Written by Sara Osenton
Figure 1 HUMN100:101 Reading Group
We don’t normally think of reading as a messy or noisy activity; instead, we’ve confined ourselves to the idea of reading as something we do quietly, and alone. I’d like to invite you to join me in imagining reading as something that can be collaborative, peer driven, active, and visual. For the past two terms, I’ve run Messy Noisy Reading workshops across all levels of ECU, in academic and studio classrooms. Using active reading practices, these workshops scaffold the skills students need to move from high school reading to university level reading, while focusing on our strengths and needs as an art and design institution. Each workshop was guided by the course theme and the reading itself while allowing us to introduce a scaffolded approach to reading, building skills appropriate to year level and discipline. Messy Noisy Reading draws on two different lines of research: 1) the role of drawing (and making) in cognition and learning; and 2) collaborative strategic reading practices.
Incorporating drawing into reading (and writing) is a research-backed method to improve student engagement, reading confidence, recall, collaboration, and to solidify reading skills. Drawing has also been found to improve equity in learning, particularly in multilingual classrooms, allowing for students to demonstrate and process “knowing” or “understanding” outside of the language and academic experience. Drawing/making allows for students to monitor their own comprehension and is an iterative process in which they turn back to course materials to improve their drawing (and making) construction.1 Research shows that drawing asks students to use their
Figure 2 HUMN100:101 Reading Group
working memory capacity which is a necessary part of finding, holding, and transferring a text to a representation. When drawing and reading students “repeatedly transition back and forth between the text and their drawings much more frequently.”2 Working memory is a skill important to academic tasks more broadly.3 Drawing a text in collaboration with a small group of students means they compare understandings, while processing their ideas/understanding from text to verbal, visual, and their own written expression. The connection here is not that diagrams or drawings produce mnemonic devices for learning (still very useful) but that drawing or making propels students into active reading and learning practices. As such, drawing/making as reading is a tool of collaborative learning, self-assessment, improved working memory development, better prioritization of information, and an equitable way to explore complex ideas.
In first year, the HUMN100/101 reading group met weekly and worked through previewing, contextualizing, and new terminology while reading aloud and drawing. In these weekly meetups, co-facilitator peer tutor Abi and I worked on basic academic reading skills such as previewing, contextualizing, prediction, and how to decide where to spend deeper time in an assigned text. This co-curricular group engaged in lively conversations—the drawings they made while reading served as a place to come back and discuss what ideas they had focused on, and their understandings or questions of the text. These discussions were also a way to revisit and refer back to the text, activating the text as something we return to, and dive in and out of. Throughout these sessions we taught, and reinforced, the skills to preview, predict, and focus appropriately in an assigned text.
Figure 3 PRAX 300 (Brendan Tang)
In second year and third year workshops, I supported the development of discipline-specific vocabulary and genre, while connecting reading arguments or content to students own assignment goals or studio skills. In Brendan Tang’s PRAX300 class, students developed definitions of Post-Modern Ceramics as they transferred surface and form qualities from the reading directly onto clay objects. In Colleen Brown’s HUMN311, Heather Young’s INDD310, and Julie Andreyev’s HUMN317, we revisited the academic tasks of reading through collaborative drawing to determine where to read carefully in course materials, and then how to put what they learn into relationship with the students’ own previously acquired knowledge
Figure 4 HUMN311 (Colleen Brown)
to support their own lines of inquiry. In Caitlin ffrench’s PRAX300 we moved into developing definitions across texts to identify specific ideas in texts they research themselves. And in prOphecy Sun’s MHIS407 we took on the more advanced task of how readings speak to each other across their specific field of inquiry, including: how definitions can be specific to disciplines; what seminal texts underlie assumptions in the newer readings; and how to put texts into conversation with each other. In these workshops we used coloured yarn to physically make interconnections between readings.
Figure 5 HUMN317 (Julie Andreyev)
In all these workshops, students were noisy and vibrant: collaborating and creating, with their reading in hand. Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) has been shown to improve students’ reading comprehension and their attitudes towards reading.4 In addition, collaborative reading allows for students to transfer reading skills across the cohort, exposing them to, and reinforcing varied strategic approaches to reading and has been found to support better equitable access for learners.5 My goal is to impart academic reading skills while changing students’ perception of both their own competency and of what reading can be.
I’d like to thank all those who collaborated with me to bring collaborative, visual reading strategies into their classrooms. If you are interested in bringing some Messy Noisy Reading to your classroom, just reach out and we will work with you to support your students’ learning outcomes and discipline specific genres. Or you can check out the Messy Noisy Reading Toolkit from the Writing Centre: we provide the markers, the post it notes, slips of paper, pens, highlighters etc. along with some options for short activities to engage with reading during class time.
Figure 6 HUMN317 (Julie Andreyev)
Figure 8 PRAX300 (Caitlin ffrench)
Figure 9 MHIS407 (prOphecy Sun)
Footnotes
[1] Fiorella and Zhang, “Drawing Boundary Conditions for Learning by Drawing.,” 1118.
[2] Fiorella and Jaeger, “Are There Metacognitive Benefits of Learner‐ and Instructor‐generated Visualizations?,” 1431.
[3] Literat, “‘A Pencil for Your Thoughts,’” 12.
[4] Riani, “COLLABORATIVE STRATEGIC READING IMPLEMENTATION TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION,” 235.
[5] Boardman et al., “Disrupting the ‘Norm’ with Collaborative Strategic Reading,” 48.