Critical Reading in the Social Sciences
How do social scientists teach critical reading? An example from Manuel Vallée, a GSI from sociology.
reading strategies
Critical Reading in the Humanities
What reading critically entails can vary by discipline; this section provides an overview of what critical reading means in the humanities.
Critical Reading in the Natural Sciences
Critical reading is a vital skill in the natural sciences. Jann Vendetti (Ph.D., Integrative Biology) shares how she teaches her students to read critically.
Creative Approaches: GSI Award Essays on Teaching Critical Reading
Examples of strategies GSIs have used to teach critical reading at Berkeley.
Poetry and the Scientific Method
by Hillary Gravendyk, English
I was … impressed to find myself in a room full of well-trained environmental studies, engineering, and biochemistry majors who were fearless (it seemed to me) in the face of those mysteries of math and science that had so baffled me as a college student. But I quickly realized that there was one thing about which these poised young scientists were utterly perplexed, even terrified: poetry.
Creative Writing and the Horizon of Expectations
by Carl Olsen, Scandinavian
Students often have trouble understanding why we can’t just “take the text as it is.” My…response has been to suggest that we consider our mission to be not just the reading of texts, but the exploration of a foreign culture by way of those texts: we are sleuths who have been given a collection of cultural artifacts.
Making It Fun: Framing Literary Discussion as a Social Practice
by James Ramey, Comparative Literature
I was dismayed to find that we had been located in a small, windowless basement room in Haas Pavilion. Claustrophobia heightened my awareness of the need for the students to get along, which led me to wonder how I might structure my course, not only as an intellectual opportunity but also as a social one.
It Said What? Reading Critically for Bias and Point of View
by Amy Lerman, Political Science
Each group had read their own article as a reasonably complete account of “the way it had happened.” When they began to see the differences between the pieces, though, they were struck by how disparate each account was from the others. In particular, the students were surprised by how even those that were technically “unbiased,” “academic” or “scientific” were unintentionally framed in certain ways.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Literature but Were Afraid to Ask the Saturday Evening Post: or, How Literature is Like Math
by Mayumi Takada, English
I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote…In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.
Current-Literature Problem Solving as a Connection to the Real World: How Solving a Problem in the Classroom Expanded Professor-Graduate Student Mentorship from the Laboratory into the Classroom
by Suzanne Blum, Chemistry
I realized that the students were not yet able to make the connection between what they were learning in the course and the bigger picture of professional chemical research…[so] I incorporated current literature into two lectures that I designed and presented to the class, as well as into problem sets and exam questions, thereby initiating student discussion about real research advances.