by discussing the implications of these new models for the future of AI. The host believes that we will see AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] this year and ASI [Artificial Super Intelligence] possibly as soon as 2027.”
“We will next ship GPT-4.5, the model we called Orion internally, as our last non-chain-of-thought model. After that, a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks. In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3. We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model. The free tier of ChatGPT will get unlimited chat access to GPT-5 at the standard intelligence setting (!!), subject to abuse thresholds. Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence. These models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more.”
The funneling of all of the capabilities of OpenAI technologies into the GPT-5 track shows a maturing of the technology. The three levels of intelligence most likely point to true AGI in the higher levels that will be released with GPT-5 later this year! Clearly, advancements are taking place very rapidly.
In addition, with the advent of new competitors both here and abroad, we are seeing new options for open-source models and alternative approaches. As these become more efficient and reliable, prices are headed lower while features continue to expand. McCoy’s vision of AGI seems only months, not years, away.
How are these highly advanced tools being used by your university to enhance teaching, learning, research and other mission-centric tasks? Are most of your faculty, staff and administrators well versed on the recent developments and potential of AI? Are they prepared for the full release of GPT-5? What can you do to help your institution remain efficient, effective and competitive?
As more and more students travel from their home to study, grappling with all the challenges of supporting commuter students has become the norm for the sector.
How do we create a sense of belonging for these students, how do we make their time on campus as positive as possible and how do we increase attendance and then keep them on campus? It’s often approached as a problem to fix.
And at the University of Worcester we did just this. And we’ve had some great solutions – providing fridges and microwaves, so commuters could bring and store food. Students services have run “fancy a cuppa” sessions throughout the week so that students have space to gather at no cost and many academic teams are developing flexible approaches to delivery that recognise the challenges of travel.
But behind the scenes colleagues were starting to recognise that the reasons for commuting and the challenges this created were complex, multi-faceted and far reaching.
Commuting students are now the majority of our students and this impacts on the experience for all students – getting it right for commuting students means getting it right for all students.
We need to shift our thinking from commuters as a problem to solve to instead how can the university change and adapt across the institution to meet the evolving needs of our students.
We needed to listen
We needed to understand the why, the how and the impact of daily travel to university. And to do this we needed to raise the profile of these students with those tasked with decision making across the university.
We launched “listening lunches” to combat survey fatigue and facilitate comfortable spaces in the middle of the day where students could drop in on their own terms, have a free lunch and share anything that was on their minds.
Travelling to campus daily involved managing caring responsibilities, school runs, late or cancelled trains and the impact of travel disruption caused by flooding and road closures. When students were unable to attend it meant disrupted classes, low attendance and made it harder for students to maintain group assignments.
It wasn’t all negative. Students shared examples of thoughtful and reactive responses from staff who were aware of these challenges and were adapting their practice accordingly. Crucially, this wasn’t formalised or widely applied.
Where staff were finding ways to support students’ engagement and students had the opportunity to talk to staff about their experience and seeing things being done as a result, this improved how students felt about the university.
Examples where students felt heard, and where their engagement was not measured in attendance but in participation, were particularly positive.
Making a case for change.
While we had anecdotal evidence from multiple sources, it wasn’t being captured in our formal feedback mechanisms, and therefore wasn’t being centred in discussions.
As part of our sustainability initiatives, we have run a student travel survey for a number of years – surveys were widely seen as important in shaping students’ experience – this was an opportunity to formally gather the feedback we had had anecdotally.
The surveys were adapted to incorporate questions relating to “commuting students” and we asked students what measures could be put in place to support their participation. Unsurprisingly a lot of the feedback was around the cost of travel, including the cost and availability of car parking and the impact of poor public transport.
Our second round of listening lunches took the feedback from this survey back to the students as a series of discussion prompts. A complex picture started to emerge that touched on areas such as sustainability, widening participation, retention, campus experience, learning and teaching and support services.
These are not necessarily areas that have always had a central focus on commuters.
We need to talk about commuter students on a much broader scale across institutions.
To do this, we’re sharing our understanding across the university, via formal committees and working groups as well as building a diverse network of colleagues who can centre the needs of commuter students in any and all conversations about the student experience.
For example, colleagues who are now members of the transport and travel group have been able to support campus-based students needing to travel to placement with timely and affordable university managed transport.
Building an institutional agenda
In order to adequately support commuter students, support can’t be centred in one department. Here’s some ways to think about commuter students across an institution.
Find ways to first centre the student voice in building your understanding of how students participate and engage when living off campus. Then consider ways to broaden the conversation to include colleagues from less obvious areas of the university such as sustainability, EDI, retention and outcomes, resources and facilities as well as continuing to include colleagues from student services and academic schools.
Reframe the way you consider engagement to go beyond attendance and towards participation and consider that there are more students impacted by commuting than you may first think.
Don’t view commuters as the problem, but instead a valued and core part of your student community. Making sure your university works for commuters means that it also works for all students.
Long breaks between lectures on campus are common and when it comes to downtime between lectures, a study or hospitality space isn’t always sufficient. Meaningful things to do on campus makes commuters feel part of a community. At Worcester we’ve co-created the “You Matter” programme to facilitate this with drop-in creative focused activities during the day.
Finally commuter students’ lives are busy and complex. They place a great deal of importance on how close the university is to their home, i.e. relocating is not a priority or an option due to complex responsibilities. The cost and availability of transport options have a significant impact on students’ ability to attend and students are often juggling family, part-time work and study in an increasingly challenging financial climate.
The more institutions begin by understanding this, the better. Only then can you build an agenda across an institution to recognise, value and support commuters.
This blog is part of our series on commuter students, click here to read more.
There is a multi-directional relationship between research culture and research assessment.
Poor research assessment can lead to poor research cultures. The Wellcome Trust survey in 2020 made this very clear.
Assessing the wrong things (such as a narrow focus on publication indicators), or the right things in the wrong way (such as societal impact rankings based on bibliometrics) is having a catalogue of negative effects on the scholarly enterprise.
Assessing the assessment
In a similar way, too much research assessment can also lead to poor research cultures. Researchers are one of the most heavily assessed professions in the world. They are assessed for promotion, recruitment, probation, appraisal, tenure, grant proposals, fellowships, and output peer review. Their lives and work are constantly under scrutiny, creating competitive and high-stress environments.
But there is also a logic (Campbell’s Law) that tells us that if we assess research culture it can lead to greater investment into improving it. And it is this logic that the UK Joint HE funding bodies have drawn on in their drive to increase the weighting given to the assessment of People, Culture & Environment in REF 2029. This makes perfect sense: given the evidence that positive and healthy research cultures are a thriving element of Research Excellence, it would be remiss of any Research Excellence Framework not to attempt to assess, and therefore incentivise them.
The challenge we have comes back to my first two points. Even assessing the right things, but in the wrong way, can be counterproductive, as may increasing the volume of assessment. Given research culture is such a multi-faceted concept, the worry is that the assessment job will become so huge that it quickly becomes burdensome, thus having a negative impact on those research cultures we want to improve.
It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it
Just as research culture is not so much about the research that you do but the way that you do it, so research culture assessment should concern itself not so much with the outcomes of that assessment but with the way the assessment takes place.
This is really important to get right.
I’ve argued before that research culture is a hygiene factor. Most dimensions of culture relate to standards that it’s critically important we all get right: enabling open research, dealing with misconduct, building community, supporting collaboration, and giving researchers the time to actually do research. These aren’t things for which we should offer gold stars but basic thresholds we all should meet. And to my mind they should be assessed as such.
Indeed this is exactly how the REF assessed open research in 2021 (and will do so again in 2029). They set an expectation that 95 per cent of qualifying outputs should be open access, and if you failed to hit the threshold, excess closed outputs were simply unclassified. End of. There were no GPAs for open access.
In the tender for the PCE indicator project, the nature of research culture as a hygiene factor was recognised by proposing “barrier to entry” measures. The expectation seemed to be that for some research culture elements institutions would be expected to meet a certain threshold, and if they failed they would be ineligible to even submit to REF.
Better use of codes of practice
This proposal did not make it into the current PCE assessment pilot. However, the REF already has a “barrier to entry” mechanism, of course, which is the completion of an acceptable REF Code of Practice (CoP).
An institution’s REF CoP is about how they propose to deliver their REF, not how they deliver their research (although there are obvious crossovers). And REF have distinguished between the two in their latest CoP Policy module governing the writing of these codes.
But given that REF Codes of Practice are now supposed to be ongoing, living documents, I don’t see why they shouldn’t take the form of more research-focussed (rather than REF-focussed) codes. It certainly wouldn’t harm research culture if all research performing organisations had a thorough research code of practice (most do of course) and one that covers a uniform range of topics that we all agree are critical to good research culture. This could be a step beyond the current Terms & Conditions associated with QR funding in England. And it would be a means of incentivising positive research cultures without ‘grading’ them. With your REF CoP, it’s pass or fail. And if you don’t pass first time, you get another attempt.
Enhanced use of culture and environment data
The other way of assessing culture to incentivise behaviours without it leading to any particular rating or ranking is to simply start collecting & surfacing data on things we care about. For example, the requirement to share gender pay gap data and to report misconduct cases, has focussed institutional minds on those things without there being any associated assessment mechanism. If you check out the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data on proportion of male:female professors, in most UK institutions you can see the ratio heading in the right direction year on year. This is the power of sharing data, even when there’s no gold or glory on offer for doing so.
And of course, the REF already has a mechanism to share data to inform, but not directly make an assessment, in the form of ’Environment Data’. In REF 2021, Section 4 of an institution’s submission was essentially completed for them by the REF team by extracting from the HESA data, the number of doctoral degrees awarded (4a) and the volume of research income (4b); and from the Research Councils, the volume of research income in kind (4c).
This data was provided to add context to environment assessments, but not to replace them. And it would seem entirely sensible to me that we identify a range of additional data – such as the gender & ethnicity of research-performing staff groups at various grades – to better contextualise the assessment of PCE, and to get matters other than the volume of research funding up the agendas of senior university committees.
Context-sensitive research culture assessment
That is not to say that Codes of Practice and data sharing should be the only means of incentivising research culture of course. Culture was a significant element of REF Environment statements in 2021, and we shouldn’t row back on it now. Indeed, given that healthy research cultures are an integral part of research excellence, it would be remiss not to allocate some credit to those who do this well.
Of course there are significant challenges to making such assessments robust and fair in the current climate. The first of these is the complex nature of research culture – and the fact that no framework is going to cover every aspect that might matter to individual institutions. Placing boundaries around what counts as research culture could mean institutions cease working on agendas that are important to them, because they ostensibly don’t matter to REF.
The second challenge is the severe and uncertain financial constraints currently faced by the majority of UK HEIs. Making the case for a happy and collaborative workforce when half are facing redundancy is a tough ask. A related issue here is the hugely varying levels of research (culture) capital across the sector as I’ve argued before. Those in receipt of a £1 million ‘Enhancing Research Culture’ fund from Research England, are likely to make a much better showing than those doing research culture on a shoe-string.
The third is that we are already half-way through this assessment period and we’re only expected to get the final guidance in 2026 – two years prior to submission. And given the financial challenges outlined above, this is going to make this new element of our submission especially difficult. It was partly for this reason that some early work to consider the assessment of research culture was clear that this should celebrate the ‘journey travelled’, rather than a ‘destination achieved’.
For this reason, to my mind, the only thing we can reasonably expect all HEIs to do right now with regards to research culture is to:
Identify the strengths and challenges inherent within your existing research culture;
Develop a strategy and action plan(s) by which to celebrate those strengths and address those challenges;
Agree a set of measures by which to monitor your progress against your research culture ambitions. These could be inspired by some of the suggestions resulting from the Vitae & Technopolis PCE workshops & Pilot exercise;
Describe your progress against those ambitions and measures. This could be demonstrated both qualitatively and quantitatively, through data and narratives.
Once again, there is an existing REF assessment mechanism open to us here, and that is the use of the case study. We assess research impact by effectively asking HEIs to tell us their best stories – I don’t see why we shouldn’t make the same ask of PCE, at least for this REF.
Stepping stone REF
The UK joint funding bodies have made a bold and sector-leading move to focus research performing organisations’ attention on the people and cultures that make for world-leading research endeavours through the mechanism of assessment. Given the challenges we face as a society, ensuring we attract, train, and retain high quality research talent is critical to our success. However, the assessment of research culture has the power both to make things better or worse: to incentivise positive research cultures or to increase burdensome and competitive cultures that don’t tackle all the issues that really matter to institutions.
To my mind, given the broad range of topics that are being worked on by institutions in the name of improving research culture, and where we are in the REF cycle, and the financial constraints facing the sector, we might benefit from a shift in the mechanisms proposed to assess research culture in 2029 and to see this as a stepping stone REF.
Making better use of existing mechanisms such as a Codes of Practice and Environment and Culture data would assess the “hygiene factor” elements of culture without unhelpfully associating any star ratings to them. Ratings should be better applied to the efforts taken by institutions to understand, plan, monitor, and demonstrate progress against their own, mission-driven research culture ambitions. This is where the real work is and where real differentiations between institutions can be made, when contextually assessed. Then, in 2036, when we can hope that the sector will be in a financially more stable place, and with ten years of research culture improvement time behind us, we can assess institutions against their own ambitions, as to whether they are starting to move the dial on this important work.
CORRIGAN: Is there anything else you’d like to share about reading, teaching, or Reading Wide Awake that I haven’t asked you?
SHANNON: I’ll start here. Reading Wide Awake examines reading as flexible practices of personal and social agency necessary for the continuous remaking of ourselves and democracy in and across changing times and contexts. By telling stories of my reading social objects (including printed texts) in everyday life, I invite readers to awaken to the ways these ‘texts’ work for and against their interests and the promises of democracy. By analyzing my reading experiences critically, I demonstrate how to take up these practices and why they are vital to acting in and on the world. I hope I wrote with some intelligence and humor.
This short book is organized according to paraphrased questions that people asked me across the first forty of my now fifty years as an educator: Why read? What is text? How do texts work? Where is meaning? Isn’t reading out of date? Can reading like this get me in trouble? Do regular people read like this? Fifteen years prior to this book, I offered a different structure in text, lies & videotape, a book about whose stories get told in and out of school. That text began with a reading of my junior high principal enforcing “school integrity” with a ping pong ball down my pant leg and a wooden paddle on my backside. My (our) reading practices are always in-the-making, and I’m only five years away from the next installment!
CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you seem to use the words “read” and “reading” loosely and expansively—to mean not just looking at written texts but more broadly seeing, recognizing, understanding, or thinking about the world. I’m wondering, how do you define “reading” and why use the word “reading” instead of something broader like “thinking”?
SHANNON: Originally, my choice of the term reading was purely tactical. If seeing, recognizing, understanding, thinking, assessing, and acting in and about the world through the production of social things can be separated from the term reading, then they can be excluded from school curricula. If they are inseparable moments of reading, then they remain basic skills (See Herb Kohl’s pre-TikTok Basic Skills – 1982). My route to this realization maps my development as a critically pragmatic reader with a sociological imagination. That is, the choice stemmed from reading personal experiences (my problem?) and eventually recognizing that they are actually social issues produced and maintained through the texts of powerful discourses in and out of schools (K-20).
By the early 1970s when I was a history graduate student, Americans had been lied to about the Bay of Pigs, Tet Offensive, and bombing of Cambodia; two Kennedys, Malcolm X, Salvador Allende, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King assassinations; the “collapse” of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers; and the Angela Davis and the Chicago 7 trials. Official and mainstream representations of these events across time and media led to Richard Nixon being elected and re-elected with an agenda to win the cold war militarily and to bring law and order back to American streets. I lost faith in the path I had chosen at the end of college to become a historian of societal outsiders, which I believed would help more people to develop their “sociological imaginations” (C. Wright Mills), overcoming the “repressive tolerance of a one-dimensional society” (Herbert Marcuse), and thus, freeing their minds to rationally pursue the truth (J. S. Mill). Although certainly necessary, more historically accurate information (reconstructed history books) about the neglected in society no longer seemed adequate. Rather I thought what would be vital, but lacking, was the habitual practice of accessing, interpreting, assessing, and acting upon daily information, artifacts, and events to secure the original promises of liberal democracy. To me, that practice was the act of reading which could be extended and spread through public schooling. I joined the Teacher Corp and set my sights on the first R.
Despite the economic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity among the families of my first class of kindergarten students, the school district supplied me with the DISTAR Language and Reading program and required me to “teach reading” by following the scripts in its teacher’s manual for a specified amount of time daily. The authors of DISTAR assumed that my students had little or no prior experience with reading, phonological or syntactic command of English, or interest in learning to read or in the world around them. They argued their approach was scientifically based. Lessons consisted of small groups articulating phonemes in unison with me. When those articulations were “mastered”, I was to point to manipulated letter symbols arranged randomly on a page in the teacher’s manual and groups were to produce the corresponding sounds (pretending that English has one-to-one letter to sound correspondence). When mastered, I was to point to a symbol to elicit the assigned sound from all, and then, run my finger to another symbol to “make a syllable or blend” as students slurred the first with second phoneme. Eventually, we all graduated to words, phrases, short sentences, and sentence strings (called stories).
All materials were black print on off white newsprint with no illustrations. To ensure that parents participated in these reading instructions, students were to bring home half-sheet “student copies” of the stories to demonstrate their mastery of reading. Standardization through teacher and student fidelity to the program assumptions and scripts were presented as the keys to success in reading, in school, and in life. There were no expected discussions of the meaning of the program’s texts or the practices encouraged in or outside of the classroom. When the students finished the last DISTAR lessons, they and I began the daily lessons supplied in commercially prepared reading materials, (called basals), following more loosely scripted lessons as we worked our way through anthologies, workbooks, worksheets, and criterion reference tests across grades 1 through 6. This defined learning “to read at school.”
Because the remainder of the kindergarten curriculum was not prescribed except by name of subjects, the students and I had time to discuss their lives outside of school, their interests, habits, family traditions, ideas about how the world works, media use (TV and radio)….Later, I came to recognize these discussions as examples of what William James meant by “pluralism:” there will always be different perspectives and interpretations of any idea, event or artifact – all work in some situations and none are superior in all. We used these talks and their surroundings to read their worlds to consider how people use symbols to make meaning and get things done. While emphasizing the “why” of reading, we engaged in the “how”, attending to salient features (color, size, position) in images and things and studying phonics by recognizing and using Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Key Words techniques (Zoo), examples from Septima Clark’s and Beatrice Robinson’s Freedom Schools (“What’s a good a word? Amendment”), local store signs (Red and White), and learning to recognize everyone’s printed name (from Abby to Zimbalist) posted on their cubbies and supply boxes. To varying degrees, all participated in what Allan Luke and Peter Freebody would later call the four-resource model of reading – code cracking, meaning making, determine use and effects of genre, and social analyses – without any of us knowing these labels.
I found willing confederates among the music, art, and gym teachers to help us study how sounds, images, and bodies can be used symbolically to represent our intentions to mean. We called this “reading”, and because I lived in the neighborhood and looped with many of these students through the primary grades (K-3), I had time to demonstrate how this reading blended with their family members’ reading outside of school. By our third year together, we had convinced our building administrator that DISTAR was not appropriate for our community; unfortunately, my fellow teachers chose to replace DISTAR with a single K-6 set of commercial reading materials (with significant amounts of promised free components and staff development promised by their publishers) for reading instruction at our school. That “other stuff” that we employed daily as reading, while not necessarily harmful, was considered “beside the point”. Those practices, you see, were not essentials in an elementary school curriculum…
I finished my four-year commitment to shepherd those students and families through the primary grades and enrolled at the University of Minnesota (then famous for its reading research program) to try to understand how my colleagues’ decision could make sense. The best outcome of that move was that I read my first-day schedule incorrectly, went to the wrong office, and met Kathleen (I’m married to Kathleen). Another outcome was that I began to develop an understanding of reading at school. My first course – History of Research on Reading – assigned titles such as The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (Huey, 1908), Reading as Reasoning (Thorndike, 1917), Remembering (Barlett 1932), Literature as Exploration (Rosenblatt, 1933)….These texts and my peers’ discussion of them taught me that my interpretation of reading was not wrong or beside the point because reading was information processing, not ever mastered or easily transferred among situations or tasks, colored by cultural attitudes and personal habits, and involved emotions as well as reason.
Buoyed with those insights, I used the intellectual tools I brought with me to class (Marxism/critical theory) and began to develop new ones (pragmatism – old, new, American and French – Richard Bernstein) to understand my experiences with past colleagues (and continued experiences in and around reading education over 40 years). Marxism directed me toward analyses of the social relations embedded in those commercially prepared basals. Critical theory honed my attention to how power was/is used in reading education (in at least the U. S.). The pragmatists pointed toward the language school personnel use to represent and reflect upon their interests and experiences while teaching reading, and then, to follow the consequences of their acting on those reflections. I concluded initially that three hegemonic discourses (science, business, and the state) speak through school personnel’s words and actions (Broken Promises, 1988). I’ve tracked the consequences of those discourses over time (e.g., Reading Against Democracy, 2007; Closer Readings of the Common Core, 2013; and Reading Poverty in America, 2014).*
You can read current consequences of the continued power of those three discourses in the recent struggles over the definitions of reading and reading instruction as it played out in the New York Times this spring – insisting reading is a psychological, not a set of social, cultural, and historical practices; treating reading instruction as a market and reading as human capital, not creative, contextualized, human endeavors; and mandating guidelines for schools and teachers to overcome social and economic inequalities, not social problems in need of collective democratic solutions.
For example, the New YorkTimes reported that the COVID pandemic resulted in a “reading crisis” across the country as systematic reading lessons moved online render the lessons to be parents’ responsibility (Jonathan Wolfe). Reflecting on his struggles with learning to read at school, the new mayor of New York City mandated that city teachers be “trained” to use phonics-based commercial reading programs to teach reading in order to overcome the crisis (Lola Fadulu). Ten days later, a Times reporter described how Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins “retreated” from meaning centered lesson to a more sound oriented position in her commercial materials (which occupies one quarter of the US market for reading education) (Dana Goldstein).
*I address a history of counter-discourses in The Struggle to Continue, 1990; Progressive Reading Instruction in America, 2017.
CORRIGAN: Throughout the middle chapters of the book you discuss reading specific types of social texts (like NPR and Google Maps), and you also present a more general theory of reading (regarding sociological competence, sociological imagination, pluralism, etc.). In other words, these chapters take up the somewhat traditional matters related to reading: texts, ideas, the life of the mind. But all of that appears bookended with two case studies from “real life,” a less traditional concern for reading: one case is about the fate of a canyon wilderness area and the other is about a dying town being revitalized and the questions are about what to do and what is being done in each situation that affects real lives of real people and environments. Through this bookending, the reading life gets anchored in the life of action—even activism—such that reading is not just about thinking and feeling but also about doing. Can you elaborate on that?
SHANNON: Bear with me…I find it not useful to consider ideas separately from actions because we must experiment to adapt to continuously changing physical and social environments. That need to adapt, to experiment, induces our ideas; not the other way around. Wide-awake reading is an array adaptation practices – ways for Americans to enhance our “self-evident” right to participate as peers with all others in the making of democratic social life. Perhaps, that is what could be meant by reading as activism – wide awake readers refuse to cede that right to others and exercise ‘intelligent action.’ I didn’t make this up – see quotes below – listed in chronological order, not the order of my ‘discovery’ of these authors (Marx, Foucault, Dewey, Emerson).
Emerson: Circles 1841
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.
Marx: Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, 1888
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Dewey: Democracy and Education (1916)
We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable it is.
Foucault: “On the Genealogy of Ethics’ (1983)
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.
Human agency begins in the deep and critical reading of the present conditions in our attempts to adapt to continuously changing environments. Marx directs Emerson’s experimenters to collective action within their historical contexts, and toward equality; Dewey engages experimenters in intelligent actions to address social problems to move closer to the realization of the promises of democracy; and Foucault warns experimenters that consequences of all alternatives are dangerous, at least to some group(s), regardless of experimenters’ aims. He rejects cynicism and passivity, setting individual and collective daily agendas to decide and act on the main dangers.
CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you connect reading to an embrace of such values as democracy, dissensus, difference, pluralism. The idea is that reading can enable and motivate readers to genuinely dialogue with those who are different and who hold different values, beliefs, opinions. But Reading Wide Awake came out in 2011, a few years before what appeared to me to be a remarkable intensification of conflict, fake news, and bad faith arguments in the United States—the Trump era. Has your hope for the possibilities of collaboration, dissensus, and dialogue changed since?
SHANNON: My short answer is “no.” If anything, the last decade has made me more committed to those values, and I thank you for considering that “reading wide awake” could serve as a tool in the on-going “real utopian project” of the making of democracy for these times. Many share your interpretation (although they vary in readings of the problem): Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear, Sarah Vowell, Max Fisher.
Liberal democracy is not a thing or a template to be applied; rather, it is a method for identifying and solving the common problems of securing the rights of life and pursuit of happiness for all, across time and contexts. According to John Dewey, “The democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing, and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions: —not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever.”
For the individual, democracy means having a share in directing the activities of the group – participatory parity; for the group, democracy demands the development and maintenance of social arrangements enabling the liberation of the potentials of each individual member. Those are unmet promises made in the second sentence of The Declaration of Independence. Democratic patriots are keepers of that faith, acting to ensure that this country lives up to those principles within and across its borders. I am a patriot.
Other patriots and I read the texts and contexts to name, resist, dismantle barriers to democratic possibilities and to develop and maintain social arrangements which would enable greater participatory party among all groups and individuals. Even among patriots, however, conflict is likely because we begin our searches for just social arrangements from differing historical positions, and therefore, while we share at least a rhetorical goal, our interests and strategies will differ necessarily. Chantel Mouffe (2018) argues “in a democratic polity, conflict and confrontation, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism.” What we patriots need then are ways to keep that agonism from becoming antagonism. Many imply that it might already be too late for dissensus – a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in relation to each other, leading to collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences. However, unless individuals and groups have given up entirely on democratic faith, I believe dissensus is possible and necessary to build coalitions among disparate groups to continue the search for and reality of democratic social arrangements.
If we engage in real utopian projects for liberal democracy within pluralistic societies, then patriots must engage in practices of dissensus to support others and ourselves as we sort through our repertoires of social discourses to find points of, at least temporary, agreement. Dissensus affords the possibility(ies) for coalitions to form around specific goals and strategies to act intelligently toward the promises of democracy. As Eric Olin Wright (2010) explained, these projects are utopian because we are thinking about alternatives that embody our deepest aspirations for a just society, and each is real because we continue to experiment with and deliberate within our associated ways of living as we struggle toward the just (and flexible) social arrangements across contexts and time. Reading wide awake can alert us to the ways power works through the “texts” of our lives, enabling us patriots to tame the harm caused by barriers to participatory parity, to erode those barriers through our actions, and to experiment toward just social arrangements. Keep the democratic faith!
CORRIGAN: Since you are on one hand a college professor and on the other hand a scholar who studies K12 education and a teacher who teaches (future) K12 teachers, it seems you have an unique view into both worlds: education in college and education before college. Traditionally and unfortunately, there has been, at least in my experience, little exchange of pedagogy across that line. But I think there are things we could learn from some cross pollination. So in that spirit, I’m curious if you might comment on what commonalities and what differences you see between what we ought to be teaching about reading before college compared to in college.
SHANNON: Most texts I encounter are institutionally produced to teach me who I am, what I should know, value, and do. Unfortunately for me, but certainly by design, they are intended to position me as a consumer, not a producer. Government, business, media news and entertainment, church, science, sports, and other institutions teach me not only to consume goods and services, but also, to swallow expert opinion, idealized representations of the past, and the spectacle of celebrity and success, as if their texts were representations of the way things are and should be. I am to receive from others and not create for myself and contribute with others; I am free to choose among, but not to determine, alternatives. These institutional texts leave little space for me to think outside their intended parameters or to imagine what they left unstated. Their intentions are not my personal problems alone; they are social issues affecting many if not all. These texts, most texts, intend to teach us that civic life is complex and boring, we’re not smart enough to understand or change it, and therefore, we should seek only comfort and security for ourselves and family. These lessons are dangerous for our individual and collective identities and agencies, and I believe, main dangers for the health of our pluralistic democracy.
Except for middle school/junior high, I’ve taught at every level from preschool to doctoral study. (I am afraid of tweens and early adolescents for reasons obvious to anyone who has personal knowledge of this age group.) Reading the texts of my teaching experiences tells me that schools participate in limiting the potential power of reading through decisions surrounding the social arrangements of school curricula and pedagogy. From my first encounter with official reading instruction as a teacher (and a student in the 50s) to the assigned reading list for the History of Reading Research which began my focused study of reading, to my assignment to teach a course on reading and teaching to 300 or more students each semester, schooling has undersold readings’ personal, social, and civic potential. The result, I fear, is that school teaches our students that they are consumers of social life, and not active, equal participants in its continuous making. So my comment to preK-25 teachers about reading is a question (an on-going inquiry really). How can we tame and erode the intentions behind school texts in order to disrupt the production of ‘sleepy’ readers, to develop the social arrangements of our classes, engaging all our students in reading wide awake; and to encourage participatory parity in the making of pluralistic democracies in and out of school?
My recommendation is to trust our students, to see them as interesting and interested, to arrange our courses and readings to enable participatory parity across the differences they bring to class, to seek real reasons for them to engage in dissensus, and to act on their new knowledge and convictions through the discourses we represent.
I’ll share one effort to address this question. During the decade before I retired, I worked with others to reorganize our university’s K-12 reading specialist certification coursework. We sought to add secondary discourses to our students’ repertoires so that they could choose to critique, tame, and erode the typical specialist habitus. Specialists are assigned officially to support students at any grade level who have been labeled as struggling to learn to read and write at school. By law and tradition, these public-school programs are typically organized around assumptions that during their cognitive development of the reading process to date, strugglers have failed to learn one or more code-breaking skills and/or mechanical strategies for extracting meaning from passages – that is their cognitive development of the reading process is incomplete for the demands of their schooling. Specialists are to repair these failures by diagnosing and remediating these problems, bringing students to mastery through scientifically-based reading instruction, and then, to send repaired students back to regular classes able to complete reading assignments. Often, specialists are taught to focus primarily on the how to read and to devote less or little attention to: why read; how texts work; why and how struggling students should assess texts’ intentions; or how struggling students make sense of (all types of) texts outside of school. If these typical reading specialist assumptions, practices, and absences brought the desired consequences, then perhaps, all these explicit and implicit lessons would be warranted. However, beyond the immediate contexts of those lessons, desired outcomes have been scarce – even by their gold standard measure, annual reading test scores. *
Our efforts were complicated by the accreditation processes legally and professionally required for all specialized certification courses. We could not just “do as we pleased.” We proposed our changes as a design experiment with the expected outcome of specialists with competence and imagination. We were approved with “some” concern from the state and some accolades from the profession. Our graduates would be competent (all would pass the state certification licensing exam for reading specialists and be recommended by practicing specialists based on a practicum experience) and imaginative (able to design and act upon social arrangements for learning to read that are not yet, but could be, if specialist focused on the roles for reading in the development of self and democracy). Our assumption for the experiment was that if the specialist could see themselves as reading agents – participants as peers with all others in the decisions of reading programs – they could demonstrate that agency for their students and negotiate/develop social arrangements in their classroom that immersed their students in participatory parity of its social life.
This is getting long and you’re probably now sorry you asked. I’ll be brief. We tripled our teaching workloads to develop three discourses for reading specialists: cognitive, socio-cultural, and political – creating three identity kits of how to speak, think, value and act accordingly across issues of pluralism, policy, scientific warrants, curriculum, and pedagogy. We arranged students in groups of at least three, encouraging the members to deliberate over meanings and likely consequences of their readings of the social things of reading specialists (e.g., cultural differences of experiences, ability grouping, technical reports, time scheduling, state mandates, book chapters, room arrangements, journal articles, pedagogical strategies, tests and assessment procedures, parents/guardians…). Whole class discussions became purposeful exercises of dissensus – always with obligation to move forward toward our state obligation to enter schools to demonstrate reading specialist competence (equipped with multiple discourses with which to read the intentions behind existing school texts), and then, to use our individual and collective imaginations to design, construct, and implement the social arrangements we thought most likely to support our first through eighth grade struggling students as wide-awake readers. From the first course to the tenth, university instructors and school supervisors worked to communicate to each cohort of university students that we expected them to be successful and we were there to support them.
Early in our efforts to remake the reading specialist courses, the students and the instructors decided that a museum was most likely to enable us to develop social arrangements that would afford struggling students the opportunity and support to develop wide awake reading. (There are ten museums on campus of various sizes and budgets.) Each university student cohort began its courses with severe doubts that such students were capable to produce exhibits individually and a museum collectively based solely on their readings and actions. Before the final imagination practicum, we worked collectively to develop our students’ language to discuss, if not believe, that a museum was possible. Doubling down on the university instructors’ belief that our (now) Teachers and their Curators could and would indeed engage actively in the inquiries and production, we scheduled a grand opening for the museum on the last day of practicum.
Following John Dewey’s (1938) notion that the realization of any ideal must be based on experience, Teachers organized practicums’ social arrangements to reduce, if not eliminate, barriers to each Curator’s participation as a peer in the design, construction, and presentation of multimodal museum exhibits on a central topic (e.g., habitats, transportation, weather). Prior to the practicum, neither Teachers nor Curators were experts concerning museums or the central topic, although each brought differing amounts of experience with each. They would learn both together. Teachers provided support for Curators as they read to become experts on the topic (“What do you know about . . . ? How do you know that? What would you like to learn about? Would you like help with that?”), and then, write and with the assistance of a resident community artist create multimodal texts to represent their new knowledge for the expected visitors to the museum (“What caught your interest in the museum we visited? How was it interesting? What would you like to write and show about your new knowledge? Would you like help with that?”).
Scores of family members, university personnel, and former participants visited the two-hour museum opening each year. We never had to defend our goals and methods to visitors, parents or Curators because our practice-based events (process and product) trumped the evidence-based practices that Curators (and their parents/guardians) experienced at school. Although the thick school folders that accompany Curators label them as autistic, behind, ELL, learning disabled, dyslexic, or ADHD, every Curator demonstrated her/his/their literate competence by producing and presenting (proudly) an exhibit situated prominently within the museum (two university classrooms and a connecting hallway). And every Teacher showed some signs of reading wide awake. Here’s an excerpt of Teacher Joshua’s final report on Curator Tim.
What does Tim need? It depends:
If you read his folder….
If you watch him during independent reading,…
If you sit next to him and listen to him read a book you picked for him….
But if you work with him on his model train, then….
The first three “ifs” suggest that Tim can’t read well enough to engage in inquiry, and therefore, he needs preliminary skill lessons before you start. The last one shows you that you don’t know Tim or his capabilities unless you let him participate (2014).
* Despite a century of reading research and billions of dollars invested annually in reading education, students from low income families (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013)— confounded by race (Vigor, 2011), immigrant status (Swartz & Stiefel, 2011) and segregated location (Burdkick-Will et al., 2011)—continue to “struggle” with school literacy. Although some schools have made modest improvements (Rowan, 2011), the overall income achievement gap has increased by 40% since the Reagan Administration (Reardon, 2011).
CORRIGAN: You stress in Reading Wide Awake that you’re still learning how to read. So what have you learned since writing this book?
SHANNON: In 2017, Penn State offered the ARod-deal to all employees of a certain age and length of employment. We had lived in the Happy Valley since 1990. I qualified, took the year’s salary to not come back (the NY Yankees offered this deal to Alex Rodriguez to induce his retirement), and began to write an operetta entitled ‘Bourne in the USA’ (while trying vainly to read ‘flow offense’ during noon basketball games). I’m working on a third draft, learning how to read many genres of musical theater in front of and behind the curtain as well as popular music at the turn of the 19th century and symbols of American social, economic, intellectual, and political history between the depression of ’93 and the end of WWI. It continues to be a thrilling, and humbling experience. When I admit to others what I’m doing “these days”, they often ask: “How are you prepared?” “Who’s Bourne?” “Why now?” “What will Bruce say?”
I have played in a garage band since 1966 (The Root Beer Beaver), appeared in several musicals as a high school student (portraying a sailor in the South Pacific, a Jet, and Conrad Birdie), and maintained a dozen or so pages of decades-old notes on Randolph Bourne. I have formal training in neither music nor theater. When Kathleen and I visit theaters now, we are becoming “wide awake” to ways in which all involved work collectively to produce that play on that “stage” in these times to teach the audience who we are, what we should know and value, and what we should do. In State College, NYC and the Twin Cities, these lessons have changed our theatering experiences, making us attentive differently than my pre-Bourne afternoons and evenings.
I declare that I’m a playwright in the making who is sampling the melodies from popular songs of Bourne’s times, rewriting lyrics to “teach” audiences Bourne’s democracy faith, and drawing images of staging for each scene, both acts, and the whole play. This is shorthand for the new ways I’m reading: new technologies, musical notation, emotional effects of auditory, physical, and visual symbols, historical presentism, lyricism across time, and technical, kinesthetic, physical, and aesthetic practices and objects of musical theater. Keeps me busy.
I picked Bourne as a subject because his life offers remarkable examples of reading wide awake and the challenges of patriotism. Bourne was a social critic and essayist who died in 1918 at the age of 32. I “discovered” Bourne (and began my notes) while reading about John Dewey and the counter-hegemonic discourse of progressive education (unassigned, but necessary texts for that first course in the UMN doctoral program). Bourne was Dewey’s student at Columbia University and wrote two books on education (and another concerning youth culture). I reconnected with Bourne when I read Jeremy McCarter’s 2017 New Yorker piece “The Critic Who Refuted Trump’s World View, in 1916.” McCarter called Bourne, the “Anti-Trump” for Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America” (published in The Atlantic Monthly). Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen devoted three pages to that essay in her 2021 book American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (Thomas Jefferson gets two pages and Dewey none in the 130 pages of prose). Between 1911 and 1918, Bourne wrote over 1400 essays that were published in regional and national magazines (e.g., Columbia Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Masses, The Dial, Seven Arts).
In its current form, the operetta has two acts. I’ve structured the first around Bourne’s writing of his first national publication “The Handicapped by One of Their Own” (The Atlantic Monthly, 1914). The attending physician misused forceps during Bourne’s birth, changing the shape of his head and altering his breathing, voice, and hearing. At four, Bourne contracted spinal tuberculosis, which over three years curved his spine and limited his gate and height. The Atlantic publisher asked Bourne to write an autobiographical piece to explain his life “struggles.” That essay is often cited as a founding manifesto of the disability rights movement in America. It ends: “Do not take the world too seriously, nor let too many social conventions oppress you. Keep sweet your sense of humor, and above all do not let any morbid feelings of inferiority creep into your soul.”
Floyd Dell’s obituary for Bourne (1919) frames the second act, highlighting Bourne’s participation in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, his “Trans-National America” argument for cosmopolitanism over melting pot assimilation to adopted Anglo Saxon cultural expectations, and his vanguard leadership of the anti-war movement (See Twilight of Idols, 1917). In the latter, Bourne explained that Americans couldn’t “make the world safe for democracy” by suppressing it at home or through military force abroad. Bourne’s positions proved unpopular with business and the state, and Bourne died of the Spanish Flu penniless and sleeping on his fiancee’s divan. As Dell (1919) explained:
“There are few avenues of expression for protest, however sane and far-seeing, against the mood of a nation in arms; and one by one, most of these were closed to him as he went on speaking out his thought. It is one of the more subtly tragic aspects of his death, a misfortune not only to a fecund mind that needed free utterance, but to a country which is nearly starved for thought, that he should in these last years have been doomed to silence.”
Oh, and I anticipate Springsteen and E Street will play the opening bars of the overture…
