The teaching of critical reading in the First Year Seminar should help students recognize and value the relationships between reading, thinking, writing and oral communication, and develop their authority, stamina and confidence as readers.  It should emphasize the development of personal response, textual analysis and the capacity to construct and express interpretations as well as respond openly and thoughtfully to the multiple, varied interpretation of others.

And so, students will:

1. Take risks as readers.

2. Relate texts to personal experience.

3. Make connections and interpretations across texts.

4. Identify underlying assumptions of texts and authors.

5. Generate and defend interpretations.

6. Question and critique texts and authors.

7. Recognize bias.

8. Recognize the characteristics and purposes of different written genres.

9. Develop critical reading skills appropriate to college-level reading, including ‘close reading’ and text annotation.

10. Develop stamina as readers and thinkers, i.e. by sustaining comprehension through lengthy texts or following a close interpretation through short, dense text.

Recommendations:

1. Texts should include novels, short stories, essays, poems,nonfiction, etc.  Texts such as graphic novels, films, musical performances, works of visual art, etc., may also be used as a means for developing students’ broader interpretive capacities.

2. Texts should be chosen to provide students with models of good writing.

3. Texts should be chosen because they challenge students to be better readers; some texts should be ‘difficult.’

4. At least some texts should be chosen to introduce students to perspectives that are not part of their cultural milieu.