Engaged Academic Literacy for All With Reading Apprenticeship

Have you ever worried about whether your students are reading and/or comprehending the texts you assign? Have you found yourself planning around the text? Do you want to encourage students to use their course texts as a key part of their learning and to gain independence in doing so? This workshop explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework, which helps instructors support students across all disciplines and levels to become motivated, strategic, and critical readers, thinkers, and writers; to develop positive literacy identities; and to engage with challenging academic texts. Workshop participants engage in metacognitive conversations centered on complex disciplinary texts. By discovering and reflecting on their own ways of unlocking course content, they experience ways the Reading Apprenticeship approach helps students master core concepts and helps instructors explicitly support academic literacy in their discipline.

By the end of this workshop, participants know or are able to:

• Demonstrate their own reading processes and see reading as a discipline-based, problem-solving activity.
• Describe Reading Apprenticeship as an instructional framework connecting rigorous academic work with social-emotional aspects of learning through text-based metacognitive conversations.
• Experience and analyze the impact of several metacognitive routines in order to begin planning classroom applications.
• Analyze students' reading, talking, and writing skills with a focus on equity and on building on students' strengths rather than deficits.

Activities:

• Participate in text-based metacognitive routines, reflective pair and small group activities, a student video-case study, and classroom planning exercises.

About the Facilitator

Dr. Nika Hogan is Associate Professor of English at Pasadena City College (PCC), a coordinator for the California Community College Success Initiative (3CSN), and the Reading Apprenticeship College Coordinator for the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd (SLI). She coordinated the Reading Apprenticeship Community College STEM Network, funded by the Helmsley Trust, from 2014-2017. Her work is focused on developing transformative inquiry-based learning opportunities that help educators and students reach their full potential. Nika has been involved in many learning communities through PCC’s Teaching and Learning Center and helped to develop the First-Year Pathways program, which was awarded the California Community College’s Chancellor’s Office Award for a Student Success Initiative. She has a B.A. in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Multiethnic U.S. Literatures from the University of Massachusetts.