Integrating Reading, Writing and Research for First-Year College Students: Piloting Linked Courses in the Education Major

Abstract

reading and writing skills on all K-12 educators. The standards include performance and demonstration of these skills in Social Studies, Science and Technology courses. Educators in K-12 environments across the US are being asked by the CCSS to do more than just raise awareness of the need for literacy skills students should develop before graduating from high school. Their work requires shifting the paradigm about who is responsible for literacy development, because it shifts responsibility to all teachers in all disciplines. That is, this work is now the responsibility not only of English teachers who push students to think deeply about literature and other texts, even those that students do not find engaging, but also of all teachers of all subject areas and courses, even if they feel unprepared to teach literacy.However, this expectation from the CCSS is not easily realized because not all K-12 teachers feel that they are prepared to teach reading and writing. Even high school English teachers will readily admit that they are not reading teachers. Their training is in teaching the themes of literature, approaches to effective writing, and overall communication skills. With a new responsibility to meet the Standards presented in Common Core, teachers are now asked to develop readers who can comprehend multiple texts on one topic and synthesize that information into new ideas that might be expressed in writing, oral presentations or in some digital format. Comprehension and synthesis are intended to lead to problem-solving and creativity. This demand places students and teachers in new territory, with new challenges that require new methods of instruction and increased interdisciplinary collaboration. So, much work remains, but there is good reason to think K-12 teachers are rising to this challenge. While there is much discussion of the assessment of the Common Core and related issues, the new requirements concerning students' reading and understanding of informational text is definitely a positive first step forward.In the best of all worlds, the reading and writing capabilities developed in K-12 should seamlessly transition into those fostered in first-year writing courses. Fortunately, a recent revival of interest in connecting reading and writing pedagogy in first-year composition courses may help to facilitate this smooth transition, offering a second step forward. While discussions of reading pedagogy have always, to some extent, been a part of composition studies, there has been a relative dearth of attention to the topic since the early 1990s. The strong scholarly and pedagogical interest in reading seen in the 1980s and early 1990s, Carillo (2015) suggests, dwindled within the discipline in part because it became complicated by debates on the relationship between composition and the literature curriculum within English studies. However, she argues that common threads from the 1980s and 90s research, as well as newer, though less plentiful, scholarship on reading and learning transfer, can lay a good f...