Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Karen Manarin, Karen Manarin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253058744
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Reading Across the Disciplines offers a collection of twelve essays detailing a range of approaches to dealing with students' reading needs at the college level. Transforming reading in higher education requires more than individual faculty members working on SoTL projects in their particular fields. Teachers need to consider reading across the disciplines.

In this collection, authors from Australia and North America, teaching in a variety of disciplines, explore reading in undergraduate courses, doctoral seminars, and faculty development activities. By paying attention to the particular classroom and placing those observations in conversation with scholarly literature, they create new knowledge about reading in higher education from disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives.

Reading Across the Disciplines demonstrates how existing research about reading can be applied to specific classroom contexts, offering models for faculty members whose own research interests may lie elsewhere but who believe in the importance of reading.

II. READING IN SPECIFIC CONTEXTS

6

READING-TO-WRITE

Rehearsing the Doctoral Literature Review

ROSEMARY GREEN

PRELUDE

Doctoral students of any discipline are assumed to be proficient at reading, understanding, and writing academic discourse. Studies of doctoral education indicate otherwise; indeed, doctoral students can become overwhelmed by the quantity, complexity, and intensity of academic reading expectations (Green 2009; Kwan 2008). Nevertheless, “reading in graduate school is of utmost importance” because it is central to doctoral students’ abilities to grasp foundational disciplinary knowledge and learn methods for gathering and synthesizing information during and beyond the doctorate (McMinn et al. 2009, 233).

Despite its role as a fundamental point of entry into the disciplines, effective academic reading is not easily defined, learned, or taught: “Learning to read properly becomes one of the most salient hurdles faced by students in postgraduate education” (Wohl and Fine 2017, 216). Tacitly prescribed by each discipline (Pace 2004), proper reading is identified, for example, by knowing how and when to deploy alternating strategies such as skimming and reading deeply (Wohl and Fine 2017). Doctoral students must read and appropriate rhetorically dense works while developing disciplinary-specific discursive practices, yet most are left to negotiate secondary discourses on their own (McAlpine 2012; Wohl and Fine 2017). The literature of doctoral pedagogies is clear: seldom are graduate students provided direct instruction in reading and writing literacies because, presumably, they have acquired such literacies elsewhere (Green 2009; Luke and Freebody 1997).

In this chapter, I detail the instructional approaches and activities used in a reading, writing, and research course in a doctor of musical arts (DMA) program at Shenandoah Conservatory, a conservatory of music in a private university in Virginia. The pedagogical focus of the course is the doctoral literature review that students drafted to support their particular research topics. I share student narratives to represent the reading practices and experiences of doctoral students of music, who, as their discipline required, routinely contended with multiple forms of academic rhetoric. The narratives I gathered from DMA student interviews and responses to writing prompts personalize what otherwise might be just a recounting of instructional exercises. The theme of reader agency emerged as I interpreted student narratives, and I drew on studies such as Lynn McAlpine’s (2012), who centers the role of reading in the development of doctoral students’ academic identity. Gary Alan Fine and Hannah Wohl (2018) consider academic reading in a similar vein, proposing that reading competence is a powerful influence on one’s standing in an academic field. These works are among the few to associate doctoral students’ reading practices with negotiating “actions in discursive situations” (Walker 2015, 4).

THE PERFORMERS: DMA STUDENTS AS ACADEMIC READERS

I hope to “shine a light” (McAlpine 2012, 351) on the perspectives and experiences of doctoral students as researchers-in-training learning to read (and write) as music scholars. McAlpine (2012) endorses direct pedagogy to support graduate reading processes, such as recognizing reading as an essential component of doctoral training, thereby ensuring that students are introduced to readings in a range of genres and scaffolding learners’ engagements with “the reading practices essential to the doctorate” (359). In this context, genre “describes a form of discourse recognizable as a common set of structural or thematic qualities” (Hart-Davidson 2015, 39). Students of music encounter disciplinary-specific textual genres that vary considerably, and they must learn to move among these texts. DMA students read across literary genres that encompass histories, biographies, theses and dissertations, essays, analyses of musical works, critiques and reviews, and empirical research. For example, DMA students read articles from journals such as Nineteenth-Century Piano Music and Jazz Research Journal; annotated historical editions of musical scores; compendia of analytical, theoretical, and musicological texts; and treatises on historical performance practices. No single formula for reading these literary forms is available or even feasible; readers must adjust their strategies to accommodate the purpose, audience, and stylistic conventions of each genre.

All graduate students arrive at text with their own schema; “one right [graduate reading] practice” does not exist (Roldan and Turns 2018, n.p.). They must decide for themselves which texts to read, which to set aside, and “‘what counts’ as reading” (Baker et al. 2019, 143). Literature reviewing requires reading extensively and deploying multiple reading-to-write strategies. When students of any discipline are encouraged to uncover their own methods of textual engagement, as were students in the Advanced Research and Writing course, they begin to comprehend increasingly “complex negotiations” with disciplinary-specific discourse and the communities that privilege those discursive practices (Baker et al. 2019, 150). This chapter aims to make visible the practices and experiences of doctoral students immersed in music scholarship and details reading-to-write activities that otherwise might have remained “unspecified” (Pace 2004, 13). While the reading-to-write experiences and practices of doctoral students of music frame this chapter, students in all disciplines face similar challenges with text. Indeed, the studies cited here originate from several fields, demonstrating interest in academic reading across multiple disciplines.

The research, teaching, and learning project outlined in this chapter is informed by frameworks of critical literacy (Gee 1996; Lea and Street 1998; Luke and Freebody 1997). All doctoral learners must confront and then train themselves in secondary discourses that function to socialize newcomers to the scholarship of their research fields (Gee 1996; Green 2009). They must learn to read themselves into disciplinary-specific ways of thinking and doing; they must unpack and decode value-laden language of their fields of study. Critical readers, such as the DMA students in this project, recognize the significance of interrogating the privileged text of published scholarship (Green 2009; Luke and Freebody 1997). Referencing the process of decoding the disciplines (Middendorf and Pace 2004; Pace 2004), J. Peter Burkholder (2011, 94) grants that, while music history students must learn facts, they also learn “how to think like music historians” by reading from and writing about music scholarship. Implicit in the model of decoding the disciplines is a critical perspective, one that requires examining power relationships ever present in academic fields.

By and large, academic reading is subordinate to academic writing, in part because the act of reading for any purpose is undertaken privately and usually silently (Kwan 2008; McAlpine 2012; van Pletzen 2006). The dominance of writing over reading is challenged by work from Sarah J. Mann (2000), from Ermien van Pletzen (2006), by essayists in the recent collection Reconnecting Reading and Writing (Horning and Kraemer 2013), and by contributors in this collection.

DOCTORAL READERS AND THE LITERATURE REVIEW

I frame DMA students’ encounters with reading-to-write as a trajectory through which students strengthen their literacy skills and gain confidence as academic readers and incoming members of scholarly communities. Attempting to move beyond individual courses and instructional practices to reach broader teaching and learning settings, I describe instructional activities that may be transferable to other disciplinary settings. I contend that the scholarly literature review acts as a vehicle through which students learn academic literacies, particularly academic reading, and it was a principal requirement of the course. The first of the following sections addresses the centrality of the literature review in the disciplines. In the next sections, the design of the Advanced Research and Writing course is described, and examples of instructional activities are outlined. Student narratives illustrate their reflections on their experiences with reading-to-write literature reviews, and the chapter closes with a brief discussion.

MAIN THEME: CENTERING THE LITERATURE REVIEW

Chris M. Golde (2007, 2) identifies the literature review as a “signature pedagogy” of the doctorate, characteristic of professional and research doctorates across all disciplines. The scholarly review of the literature conveys “strong and consistent messages of the discipline and the form of inquiry required in the discipline” (Johnson, Lee, and Green 2000, 287). The process of reviewing the literature affords a site where students continue to unpack and rehearse the secondary discourse of their disciplines. When doctoral students read themselves into their disciplines (McAlpine 2012; Wisker 2015), they learn to wrestle with the debates, alliances, and other contingencies communicated, subtly or overtly, through the literature (Kamler and Thomson 2006). Becky S. C. Kwan (2008, 42) identifies literature reviewing “as a strategic site of research” where doctoral reading, writing, and researching align. Such studies shape the body of inquiry regarding doctoral students’ approaches to literature reviewing, wherein the act of reading and reading choices are socially mediated and disciplinary-specific.

Similar to the role of reading in the academic lives of music students, literature reviewing as a pedagogical feature in music specialisms has received little notice from the research community. One exception is the work of Patrick K. Freer and Angela Barker (2008), who explore reading and reviewing literature with their graduate music education students. Their practice-based investigation focuses on teaching and learning the literature review process; as I did, they guided their students’ understanding of “the value of literature reviews” and experience with “how literature reviews can assist readers of research” (Freer and Barker 2008, 71). When student reviewers of literature read, write about, and critically synthesize scholarship, they encounter defining yet tacit discursive expectations. Course activities that guided literature-reviewing activities were aimed at strengthening literacy practices of DMA newcomers to the territory of music scholarship where they would eventually be situated. Literature reviewing provides students opportunities to reposition themselves as “agents who use and evaluate the research of others, in order to make a place for their own work” (Kamler and Thomson 2006, 35; emphasis in original).

THE COURSE AS INSTRUCTIONAL AND RESEARCH SITE

By design, the Advanced Research and Writing course aimed to provide DMA students tools for developing and practicing scholarly reading, researching, and writing skills that supported original doctoral research topics. Each student applied the literature review to a proposal for her or his culminating DMA research project. Scaffolded activities and discussions often emphasized reading, with particular attention to reading for the purpose of writing a literature review. As Cynthia R. Haller (2013, 200) notes, “Generating reading-informed writing appropriately designed to reach academic readers is at the heart of academic discourse,” and nowhere is reading-informed writing more evident than in the literature review. Reading, conceptualizing, and writing were approached as distinct yet coconstructed literacies endemic to literature reviewing. Because each student focused entirely on her or his own research interest, the course and course activities were framed as inquiry-based. Advanced Research and Writing provided the sort of structured and supportive setting that Sarah M. Urquhart et al. (2016) recommend, as musician-students learned to wrestle with reading in subdisciplines such as musicology, music theory, and music pedagogy.

The decision to feature doctoral reading practices and experiences in the Advanced Research and Writing course resulted from my ongoing interest in the role of academic reading in the lives of doctoral students (Green 2009). Consequently, the course afforded a site for an SOTL investigation into DMA students’ reading practices and experiences when engaged in crafting literature reviews. The 2011–2018 research project described in this chapter was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Shenandoah University. To foreground academic reading, I routinely posed writing prompts to spark students’ metacognitive awareness of their reading practices, positioning, and agency with text. Each cohort of DMA students submitted responses to three or more writing prompts concerning their reading strategies and reactions to academic reading. I gathered approximately 150 reflections of 200–250 words from 65 students throughout 2011–2018; not all students completed every prompt. In May 2018, I interviewed four students who successfully completed the course in 2016 and 2017. Excerpts of written (noted with a W) and interview (noted with an I) narratives from eighteen students appear throughout the chapter. Encouragingly, one student said, “Reading is so important to what we do, and I think it’s not talked about enough” (I).

THEMATIC SEQUENCING: READING-TO-WRITE

Pedagogical principles of transparency and scaffolding underpinned the course. Because the “practices of teaching and learning are rarely transparent” (Gale and Golde 2004, 9), I appreciated that the students should understand not only what they were asked to do but also why. Therefore, I detailed the assignments as well as the rationale for staging assignments, the relevance of assignments, and each assignment’s role in the course scheme. Knowing that academic reading and writing inevitably take longer than anyone anticipates, I asked them to start with small bits of reading and writing from their individual research readings. As their research projects evolved and their sense of agency grew, I provided less feedback and discontinued direct instruction. Most reading and writing assignments were scaffolded, allowing students to manage a few or only one learning task for a time, which facilitated increasing mastery (Burkholder 2011; Freer 2009; Pace 2004). Eventually, individual writing drafts contributed to final literature review drafts and research proposals. Each reading-to-write assignment was dependent on preceding assignments, and final writing projects were cumulative of earlier ones.

The next sections describe instructional reading-to-write activities and topics encompassed in the first several weeks of the course as students grappled with finding and reading text. During those weeks, students experimented with new reading strategies such as reading aloud, and they wrote abstracts, critiques, and annotated bibliographies. They also completed activities for conceptualizing and organizing bodies of literature. By the last few weeks, they had developed reading-to-write tools and had become confi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Reading Across the Disciplines: An Introduction
• I. Ways of Reading
• II. Reading in Specific Contexts
• Index
• About the Author