“Reading in the Age of Distrust”
Discussion questions for reading groups

PIL Provocation Essay #2: “Reading in the Age of Distrust,” April 7, 2021 (3,788 words)
Author: Alison J. Head, Editor, PIL Provocation Series
Read the author's reflections on what inspired this essay, April 7, 2021

Questions prepared by the PIL Provocation Series Team: Steven Geofrey, Alaina Bull, Barbara Fister, Alison Head, Merinda Kaye Hensley, Kirsten Hostetler, and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy (PIL) Team, April 23, 2021.

About the “Reading” essay

For many decades, professors have held onto the notion that college develops students into critical and analytical readers, who can arrive at a deeper understanding of texts through inference and making connections of their own. In “Reading in the Age of Distrust,” Alison argues many educators and librarians may be overlooking how the task of reading has dramatically changed in a world plagued by an endless stream of misinformation while students are increasingly prone to distrusting of news and information. The essay argues that college students must be taught how to be skillful, discerning readers, who can engage actively with texts and better understand the source of information and how it is being disseminated at warp speed across a vast universe of connected networks. For today’s students, these critical reading skills are urgently needed in a chaotic world where information is a free-for-all and even the smartest people can get fooled.

Purpose and intended use of this resource

Project Information Literacy’s Provocation Series essay by Alison Head offers a wide variety of lessons to educators and librarians about making the invisible activity of reading more visible at a time when it is more difficult, and more crucial, than ever. This essay (as do other essays in our occasional series) makes an argument grounded in research while posing questions for the future: What haven’t we considered as the information landscape grows more complex? What new directions in information literacy and higher education should we be exploring? What fundamental aspects of student experiences with navigating information spaces have we overlooked? What fresh ideas can we advance to inspire librarians, educators, researchers, students, journalists, and policy-makers?

These OA prompts are designed to provoke discussion around the themes in the essay, suggest ways to advance teaching and learning in your institutional context, and open up new avenues for inquiry and experimentation.

Questions or comments? Drop us a line at: projectinfolit@pilresearch.org.in

Discussion questions

1. In the essay, “Reading in the Age of Distrust,” Alison Head claims that “there is an invisible and growing problem with reading on American college campuses today.”
   1. What social and technological roots of the reading problem do you see in your own practice and teaching?
   2. How is the academic value placed on reading demonstrated by faculty and librarians on your campus?
2. In the section “A Curious Conundrum,” the essay makes an argument for both educators and librarians to help students see how what they read is situated in networked systems. Specifically, students “must learn how to read these systems — the architectures, infrastructures, and fundamental belief systems — so they can put what they read in context and determine whether or not it’s trustworthy.”
   1. In your discipline, what are the networked systems (i.e., disciplines, platforms, methods, and beliefs) that operate on how knowledge is circulated?
   2. What strategies or tools are you using, or could you use, to help expose those systems through the readings and activities you assign?
3. In the “Two Faces of College Reading” section, the essay describes how a reading list can set the tone and context of the classroom reading culture.
   1. What reading culture does your campus tend to promote across disciplines and its teaching and learning activities?
   2. How do we become more intentional and inclusive in the readings we select and assign as the demographics and needs of enrolled college students change?
   3. What strategies do you use to make the role selected readings play in your class more transparent?
   4. How would your selection process change if you followed the suggestion made in the essay to lighten the reading load as a means of sparking deeper engagement?
4. In the “Turn the Page” section, the essay suggests four ways for educators and librarians to invite students to deepen their reading skills. One of these is to “make the invisible activity of reading more visible,” by including questions with a reading assignment that interrogate the act of reading itself. Doing so reframes the value of reading as an experiential process, rather than “a means to a more obvious end — passing a quiz, contributing to a group project, or earning a good grade.”
   1. What can you do to encourage this shift in orientation towards reading as a process, rather than as a task with a quantifiable end goal?
   2. How might collaboration with a librarian encourage students to make connections between research and reading?
5. What instruction do you currently give around the reading you expect students to do for class?
   1. What do you ask students to read for, e.g., specific facts and information within the reading itself, connections to other readings and life experiences, deeper symbolic and rhetorical meanings?
   2. What difficulties have you seen students have with the readings you assign?
   3. How do you assess reading in your classes?
6. How do students in your classes understand the structure of a text, and how does that help them read in your field?
   1. What does reading look like in your discipline, and how does that differ from what students may have already experienced in other classes?
   2. How are articles or other readings in your discipline structured (see for example the famous chicken paper)?
7. Every day, we all read non-academic, non-news content, such as social media content, email, fiction reading, comics, graphic novels, “how-to” guides and cookbooks.
   1. How does the skill and practice of “casual” reading you do play into building analytical reading skills?
   2. How do you know when to read deeply and when to skim in the reading you do?
   3. How can you translate the skills that you have learned from non-academic reading to helping students develop this discernment?
8. What are some ways that you might engage students in applying their critical reading skills to making informed choices when scrolling through news digests or social media?
   1. Where in your courses could you help students connect scholarly reading practices to current events and everyday information use?
   2. How could you model how to make good choices and negotiate differences in an era of deep distrust?
9. The essay emphasizes the importance of making connections as part of reading, and notes that PIL's 2012 study found employers concluded that new graduates they hired lacked this skill.
   1. How can we foster students’ abilities to make connections across texts, across disciplines, between academic and personal information sources, between scholars and themselves as lifelong learners?
10. The essay provides a recommendation for how instruction librarians can bring reading into the research process in one-shots, but what else could be done during these short sessions that so many librarians have with students?
    1. How can librarians use the ACRL Framework to talk with students about what deep and analytical college reading requires?
    2. What reading activities and assessments can you think of that would support any of the major frames?
    3. How does the definition of information literacy intersect with our understanding of critical reading skills?
11. What opportunities for collaboration are there at your institution for librarians, writing centers, and disciplinary faculty to facilitate conversation across campus towards improving students’ reading skills?