Unit Readings: Liberal Arts and General Education
- Carol Dweck’s TED Talk
- UNE’s Core Handbook, sections I, II, III, VI, & VII (link)
- Jeffrey Scheuer, “Critical Thinking and the Liberal Arts”
- Sanford Ungar, “7 Major Misperceptions about the Liberal Arts”
- Ken Bain, “Curiosity and Endless Education”
Reading Strategies
- Overview of active and critical reading strategies
- Preview readings before deep reading them
- Break complex texts into smaller chunks, summarize and paraphrase chunks
- Improve your comprehension, critical response, and ability to use texts through annotation: a high-impact practice
- Supercharge you reading by focusing on concepts
- Look for patterns of repetition and similarity, notice anomalies
- Understand both “What It Says” and “What It Does”
- Give a name to the reading difficulty you’re having with a particular text and get help
- Simplify complex sentence structures to improve comprehension
- Use effective post-reading strategies
- Make a synthesis table to see text-to-text connections
- Passage-based focused freewriting
- Notice more about a passage using 10-on-1
- To develop your response to reading make an idea map of “What You Like,” “What Bothers You,” and “What You’re Not Sure Of”
- Use peer reading and collaborative summarizing activities to check and expand your comprehension and develop your ideas
- Three Tips for Increasing Reading Speed and Comprehension: Reduce eye movement, expand your focal range, quiet your internal voice
