This week I chose to read chapters from Jenea Cohns book Skim, Dive, Surface, moving to the second section of this book, which focuses on the “dive” element advertised in the title. I will read these chapters and apply Cohns teachings as I read over the course of my ILC, evaluating my reading process as I go and making parallels between the consumption of food and literature, and access to food and academics. As my ILC is on a shorter timeline than usual, 5 weeks instead of 10, I will also be evaluating how the pace of consumption affects my learning.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – An Introduction to the Digital Reading Framework
In this introductory chapter to the “dive” section of the book, Cohn introduces the reader the five concepts that would be explored, later elaborating “The five concepts within this framework capture five categories for engagement for readers to cultivate as they move between digital and non-digital spaces to do the work of deep, sustained, and engaged reading” (p.131) These categories are curation, connectivity, creativity, contextualization, and contemplation, and double as the chapter titles for the following five chapters. Within this ILC I plan to read “curation”, “connectivity”, and “creativity”, but I am hoping to read the last two in week 5 if time allows it.
The chapter opens with some ideas surrounding reading and lived experience that snacks up the work that I did in spring, talking about how our experiences dictate what good reading looks and feels like to us as individuals. This lead me down a rabbit hole of questioning what I perceive “good reading” as, and where those habits came from, are they productive or are they just ingrained? Did I read something “better” because I remember more of it, or because I had more questions? Does my enjoyment of the texts or agreement with the writer change the outcome of my comprehension of it?
Cohn goes on to push for accessibility in schools via more mediums of reaching knowledge, stating “Some educators argue that they can’t necessarily anticipate all of the possible students that may enter their classroom spaces and, therefore, they cannot make multiple options for reading available to their students. To this end, I take up Anne-Marie Womack’s (2017) argument that accommodation is “the process of teaching itself” (p. 494).” I enjoyed her discourse on what reading is defined as and the generality of the idea of acquiring knowledge, and how she worked it into the need to expand the means through which students can access learning materials. My favorite quote from the chapter was here, when Cohn says
“When we say that reading can only happen in certain spaces at certain times, we’re ignoring all of the students who can’t read in those spaces at those times. These concerns bring the key tension of teaching reading directly to the fore: we know that reading well is important to understanding knowledge, but if we don’t know exactly how to delimit what reading is, then what teaching reading well looks like can feel slippery and hard to delimit.”
Chohn goes on to describe the five concepts mentioned above and lets the reader know what they can expect for each section, before inviting them to read selectively, to take what they need, and leave the rest. This is one of my favorite things about Cohn, her ability to demonstrate the practical applications of her writing within her own work, offering the reader more than knowledge, but almost a skill class.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – Curation
Cohn starts this chapter by recalling her time in college making mixed CD’s for her friends, the ways in which she would order songs to tell stories and give the listener a journey, and how thematic playlists can be used to convey emotion. This opens into a broader discussion of the change in format in the way we curate music. With the fast rise and takeover of digital music, not only has the reach of our playlists grown but our options have expanded tremendousley. This changed has happned in tandem with the digitization of litreture, as the age of the internet has given the same oportunity for anyone to make their music public as it has texts. But this parralell of playlists are important not just for their medium but also for the way playlists are used to convey messages through multiple songs.
Cohns quote “a successful reading curator can bring together multiple streams of thought to come to a unifiedn conclusion about what the text means to them.” really captures what I have been trying to do in my ILC’s, but it also got me thinking about taste buds and personal history. The curration of our own menus happens over time and experience, and most people have one whether or not they think about it. Not only can we convey emotion through food, but I think we can tell stories through a meal the same way you could through a playlist.
Moving to discuss students and curation, Cohn gives a few examples of other teachers and writers in-classroom activites used to teach and reienforce curation skills in their students. Online platforms such as pintrest are referenced a few times as a popular way to teach students to digitally organize their thoughts and findings, another example of the usefulness of digitization in the classroom, especially as many of these activities are used in small group or partner settings but can be done from home.
An example activity by Jason McIntosh looks very much like the style of annotation I already subscribe to. As described “three different approaches to using digital content curation tools in a first-year composition course that he teaches: clipping, tagging, and annotating (p. 178). Clipping refers to the moment when you find something from the web and save a portion of it as a clip rather than the whole
piece; tagging is adding a user-defined label or short phrase to something; and annotating is adding longer notes to a text.” This is the way I aim to annotate, it takes the pressure off making each note profound and allows me to get my real thoughts into reccord. And I believe that this, combined with Ryan Traceys refrenced thoughtwork “curation framework encourages curators to name the function of the sources they’ve curated. For example, a reader may curate a collection of sources to add value to a particular conversation or to extend awareness of a particular thought.”, is how I develope my best ILC work and therfore my best thought enquiries and discoveries.
Cohn concludes the chapter with her own curation activities, saying “The overarching goal of these activities is to help students curate collections of ideas—either within a single reading or across multiple readings—so they will have constructed their own individualized impressions of how concepts from readings are in conversation with each other or how those concepts connect to what the students previously learned in the course.” I particularly liked the third activity “Where In The World Does This Idea Go? Creating A Key Concepts Map” in which students using multiple sources and readings creating an integrated mind map that connects key ideas within one reading to those within another. I think if I were to help a first or second year student write their first ILC I would encourage them to make this an ongoing project within, it would provide not only great practice but also a satisfying end product.
Curation is one of the fundementals of writing ILC’s like the ones I do, and especially when curating semi-blind as I have to for school, creating a mind map like this before I do my readings to identify the key themes I am looking for throught my ILC could also be an interesting activity. Regardless, curation is a skill I feel I have strengthend heavily over the past couple years and was the chapter I was most looking forward to. I am curious how curation can be used not only as something taught but as a way to assist students.
Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn – Connection
“Connection” as an idea within this book seemed like a really broad term, so I was excited to see what direction Cohn would take when discussing it. She started by painting a scene involving building Ikea furniture and connecting (or not) to the instruction booklet. She draws easy parallels from here to talk about digital reading, discussing the ways in which e-readers may make a reader feel less connected from the text.
“When you access a text on an e-reader, it may not be obvious how long a text is, and the internal headings for the text may not be easily scannable. Without quickly flipping through the length of the text itself, seeing how it is organized and what’s to come, it may be challenging to get a sense of where the text is going or how it builds from beginning to end. Certainly, readers can scroll through a full text or swipe the digital pages to get a feel for its larger body, but that interaction may not be as accessible as it is in a bound stack of papers or a book” (p.158)
When discussing scholarly connections, Cohn has a particularly interesting section on hyperlinks and their academic uses. While at first I didn’t think much of this section, the more I thought about it the more I could see how incredibly useful hyperlinks can be and could be in the creation and curation of research projects. Hyperlinks on articles and journals have driven so much new ILC learning over the last few years, and have allowed me to add additional context where the writer feels necessary, which adds another level of reading as you can infer the writer’s intentions more clearly. While a book will have citations, hyperlinks allow the reader instant access to more knowledge and context.
She later goes on to talk about the general practice of teaching reading skills in higher education, citing a 2016 study by Tara Lockhart and Mary Soliday that “many students may not acquire these skills in any other places or have access to academic skill development in this way. In a multiyear study in which undergraduates at a large, public research institution were interviewed about their college reading experiences, Tara Lockhart and Mary Soliday (2016) found that many students reported reading practices as a critical component of their ability to enter into academic discourse communities in their upper-level courses” As I think about teaching critical reading and thinking skills in higher education and the effects of our personal history on our consumption of literature across multiple mediums, I also want to think about how the parallel of food, cooking, and personal history falls in. If higher education can reteach one how to read, and how to question what they are reading, how can we also use higher education and college to read teach food thought and cooking practices? And how does connection (and curation) fit into the idea of building our personal menu? How can digitization of texts link both the teaching of reading skills and food thought for questioning and reflection?
The last section of the chapter is example class activities, my favorite was #2 “Highlight And Link” in which the student digitally annotates a text with links relating to their annotated section. I have gotten more rigid with my ILC structure and I wonder if this activity would help me in future quarters, and allow me to be more explorative as I was when I first started. Cohn lists one of the key chapter takeaways as “Engaging in connection fosters curiosity in students to promote inquiry-based thinking.” How can we use higher learning to foster healthy curiosity about food?