If it isn’t yet the time, it will shortly be that time of year when Amazon wish lists shift their focus, when Blackwells and other booksellers either rub their hands in glee or (I suspect, more often these days) look anxiously at the takings: the time when reading lists assume an importance.
Even if the parental start-up package (assuming there is such a thing, to pay for duvet covers and a kettle) stretches to books, where do you start? The Bible and Shakespeare? A student cookbook (I was going to recommend the Guardian online version, but it is accompanied, in the most breathlessly idiotic sexism I’ve seen for a while, by adverts for tampons, thereby telling us who should cook at University – thanks, beloved Guardian!) or financial survival guide? Well, yes, there’s part of the problem: how do you afford them? How do you know what to get? Or should we (tutors) suggest course books?
Ah. Pause for thought.
Of course, the ever-useful Upgrade service at Brookes provides enlightenment on what reading entails at HE, and links to sites from other Universities (including v good advice on reading from Reading, which I am childish enough to find amusing), but faced with a bill of £100 or more (maybe lots more!), what is a new HE student to do? And what should we, as tutors, be thinking about when we suggest pre-course reading?
The approach by our Ed Studies team has been slightly different this year: rather than going for study skills books (Stella Cottrell, for example, whose excellent handbook appears to be available from Palgrave as a sample pdf and the linked site is available here) or a pile of books from Year 1 Modules, the team have opted for a reading of an historically important text. Dave Aldridge has suggested Rousseau’s Emile.
Throwing Year 1 students in medias res with a book from eighteenth century France is a bold move, I know, but I come back to my earlier question: when we suggest books to incoming students, maybe not-so-fresh men and women in a post A-level fug, do we do so to make their lives easier on the course? To make our lives easier when they get here? To set the scene for the discipline of degree-level study: reading, as we used to say, for a degree? Or (as Dave is doing here, I think), to give them more of a sense of purpose in their studies?
So what am I trying to get at when I say a “sense of purpose”? I suppose it’s about the Big Questions, again and again. Links to elsewhere in this blog would be tedious; the big questions are what this blog is really about.
Why study education? What is the place of theory in all of this? Where does reading fit in anyway? Where does learning start in institutions? And what about in the family?
I hope I don’t sound too Mr Hector if I end by saying “Emile vous appelle.”
nicktomjoe 