Charlotte Stevens
Charlotte Stevens
At the 2021 Becoming Well Read symposium ( BWR21 ), I pledged to devote more time to the practice of academic reading , to reflect on what I read , and to share my reading with colleagues . At the BWR22 event , I talked about my progress over the year , the challenges and barriers I encountered , as well as the opportunities I created . I also invited colleagues to share their own experiences , and the strategies they had found useful in helping them facilitate their own academic reading practice .
PADLET QUESTION : ‘ What bARriers do you face in your own academic reading practice ? And what strategies have you used to help you engage more in academic reading ?'
Barriers
At the point of registering for BWR22 , 43 % of delegates indicated that they were dissatisfied with the amount of academic or professional reading they were undertaking ( BWR , 2022b ). We do not have to look far to find the reasons why . Comments from delegates highlighted a common challenge : ‘ Allocating time and sticking to it ’; ‘ Struggle to find the time to read as much as I ’ d like to ’ ( BWR , 2022a ).
Is this because academic reading is still perceived as ‘ an indulgence in an otherwise busy role ’? ( Fitzgibbon , 2021 ). This is certainly something that resonated with me . During the 2021 symposium , I reflected that I ’ d not considered reading to be ‘ real work ’ and quickly deprioritised it in the face of other , seemingly more important , tasks ( Stevens , 2021 , p . 41 ). This sentiment was echoed by delegates at the 2022 event : ‘ With a busy workload , it is so easy to give up my reading slot when responding to day to day pressures ’, as well as an unease about ‘ making time for one ' s one research / reading as opposed to the day job ’ ( BWR , 2022a ).
focused on the reading habits of academics and students , it was found that most academic reading appeared ‘ to be linked to the production of an outcome , such as a lecture or academic paper ’ ( p . 8 , 2020 ). Comments from BWR22 delegates reaffirm this : ‘ Reading relating to what I see fit [ sic ] within my teaching role , I will read as I know it will be useful for conversations with postgrads ’; ‘ My reading is really more purposeful at the moment as I ' m on a program to develop a research proposal ’ ( BWR , 2022a ).
Self-selected reading , or reading ‘ solely for scholarly practice ’, was notably absent in Miller and Merdian ’ s findings , as it was in my own context . Committing time to ‘ reading for reading ’ s sake ’, whether to further research interests or for professional development , was certainly a barrier for me . Yet , at the same time , it wasn ’ t something I felt comfortable with ; I could relate to the ‘ feelings of failure ’, a ‘ need to change ’ and a ‘ need to practise self-discipline ’ shared by the 2022 delegates .
The question is : can we make time to read more and , if so , how can we make the best use of that time ? The next section shares some learning points and reflections based on strategies I instituted over the last year to develop my own academic reading practice , along with contributions shared via the Padlet .
Opportunities
I developed the following model in order to group the different strategies I used .
For me , reading had tended to happen when it was ‘ oriented toward contextually meaningful purposes ’ ( Fox and Alexander , p . 8 , 2016 ). This is not new . In Miller and Merdian ’ s study ,
Figure 1 : Strategies to facilitate academic reading ( Stevens , 2022 )
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