“The Reading Project”: A Humanities Center Research Collaborative
The idea for this research collaborative emerged out of conversations about the difficulties that our students have in completing the assigned reading for class. Students themselves offer a range of explanations: They cannot focus; they never developed the habit of reading; they have long struggled with reading; they are too busy to read; or they do not see the value in reading.
“The Reading Project” will explore these concerns and challenges by addressing three interrelated questions:
1. What value does reading (still) have?
2. Why do so many students find reading difficult and/or unimportant?
3. What can we, as university instructors, do about it?
These three questions will guide the Research Collaborative in its yearlong discussion of articles on the subjects of attention and reading; Zoom conversations with specialists in the field; and focus groups with Miami students about their reading practices. We will conclude with a panel in spring 2026. These events are open to the entire Miami community—you can come to all of them or just to one or two, depending on your schedule and interest. Just as importantly, “The Reading Project” creates a community of faculty who care about student reading and who will continue to explore, experiment, and share their experiences with each other outside of these scheduled events and beyond this academic year.
Conduct of the Project:
The three questions above guided the Research Collaborative as it organized a yearlong series of discussions of articles on the subject of college reading, in-person conversations with specialists in the field, focus groups with Miami students about their reading practices, and a concluding panel in April 2026.
Findings:
The following “findings” simply represent the insights that I—Erik Jensen, one of the principal investigators— have drawn from this project. They do not necessarily represent the views of the other participants or the other three principal investigators.
First of all, the project has reminded me that many students, often a majority of them, still do read thoroughly, and they are genuine assets in the classroom. Lizzie Hutton’s tentative findings from the Student Focus Groups corroborate this conclusion, as well.
Second, one of the articles that we read that addressed the perceived decline in students’ college reading dated back to early 2007, and that article drew on the arguments of books that had appeared two or three years before that—in other words, well before the introduction of the first iPhone in January 2007. As the opening paragraphs of that 2007 article—a review essay titled “Learning to Read as Continuing Education,” by David A. Jolliffe (citation below)—made clear, pervasive complaints about students’ reluctance to read in college has been with us for a long time, even if it might be more serious now and is certainly of a different nature. As that article made clear to me, the question (or, really, complaint), "Do I really have to teach reading?," represents dead-end thinking. I have to teach the students that I have in front of me, and I need to teach them what I think they ought to know, regardless of what I think they ought to have "mastered" before they got to me. This has encouraged me to say to my students, "Let's work on how to read this text." A number of readings emphasized the need to start with my learning outcomes and teach backward from them, taking a close look at the final assignments and figuring out the relationship between reading, writing, and the assignments’ completion.
Dan Keller’s talk on November 11, in particular, offered a number of contextual reminders, ideas, and approaches. He encouraged us to think of all of the ways in which, historically, societies have constantly sought to manage and lighten our reading loads: abstracts, indexes, tables of contents, chapter organization, punctuation, headings, skimming, scanning, Control F, and even Evelyn Wood’s speed-reading courses (for which I remember TV ads in the 1970s), and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (of which my dad was a huge fan).
The scholar Robert Scholes has noted how puzzling it is that we have made writing so visible in the curriculum, but we have not done the same for reading. Reading is “invisible,” part of the “hidden syllabus” or “hidden curriculum,” and something that we just assume that students know how to do. Moreover, we need to reassure students that reading is a constant exercise and challenge, and we can do so by talking about how we have struggled, too. It's not something that one either "gets" or doesn't. This helps to counter the self-defeating narrative that many students have, in which they tell themselves "I'm just not a good reader." (…. For those students who may have diagnosed reading challenges, of course, the situation is different.)
Other useful tips, approaches, and guidance that I have taken from the Reading Project include:
This semester, I have experimented with some different approaches to reading in my classes, including a “choose your own adventure” experiment in my 300-level history class that drew on one of the insights of Lucy Calkins, a Columbia University researcher on the teaching of reading. She has argued that, if we want students to read, we need to let them read what they like to read. I tweaked this approach for HST 330N this semester (Spring 2026) by letting students decide whether they wanted to read historical documents such as letters, diary entries, and political treatises; or whether they wanted to read historical documents in the form of autobiographically-inflected novels. About 40% of the class chose the former, and 60% the latter, and I divided them into two sections for our intensive discussions. Over the course of the semester, each section gave oral presentations to the other about what they read and what they learned. Did it work? Not entirely, at least as I designed this first experimental iteration, since it shortened my class time with each section, but I am pondering potential changes that might make a different variation work in the future.
I have also experimented with having students read out loud together in class, which really helped us to dive deeper into difficult and important passages of texts, and it is something that I plan to do more of in the future.
Finally, a lot of participants in the Reading Project emphasized the need for the university to frame reading as a learning outcome and to talk to employers about reading as a job skill. Along with critical thinking, written communication, and teamwork, attentive reading should be a central part of the “soft” skills that are now being rebranded as “durable” skills in this age of artificial intelligence. As A.I. reshapes entire industries, employers now value these “durable” skills more than technical ones, according to the Job Outlook 2025 report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and reading attentively is a skill that the Humanities, in particular, facilitate in our students.
Series Events:
