Learning Outcome III
Below are examples from a scientific journal that we as a class read, analyzed, and annotated for our second project of the year:
Christina Haas:
Framing Statement: Susan Gilroy, a professor from Harvard, says that we should “take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you”. I do believe that for the most part I have followed this instruction pretty well in my active reading and annotating. I try to pick out and highlight key ideas that seem important to my understanding and/or relevance to the conversation we are trying to enter. Furthermore, from looking at my annotations above you can observe that I utilized concepts that we discussed in class such as understanding and relating. To make sure I was processing what I was reading I often used understanding to make it clearer. This can be seen when I was attempting to understand what “rhetorical reading” meant in the first example. I annotated what it thought it meant, highlighted two examples that followed, and then reaffirmed my understanding. I also highlighted relationships to myself and other texts that I found while I was reading, as I knew they would be relevant to future discussions. An example of this is when I found evidence of Cuddy’s “mentor-student relationship” in Haas’ work in the last example and made a connection, as well as when I found a similar concept to Gee’s “meta knowledge” in Haas’s work in the third example. Looking back now on work from a few weeks ago I can clearly see that I did not use more complex concepts such as questioning and challenging which can be used for more intelligent active reading. I will strive to look harder into texts I read in future classes and attempt to find ideas that I can question and/or challenge. If there is one thing I learned about reading this semester it is that you can never “simply” read an academic purposed text as in order to find meaning and connection, one must look beyond the surface in order to be able to understand, relate, question or challenge academic writing.
